The Chichevache is a mythological European monster fabled to feed on good women.

In Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer , known as the Father of English literature, is widely considered the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages and was the first poet to have been buried in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey...

's Canterbury Tales, this human-faced cow is perpetually starved to skin and bone due to the scarcity of obedient and faithful wives. The Bicorne or Bycorne, a counterpart to the Chichevache which fed on obedient and kind husbands, was reputedly fat and plump because of the plentiful supply of such men.

Chaucer may have borrowed the French term chichifache ("thin face") and put it with vache ("cow") to make the similar term chichevache ("thin or meagre cow"). D. Laing Purves notes that "The origin of the fable was French; but Lydgate

John Lydgate

John Lydgate of Bury was a monk and poet, born in Lidgate, Suffolk, England.Lydgate is at once a greater and a lesser poet than John Gower. He is a greater poet because of his greater range and force; he has a much more powerful machine at his command. The sheer bulk of Lydgate's poetic output is...

has a ballad on the subject. 'Chichevache' literally means 'niggardly' or 'greedy cow.'"

Here is the paragraph where the word appears, in the "Clerk's Tale":

O noble wyves, full of heigh prudence,

Lat noon [no] humylitee youre tonge naille:

Ne [nor] lat no clerk have cause or diligence

To write of yow a storie of swich [such] mervaille,

As of Grisildis [Griselda], pacient and kynde,

Lest Chichivache yow swelwe [swallow] in hire entraille.