MORE DRUNK MESSENGER: BACK TO CHAUCER

The messenger drinks ale and wine, and his letters are stolen while he sleeps like a pig, as messengers are wont to do.

• The Man of Law waxes poetic about how terrible and wrong it is to drink.
• Um, thanks for the tip?
• Basically, he's calling out the messenger for betraying secrets and ruining all the family bliss.

• The Man of Law complains about how awful Donegild is, and calls her all sorts of things, like, for example, a mannish woman.
• He hopes she'll go to the devil and accuses her of being from hell.
• We're gonna go out on a limb here and say that the Man of Law is decidedly not Team Donegild. 

For one thing, Donegild's methods are a little more subtle. Instead of killing everyone who gets in her way, she falsifies letters between her son and the Constable in order to get Custance abandoned at sea (again). Instead of protesting at her son's conversion to Christianity, she simply objects to his marriage to someone so different from himself. She's a bit more sneaky. A bit more vindictive, if we may say so.
Donegild's fear of the so-called Other leads her to symbolically transform Custance into what she fears when she claims to her son that his wife is some kind of elf or evil spirit. She's off her rocker of course, but she's really a victim of her own crazy fears and imagination. 
Donegild acts alone. Her evil is specific to her and not suffused throughout her whole religion or culture. In Donegild, then, we have a representation of individual rather than cultural evil. It makes sense then that Donegild dies alone in punishment for her crimes. She pays the price and that's that.
Women who attempt to control their fates, like the mothers-in-law, are labeled un-feminine. 
"The Man of Law's Tale" punishes Donegild because of her refusal to yield authority to men.

13)  In an interesting outburst, the lawyer calls Donegild "mannysh" and "feendlych spirit" (II.782-3). What does the apparently insulting usage "mannysh" indicate about the lawyer's expectations?

Northumbria, Land of Alla

Northumbria, on the other hand, is comfortingly familiar, It's people understand the "maner Latyn corrupte" in which Custance speaks. The linguistic rapport that Custance shares with the Northumbrians is perhaps symbolic of a larger cultural rapport between them (519). Maybe that's why Christianity "takes" in Northumbria while it fails in Syria, a nation just too "other" to successfully share its customs.