Could someone explain to me the ballad "Get Up and Bar the Door"?

This
is a humorous ballad about the relationship between a husband and a wife. At the start of the
pudding, the "goodwife" is busy at her chores: making puddings. The cold wind blows
across the floor, and the woman's husband asks her to "gae out and bar the
door."

The woman tells her husband: look, I'm busy. If he wants the door
barred, he must bar it himself. The pair of them agree that whoever speaks first will have to
get up and bar the door.

Then, at twelve that night, two gentlemen approach.
They ask whether this is a rich man's or a poor man's house, but neither the husband or the wife
will say anything. So the two gentlemen come in and eat the puddings the wife has been making,
and neither husband nor wife says anything because of their pact.

Eventually
one of the gentlemen says to the other that they should cut off the husband's beard and kiss the
wife. One of them complains to the other that there's no water in the house; the second
gentleman replies that there's nothing wrong with the "pudding-broo" or the boiled
water in the pan.

This incenses the goodman, who angrily demands to know
whether the gentlemen intend to kiss his wife in front of him and then scald him with pudding
water.

His wife, far from being upset too, "skips on the floor" in
delight at having won their argumentbecause her husband has "spoken the foremost
word," he must now get up and bar the door himself.

The point of the
ballad, essentially, is that husbands should know better than to try and tell their wives what
to do; the stubbornness of women will usually outlast that of men.