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of twenty-one were all ‘free’, in the sense that they could earn money and keep or spend it as they chose, as married women could not, and they could marry without waiting on their parents’ wishes. In Elizabethan England there were probably more women over the age of twenty-one who were fatherless than whose fathers were still living. As for the suggestion that Ann was ‘to some extent…independent’, she could have been a girl of independent means, if property had been entailed on her by her mother’s family, but such an arrangement would have left a paper trail that has yet to be discovered.
    Even if Ann did have some property of her own, as a husbandman’s daughter she would not have been expected to pass her life in idleness. As small children she and her brother would have been sent into the fields to scare away birds from the crops, and perhaps even to pick stones out of the soil. At an early age she would have learnt how to milk her father’s ewes—
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    Each shepherd’s daughter with her cleanly pail
    Has come afield to milk the morning meal. 2
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    What the family did not drink for breakfast, together with what she milked in the evening every day from April to October, would have been fermented until it separated to curds and whey. The whey was the family’s usual drink; the curds were made into cheeses, soft for immediate consumption and hard for keeping.
    Before 1534 the making of hard cheeses was done in the cool vaults of the monasteries; after the dissolution farmers took over the cheese-making themselves with rather variable results. In the 1580s cows were still a relative rarity in Warwickshire compared to sheep, but Ann may well have had a cow or two to take care of. Though the herding of the animals was mostly men’s work, women could do it at a pinch. Milking and the preparation of milk products on the other hand was exclusively women’s work. Ewes the milkmaid could handle by herself; if she was dealing with a cow, she needed a cowherd to hold the halter to control the beast. Women also looked after the smaller creatures, the chickens, ducks and geese.

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    My love can milk a cow
    And teach a calf to suck
    And knows the manner how
    To set a brooded duck 3
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    Most of Hathaway’s neighbours would have fattened a pig or two each year on skim milk, root vegetables and the acorns and chestnuts of the woodlands and commons. If the jobs connected to her home farm were covered, a girl was as likely as a boy to be placed out to service on someone else’s farm. For all we know Ann never lived at the house in Shottery, for she could have been placed in service as a girl of six or seven. It is only in the halcyon imagination of bardolaters that Ann could have sat around for twenty-six years waiting for a boy to set her cap at.
    One very heavy task that always fell to women was laundry. The bigger the family, the more babies to appear, the heavier the work. Washing was not done weekly, because the linen took too long to dry. It was mostly, though not only, in the summer that smocks and sheets, bed-and childbed-linen were washed and thrown over bushes and on to the grass to bleach in the sun. Farmer’s daughters were dressed in a fashion that displayed their industry and expertise. While women of higher rank, citizens’ and merchants’ wives, wore heavy gowns of dark coloured stuffs, the milkmaids dressed in white shifts, under skirts of red flannel or sheep’s russet, and stiff waistcoats of buckram or durance, scrubbed dazzling white, with a white neckerchief or scarf under a broad-brimmed straw hat.
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    Upon her back she wore
    A fustian waistcoat white.
    Her body and her stomacher
    Were fastened very tight…
    Her neckerchief of Holland sure… 4
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    In Greene’s Vision , Tomkins the wheelwright falls in love with a ‘maid that every day went to sell cream in Cambridge’.
    A bonny lass she was, very