In Stratford, after the death of Richard Balamy, the smith who also acted as the locksmith for the Corporation in 1580, his widow Katharine Balamy took over the business and ran it herself with hired labour.29
Female employment was universal in Tudor England; the woman of leisure is a creature of a later era. All women worked, even if most were no more likely to receive actual cash money than the animals in their husbands’ stalls. If she could make no significant contribution to the family income, a single girl could not expect to keep her feet under her father’s table. She had to find work, with neighbours, with kin, or far away, with strangers. ‘Domestic service’ was not a matter of frilly caps and aprons but of hard graft, sweating in the kitchen or brewhouse or bakery, living on hard rations. Mistress Winchcombe, wife to Jack of Newbury in Deloney’s tale, is admonished by her gossip for feeding her servants too well:
You feed your folks with the best of the beef and the finest of the wheat, which in my opinion is a great oversight: neither do I hear of any knight in this country that doth it…Come thither, and I warrant you that you shall see but brown bread on the board; if it be wheat and rye mingled together, it is a great matter, and the bread highly commended. But most commonly they eat either barley bread, or rye mingled with pease and suchlike coarse grain, which is doubtless but of small price, and there is no other bread allowed, except at their own board. And in like manner for their meat. It is well known that necks and points of beef is their ordinary fare which, because it is commonly lean, they seethe therewith now and then a piece of bacon or pork, whereby they make their pottage fat, and therewith drives out the rest with more content. And thus must you learn to do. And beside that the midriffs of the oxen, and the cheeks, the sheep’s heads, and the gathers, which you give away at your gate, might serve them well enough, which would be a great sparing to your other meat, and by this means you would save in the year much money, whereby you might the better maintain your hood and silk gown.30
Domestic service was not always and perhaps not even often a stepping-stone to marriage. Most of the women who went into service did not find husbands; a woman whose employer chose not to release her, and did not permit anyone to pay his addresses to her, was likely to die unmarried. The more highly a servant was valued, the less likely she was to be let go. It was a rare master who gave a marriage portion to a servant.
As Miranda Chaytor and Jane Lewis pointed out in 1982:
not all daughters had dowries. The eldest might marry well, into a trading family as prosperous as her father’s, but the maidservants…were usually her less fortunate younger sisters. [Alice] Clark’s somewhat idealised account of the family business, centred on the naturalness of the husband—wife partnership, the equality between them and the complementarity of their roles, overlooks the exploitation of other household members—the younger sons and daughters, the maid servants without dowry or prospects whose exclusion and drudgery ensured the comfort of the prosperous few.31
Thomas Deloney gives a fascinating insight into how women found work in Thomas of Reading or The Six Worthy Yeomen of the West (1597). The occasion was ‘a fair that was kept near Gloucester, there to be ready for any that would come to hire them, the young men stood in a row on one side and the maidens on the other’. The same kind of fair or ‘mop’ was held at Stratford every year. In Deloney’s story the daughter of the banished Earl of Shrewsbury encounters two girls on their way to the fair, and introduces herself. ‘I am a poor man’s child that is out of service, and I hear that at the Statute, folks do come of purpose to hire servants.’ The girls invite her to go along with them, and she asks what kind of service she should offer.
‘What can you do?’ quoth the maidens. ‘Can you brew and bake, make butter and cheese, and reap corn well?’…
‘If you could spin or card,’ said another, ‘you might do excellent well with a clothier, for they are the best services that I know…’32
But the earl’s daughter can only read and write, sew a fine seam and play the lute. In the event she becomes a personal maid, but even so she is sent out into the fields for the hay-making; ‘attired in a red stammell petticoat and a broad straw hat upon her head, she had also a hay-fork and in her lap she did carry her breakfast’.33
In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Launce has made a memorandum of the qualifications of the woman he wants to marry:
’tis a milkmaid, and yet ’tis not a maid for she has gossips. Yet ’tis a maid, for she is her master’s maid and serves for wages…Imprimis: she can fetch and carry…Item: she can milk…Item: she brews good ale…Item: she can sew…Item: she can knit…Item: she can wash and scour…Item: she can spin…(III. i. 266–307)
The routine of a farming household was tough; the day began at five a.m. in the winter, four in the summer. Ann had probably begun working almost as soon as she could walk, wool-picking and looking after the lambs. Joan of Arc’s father, in Henry VI, Part 1, talks of Joan’s herding his lambs when she was a little girl. Sheep were often left to children in Warwickshire wills in this period. John Eliott of Luddington left a ewe sheep to each of three goddaughters in 1560.34 Philip Wells of Shottery left a sheep to each of his brother’s children when he died in 1562.35 In 1570 Richard Hathaway’s godson, Roger Burman’s shepherd Edmund Cale, left two sheep to the children of Thomas Burman, and a ‘little lamb’ to another little girl.36 Ann’s father left a sheep each to two of his young nieces. When Simon Beard of Bishopton made his will in 1587 his daughter Mary was expecting a child, who would receive a lamb when it was born.37 Roger Burman of Shottery, who died in 1592, left one sheep to each of the children of his son Thomas.38 When Ann’s brother Bartholomew came to make his will in 1624, he left a ‘chilver sheep’ to a daughter of his first son Richard, and four of the children of his second son each received one of his best ewes. As Bartholomew was then farming Hewlands, his inventory gives a pretty good idea of how they lived. When he died, in the barns and outhouses there were, as well as twenty quarters of barley, ten strikes of wheat, pulses and hay, a malt mill and a cheese press, with the hemp and flax to be used with both.39 Ann would have learnt, as her nieces did, the proper use of both malt mill and cheese press.
Ann Hathaway would have been quite small when she learnt like her cousins to care for her own ewe lamb, which she was to rear by hand after it had been taken from its mother in April. The ewe would then be milked each day until October when she would be mated again. The lamb reared by Ann would have been mated in due course and brought forth its own lamb, and then it would have been time for Ann to learn to milk the grown ewe. The milk would be put in the dairy to separate, and she would have been taught how to skim off the cream and set it as curd cheese. The whey left to ferment would have been drunk by the family and the rest of the skim milk fed back to the lambs or used to fatten a pig. Pressing removed the last of the moisture in the curd, to make a hard cheese that would last the winter. Curds or cheese together with hard, dark bread were the healthy staples of the sheep-farming diet.
No farmer would have taken on a servant with three small children, but it was also possible for Ann to have made cheeses at home. Katherine Salisbury had in her house in Church Street at the time of her death in 1591 five flitches of bacon and twenty-two cheeses, as well as ‘one dozen cheese trenchers’.40 Her husband, Alderman Robert Salisbury, was a brewer; when he died, and her son-in-law took over the business and the main house, Katherine moved into the gatehouse, where she worked to sustain herself. Among her belongings was a malt mill.41
Many of the Stratford women left with children to support turned to malt-making. Two-thirds of the value of the estate of the widow Agnes Eliott, who died in 1564, was in malt. Her inventory lists ‘18 quarters of malt [180 bushels], a quarter of muncorne [mixed grain]; half a quarter of malt, 2 strikes of barley [2 bushels]’.42 In the inventory of Margaret Hathaway, the widow of Ann Shakespeare’s nephew Edmund, are listed: ‘one malt mill, two little grates, three wheels, one strike [a measure], three malt s
ieves, one peck [another measure], one try [another kind of sieve], one haircloth [used in drying malt], one winnow sheet…three looms [open tubs], two kivers [pails]…’ and ‘twenty-four quarters [240 bushels] of malt in two garners’.43 Other women brewed and sold ale for a living. After Rose Reve’s husband died in 1625, she worked as a brewer and as a needlewoman to support her five children. When she died five years later, the appraisers of her goods found that she had, as well all the equipment for beer-making in her kitchen and four quarters of malt in an upper room, seven hogsheads of strong beer, three of ordinary beer, six half-hogsheads of beer and four barrels of small beer in her cellar, with a impressive total value of £22.44
Ann could have set herself up as an ale-wife or have used her smidgin of capital and what she had learnt as the eldest daughter of a farming family to set herself up as a market trader. If she was farming for herself, she may have made enough money from the sale of her butter, cheese and cream, her eggs, honey and pies to house, clothe and feed her family and even a servant. It would have been unusual for the unsupported mother of three tiny children to attempt to support herself in any of these ways, but perhaps Ann was an unusual woman. In her Bible she would have read:
Who shall find a virtuous woman?…
She seeketh wool and flax and laboureth cheerfully with her hands.
She is like the ships of the merchant; she bringeth her food from afar.
And she riseth while it is yet night, and giveth the portion to her household, and the ordinary to her maids.
She considereth a field and getteth* it and with the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard.
*She purchaseth it with the gains of her travail.
(Proverbs, xxx: 10–16)
Ann could have found work indoors, as a housewife or housekeeper. In the sixteenth century ‘housewife’ was a job description. As set out by Gervase Markham in The English Housewife, the inward and outward virtues to be found in a compleat housewife were:
her skill in physic, surgery, cooking, extraction of oils, banqueting stuff, ordering of great feasts, preserving of all sorts of wines, conceited secrets, distillations, perfumes, ordering of wool, hemp, flax, making cloth and dyeing, the knowledge of dairies, office of malting, of oats, their excellent uses in families, of brewing, baking, and all other things belonging to a household.45
This kind of skilled work was probably not available to Ann Shakespeare until rather later in her career, when her children were able to fend for themselves. Under normal circumstances the housewife was the partner of the husband. When Thomas Tusser voiced the first version of ‘a woman’s work is never done’, he was thinking of the woman working in her own household.
Though husbandry seemeth to bring in the gains,
Yet housewifery labours seem equal in pains.
Some respite to husbands the weather may send
But housewives’ affairs have never an end.46
Housewives did also work in the houses of others, of widowed men for example, and of married men whose wives were too grand or too ignorant or too young to undertake the work of running the household. Girls were apprenticed to housekeepers to learn ‘the mystery and sciences of housewifery’ whether they had marriage in prospect or not.47 In The Merry Wives of Windsor, the house of Dr Caius was kept by Mistress Quickly, ‘which is in the manner of his nurse, or his dry nurse, or his cook, or his laundry, his washer and his wringer’ (I. ii. 1–5). She gives us her job description: ‘I may call him my master, look you, for I keep his house, and I wash, wring, brew, bake, scour, dress meat and drink, make beds and do all myself’ (I. iv. 89–92).
When John Attwood died in Stratford in 1601, his daughter was indentured to the whittawer Robert Butler and his wife as a maidservant for ten years, while her brother was apprenticed to his uncle a tailor.48 In 1606 orphaned Katherine Sumner was placed with the seamstress Jane Lummas for seven years.49 In November 1614 Ellen Burcher, daughter of a cutler from Henley-in-Arden, was apprenticed to Richard and Susanna Holmes to learn the business of weaving bone-lace and housewifery.50
In Thomas Deloney’s novel, designed to be read by the clothworkers of London, Jack of Newbury employed more women than men; this huge workshop is a myth but the division of labour would have been accurate.
Within one room, being large and long,
There stood two hundred looms full strong.
Two hundred men, the truth is so,
Wrought in these looms all in a row.
By every one a pretty boy
Sat making quills with mickle joy,
And, in another place hard by,
An hundred women merrily
Were carding hard with joyful cheer,
Who singing sat with voices clear,
And, in a chamber close beside,
Two hundred maidens did abide,
In petticoats of Stamell red
And milk-white kerchiefs on their head…
Those pretty maids did never lin
But in that place all day did spin.51
In London about half of all apprentices to crafts and trades were female. If Ann was a skilled worker, then it would follow that she had served an apprenticeship before she was married, possibly far from Shottery. For this her father would have had to pay a fee for her training and something towards the cost of housing, feeding and clothing her, but this comparatively small investment coupled with her own aptitude and diligence would have combined to give her another attraction to join with her dowry often marks in the quest for a good match. There were other skills, however, that she could have learnt at home. As the exemplary wife says in the comedy How to choose a good wife from a bad, the best resource for a woman with an improvident husband was her needle.
My husband in this humour well I know
Plays the unthrift, therefore it behoves me
To be the better housewife here at home,
To save and get, while he doth laugh and spend.
Though for himself he riots it at large,
My needle shall defray the household’s charge.52
Spinning was a job that had always been done by unmarried women or spinsters. Women also made lace by winding linen threads on pigs’ trotter-bones (hence ‘bone-lace’) and weaving them under and over around a pattern picked out on a bolster with pins, much as bobbin lace is still made today.
Lacemaking…was work which did not depend on the man’s occupation and where the woman acted as an autonomous producer, an independent wage earner in her own right. The lacemaking community of Colyton in Devon, where Honiton lace was made between about 1600 and 1740, had a preponderance of women in the population and a later than average age of marriage. Lacemakers’ earning were high, probably higher than those of wool spinners.53
Ann could, like the gentlewomen mentioned in Henry V, have earned an honest living by the ‘prick of her needle’ and/or she could have made bone-lace. She could have, but in the 1580s there was no shortage of seamstresses or lace. The demand for knitted stockings on the other hand was growing faster than it could be met. In the midlands, where the sheep bore wool of a fine, long staple, knitting worsted stockings was a growth industry. Joan Thirsk, summarising the information in Stow’s Annals, tell us that ‘stocking knitting…was a handcraft among peasant communities before this period, probably for centuries before, but it developed into an industry commanding a considerable place in English domestic trade from the mid-sixteenth century onwards’.54
The first mention of knitting in an English document is in an act of 1563 regulating manufacturers of and dealers in ‘knit hose, knit petticoats, knit gloves and knit sleeves’. Before wire-drawing was mechanised in 1566, it was impossible to make steel knitting needles. Needles were originally imported from Spain: ‘The making of Spanish needles was first taught in England by Elias Crowse, a German, about the eighth year of Queen Elizabeth, and in Queen Mary’s time there was a negro made fine Spanish needles in Cheapside but would never teach his art to any.’55 Before that ca
ps and stockings were knitted on wooden and bone needles but most hose were constructed out of woven cloth, usually cut on the bias. Henry VIII and Edward VI were both presented with knitted silk stockings from Spain.
Just how expensive they were we may deduce from an entry in the London port book of 1567–68. Twelve pairs of silk hose were shipped from Malaga to London and valued by the customs officers at nearly £4 a pair. Since such valuations were well below, and sometimes only half, the true value, we may estimate their full worth at something nearer £8 a pair.56
In 1560 Mistress Mountague, silk woman to Elizabeth I, presented her with a pair of black silk stockings that she had knitted herself; the queen was so delighted with them that she never wore woven hose again.57 According to Stow:
In the year one thousand five hundred and sixty four, William Rider, being an apprentice with Master Thomas Burdet…chanced to see a pair of knit worsted stockings in the lodging of an Italian merchant that came from Mantua, borrowed those stockings and caused other stockings to be made by them, and these were the first worsted stocking to be made in England. Within few years after, began the plenteous making both of kersey and woollen stockings, so in short space they waxed common.58