“Wives,” writes a Dutchman, “are not kept so strictly as they are in Spain or elsewhere. Nor are they shut up, but they have the free management of the house or housekeeping, after the fashion of those of the Netherlands and others their neighbours. They go to market to buy what they like best to eat. They are well dressed, fond of taking it easy, and commonly leave the care of household matters and drudgery to their servants. They sit before their doors, decked out in fine clothes, in order to see and be seen by the passers-by. In all banquets and feasts they are shown the greatest honour. They are placed at the upper end of the table, where they are first served; at the lower end they help the men. All the rest of their time they employ in walking and riding, in playing at cards or otherwise, in visiting their friends and keeping company, conversing with their equals (whom they term gossips) and their neighbours, and making merry with them at child-births, christenings, churchings, and funerals; and all this with the permission and knowledge of their husbands, as such is the custom. Although the husbands often recommend to them the pains, industry, and care of the German or Dutch women, who do what the men ought to do both in the house and the shops, for which services in England men are employed, nevertheless the women usually persist in retaining their customs. This is why England is called the paradise of married women. The girls who are not yet married are kept much more rigorously and strictly than in the Low Countries.” Another observer says-- “The women have much more liberty than perhaps in any other place.... The females have great liberty, and are almost like masters.” Manners were very free, nowhere more so than among persons of quality, and language was very coarse to modern ears. But if women did not hesitate to use an oath, if their behaviour to men seems bold and their coquetry of a type too pronounced, it must be remembered that they only adopted the tone of the society in which they lived. “In all the world,” says a sixteenth-century writer, “there is no regyon nor countrie that doth use more swearynge than is used in Englande, for a chylde that scarse can speake, a boy, a gyrle, a wenche, now-a-dayes wyl swere as great othes as an old knave and an olde drabbe.... As for swearers a man nede not to seke for theym, for in the Kynges courte and lordes courtes in cities, borowes and in townes, and in every house, in maner there is abbominable swerynge, and no man dothe go about to redresse it, but doth take swearyng as for no synne, whiche is a damnable synne; and they the which doth use it, be possessed of the Devill, and no man can helpe them but God and the kyng.”