Dorothy Osborne describing her own day to her lover, gives an idyllic picture of the maidens tending cows on the common: “The heat of the day is spent in reading or working, and about six or seven o’clock I walk out into a common that lies hard by the house, where a great many young wenches keep sheep and cows, and sit in the shade singing of ballads. I go to them and compare their voices and beauties to some ancient shepherdesses that I have read of, and find a vast difference there; but trust me, I think these are as innocent as those could be. I talk to them and find they want nothing to make them the happiest people in the world but the knowledge that they are so. Most commonly, when we are in the midst of our discourse, one looks about her, and spies her cows going into the corn, and then away they all run as if they had wings at their heels. I, that am not so nimble, stay behind, and when I see them driving home their cattle, I think ’tis time for me to retire too.”[98] Footnote 98: _Osborne (Dorothy), Letters_, pp. 103, 4. 1652-1654. Husbandmen have been defined as a class who could not subsist entirely upon their holdings, but must to some extent work for wages. Their need for wages varied according to the size of their holding and according to the rent. For copy-holders the rent was usually nominal,[99] but in other cases the husbandman was often forced to pay what was virtually a rack rent. Few other money payments were necessary and if the holding was large enough to produce sufficient food, the family had little cause to fear want. Footnote 99: 30s. Susanna Suffolke a young maid holds a customary cottage, ... and renteth per annum 2d. £28 Eliz. Filoll (widdow) holdeth one customary tenement. Rent per annum 26s. 8d. £2 Mary Stanes holdeth one customary cottage (late of Robert Stanes) and renteth per annum 7d. £12 Margaret Dowe (widdow) holdeth one customary tenement (her eldest son the next heir) rent 7s. 8d. Among freeholders. Johan Mathew (widow) holdeth one free tenement and one croft of land thereto belonging ... containing three acres and a half and renteth 3d. (Stones, Jolley. 1628. From a List of Copyholders in West & S. Haningfield, Essex.) Randall Taylor wrote complacently in 1689 that in comparison with the French peasants, “Our _English_ husbandmen are both better fed and taught, and the poorest people here have so much of brown Bread, and the Gospel, that by the Calculations of our _Bills_ of _Mortality_ it appears, that for so many years past but One of Four Thousand is starved.”[100] Footnote 100: Taylor. (Randall), _Discourse of the Growth of England, etc._, p. 96, 1689.