The woman of the husbandman class was muscular and well nourished. Probably she had passed her girlhood in service on a farm, where hard work, largely in the open air, had sharpened her appetite for the abundant diet which characterised the English farmer’s housekeeping. After marriage, much of her work was still out of doors, cultivating her garden and tending pigs or cows, while her husband did his day’s work on neighbouring farms. Frugal and to the last degree laborious were her days, but food was still sufficient and her strength enabled her to bear healthy children and to suckle them. It was exactly this class of woman that the gentry chose as wet nurses for their babies. Their lives would seem incredibly hard to the modern suburban woman, but they had their reward in the respect and love of their families and in the sense of duties worthily fulfilled. The more prosperous husbandmen often added to their households an apprentice child, but in other cases the holdings were too small to occupy even the family’s whole time. At harvest in any case all the population of the village turned out to work; men, women, and children, not only those belonging to the class of husbandmen, but the tradesmen as well, did their bit in a work so urgent; for in those days each district depended on its own supply of corn, there being scarcely any means of transport. Except during the harvest, wages were so low that a man who had a holding of his own was little tempted to work for them, though he might undertake some special and better-paid occupation, such as that of a shepherd. Pepys, describing a visit to Epsom, writes: “We found a shepherd and his little boy reading, far from any houses or sight of people, the Bible to him, I find he had been a servant in my Cozen Pepys’s house ... the most like one of the old patriarchs that ever I saw in my life ... he values his dog mightily, ... about eighteen score sheep in his flock, he hath four shillings a week the year round for keeping of them.”[101] Footnote 101: Pepys, Vol. IV, p. 428. 14 July, 1667. Probably this picturesque shepherd belonged to the class of husbandmen, for the wages paid are higher than those of a household servant. Four shillings a week comes to £10.8.0 by the year, whereas a Wiltshire wages assessment for 1685 provided that a servant who was a chief shepherd looking after 1,500 sheep or more was not to receive more than £5 by the year.[102] On the other hand, four shillings a week would not maintain completely the shepherd, his boy and a dog, not to speak of a wife and other children. Thus, while the shepherd tended his sheep, we may imagine his wife and children were cultivating their allotment. Footnote 102: _Hist. MSS. Miss. Com. Var. Coll._, Vol. I. p. 170.