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 talk to them, and find they want nothing to make them the happiest people in the world, but the knowledge that they are so.

Letters of Dorothy Osborne to William Temple (ed. G. C. Moore Smith, 1928) 2 June 1653