The Music of A Dead Culture

Extract

Dorothy Osborne, writing to her lover, Sir William Temple, in 1653 gives this description of her daily life at her home in Bedfordshire:

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 or cows, and sit in the shade singing 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 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 to their heels.

The picture of the shepherdesses singing at their task on an English summer’s evening catches the same pastoral beauty that one finds in Gray’s Elegy: to some it may seem romantic and a touch sentimental. The writer, however, was not of that temper: she shows in her letters a plain common-sense and humour, which gives this description a sense of exactness: nor is her picture exceptional. Sir Thomas Overbury had written this of milkmaids and shepherdesses a few years earlier:

She dares to go alone and unfold her sheep in the night, and fears no manner of ill, because she means none; yet to say the truth she is never alone; she is still accompanied with old songs, honest thoughts and prayers, but short ones.