And again more bitterly: 

  Some pester the commons with jades and with geese,
  With hog without ring, and with sheep without fleece. 
  Some lose a day’s labour with seeking their own,
  Some meet with a booty they would not have known. 
  Great troubles and losses the champion sees,
  And even in brawling, as wasps among bees: 
  As charity that way appeareth but small;
  So less be their winnings, or nothing at all.

The probabilities are that he was quite right; but so long as copyhold endured so long lasted the open fields.

Tusser’s holding, and that of every husbandman in England in his time, was self-sufficient.  Not only did you eat your own mutton, make your own souse, your own beer, cheese, butter, wine, cordials, and physic; you built your own house, made your own roads, fenced your own lands, contrived your own plows, wains, wagons, wheelbarrows, and all manner of tools.  But much more than that.  You grew your own hemp, had your own ropewalk, twisted your own twine; you grew your flax and wove your linen; you tanned and dressed your own leather, cut and spun your own wool, made, no doubt, your own clothes.  Indeed, you stood four-square to fate in Tusser’s time; and in that particular, as well as in another which I must speak of next, you were much nearer to Hesiod’s farmer than to ours.  This precept of his upon the uses of your woodland recalls Hesiod directly: 

  Save elm, ash and crabtree for cart and for plow;
  Save step for a stile of the crotch of the bough;
  Save hazel for forks, save sallow for rake;
  Save hulver and thorn, whereof flail to make.

Hulver is holly.  In the same section (April) he has a verse about stone-picking which will show his encyclopaedic grip of his matter: 

  Where stones be too many, annoying thy land,
  Make servant come home with a stone in his hand: 
  By daily so doing, have plenty ye shall,
  Both handsome for paving and good for a wall.

He bought little or nothing, trafficked very much by barter, and had scarcely any need for money.  His men and maids lived in the house, and if they were paid anything, he does not say so.  I suppose they were paid something, those of them who were not apprentices, bound for a seven years’ term.  They stood to his wife and himself as children, had their keep, learned their business, married each other by and by, and probably set up for themselves with a pig and a cock and hen on a pightle of land of the master’s.  It was a family relationship well into the eighteenth century.  Horace Walpole used to call his servants his family.  With the privilege of parenthood went the power of the rod.  There’s no doubt about that:  maid and man had it if it was earned.  In his dairy instruction Tusser gives us a list of “ten topping guests unsent for,” whose presence in the cheese will cause Cicely to rue it.  There are: 

  Gehazi, Lot’s wife, and Argus his eyes,
  Tom Piper, poor Cobler, and Lazarus’s thighs: 
  Rough Esau, with Maudlin, and gentles that scrawl,
  With Bishop that burneth—­ye thus know them all.