Early Modern England Encyclopedia: The Dairy

The Dairy

A woman in an apron and head bandana uses a butter churn. A small cat rubs against her leg. — Woman Churning Butter, an etching by Jean-François Millet (1855–1856). Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain.

Para1

Either I mistake your shape and making quite,

Or else you are that shrewd and knavish sprite

Call’d Robin Goodfellow: are not you he

That frights the maidens of the villagery;

Skim milk and sometimes labour in the quern grain grinder

And bootless make the breathless housewife churn.
(A Midsummer Night’s Dream 2.1.399–405)

Overview

Para2Among the most important duties of a housewife, especially a countrywoman, would be the production of dairy foods for her household. Common people, particularly those of the poorer classes, would have gotten much of their protein from cow’s milk (and occasionally ewe’s milk) products.

Para3A rustic character in ThomasLodge and Robert Greene’s play A Looking Glass for London and England cogently sums up the value of the cow in the ordinary man’s diet:

Why, sir, alas, my cow is a common-wealth to me, for first, sir, she allows me, my wife and son, for to banquet ourselves withal: butter, cheese, whey, curds, cream, sod boiled milk, raw milk, sour milk, sweet milk and buttermilk. (1.3.91–5)

Para4Women typically milked the cows, strained the milk, separated the cream, and made cheese products from the family cow. Both soft, unripened cheeses and harder, aged cheeses were developed to preserve the nutrition of milk without refrigeration. Because England has a temperate climate that features extensive grass pastures, it’s ideal for grazing cattle. That temperate climate means that the cool rooms in a farmhouse or barn room with thick stone walls, especially if it is partly below ground, can be used to store and to age dairy products.

Para5Gervase Markham notes that:

Touching the well ordering of milk after it is come home to the dairy, the main point belonging thereunto is the housewife's cleanliness in the sweet and neat keeping of the dairy house; where not the least mote of any filth may by any means appear, but all things either to the eye or nose so void of sourness or sluttishness, that a prince's bed chamber must not exceed it. Markham

Markham also comments extensively on the process for churning butter, which the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust also explores in a discussion of important material objects of the period. The upshot of all the specific instructions on dairy work in household management guides of the period emphasizes that women remained responsible for dairy production as an important aspect of their economic contribution to a household.

Key Print Sources

Forgeng, Jeffrey L. Daily Life in Elizabethan England. 2nd ed. Greenwood Press, 2010.

Markham, Gervase. The English Housewife. Ed. Michael Best. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1986.

Orlin, Lena Cowen. Elizabethan Households: An Anthology. Folger Shakespeare Library, 1995.

Key Online Sources

Best, Michael. The Dairy. Shakespeare’s Life and Times.Internet Shakespeare Editions, https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/society/huswifery/dairy.html. Accessed 18 Feb. 2023.

Sharrett, Elizabeth. Shakespeare’s World in 100 Objects: Butter Churn. Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, 21 Jun. 2023, https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/blogs/shakespeare-100-objects-butter-churn/.

Image Sources

Millet, Jean-François. Woman Churning Butter 1855–1856. Etching. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Object number: 17.21.40. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/371478.

Prosopography

Janelle Jenstad

Janelle Jenstad is a Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director of The Map of Early Modern London, and Director of Linked Early Modern Drama Online. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Beatrice Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools (Routledge). She has edited John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice (with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Elizabethan Theatre, Early Modern Literary Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Renaissance and Reformation, and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She contributed chapters to Approaches to Teaching Othello (MLA); Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives (MLA); Institutional Culture in Early Modern England (Brill); Shakespeare, Language, and the Stage (Arden); Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate); New Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter); Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana); Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota); Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (Routledge); and Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (Routledge). For more details, see janellejenstad.com.

Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

Orgography

LEMDO Team (LEMD1)

The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors.

University of Victoria (UVIC1)

https://www.uvic.ca/

Metadata

Authority title	The Dairy
Type of text	Critical
Publisher	University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform
Series	Early Modern England Encyclopedia
Source	By Kate McPherson, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions
Editorial declaration	This document uses Canadian English spelling
Edition	Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a
Sponsor(s)	Early Modern England Encyclopedia Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.
Encoding description	Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines
Document status	published
Funder(s)	Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Mitacs Globalink Research Internship Utah Valley University
License/availability	Unless otherwise noted, intellectual copyright in EMEE Anthology pages is held by Kate McPherson on behalf of the contributors. Copyright on the TEI-XML markup is held by the University of Victoria on behalf of the LEMDO Team. The content and TEI-XML markup in this file are licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. This file is freely downloadable without permission under the following conditions: (1) credit must be given to the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO in any subsequent use of the files and /or data; (2) this availability statement must remain in the file; (3) the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except for quotations for the purposes of academic review and citation); and (4) commercial uses are not permitted without the knowledge and consent of the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO. Neither the content nor the code in this file is licensed for training large language models (LLMs), ingestion into an LLM, or any use in any artificial intelligence applications; such uses are considered to be commercial uses and are strictly prohibited.