In 1615 soldier, writer, and horse-breeder Gervase Markham published a comprehensive estate guide that became an enduring bestseller in seventeenth-century England. First appended to a book about men’s rural sports, The English Housewife pointedly took issue with other fashionable cookery books encouraging hospitality, shopping, and leisure activities for women. With chapters detailing medical care, cooking, distilling, brewing, dairying, and textile-making, Markham instead promoted the path of home-grown practice and thrift for his national home-worker, and he did so by linking the virtues of womanhood to tasks important for the ‘generall good of this kingdome’ (Figure 10.1).