Grass Green Stockings
Eleanor Hubbard: A Spinster’s Accounts, 21 March 2013
The Business and Household Accounts of Joyce Jeffreys, Spinster of Hereford, 1638-48
edited by Judith Spicksley.
Oxford, 413 pp., £90, March 2012,978 0 19 726432 4 Show More
edited by Judith Spicksley.
Oxford, 413 pp., £90, March 2012,
“... In June 1646, Joyce Jeffreys lost her spectacles. When a servant found them, Jeffreys tipped her sixpence, and then the elderly gentlewoman, following her habit, entered the expense into her account book. Between 1638 and 1648, Jeffreys kept a record of all her receipts and expenditures, noting them in a neat, regular hand. While we know little of her early life – when she was born, for example, or why she never married – we know a great deal about her business dealings, friendships and pastimes during her later years ... ”