Mrs. Cotton (née Lily Brown)

	Tolman Cotton		Lily Brown
Tolman Cotton (junior)	Rose Cotton	Wilcome Cotton ('Jolly')	Bowman Cotton ('Nick')	Carl Cotton ('Nibs')

A Hobbit of the Shire, descending from the otherwise unknown Brown family. Based on the age of her husband (we have no specific dates for Lily herself) she would probably have been born close to the year III 2942 (S.R. 1342), about the time that Bilbo Baggins vanished from the Shire and reappeared a year later.

Lily Brown married Tolman the son of Holman Cotton, whose family held a farm on South Lane near Bywater. Thus Lily became Mrs. Cotton the farmer's wife, a title she is usually given in the tales of the time. She had five children in total, with the first, a son, being named for his father Tolman. Next, apparently,² came a pair of twins, Rose and Wilcome, followed by two younger sons, Bowman and Carl.

By the time of the War of the Ring, all of these children were grown; even the youngest, Carl, would have been thirty-two years old when Sharkey's Men came to the Shire. Mrs. Cotton and her family held out against the ruffians at their farm, until one day (2 November III 3019, or S.R. 1419), Sam Gamgee came down South Lane to the farm. An old family friend, Sam had disappeared from the Shire more than a year earlier, but now he had returned to help rouse the Shire-folk. Lily stayed behind at the farmhouse with her daughter Rose, while Farmer Cotton and his sons went to aid in the uprising.

The Shire-hobbits succeeded in driving out Sharkey and his Men, and set about reclaiming and rebuilding their land. In the following May, Lily's daughter Rose married Sam, and so Mrs. Cotton, née Lily Brown, became the mother-in-law of Samwise Gamgee. Though her dates are uncertain, at this time she would have been approaching the age of eighty. We have no records of her later life, but given the typical Hobbit lifespan of about a hundred years, we might expect that she lived on for some time in peace at the farm at the end of South Lane.