  A future e+e- collider, such as the ILC or CLIC, would allow the Higgs sector
to be probed with a precision significantly beyond that achievable at the
High-Luminosity LHC. A central part of the Higgs programme at an e+e- collider
is the model-independent determination of the absolute Higgs couplings to
fermions and to gauge bosons. Here the measurement of the e+e-->HZ
Higgsstrahlung cross section, using the recoil mass technique, sets the
absolute scale for all Higgs coupling measurements. Previous studies have
considered e+e- ->ZH with Z->l+l-, where l = electron or muon. In this paper it
is shown for the first time that a near model-independent recoil mass technique
can be extended to the hadronic decays of the Z boson. Because the branching
ratio for Z->qq is approximately ten times greater than for Z->l+l-, this
method is statistically more powerful than using the leptonic decays. For an
integrated luminosity of 500 fb-1 at a centre-of-mass energy of 350 GeV at
CLIC, the e+e-->HZ cross section can be measured to 1.8 % using the hadronic
recoil mass technique. A similar precision is found for the ILC operating at
350 GeV. The centre-of-mass dependence of this measurement technique is
discussed, arguing for the initial operation of a future linear collider at
just above the top-pair production threshold.
