CHAPTER XXIII. 



ON THE PRICE OF FOREIGN PRODUCE. SPICES, FRUITS, 

 SUGAR, CONFECTIONERY. 



THE Englishman of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was 

 accustomed, as we have seen above, to a copious but coarse 

 diet. During several months of the year, all, except those 

 opulent persons who possessed parks and chases, and were 

 therefore able to supplement their ordinary food by the flesh of 

 wild animals, were constrained to subsist on salted meat. Before 

 the Reformation, salt fish was a common and obligatory 

 article of diet with all classes, and when the alimentary re- 

 straints of the old creed were released, policy, and indeed 

 thrift, required that a fish diet should be maintained by custom 

 or enforced by law. The familiar vegetables of our experience 

 were generally unknown. Onions were, apparently, in com- 

 mon use. There are numerous entries of garden peas, and 

 a few of edible beans. I have found one record of the pur- 

 chase of cabbage-seed. But garden roots, the turnip, parsnip, 

 and carrot, are, as far as my researches supply me with in- 

 formation, unknown, and remained unknown until, in the reign 

 of James I, they were introduced from Holland. Potatoes 

 came in at about the end of the sixteenth century, for I have 

 found, at a period later than that at which these volumes close, 

 purchases made on the great Queen's account at 2,s. 6d. a pound. 

 The only native flavours were a few wild plants. 



For seasoning to their viands, our forefathers depended on 

 the traffic with the East, which, as I said in my first volume, 

 p. 147 sqq., originally went over several routes. The gradual 

 downfall of the Greek empire, and the desolation induced 

 upon Central and Western Asia by Tartars and Turks, appear 



