82 History of the English Landed Interest. 



foot and a half long, twelvepence ; beef, three-lialfpence the 

 pound ; oysters, a penny the hundred ; eggs twelve, and 

 pears six a penny. Without rushing to the conclusion that 

 food was equally cheap everywhere, we may imagine that it 

 was not from want of means that the average Englishman of 

 the seventeenth century had become more abstemious than his 

 forefathers. 



Kalm tells us that he had been informed that in war times 

 provisions were actually cheaper, owing to the prohibitions 

 against their being conveyed out of the kingdom. He seems 

 to have thought the meat dear, but was assured that this was 

 a temporary phase of the market, entirely caused by recent 

 losses from epizootic disease.^ He was evidently surprised at 

 the Englishman's predilection for meat, especially as every- 

 where he found an abundance of the finest wheaten bread 

 in the world. 



Notwithstanding the low prices of food. Dr. Chamberlains 

 suggested that all comestibles exposed for sale in markets and 

 shops should be sold by weight at rates periodically assessed 

 by sworn officials, as in Spain ; and that the prices of refresh- 

 ments offered to the public in houses of entertainment, should 

 be advertised by means of printed tables, as in Italy. His pro- 

 posal, that in all great market towns there should be (as in 

 Holland, and within a ten miles radius round London) public 

 brewhouses ready to serve all within ten miles of the place, and 

 paying the ordinary excise to a public stock, shows a side of 

 the licensing question the opposite to what we, at the present 

 day, are accustomed.^ 



The ineffectual highway legislation of the period is illus- 

 trated first by the same writer's demand, that the repairs of 

 great roads leading to and from the metropolis should be pro- 

 vided for out of a public fund managed by Commissiouers, 

 and controlled by the Lord Mayor ; and secondly, by his re- 

 quest that all roads leading from any part of England to 

 London should be speedily repaired, made at least twenty feet 

 wide, straightened where crooked, filled up where hollow, and 



^ Kalm's England, p. 56. 



* England's Wants, etc. Dr. Chambeiiaine, 1689. 



