USE OP CORN IN ENGLAND. 73 



growth, in the exhausted receiver of an air-pump, 

 ascertained that they were thereby prevented from 

 exhibiting any sign of vitality. 



THE Anglo-Saxon monks of the abbey of St Edmund, 

 in the eighth century, ate barley bread, because the 

 income of the establishment would not admit of their 

 feeding twice or thrice a day on wheaten bread.* 

 The English labourers of the southern and midland 

 counties, in the latter part of the eighteenth century, 

 refused to eat bread made of one-third wheat, one- 

 third rye, and one-third barley, saying, that ' they 

 had lost their rye-teeth. '| It would be a curious 

 and not unprofitable inquiry, to trace the progress 

 of the national taste in this particular. It would 

 show that whatever privations the English labourer 

 may now endure, and whatever he has endured for 

 many generations, he has succeeded in rendering the 

 dearest kind of vegetable food the general food of the 

 country ; this single circumstance is a security to 

 him against those sufferings from actual famine 

 which were familiar to his fore-elders, and which are 

 still the objects of continual apprehension in those 

 countries where the labourers live upon the cheapest 

 substances. Wages cannot be depressed in such a 

 manner as to deprive the labourer, for any length of 

 time, of the power of maintaining himself upon the 

 kind of food which habit has made necessary to 

 him ; and as the ordinary food of the English labourer 

 is not the very cheapest that can be got, it is in his 

 power to have recourse for a while to less expensive 



* Dugdale's Monasticon , quoted in Turner's History of the 

 Anglo-Saxons, vol. iii, p. 25. 



t Annals of Agriculture, quoted in Eden's History of the 

 Poor, vol. i, p. 526. 



VOL. XV. 7 



