FOOD, DRESS, AND " CREDIT." 287 



' broth/ made of fat, bread and water ; for the mid-day meal, 

 perhaps a little bread and cheese, or potatoes and pork 

 sometimes, for a change, a little dried fish instead of pork ; 

 for the evening meal a cup of tea with dried bread. Pies 

 and pasties are the great feature of the Cornish diet. 

 The ordinary pasty of the Cornish labourer is clean, whole- 

 some, and nutricious, and the Devonshire labourer might 

 with advantage adopt the same kind of diet. When a pig 

 is kept by the Devon peasant and is fat enough to kill, 

 half of it is salted for the use of himself and family for the 

 greater portion of the year ; the remainder is usually sold to 

 the butcher. The salted portions of the pig thus forms 

 the whole, or nearly so, of the animal diet of the peasantry 

 in this district." 



A farmer of considerable experience, long residing 

 in the " South Hams " of Devon, a wonderfully fertile 

 and beautiful region, agreed with the previously quoted 

 correspondent as to the peasant's improvement in food. 

 He remarked : 



" The peasant certainly lives very much better than his 

 father did. Living, during the last generation, consisted 

 chiefly of barley bread and broth for breakfast, with a little 

 skimmed ' country ' cheese. For dinner he had barley 

 dumpling with a very small piece of bacon in the middle 

 and barley bread, with a little salt fish or bacon for his 

 supper. But when potatoes were good, plentiful, and cheap, 

 this diet was often varied by large quantities of potatoes 

 being used. Many an old labourer, however, has told me 

 that he could not work on a potato diet as well as he could 

 on a barley one. If the peasant then tasted meat, it was 

 generally bacon beef or mutton being, as a rule, a treat. 

 Wheat was sometimes mixed with the barley to make 

 loaves, and the peasant's wife then always made and baked 

 the family bread at home under an iron kettle on the hearth. 

 By this method the labourers were sure of one thing, namely, 

 that the bread they manufactured was pure and unadulter- 

 ated. To show how little wheat was then used in large, poor 

 families, an old labourer of mine has told me that, when 

 a boy, his mother used to hold out to him as an inducement 

 to be ' good ' that they would have a peck of wheat at 

 Christmas next, and this promise was often given to the 

 children in January. But the peasant eats very little, if 

 any, barley now. His wife generally buys wheaten bread, 

 ready made, and baked by the small town or village baker, 

 who delivers it at the labourers' doors ; and most rural 

 districts have their butchers, who deliver meat in the same 

 way. The small shops, too, of most villages and hamlets, 



