SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY 



Even allowing for a lower scale of living for the ordinary labourer, his 

 standard in the fourteenth century must thus have been fairly comfortable. 

 Bread and ale were probably the staple articles of subsistence, to judge from 

 these allowances of food and from the prominence given to the growth of 

 wheat and barley in the manorial accounts. The price of these neces- 

 sities was carefully regulated by the assize of bread and beer. According 

 to a fourteenth-century ordinance at Bristol 1 beer was to be sold at \d. a 

 gallon when the prices of grain were, 3*. to 3*. 4</. a quarter for wheat, 

 u. 8</. to 2s. for barley, is. ^d. for oats. Prices outside the city were 

 slightly lower. A rather later ordinance* fixed ale at \\d. the gallon, and 

 loaves at \d. each. 8 



Besides bread, however, the peasant and even the landless labourer, 

 who probably was allowed some rights of common on the waste and the 

 'balks' must have enjoyed abundance of eggs and poultry; butter, milk, 

 and meat were all cheap, and fish were abundant in Gloucestershire. The 

 finer sorts were chiefly preserved in the lord's fish ponds ; but in the towns 

 sea fish were imported in numbers, and at rates suitable for all classes.* The 

 Severn, the ' speciall glory ' among ' all good gifts,' as Malmesbury says, 

 ' than which there is not any in all the land for Channell broader, for streame 

 swifter, or for fish better stored,' had been famous as far back as Domesday, 

 where Tidenham already appears as the great fishing manor. At that date it 

 contained upon the Severn eleven fisheries in demesne, and forty-two held by 

 villeins, 1 besides a few in the Wye, and the rent paid by its lord to Bath 

 Abbey consisted of six porpoises and 30,000 herrings." The existence of 

 herrings in even a tidal river like the Severn certainly appears improbable ; 

 yet at Sodbury there is still a place called Herringbridge, and Smyth 

 (seventeenth century) in the course of his ' cookish observations ' expressly 

 mentioned herrings as one of the fish caught at Berkeley. 7 But the great 

 delicacy of the Severn was the lamprey, that c fish of note and eminency, 

 Gloucester's Royal Fish.' King John had a special liking for it, and quarrelled 

 mightily with the men of Gloucester when ' they did not pay him sufficient 

 respect in the matter of his lampreys.' 8 Henry III was regularly supplied 

 with Severn lampreys and herrings, and Edward III was propitiated by the 

 earl of Berkeley with a gift of six lampreys, costing the fabulous sum of 

 6 ys. "id. The same prudent earl, evidently distrusting the provender of 

 the north, took nine lamprey pies with him on the Scottish expedition of 

 1308. The bailiff of Cheltenham, early in the fifteenth century, was con- 

 tinually receiving orders to send lampreys to his mistress, the countess of 

 Huntingdon, with minute instructions as to their baking, salting, and packing. 

 Prices varied from g</. to 5/. apiece.* The annual presentation of a lamprey 



1 Little Red Book, \\, 217. * Ibid. p. 224-5. 



' The weights of loaves were also very carefully fixed, through a long scale of different qualities of bread, 

 which includes 'Simnel,' ' wastel,' ' cokel,' and 'bread of Our Lord,' and ends with ' horse bread' a mixture 

 of beans and other horse's food. Ibid. p. 237. 



' See Landboc, Introd. p. xxxi. 



' The same entry also mentions weirs called ' cytweras ' and ' haecweras.' Seebohm considers the former 

 to have resembled the 'puttchers,' ' putt-weirs,' or basket-weirs of the present day, and the latter to have been 

 like the ' hackles ' by which an eddy is foimed to guide the fish into the stop-net. See Engl. Yillagf Community, 

 pp. 151-3, where an illustration of' puttchers' is given. 



C. S. Taylor, op. cit. ' Berkeley MSS. iii, 319-20. 



1 Glout. Right Royal Fish, 1902. ' Mins. Accts. bdle. 852. 



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