LABOURERS' WAGES AND DIET 307 



assume that this, though it seems a very insufficient diet, was 

 not unlike the food of some labourers at that date. However, 

 the bread he recommends was not that eaten by a large 

 number of them. Eden ^ states that in 1764 about half the 

 people of England were estimated to be using wheaten 

 bread, and at the end of the century, although prices had 

 risen greatly, he says that in the Home Counties wheaten 

 bread was universal among the peasant class. Young, indeed, 

 acknowledges that many insisted on wheaten bread.^ In 

 Suffolk, according to Cullum,^ pork and bacon were the 

 labourer's delicacies, bread and cheese his ordinary diet. 



The north of England was more thrifty than the south. At 

 the end of the eighteenth century barley and oaten bread were 

 much used there. Lancashire people fed largely on oat bread, 

 leavened and unleavened ; the 33rd Regiment, which went by 

 the name of the ' Havercake lads', was usually recruited from 

 the West Riding where oat bread was in common use, and was 

 famous for having fine men in its ranks.* The labourers of 

 the north were also noted for their skill in making soups in 

 which barley was an important ingredient. In many of the 

 southern counties tea was drunk at breakfast, dinner, and 

 supper by the poor, often without milk or sugar ; but alcoholic 

 liquors were also consumed in great quantities, the southerner 

 apparently always drinking a considerable amount, the north- 

 erner at rare intervals drinking deep. The drinking in cider 

 counties seems always to have been worse as far as quantity 

 goes than elsewhere, and the drink bills on farms were enor- 

 mous. Marshall says that in Gloucestershire drinking a gallon 

 * bottle ', generally a little wooden barrel, at a draught was no 

 uncommon feat ; and in the Vale of E yeshgm^a Jabourcr who 



^ State of the Poor, i. 562. 



* According to Walter Harte, though the yeoman in the middle of the 

 seventeenth century ate bread of rye and barley (maslin), in 1766 even the 

 poor cottagers looked upon it with horror and demanded best wheaten 

 bread. Yet in 1766 the quartern loaf in London was is. td.\ — Tooke, 

 History of Prices, i. 68. 



' History of Hawsted, p. 184. * Eden, State of the Poor, i. 513. 



