THE ORAMINEiE. 



21.0 



Grenewiche parke for xiiij lode of hey And for 

 ri lode of Oots, for the relief of the dere there, 

 And for the carriage thereof, y]li. ijs. v'md." 

 Oatmeal, prepared by various processes of cook- 

 ing, composes at this day a large proportion of 

 tlie food of the inhabitants of Scotland, and par- 

 ticularly of the better-fed portion of the labour- 

 ing cLisses. Oaten cakes, too, are much used in 

 Lancasliire. 



The wild oat, which is certainly indigenous to 

 tliis country, is found to be a very troublesome 

 weed. It is said that tlie seed wiU remain buried 

 under the soil during a century or more without 

 losing its vegetating power; and that ground 

 which has been broken up, after remaining in 

 grass from time immemorial, has produced the 

 wild oat abundantly. 



The Anglo-Saxon monies of the abbey of St 

 Edmund, in tlie eighth century, ate barley bread, 

 liecause 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, tliat "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 tlie English labourer 

 may now endure, and whatever he has endured 

 for many generations, he has succeeded in ren- 

 dering the dearest kind of vegetable food the gen- 

 eral food of the country; this single circumstance 

 is a security to him against those sufferings from 

 a^'tual famine which were familiar to his fore- 

 elders, and wliich are still the objects of conti- 

 nual 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 lengtli of time, 

 of the power of maintaining himself upon the 

 kind of food which haiiit has made necessary to 

 him ; and as the ordinary food of the Englisli 

 labourer is not the very cheapest that can be got, 

 it is in his power to have recourse for a while to 

 less expensive articles of subsistence sliould any 

 temporary scarcity of food, or want of employ- 

 ment, deprive him of his usual faro — an advan- 

 tage not possessed by his Irish feUow-subjects, 

 to whom the failure of a potatoe crop is a matter 

 not of discomfort merely, but of absolute starva- 

 tion. 



Pierce Plowman, a writer of the time of Ed- 

 ward III., says, tliat lehen the new corn began to 

 be sold, 



" Woulde no begjyar eat bread tliat in it bcfincs wcrn, 

 But of coket, and el:-mantyne,or else clcne wlicate.'* 



, Tliis taste, however, was only to be indulged 

 "when the new com began to be sold ;" for tlien 



a short season of plenty succeeded to a long pe- 

 riod of fasting — the supply of corn was not equal- 

 ized througliout the year by the provident effects 

 of commercial speculation. The fluctuations in 

 the price of grain, experienced during tliis period, 

 and wliich were partly owing to insufficient agri- 

 cultural skill, were sudden and excessive. On 

 the securing of an abundant harvest in 1317, 

 wheat, the price of which had been so high as 

 80^., fell immediately to 6s. Qd. per quarter. 

 The people of those days seem always to have 

 looked for a great abatement in the price of grain 

 on the successful gathering of every harvest; and 

 the inordinate joy of our ancestors at their har- 

 vest-home — a joy which is faintly reflected in our 

 own times — proceeded, there is little doubt, from 

 the change which the gathering of the crops pro- 

 duced, from want to aliundance, from famine to 

 fullness. That useful class of men, who employ 

 themselves in purchasing from the producers that 

 they may sell again to the consumers, was then 

 unlvnown in England. Immediately after the 

 harvest, the people bought their corn directly 

 from the farmers at a cheap rate, and, as is 

 usual under such circumstances, were improvi- 

 dent in the use of it, so that the supply fell short 

 before the arrival of tlie following harvest, and 

 prices advanced out of all proportion. 



In a valuation of Colcliester, in 1296, almost 

 every family was provided with a small store of 

 barley and oats, usually about a quarter or two 

 of each. Scarcely any wheat is noticed in the 

 inventory, and very little rye. The corn was 

 usually ground at home in a handmill or quern; 

 although wind and water mills were not uncom- 

 mon. The general use of the latter machines 

 was probably prevented by the compulsory laws 

 by which the tenant was under an obligation tu 

 grind his corn at the lord's mill ; and, therefore, 

 to evade the tax called mullure,the labour of the 

 liandmill was endured. In WiclifFs translation 

 of the Bible we find a passage in the 24th chap- 

 ter of St Matthew thus rendered : " Two wym- 

 menschulen (shall) begryndyngeinonequeme." 

 Hanison, the historian, two centuries later, says, 

 that his wife ground her malt at home upon her 

 quern. In the present authorized version of the 

 Bible, published more than half a century after 

 Harrison, the word "quern" yields to "mill." 

 By that time, probably, the trades of a miller 

 and a baker were freely exercised ; and the lord's 

 mill and the coi-poration oven had been super- 

 seded by the competition growing out of increas- 

 ing capital and population. 



The Reformation and the discovery of America 

 were events tliat had a considerable influence 

 upon the condition of the great body of the people 

 in England. The one drove away the inmates 

 of the monasteries, from whence the poor were 

 accustomed to receive donations of food; the 

 other, by pouring the precious metals into Eu- 



