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281
[1913
passed entitled "The Pillory and Tumbrell," for the expressed purpose of
protecting the public from the dishonest practice of bakers, vintners, brewers,
butchers and others. This enactment is remarkable in that it is the first in
which the adulteration of human food is specially noticed and prohibited, and
it is well to find that it was enforced with more or less vigour until the reign
of Queen Anne (1709). The Liber Albus tells us that it was strongly enforced
in the days of Edward the First, for it relates If any default should be found
in the bread of a baker in the City, the first time let him be drawn on a
hurdle from the Guildhall to his own home through the great street where
thereby most people assemble, and through the great streets which are most
followed, with the faulty loaf hanging from his neck; if a second time he shall
be found committing the same offence, let him be drawn through the great
street of Cheepe in the manner aforesaid to the pillory and remain there at
least one hour in the day; and the third time that such fault shall be found,
he shall be drawn, and the oven shall be pulled down and the baker made to
forswear the trade for ever."
Somewhere between 1350 and 1400 that amazing book, "Piers Plowman,"
attributed to William Langland, throws some light on the practices that were
so prevalent, for he writes:—*
Women that bake and brew
They are the people
They harm the poor
and secretly and oft
They grow rich on their retail
They buy houses
If they sold honestly
nor buy their tenures.
Butchers and Cooks,
that harm the poor,
Who can but buy in pennyworths,
They poison them;
With what the poor should eat,
They become landlords,
they would not build so high,
It is curious to find in this long-ago book, one of the first in the English
language, that the requirements of the poor were much as they are now;
lower rents, unadulterated and good food, and warm clothing. That their
food was not of a very luxurious character is apparent from another passage
in it, where one learns that they require "milk and meal to satisfy the babes
that continually cry for food" and that "bread and thin ale" are for themselves
a banquet; that "cold flesh and cold fish are like roast venison"; a
farthingsworth of mussels, a farthingsworth of cockles were a feast for them
on Fridays or Fast Days."
In another place he speaks of their dinner of peascods, beans and baken
apples; onions and salads and cherries and bread with beans in it, and halfpenny
ale.
*These lines are taken from Burrell's modernized English version and are to be read
across the page.