OLD LONDON

Greymouth Evening Star, 23 June 1928, Page 8

OLD LONDON

WAGES AND FOOD PRICES

In the fifteenth century the wages of London bakers employed in mixing the dough were twelve pence a. week and a penny a day for beer, which meant a daily allowance of two quarts of the best beer, sold at the low price of 2d a gallon. A cheaper beer was sold at half this price. The bakers lived at the bakery and received board and lodging in*addition to wages. The men \vlio mixed the dough were known as sowreours, the name being derived from the fact that they mixed the sour yeast into the flour The men who weighed the dough and shaped the loaves were called whitehews, and were paid thirteen pence a week, in addition to the allowance for beer and free board and lodging. The highest grade of workers employed at the bakeries were those who baked the bread and were known as fourners, i.e., furnace or oven men. Their wages were sixteen pence a week. •> ’The average wage paid to labourers in London during the fifteenth century was five pence a day. They were able to sustain life on this low wage because food was cheap. Air Charles Pendrill, in his recent book, “Wanderings in Mediaeval London,” which is based on. thousands of notes taken during several years of research among ancient civic records, gives some interesting details regarding food prices in London in those distant days. In 1533 a law was passed which compelled London. butcTiers for illi’e first time to sell meat by weight. The price of beef was fixed at Jal per lb. and of mutton at' 3-4 d per lb. These figures seem very low to the present generation, but the butchers were able to make a profit, for fat oxen were sometimes sold as low as £1 6s Bd, fat salves and fat sheep at 3s 4d, and lambs at 12d. Eggs were usually sold at ten a penny, but in times of great scarcity they rose as high as three for twopence. Fat capons could be bought for sixpence each. The price of cheese was a lb. Butter was sold by measure in a semiliquid condition during the fourteenth century at Igd per pint; but during the fifteenth century it was sold by weight at Boz for J>-d in summer, and 6oz for gd in winter. By Uhe end of the sixteenth century butter had risen to 3d a lb, and in time of scarcity rose to 7d a lb.

Oysters were popular even in the middle ages, and were sold at fourpence a bushel, but by the seventeenth century, their reputation had spread to such an extent that an export trade had grown up, and the price in London rose to 2s a bushel —an extravagant price, which caused grave concern even in the highest circles. A royal decree was issued forbidding the export of oysters, and the Admiralty was empowered to arrest any foreign vessel caught taking oysters out of the country. White sugar was dear at Is per lb ; tallow candles were sold at 2d a lb., and wax candles, which were used in the churches, and at funerals, cost three times as much.

Bread was cheap, the price varying accordilng to quality. “Each baker was allowed to prepare only one kind of bread —■white or brown,’’ writes Mr Pendrill. “The white bakers made Anything which could be made from bolted meal, such as white loaves and wastel buns. They also made white bread of inferior leaven, called basketbread, which, together -with any loaves which turned out too light in weight, or in any other way spoilt in the baking, were sold to the poor in the street market of Cheapside at three a penny instead of the usual price of two a penny. The brown bakers made tourtebread, or coarse bread of unbolted meal, and this was the usual bread of the poor. Many of the poor also brought their own flour to be made into bread by the brown bakers, and this they baked at a charge of a penny a bushel. If any baker was caught persistently offering for sale bread short in wieght he received the punishment of the hurdle. For this purpose he was strapped’ to a sort of low cart harnessed to a horse, and so dragged through the streets, accompanied by the city minstrels playing on tabors and pipes, and finally brought back and released at his own door.’’

Other tradesmen in the middle ages were guilty of defrauding the public. The wax chandlers used to fill the centre of their candles with fat, turpentine, cobblers’ wax, and resin. In order to protect the public from this fraud, steps were taken to compel each craftsman to imprint his trade mark on all his wares,, a specimen of which, imprinted on wax, was kept at the Giuldhall for reference. The cloth makers used to wet their cloths and stretch them on a tenter. When such cloth was exposed to rain it shrank considerably. In 1482 the Common Council of the City of London made an order that no cloth maker should keep a tenter in his home for stretching cloth, and that no more than ten tenters should be kept in the city—five at Fuller’s Hall and five in Leadenhall

Cook shops, from whirfh the modern restaurant has evolved, were numerous in London during the middle ages ; but in accordance with the practice whereby shops of the same kind were congregated, the cook shops were confined to Eastcheap and Bread Street. The cooks roasted meat in the old-fashioned way on spits, and if they served it too underdone, or in any other way badly cooked, they were liable to a line of 6s Bd. One of the rules drawn up by the Company of Cooks incorporated by royal charter provided that no food, whether flesh, or fish, should be warmed up a second time for sale. “Pies were perhaps the form of food dearest to the Londoner’s heart,” writes Mr Pendrill, “and the cooks of Eastcheap provided them in every variety of meat, fish, poultry, and game. The makers of pies were known as ‘pastelers,’ and in 1379 they were forbidden to sell beef pies as venison, pies, or to make pies of goose, rabbit or giblets, on account of the evil condition to which some of these articles had come before being used. An important part of their trade was the preparation of eel pies, and open tarts or fans, which they sold to hucksters, who retailed them in the streets. They also retailed for wedding and funeral feasts. No member of the ci-aft was allowed to cater for more than two dinners and one supper in any one day. .At other times they would be called to a house to prepare a dinner where the provender had been bought by the host, and rm these occasions they received a fee which to us would seem anything but extravagant An example is Io be found in the churchwarden's accounts of St. Mary, at Hill, in 1510, when the cook was paid fourpence for preparing a meal consisting of a pike, two soles, half a side of salt fish, a side of ling, roach, oysters,

flounders, sauce, a quince pie and nuts. The whole dinner cost 7s Id.” But London was a filthy, insanitary city during the middle ages, and was often swept by plague and pestilence. The streets leading into the main thoroughfares were narrow and dark. The practice of building houses with each successive storey jutting outwards a few feet beyond the storey below shut out the sunlight from the streets. In some of the narrow lanes the people living on the top stories of houses on opposite sides could shake hands with one another There was no sanitary system of any kind. Household refuse and even the slops were thrown into the streets, and passing pedestrians were liable to be drenched. In 1647 a decree was issued to prevent slops being thrown into the street until after 9 p.m., when there would be few pedestrians about. Dead dogs, cats, and the bodies of other deceased pets, were thrown into the streets. Butchers, fishmongers, poultrykeepers, and other tradesmen threw entrails and other filth into the rivers and ditches, and the banks of all watercourses were lined with festering filth. “Anyone to whom for business or private reasons running water was important,” states Air Pendrill, “would make the fullest use of it., without regard to the comfort or convenience of his neighbours. The London tanners were perhaps the worst offenders in ilhis respect. Moreover, in the absence during early times of any drainage system, any householder who had access to a stream, whether the Fleet River, the Walbrook, or the Thames itself, rarely failed to erect his household convenience over the water.” At irregular intervals the streets were cleaned by rakers, but their work was inefficiently done, and the filth collected was stacked ,on vacant pieces of ground within the city and outside its walls. In the church yards, in some of which there were wells which supplied the neighbourhood with water, the dead were buried so thickly that whenever a new grave was dug some old human bones were unearthed, for the poor were buried without coffins. Many of the city churches had charnel houses, in which the bones dug up in this way -were stored. The dead had been buried so thickly for generations that the ground in many of the churchyards of the city of London are above the level ©f the pavements, although more than a century has elapsed since there was a burial in any of them.