troduction of the latter into England
continues to be a matter of uncertainty. It was clearly very scarce,
and doubtless equally dear, when, in 1226, Henry III. asked the Mayor
of Winchester to procure him three pounds of Alexandria sugar, if so
much could be got, and also some rose and violet-coloured sugar;
nor had it apparently grown much more plentiful when the same prince
ordered the sheriffs of London to send him four loaves of sugar to
Woodstock. But it soon made its way into the English homes, and before
the end of the thirteenth century it could be procured even in remote
provincial towns. It was sold either by the loaf or the pound. It was
still exorbitantly high in price, varying from eighteen pence to
three shillings a pound of coeval currency; and it was retailed by the
spice-dealers.

In Russell's "Book of Nurture," composed about 1450, it occurs as an
ingredient in hippocras; and one collects from a letter sent by Sir
Edward Wotton to Lord Cobham from Calais in 1546, that at that time
the quantities imported were larger, and the price reduced; for Wotton
advises his correspondent of a consignment of five-and-twenty loaves
at six shillings the loaf. One loaf was equal to ten pounds; this
brought the commodity down to eight pence a pound of fifteenth century
money.

The sugar of Cyprus was also highly esteemed; that of Bezi, in the
Straits of Sunda, was the most plentiful; but the West Indian
produce, as well as that of Mauritius, Madeira, and other cane-growing
countries, was unknown.

Of bread, the fifteenth century had several descriptions in use:
pain-main or bread of very fine flour, wheat-bread, barley-meal
bread, bran-bread, bean-bread, pease-bread, oat-bread or oat-cakes,
hard-bread, and unleavened bread. The poor often used a mixture
of rye, lentils, and oatmeal, varied according to the season and
district.

The author of "The Serving-man's Comfort," 1598, however, seems to say
that it was counted by the poorer sort at that time a hardship only to
be tolerated in a dear year to mix beans and peas with their corn,
and he adds: "So must I yield you a loaf of coarse cockle, having no
acquaintance with coin to buy corn."

In a _Nominale_ of this period mention is made of "oblys," or small
round loaves, perhaps like the old-fashioned "turnover"; and we come
across the explicit phrase, _a loaf of bread_, for the first time,
a pictorial vocabulary of the period even furnishing us with a
representa