tion of its usual form.

Nor were the good folks of those days without their simnels,
cracknels, and other sorts of cakes for the table, among which in the
_wastel_ we recognise the equivalent of the modern French _gateau_.

Besides march-pain or pain-main, and pain-puff, two sorts baked
on special occasions, and rather entering into the class of
confectionery, our better-to-do ancestors usually employed three
descriptions of bread: manchete for the master's table, made of fine
boulted flour; chete, of unboulted flour, but not mixed with any
coarser ingredient; and brown-bread, composed of flour and rye meal,
and known as _maslin_ (mystelon).

A bushel of wheat, in a romance of the thirteenth century, is
estimated to produce twenty loaves; but the statement is obviously
to be taken with allowance. The manchet was sometimes thought to be
sufficient without butter, as we now eat a scone. In the "Conceits of
Old Hobson," 1607, the worthy haberdasher of the Poultry gives some
friends what is facetiously described as a "light" banquet--a cup
of wine and a manchet of bread on a trencher for each guest, in an
apartment illuminated with five hundred candles.

There is no pictorial record of the mode in which the early baker
worked here, analogous to that which Lacroix supplies of his sixteenth
century _confrere_. The latter is brought vividly enough before us in
a copy of one of Jost Amman's engravings, and we perceive the bakery
and its tenants: one (apparently a female) kneading the dough in a
trough at the farther end, a second by a roasting fire, with a long
ladle or peel in his hand, putting the loaf on the oven, and a third,
who is a woman, leaving the place with two baskets of bread, one on
her head and one on her arm; the baker himself is almost naked, like
the operatives in a modern iron furnace. The artist has skilfully
realised the oppressive and enervating atmosphere; and it was till
lately quite usual to see in the side streets of Paris in the early
morning the _boulanger_ at work precisely in the same informal
costume. So tenacious is usage, and so unchanging many of the
conditions of life.

The Anglo-Norman used butter where his Italian contemporary used oil.
But it is doubtful whether before the Conquest our ancestors were
commonly acquainted with butter.

The early cook understood the art of glazing with yolk of egg, and
termed it endoring, and not less well that of presenting dishes under
names calcula