eat is consumed and
spent'. But, besides these, there were many poorer farmers who lived
at home 'with hard and pinching diet'. Wheaten bread was at this time
a luxury confined to the gentility, the farmer's loaf, according to
Tusser, was sometimes wheat, sometimes rye, sometimes mastlin, a
mixture of wheat and rye, though the poorer farmer on uninclosed land
ate bread made of beans.

The poor ate bread of rye or barley, and in time of dearth of beans,
peas, and oats, and sometimes acorns.[232] According to Tusser, the
labourer was allowed roast meat twice a week,

'Good plowmen looke weekly of custom and right,
For roast meate on Sundaies, and Thursdaies at night';

and Latimer calls bacon 'the necessary meate' of the labourer, and it
seems to have been his great stand-by then as now. The bread and bacon
were supplemented largely by milk and porridge.[233] The statute, 24
Hen. VIII, c. 3, says that all food, and especially beef, mutton,
pork, and veal, 'which is the common feeding of mean and poor
persons.' was too dear for them to buy, and fixed the price of beef
and pork at 1/2d. a lb. and of mutton and veal at 5/8d. a lb.; but the
statute, like others of the kind, was of little avail, and the price
of beef was in the middle of the sixteenth century about 1d. a lb. or
8d. in our money. As the average price of wheat at the same date was
14s. a quarter, or about 112s. in our money, fresh meat was
comparatively much cheaper, and it is no wonder that even the farmer
could not afford wheaten bread regularly. Moryson, writing in
Elizabeth's reign, says 'Englishmen eate barley and rye brown bread,
and prefer it to white as abiding longer in the stomeck and not so
soon digested'.[234]

A tithe dispute at North Luffenham in Rutlandshire throws considerable
light on the financial position of the various classes interested in
the land about 1576. At the trial several witnesses were examined, who
all made statements as to the amount of their worldly wealth, and it
is a noteworthy fact that even the humblest had saved something;
perhaps because there was no poor law or State pension fund to
discourage thrift.[235] Thomas Blackburne, a husbandman, who had
served his master as 'chief baylie of his husbandrie', had at the end
of a long life saved L40. Another, William Walker, eighty years of
age, during forty years of service to Mr. John Wymarke had put by L10.
Robert Sculthorp, who had at one time been a farmer, was