day, tolerate them the second, weary
of them the third, and wish 'em at the devil after four days.

The gentry usually ate wheat bread, of which there were four kinds, and
the poor generally bread made of rye, barley, and even oats and acorns.
Corn was getting so dear, owing to the forestallers and middlemen, that,
says the historian, "if the world last a while after this rate, wheat and
rye will be no grain for poor men to feed on; and some catterpillers
[two-legged speculators] there are that can say so much already."

The great drink of the realm was, of course, beer (and it is to be noted
that a great access of drunkenness came into England with the importation
much later of Holland gin) made from barley, hops, and water, and upon
the brewing of it Harrison dwells lovingly, and devotes many pages to a
description of the process, especially as "once in a month practiced by
my wife and her maid servants." They ground eight bushels of malt, added
half a bushel of wheat meal, half a bushel of oat meal, poured in eighty
gallons of water, then eighty gallons more, and a third eighty gallons,
and boiled with a couple of pounds of hops. This, with a few spices
thrown in, made three hogsheads of good beer, meet for a poor man who had
only forty pounds a year. This two hundred gallons of beer cost
altogether twenty shillings; but although he says his wife brewed it
"once in a month," whether it lasted a whole month the parson does not
say. He was particular about the water used: the Thames is best, the
marsh worst, and clear spring water next worst; "the fattest standing
water is always the best." Cider and perry were made in some parts of
England, and a delicate sort of drink in Wales, called metheglin; but
there was a kind of "swish-swash" made in Essex from honey-combs and
water, called mead, which differed from the metheglin as chalk from
cheese.

In Shakespeare's day much less time was spent in eating and drinking than
formerly, when, besides breakfast in the forenoon and dinners, there were
"beverages" or "nuntion" after dinner, and supper before going to bed
--"a toie brought in by hardie Canutus," who was a gross feeder.
Generally there were, except for the young who could not fast till
dinnertime, only two meals daily, dinner and supper. Yet the Normans had
brought in the habit of sitting long at the table--a custom not yet
altogether abated, since the great people, especially at banquets, sit
till two or three o'