d Book
describes the storing of salted provision for the earl's establishment at
Michaelmas; and men now living can remember the array of salting tubs in
old-fashioned country houses. So long as pigs, poultry, and other articles
of food, however, remained cheap and abundant, the salt diet could not, as
Hume imagines, have been carried to an extent injurious to health; and
fresh meat, beef as well as mutton, was undoubtedly sold in all markets the
whole year round in the reign of Henry VIII., and sold at a uniform price,
which it could not have been if there had been so much difficulty in
procuring it. Latimer (_Letters_, p.412), writing to Cromwell on Christmas
Eve, 1538, speaks of his winter stock of "beeves" and muttons as a thing of
course.

[25] STAFFORD'S _Discourse on the State of the Realm_. It is to be
understood, however, that these rates applied only to articles of ordinary
consumption. Capons fatted for the dinners of the London companies were
sometimes provided at a shilling apiece. Fresh fish was also extravagantly
dear, and when two days a week were observed strictly as fasting days, it
becomes a curious question to know how the supply was kept up. The inland
counties were dependent entirely on ponds and rivers. London was provided
either from the Thames or from the coast of Sussex. An officer of the
Fishmongers' Company resided at each of the Cinque Ports whose business it
was to buy the fish wholesale from the boats and to forward it on
horseback. Three hundred horses were kept for this service at Rye alone.
And when an adventurous fisherman, taking advantage of a fair wind, sailed
up the Thames with his catch and sold it first hand at London Bridge, the
innovation was considered dangerous, and the Mayor of Rye petitioned
against it.

Salmon, sturgeon, porpoise, roach, dace, flounders, eels, etc., were caught
in considerable quantities in the Thames, below London Bridge, and further
up, pike and trout. The fishermen had great nets that stretched all across
Limehouse-reach four fathoms deep.

Fresh fish, however, remained the luxury of the rich, and the poor were
left to the salt cod, ling, and herring brought in annually by the Iceland
fleet.

Fresh herrings sold for five or six a penny in the time of Henry VIII., and
were never cheaper. Fresh salmon five and six shillings apiece. Roach,
dace, and flounders from two to four shillings a hundred. Pike and barbel
varied with their length. The barbel a f