mistake ribaldry and loquacity for wit and wisdom, and occasionally are
cup-shotten; and what wonder, when they who have hard diet and small
drink at home come to such opportunities at a banquet! The wealthier sort
in the country entertain their visitors from afar, however long they
stay, with as hearty a welcome the last day as the first; and the
countrymen contrast this hospitality with that of their London cousins,
who joyfully receive them the first 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