The Lenten arrangements for feeding the natural man and woman from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday in those hardy and robust days are, even to think of, enough to turn our refined and educated stomachs. Eggs, to a certain limited extent, no doubt these good religious had; although, on the principle before explained, we do not find them mentioned, except as included in their natural producer, the domestic hen. But beyond this, during all this penitential time, the staple food, here as everywhere throughout England, was salted and dried fish. Conger, green fish, ling, and codling stockfish, wealing or whiting, and mackerel are among those named in Russell’s _Book of Nurture_ as the usual Lenten food. How tired the mouth of even the most ascetic religious must have got of the taste of salt fish, however much it was disguised with mustard sauce, or, as on great festivals, “baken, dressed, and dished with white sugar”! No wonder the rising generation in those primitive times were warned by Russell to look carefully upon what they ate for fear they might light on some unsavoury morsel; and “of all manner salt fish,” he says, “look ye pare away the pele (skin) before beginning upon it.” No wonder that after six weeks of salt herring, stockfish, and such-like, our ancestors in the cloisters could look forward to the time-honoured Easter-day joke of “the devil on horseback,” or a split red-herring riding as a jockey on the back of a duck, perpetrated by the convent cook. Lent, however, is naturally not a fair sample of the food supplied to the Grace Dieu nuns, so let us take the page of expenses for Easter week. Here it is:-- “A stall-fed ox, 16_s._ 1 pig from the farm. 3 small pigs, price 14_d._ 1 calf, price 2_s._ Almonds and rais (raisins), 12_d._, and for Friday 150 fresh herrings and a stockfish (_i.e._ cod), 2_s._” The almonds and raisins were a great luxury to the good sisters, and only on a few other occasions during the four years of Dame Petronilla’s housekeeping does this extraordinary expense occur! We cannot help thinking, too, with what pleasure the nuns must have welcomed the change of fish diet on the Friday in Easter week. Two shillings was in those days a great sum to pay for any article of food, but the fresh sea fish must have been scarce enough in Charnwood Forest before the days of railroads. “White herring fresh, if it be seaward and newly caught, with the roe white and tender,” says an old authority, “is toothsome food”; and the _Book of Nurture_ tells “the cook” how best to prepare it for his master’s eating. “The white herring by the bak a brode ye splat him sure, Both roe and bones voyded, then may your lord endure to eat merily with mustard.”