The City of London has always been famous for the great plenty and variety of its food. Beef, mutton, and pork formed then, as now, the staple of the diet; small beer was the drink of all, men, women, and children. When, for instance, the Franciscans first set up their humble cells, the small beer being short in quantity, they did not drink water, but mixed water with the beer, in order to make it go round. There were so many fast-days in the year that fish was as important a form of food as mutton or beef. They ate lampreys, porpoise, and sturgeon, among other fish. Ling, cod, and herring furnished them with salted fish. Peacocks and swans adorned their tables at great banquets. Their dishes were sweetened with honey, for sugar was scarce, but spices were abundant. By the thirteenth century they had begun to make plentiful use of vegetables. They were fond of pounding meats of different kinds, such as pork and poultry, and mixing them in a kind of _rissole_. At a certain great banquet, the menu of which has survived, there appears neither beef nor mutton, probably because those meats belonged to the daily life, but there are great birds and little birds, brawn, rabbits, swans, and venison for meats, soup of cabbage, then the _rissoles_ just mentioned, and various sweetmeats. Their drink was strong ale for banquets, hot spiced ale with a toast, the loving-cup of hypocras, and for wines, Rhenish, sack, Lisbon, and wine of Bordeaux. Since every man in the City who practised a trade must be a freeman and a member of a company or trade guild, and since every company looked after its livery, there should have been no poor in the City at all. But performance falls short of promise; laws cannot always be enforced; there was, it is quite certain, a mass of poverty and worthlessness in the City even in those days. Perhaps the City proper, with its wards, was tolerably free from rogues and vagabonds, but there were the suburb of Southwark, that of the Strand, that already springing up outside Cripplegate, and the city of Westminster. Plenty of room here for rogues to find shelter. There were also the trades of which the City took no heed, of minstrels, jugglers, and actors, and all those who lived by amusing others; also the calling of servant in every kind, as drover, carter, wagoner, carrier, porter (not yet associated), and so forth. And there were the men who would never do any work at all, yet wanted as much drink and food as the honest men who did their share. For all these people, when they were hungry, there were the charities of the great men, the bishops, and the monasteries. For instance, the Earl of Warwick allowed any man to take as much meat as he could carry away on a dagger; the Bishop of Ely (but this was later, in the sixteenth century) gave every day bread, drink, and meat to two hundred poor people; the Earl of Derby fed every day, twice, sixty old people; thrice a week all comers; and on Good Friday 2700 men and women.