The bread that formed the substitute for our best and “second households,” was of various kinds, the finest being a sort of spice-cake of superior quality; simnel and wastel cakes were the ordinary food for the aristocracy, while commoners were content with a coarse brown material manufactured from rye, oats, or barley, that would at this day cause a revolution in prisons, or pauper workhouses, were it to be found in the dietary table of either, much less on the dinner-table. The special wines, hippocras, pigment, morat, and mead, were the temptations to inebriety among the rich; cider, perry, and ale, the form of alcoholic drinks common to the less affluent. The record of Peter de Blois, in one of his letters from the Court of Henry II., may be estimated perhaps as a faithful, if not attractive, description of the ordinary fare on which many unfortunate knights and retainers were sometimes compelled to subsist. He tells us that a priest or soldier had bread put before him, “not kneaded, not leavened, made of the dregs of beer, like lead, full of bran, and unbaked, wine spoiled by being sour or mouldy, thick, greasy, rancied, tasting of pitch, and vapid, sometimes so full of dregs, that they were compelled rather to filter than drink it, with eyes shut and teeth closed; meat stale as often as fresh; fish often four days old.” The picture is heightened by sundry details of a pungent character, all tending to prove the truth of his assertion, that powerful exercise was an essential assistant to overcome the evils of such diet. Early hours possibly contributed to lessen its injurious effects; and these of course, at any rate as far as regarded the “early to bed,” were enforced by the curfew, which has so mistakenly been attributed to the Norman Conqueror’s despotism, whereas it had long prevailed as a custom here, as on the continent, prior to his era, and was, in fact, a necessary precaution against the dangers of fire, when the dwelling-houses that formed a town or city were little more than bundles of faggots, well dried and bound up ready for burning.