The method of cheating their customers by the beer-sellers was, we are told, exactly the contrary plan followed by our modern publicans. Now, when a man gets into a warm corner at the pot-house, they tell me that John Barleycorn is apt to serve out more drink than is good for him; but six hundred years ago the beer-seller made his profit, or tried to make it, by giving his customer less than he asked for. Tobacco was quite unknown; it was first brought into England about three hundred years after the days we are dealing with. When a man once sat himself down with his pot he had nothing to do but drink. He had no pipe to take off his attention from his liquor. If such a portentous sight could have been seen in those days as that of a man vomiting forth clouds of smoke from his mouth and nostrils, the beholders would have undoubtedly taken to their heels and run for their lives, protesting that the devil himself had appeared to them, breathing forth fire and flames. Tea and coffee, too, were absolutely unknown, unheard of; and wine was the rich man's beverage, as it is now. The fire-waters of our own time--the gin and the rum, which have wrought us all such incalculable mischief--were not discovered then. Some little ardent spirits, known under the name of _cordials_, were to be found in the better appointed establishments, and were kept by the lady of the house among her simples, and on special occasions dealt out in thimblefuls; but the vile grog, that maddens people now, our forefathers of six hundred years ago had never even tasted. The absence of vegetable food for the greater part of the year, the personal dirt of the people, the sleeping at night in the clothes worn in the day, and other causes, made skin diseases frightfully common. At the outskirts of every town in England of any size there were crawling about emaciated creatures covered with loathsome sores, living heaven knows how. They were called by the common name of lepers, and probably the leprosy strictly so called was awfully common. But the children must have swarmed with vermin; and the itch, and the scurvy, and the ringworm, with other hideous eruptions, must have played fearful havoc with the weak and sickly. As for the dress of the working classes, it was hardly dress at all. I doubt whether the great mass of the labourers in Norfolk had more than a single garment--a kind of tunic leaving the arms and legs bare, with a girdle of rope or leather round the waist, in which a man's knife was stuck, to use sometimes for hacking his bread, sometimes for stabbing an enemy in a quarrel. As for any cotton goods, such as are familiar to you all, they had never been dreamt of, and I suspect that no more people in Norfolk wore linen habitually than now wear silk.