The decadence of the art of domestic brewing is, for some reasons, a matter for regret. The causes are not far to seek. The improved machinery of the modern brewer, which enables him to make an uniformly excellent beer, and to sell it at a low price; and the railways which now traverse every part of the country, carrying his single, double, or treble X, as the case may be, to places where half a century back no one dreamt of purchasing ale for home consumption—to these great changes is undoubtedly due the partial downfall of home-brew that has taken {47} place. Not only has the practice of domestic brewing much declined, but from the same causes there has been of late years an extraordinary and lamentable decrease in the numbers of small country brewers. Although the name of home-brew carries with it many old associations and sentiments which we abandon with regret—memories of bright March beer and mellow old October, of snug ingle-nooks and raftered ceilings, and of kind, if homely, welcome—we cannot but admit, as on a hot day we drain our tankard of Burton bitter, or of world-famed London stout, that life has still its compensations. “To make barley-water was an invention which found out itself with little more than the joyning the ingredients together,” said old Fuller, in his _Worthies of England_; “but to make mault for drinke, was a master-piece indeed.” This old writer would seem to give the maltster more credit than the brewer. In his day, however, the distinction between the two was slight, for nearly every country gentleman or farmer was both his own brewer and his own maltster. In 1610, the justices of Rutland, in settling the rate of domestic servants’ wages, adjudged that a chief woman, who could bake and brew _and make malt_, should have the sum of 24_s_. 8_d_. by the year; while a second best, who could brew but not malt, was to have 23_s_. 4_d_. The earliest connected account of domestic malting and brewing which we have been able to find, occurs in a poetical work of the thirteenth century, called the _Treatise of Walter de Biblesworth_. The treatise deals with most matters of domestic concern and every-day life, and the passage in which the malting of barley and the brewing of ale are described, is so curious that it is given below in full length from the text to be found in _National Antiquities_, vol. i. (priv. pub. Th. Wright, Ed.).