The food of country people in the fourteenth century was little different to that they use to-day, save that potatoes and buckwheat (so frequent in French rural diet) were then conspicuous by their absence. Then, as now, their meat was chiefly pork, in all its forms of bacon, ham, brawn, or blood-pudding; and pork was relatively little cheaper than it is in many a remote and rural place to-day. Butter, cheese, eggs were very plentiful; herrings were an article of almost daily diet (they cost a sol the hundred, about a halfpenny apiece), and in the north of France people consumed freely a kind of salted whale called _craspois_, a truly Viking dish, of which the popularity has wholly vanished.[29] In Normandy pea-soup was then, as now, a favourite food.[30] Wine, beer, and mead were drunk by all classes. In 1392, a homeless pin-maker on the tramp breakfasts off wine and fish;[31] workmen out of employment dine at the village inn off bread, meat, and red wine at fourpence the pint.[32] In the same year the provisions left in the house of the wife of the Duke of Bourbon’s minstrel were: bacon to the value of four sous or shillings, six large loaves of bread, a great pot full of green peas, two penn’orth of onions, and a shilling’s worth of salt.[33] But the best criterion we get of the daily food of the rural population is the record preserved in the accounts of manors and monasteries of the dinners afforded to labourers on _corvée_, or, doled out day by day in return for some bounden service. Thus, the smith of the monastery of Jumièges received in return for his occasional services a daily ration of two small loaves, a measure of wine of medium quality, and either six eggs, four herrings, or some equivalent dish.[34] A vintager of St. Ouen, on _corvée_, was supplied every day with two rolls and a mess of peas and bacon with salt.[35] A tenant of the monks of Bayeux, during his _corvée_, was entitled to a daily meal of a white loaf, a brown loaf, five eggs, or three herrings, with a gallon of beer.[H] The monks of Montebourg gave each of their men a loaf, a mess of pea-soup, three eggs, and the quarter of a cheese, or, if they chose, six eggs, and no cheese; on fast days they made shift with three herrings and some nuts: they washed down this ample meal with as much beer as they chose to drink.[36] A tenant of the monks of St. Ouen received, in return for his _corvée_, not only bread and wine, pea-soup and bacon, but fresh or salt beef and poultry. All this is in Normandy. In Anjou, the men on _corvée_ dine more sparely off wine and bread and garlic; but the carpenters on a farm receive in addition to a daily wage of one sol eight deniers, five penn’orth of meat per person; the hedgers and ditchers also dine off bread and meat.[37] In almost every one of the numerous records that we have of the daily fare of the labouring class in fourteenth-century France, we find a dish of eggs, a mess of peas and bacon, half a