This brief account may, I hope, give you some little idea of the manner in which those people lived, and so laid the foundations of our life to-day. They were without a great many things which we look on as absolute necessities. They had, at first, no cotton and no linen for their clothes. They had no tea or coffee to drink; no tobacco to smoke. They had beer, which they brewed and sometimes sweetened with honey, for they understood bee-keeping. The honey was important for them, for they had no sugar. Neither had they potatoes; and they grew no root crops for their cattle to eat in winter. That fact that they had no root crops was important in their lives, for it meant that all they had to keep their cattle and sheep alive on in the winter was such hay as they could make and store. It would not support a very large stock all through the winter, and the consequence was that they killed down all their stock, except what was wanted for breeding purposes, at the beginning of each winter. Now you may remember I said that one of the chief necessities that the villagers would have to buy, {115} because they could not produce it for themselves, was salt. Seeing how many of what we call necessities, such as sugar and the like, they could do without, you may wonder that salt should be so necessary. But now that you know about this killing off of so much of the stock at the beginning of winter you may begin to see the necessity of the salt. Unless all this good food was to go bad it must be salted, in order to preserve it for eating as required. So, in the winter months, they might have meat sometimes; but it would be salted meat, not fresh. [Sidenote: Importance of hunting] But of course that would not apply to any game that they might kill by hunting in "the waste"--the woodland--nor does it appear that freemen were forbidden, in Anglo-Saxon times, to hunt. They had bows, which they made of yew or other wood, and spear shafts and arrows of ash, and the English very early were famous for their archery. They were famous too for their breed of hunting dogs, which were sometimes exported to the Continent, so highly were they valued. So they had this resource--free hunting in woods which probably were well stocked with game in comparison with the small human population. Make a note in your mind of this importance of the game, due to the fact that they could get no fresh meat from their domestic stock in winter. It is an importance which partly explains the reason of the fearfully severe game laws--laws to protect the game--which were passed a little later.