They have Breakfasts, dinners, and suppers every day in the week. For each meal 4 oz. bread, 1½ oz. cheese, 1 oz. butter, 1 pint of beer. Breakfast, four days, bread and cheese or butter and beer. Mondays a pint of Pease Pottage, with Bread and Beer. Tuesdays a Plumb Pudding Pye 9 oz. and beer. Wednesdays a pint of Furmity. On Friday a pint of Barley Broth and bread. On Saturdays, a plain Flower Sewet Dumpling with Beer. Their supper always the same, 4 oz. bread, 1½ of cheese or 1 oz. of butter, and beer sufficient. (Stow, _London_, Book I, p. 199). _Lady Grisell Baillie gives her servant’s diet_: Sunday they have boild beef and broth made in the great pot, and always the broth made to serve two days. Monday, broth made on Sunday, and a Herring. Tuesday, broth and beef. Wednesday, broth and two eggs each. Thursday, broth and beef. Friday, Broth and herring. Saturday, broth without meat, and cheese, or a pudden or blood-pudens, or a hagish, or what is most convenient. Breakfast and super, half an oat loaf or a proportion of broun bread, but better set down the loaf, and see non is taken or wasted, and a muchkin of beer or milk whenever there is any. At dinner a mutchkin of beer for each. _Baillie (Lady Grisell). Household Book_, pp. 277-8. 1743. A comparison between the purchasing power of money in the seventeenth and twentieth centuries is unsatisfactory for our purpose, because the relative values of goods have changed so enormously. Thus, though rent, furniture and clothes were much cheaper in the seventeenth century, there was less difference in the price of food. Sixpence per day is often given in Assessments as the cost of a labourer’s meat and drink and this is not much below the amount spent per head on these items in wage-earners’ families during the first decade of the twentieth century. One fact alone is almost sufficient to prove the inadequacy of a labourer’s wage for the maintenance of his family. His money wages seldom exceeded the estimated cost of his own meat and drink as supplied by the farmer, and yet these wages were to supply all the necessaries of life for his whole family. Some idea of the bare cost of living in a humble household may be gained by the rates fixed for pensions and by allowances made for Poor Relief. From these it appears that four shillings to five shillings a week was considered necessary for an adult’s maintenance. The Cromwell family paid four shillings weekly “to the widd. Bottom for her bord.”[124] Pensions for maimed soldiers and widows were fixed at four shillings per week “or else work to be provided which will make their income up to 4s. per week. Sick and wounded soldiers under cure for their wounds to have 4s. 8d. per week.”[125] Footnote 124: _Cromwell Family, Bills and Receipts_, Vol. II., p. 233, 1635. Footnote 125: