Thus the amount paid by the Justices for maintaining one pauper child sometimes exceeded the total earnings of a labourer and his wife. Other pauper children were maintained in institutions. The girls at a particularly successful Industrial School in Bristol were given an excellent and abundant diet at a cost of 1s. 4d. per head per week.[132] At Stepney, the poor were maintained at 2s. 10d or 3s. per week, including all incidental expenses, firing and lodging. At Strood in Kent, 2s. was paid for children boarded out in poor families, while the inmates of the workhouse at Hanstope, Bucks, were supposed not to cost the parish more than 1s. 6d. a week per head.[133] At Reading it was agreed “that Clayton’s wief shall have xiiiiid. a weeke for every poore childe in the hospitall accomptinge each childe’s worke in parte of payment.”[134] Footnote 132: Cary, _Acc. Proceedings of the Corporation of Bristol_. 1700. “Their diets were made up of such provisions as were very wholesome, viz. Beef, Pease, Potatoes, Broath, Pease-porridge, Milk-porridge, Bread and Cheese, good Beer, Cabage, Carrots, Turnips, etc. it stood us (with soap to wash) in about sixteen pence per week for each of the one hundred girls.” Footnote 133: _Account Workhouses_, 1725, p. 13, p. 37, p. 79. Footnote 134: Guilding, _Reading_, Vol. II., p. 273, Jan. 16, 1625-6. These and many other similar figures show that a child must have cost from 1s. to 1s. 6d. a week for food alone, the amount varying according to age. Above seven years of age, children began to contribute towards their own support, but they were not completely self-supporting before the age of thirteen or fourteen. According to the wages assessments, a woman’s diet was reckoned at a lower figure than a man’s, but whenever they are engaged on heavy work such as reaping corn or shearing sheep, 6d. or 8d. a day is allowed for their “meate and drinke.” On other work, such as weeding or spinning, where only 2d. a day is reckoned for wages, their food also is only estimated as costing 2d. to 4d. As in such cases they are classed with “other impotent persons” it must not be supposed that 2d. or 3d. represents the cost of the food needed by a young active woman; it may even have been prolonged semi-starvation that had reduced the woman to the level of impotency. Unfortunately, there is often a wide difference between the cost of what a woman actually eats and what is necessary to maintain her in efficiency. Probably the woman who was doing ordinary work while pregnant or suckling a baby may have needed as much food as the woman who was reaping corn; but in the wage-earner’s family she certainly did not get it; thus when a writer[135] alleges that a man’s diet costs 5d. a day and a woman’s 1s. 6d per week, his statement may be correct as to fact, though the babies have perished for want of nourishment and the mother has been reduced to invalidism. Footnote 135: