Diet for Workhouse, Bishopsgate Street, London.
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.
[124]. Cromwell Family, Bills and Receipts, Vol. II., p. 233, 1635.
[125]. Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, II., p. 556. (For Maimed Soldiers and Widows of Scotland and Ireland, Sept 30, 1651.)
[126]. Yorks. North Riding, Q.S. Rec., Vol. VII., p. 106, 1690.
[127]. Hertfordshire, Co. Rec., Vol. I., p. 258, 1675.
[128]. Yorks. N.R. Q.S. Rec., Vol. VI., p. 242, 1675.
[129]. Ibid. p. 217, 1674.