[216] In connection with the dearth of milk it is important to notice the rise in the price of cheese. ‘Poor people,’ says Davies, (p. 19), ‘reckon cheese the dearest article they can use’ (cf. also p. 143), and in his comparison of prices in the middle of the eighteenth century with those of 1787–94 he gives the price of 112 lbs. of cheese at Reading Fair as from 17s. to 21s. in the first period, and 40s. to 46s. in the second. Retail cheese of an inferior sort had risen from 2½d. or 3d. a lb. to 4½d. or 5d. (p. 65); cf. also correspondent in Annals of Agriculture, vol. ii. p. 442. ‘Every inhabitant of Bath must be sensible that butter and cheese have risen in price one-third, or more, within these twenty years.’ (Written in 1784).
[217] Reports on Poor, vol. i. p. 129.
[218] Ibid., vol. iii. p. 78.
[219] Annual Register, 1806, p. 974; ‘My local situation afforded me ample means of knowing how greatly the lower orders suffered from being unable to procure a supply of milk; and I am fully persuaded of the correctness of the statement that the labouring poor lose a number of their children from the want of a food so pre-eminently adapted to their support’; cf. also Curwen’s Hints.
[220] Eden, vol. i. p. 510.
[221] Vol. iii. p. 96.
[222] Eden, vol. iii. p. 694.
[223] Cf. Reports on Poor, vol. i. p. 43; ‘Where there are commons, the ideal advantage of cutting flags, peat, or whins, often causes a poor man to spend more time in procuring such fuel, than, if he reckoned his labour, would purchase for him double the quantity of good firing.’
[224] Vol. iv. p. 496.
[225] Vol. ii. p. 587.