History

Shakespeare's Audience

Extracted from FOR WHOM SHAKESPEARE WROTE by Charles Dudley Warner

The gentry usually ate wheat bread, of which there were four kinds, and the poor generally bread made of rye, barley, and even oats and acorns. Corn was getting so dear, owing to the forestallers and middlemen, that, says the historian, "if the world last a while after this rate, wheat and rye will be no grain for poor men to feed on; and some catterpillers [two-legged speculators] there are that can say so much already."

The great drink of the realm was, of course, beer (and it is to be noted that a great access of drunkenness came into England with the importation much later of Holland gin) made from barley, hops, and water, and upon the brewing of it Harrison dwells lovingly, and devotes many pages to a description of the process, especially as "once in a month practiced by my wife and her maid servants." They ground eight bushels of malt, added half a bushel of wheat meal, half a bushel of oat meal, poured in eighty...
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