[23] 33 Hen.  VIII. cap.  II.  The change in the prices of such articles commenced in the beginning of the reign of Edward VI., and continued till the close of the century.  A discussion upon the subject, written in 1581 by Mr. Edward Stafford, and containing the clearest detailed account of the alteration, is printed in the Harleian Miscellany, vol. ix. p.139, etc.

[24] Leland, Itin., vol. vi. p.17.  In large households beef used to be salted in great quantities for winter consumption.  The art of fatting cattle in the stall was imperfectly understood, and the loss of substance in the destruction of fibre by salt was less than in the falling off of flesh on the failure of fresh grass.  The Northumberland Household Book describes the storing of salted provision for the earl’s establishment at Michaelmas; and men now living can remember the array of salting tubs in old-fashioned country houses.  So long as pigs, poultry, and other articles of food, however, remained cheap and abundant, the salt diet could not, as Hume imagines, have been carried to an extent injurious to health; and fresh meat, beef as well as mutton, was undoubtedly sold in all markets the whole year round in the reign of Henry VIII., and sold at a uniform price, which it could not have been if there had been so much difficulty in procuring it.  Latimer (Letters, p.412), writing to Cromwell on Christmas Eve, 1538, speaks of his winter stock of “beeves” and muttons as a thing of course.

[25] STAFFORD’S Discourse on the State of the Realm.  It is to be understood, however, that these rates applied only to articles of ordinary consumption.  Capons fatted for the dinners of the London companies were sometimes provided at a shilling apiece.  Fresh fish was also extravagantly dear, and when two days a week were observed strictly as fasting days, it becomes a curious question to know how the supply was kept up.  The inland counties were dependent entirely on ponds and rivers.  London was provided either from the Thames or from the coast of Sussex.  An officer of the Fishmongers’ Company resided at each of the Cinque Ports whose business it was to buy the fish wholesale from the boats and to forward it on horseback.  Three hundred horses were kept for this service at Rye alone.  And when an adventurous fisherman, taking advantage of a fair wind, sailed up the Thames with his catch and sold it first hand at London Bridge, the innovation was considered dangerous, and the Mayor of Rye petitioned against it.

Salmon, sturgeon, porpoise, roach, dace, flounders, eels, etc., were caught in considerable quantities in the Thames, below London Bridge, and further up, pike and trout.  The fishermen had great nets that stretched all across Limehouse-reach four fathoms deep.

Fresh fish, however, remained the luxury of the rich, and the poor were left to the salt cod, ling, and herring brought in annually by the Iceland fleet.