Harrison praises the farmer of his day highly:  ’the soyle is even now in these oure dayes growne to be much more fruitfulle; the cause is that our country men are grown more skilful and careful throwe recompense of gayne.’  He was also doing well by means of his skill and care; and in spite of the raising of rents by the much-abused landlords; for in former times ’for all their frugality they were scarcely able to live and pay their rents on rent day without selling a cow or a horse’.  Such also used to be their poverty, that if a farmer went to the alehouse, ‘a thing greatly used in those days,’ and there, ’in a braverie to show what store he had, did caste downe his purse and therein a noble or 6 shillings in silver unto them, it was very likely that all the rest could not lay downe so much against it.’  And In Henry’s time, though rents of L4 had increased to L40, L50, or L100, yet the farmer generally had at the end of his term saved six or seven years’ rent, besides a ‘fair garnish of pewter on his cupboard’, and odd vessels, also ’three or four feather beds, so manie coverlids and carpets of tapestry, a silver salt, a bowle for wine, and a dozzen of spoones to furnish up the sute’.  His food consisted principally of beef, and ‘such food as the butcher selleth’, mutton, veal, lamb, pork, besides souse, brawn, bacon, fruit, fruit pies, cheese, butter, and eggs.[231] In feasting, the husbandman or farmer exceeded, especially at bridals, purifications of women, and such other meetings, where ’it is incredible to tell what meat is consumed and spent’.  But, besides these, there were many poorer farmers who lived at home ‘with hard and pinching diet’.  Wheaten bread was at this time a luxury confined to the gentility, the farmer’s loaf, according to Tusser, was sometimes wheat, sometimes rye, sometimes mastlin, a mixture of wheat and rye, though the poorer farmer on uninclosed land ate bread made of beans.

The poor ate bread of rye or barley, and in time of dearth of beans, peas, and oats, and sometimes acorns.[232] According to Tusser, the labourer was allowed roast meat twice a week,

     ’Good plowmen looke weekly of custom and right,
     For roast meate on Sundaies, and Thursdaies at night’;

and Latimer calls bacon ‘the necessary meate’ of the labourer, and it seems to have been his great stand-by then as now.  The bread and bacon were supplemented largely by milk and porridge.[233] The statute, 24 Hen.  VIII, c. 3, says that all food, and especially beef, mutton, pork, and veal, ’which is the common feeding of mean and poor persons.’ was too dear for them to buy, and fixed the price of beef and pork at 1/2d. a lb. and of mutton and veal at 5/8d. a lb.; but the statute, like others of the kind, was of little avail, and the price of beef was in the middle of the sixteenth century about 1d. a lb. or 8d. in our money.  As the average price of wheat at the same date was 14s. a quarter, or about 112s. in our money, fresh meat was comparatively much cheaper, and it is no wonder that even the farmer could not afford wheaten bread regularly.  Moryson, writing in Elizabeth’s reign, says ’Englishmen eate barley and rye brown bread, and prefer it to white as abiding longer in the stomeck and not so soon digested’.[234]