It was from
magazines like these that the turbulent barons supported in idleness
their riotous swarms of retainers ready for any disorder or mischief.
But agriculture is now arrived at such a pitch of perfection, that our
best and fattest meats are killed in the winter; and no man need eat
salted flesh, unless he prefers it, that has money to buy fresh.
(** Viz. : Six hundred bacons, eighty carcasses of beef, and six
hundred muttons.)
One cause of this distemper might be, no doubt, the quantity of
wretched fresh and salt fish consumed by the commonalty at all
seasons as well as in Lent; which our poor now would hardly be
persuaded to touch.
The use of linen changes, shirts or shifts, in the room of sordid and
filthy woollen, long worn next the skin, is a matter of neatness
comparatively modern; but must prove a great means of preventing
cutaneous ails. At this very time woollen instead of linen prevails
among the poorer Welch, who are subject to foul eruptions.
The plenty of good wheaten bread that now is found among all
ranks of people in the south, instead of that miserable sort which
used in old days to be made of barley or beans, may contribute not
a little to the sweetening their blood and correcting their juices; for
the inhabitants of mountainous districts, to this day, are still liable
to the itch and other cutaneous disorders, from a wretchedness and
poverty of diet.
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