[Sca-cooks] Types of Wheat for Bread

[Daniel & Elizabeth Phelps]

>From but a bit into the chapter.  Hope it helps.  The source is, of course, 
slightly later than requested:

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1577harrison-england.html#Chapter VI
Modern History Sourcebook:
William Harrison (1534-1593):
Description Of Elizabethan England, 1577
(from Holinshed's Chronicles)


The bread throughout the land is made of such grain as the soil yieldeth; 
nevertheless the gentility commonly provide themselves sufficiently of wheat 
for their own tables, whilst their household and poor neighbours in some 
shires are forced to content themselves with rye, or barley, yea, and in 
time of dearth, many with bread made either of beans, peas, or oats, or of 
altogether and some acorns among, of which scourge the poorest do soonest 
taste, sith they are least able to provide themselves of better. I will not 
say that this extremity is oft so well to be seen in time of plenty as of 
dearth, but, if I should, I could easily bring my trial. For, albeit that 
there be much more ground eared now almost in every place than hath been of 
late years, yet such a price of corn continueth in each town and market 
without any just cause (except it be that landlords do get licences to carry 
corn out of the land only to keep up the prices for their own private gains 
and ruin of the commonwealth), that the artificer and poor labouring man is 
not able to reach unto it, but is driven to content himself with horse corn 
I mean beans, peas, oats, tares, and lentils: and therefore it is a true 
proverb, and never so well verified as now, that "Hunger setteth his first 
foot into the horse-manger." 3 If the world last awhile after this rate, 
wheat and rye will be no grain for poor men to feed on; and some 
caterpillars there are that can say so much already.

  [Footnote 3: A famine at hand is first seen in the horse-manger, when the 
poor do fall to horse corn. - H.]

Of bread made of wheat we have sundry sorts daily brought to the table, 
whereof the first and most excellent is the manchet, which we commonly call 
white bread, in Latin primarius panis, whereof Budeus also speaketh, in his 
first book De asse; and our good workmen deliver commonly such proportion 
that of the flour of one bushel with another they make forty cast of 
manchet, of which every loaf weigheth eight ounces into the oven, and six 
ounces out, as I have been informed. The second is the cheat or wheaten 
bread, so named because the colour thereof resembleth the grey or yellowish 
wheat, being clean and well dressed, and out of this is the coarsest of the 
bran (usually called gurgeons or pollard) taken. The ravelled is a kind of 
cheat bread also, but it retaineth more of the gross, and less of the pure 
substance of the wheat; and this, being more slightly wrought up, is used in 
the halls of the nobility and gentry only, whereas the other either is or 
should be baked in cities and good towns of an appointed size (according to 
such price as the corn doth bear), and by a statute provided by King John in 
that behalf. 4 The ravelled cheat therefore is generally so made that out of 
one bushel of meal, after two and twenty pounds of bran be sifted and taken 
from it (whereunto they add the gurgeons that rise from the manchet), they 
make thirty cast, every loaf weighing eighteen ounces into the oven, and 
sixteen ounces out; and, beside this, they so handle the matter that to 
every bushel of meal they add only two and twenty, or three and twenty, 
pound of water, washing also (in some houses) their corn before it go to the 
mill, whereby their manchet bread is more excellent in colour, and pleasing 
to the eye, than otherwise it would be. The next sort is named brown bread, 
of the colour of which we have two sorts one baked up as it cometh from the 
mill, so that neither the bran nor the flour are any whit diminished; this, 
Celsus called autopirus panis, lib. 2, and putteth it in the second place of 
nourishment. The other hath little or no flour left therein at all, howbeit 
he calleth it Panem Cibarium, and it is not only the worst and weakest of 
all the other sorts, but also appointed in old time for servants, slaves, 
and the inferior kind of people to feed upon. Hereunto likewise, because it 
is dry and brickle in the working (for it will hardly be made up handsomely 
into loaves), some add a portion of rye meal in our time, whereby the rough 
dryness or dry roughness thereof is somewhat qualified, and then it is named 
miscelin, that is, bread made of mingled corn, albeit that divers do sow or 
mingle wheat and rye of set purpose at the mill, or before it come there, 
and sell the same at the markets under the aforesaid name.

  [Footnote 4: The size of bread is very ill kept or not at all looked unto 
in the country towns or markets. - H.]

In champaign countries much rye and barley bread is eaten, but especially 
where wheat is scant and geson. As for the difference that it is between the 
summer and winter wheat, most husbandmen know it not, sith they are neither 
acquainted with summer wheat nor winter barley; yet here and there I find of 
both sorts, specially in the north and about Kendal, where they call it 
March wheat, and also of summer rye, but in so small quantities as that I 
dare not pronounce them to be greatly common among us.