Food Expenditures and Economic Well-

Being in Early Modern England

CAROLE SHAMMAS

The proportion of a household's budget spent on diet has commonly served as an

important measure of material welfare. This paper pulls together data concerning
trends in food expenditures for early modern England and draws comparisons
with figures for later periods. The usefulness of wage assessments, a new source
for estimating the proportion of outlays devoted to diet, is examined. The impact
on food expenditures of new commodities and other dietary shifts is also
explored. The findings call into question earlier estimates of the proportion of
total expenditure devoted to food and drink in the pre-industrial period and the
assumption that food expenditures are always inelastic.

T HE proportion of a household budget devoted to diet has common-

ly served as an important measure of material welfare. According
to "Engel's Law," named after Ernst Engel, a nineteenth-century
pioneer in budget studies, as total family expenditure rises the percent-
age given over to food purchases should decline.1 Households in most
post-industrial countries spend between one-fifth and one-third of their
disposable income on diet. It is assumed that the percentages for early
modern societies were much higher. One frequently cited work shows
English families from the fifteenth century to World War I consistently
allocating 80 percent of their budget to diet.2 Food percentages also
have an impact on other measures of economic well-being because they
are used to weight the basket of consumables in cost of living indices.
The index for England 1264-1954, based upon the above-mentioned
weights, shows real wages not regaining late fifteenth-century levels

Journal of Economic History, Vol. XLIII, No. 1 (March 1983). © The Economic History
Association. All rights reserved. ISSN 0022-0507.
The author is Associate Professor of History, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee,
Wisconsin 53201.
1
On Engel studies see George J. Stigler, "The Early History of Empirical Studies of Consumer
Behavior," Journal of Political Economy, 42 (April 1954), 95-113; Jeffrey G. Williamson,
"Consumer Behavior in the Nineteenth Century: Carroll D. Wright's Massachusetts Worker in
1875," Explorations in Entrepreneurial History, 4 (Winter 1967), 98-135; and more recently,
Steven Dubnoff, "A Method for Estimating the Economic Welfare of American Families of any
Composition: 1860-1909," Historical Methods, 13 (Summer 1980), 171-80.
2
E. H. Phelps Brown and Sheila V. Hopkins, "Seven Centuries of the Prices of Consumables,
Compared with Builders' Wage-Rates," in Essays in Economic History, vol. 2, edited by E. M.
Carus-Wilson (New York, 1962), pp. 179-96. A new version of the Phelps-Brown and Hopkins
figures for 1500-1911 appears in E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of
England 1541-1871 (London, 1981), pp. 638-44, but the weights remain the same. The other two
weighted indices covering long periods of time, those of Gilboy and Tucker, use percentages for
diet of 80 percent and 75 percent respectively. See their articles reprinted in The Standard of Living
in Britain in the Industrial Revolution, edited by Arthur J. Taylor (London, 1975), pp. 1-35.

89

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 90 Shammas

until the 1880s! Looking at these figures, a reader might well conclude
that little of importance happened in terms of food consumption until
well after industrialization.
On the other hand, we know from demographic research that by the
mid-seventeenth century starvation-related mortality crises disappeared
in all regions of England and that by the early eighteenth century no
relationship (or only a negative one) remained between grain prices and
mortality.3 Furthermore, the early modern period was the time when, it
is generally acknowledged, non-European commodities—potatoes,
rice, maize, tea, coffee, chocolate, sugar, and tobacco—became en-
sconced in the English diet.4 These developments suggest a time of
great change in consumption levels and eating habits.
The purpose of this short paper is to pull together data concerning
trends in food expenditures for early modern England and draw
comparisons with figures for later periods. The usefulness of wage
assessments, a new source for estimating the proportion of outlays
devoted to diet, will be examined. The impact on food expenditures of
the new commodities and other dietary shifts will also be explored.
While there are many problems involved in trying to estimate food
expenditures in a predominantly agricultural society, a large number of
people in rural as well as urban England in this period depended
primarily on wages for their livelihood and purchased the bulk of their
diet on the market. More than any other group, these wage laborers will
be focused upon here.

Statisticians did not begin conducting budget surveys in a systematic

fashion until the later nineteenth century, but a few contemporaries on
the scene during the early modern period made computations and even
circulated questionnaires about the spending patterns of the laboring
classes that invite comparisons with modern household budget data.
Table 1 shows the percentage of household expenditure devoted to diet
at 13 different points in time from 1695 to 1978. The first column of
percentages is for all households in the survey while the second column
is for that category of household having the lowest income in each
survey. The first figures, those for 1695, are from estimates made by
Gregory King. The next five surveys were inquiries conducted on a
3
Andrew B. Appleby, "Grain Prices and Subsistence Crises in England and France, 1590—
1740," this Journal, 39 (Dec. 1979), p. 867; and Wrigley and Schofield, Population History, pp.
371-72, 399. Appleby, "Grain Prices," p. 882, mentions that the "only likely candidate" for being
an exception to the generalization is a group of Midlands parishes between 1727 and 1730.
4
See Femand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life (London, 1981), chaps. 2 and 3; and
Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the
European World Economy 1600-1750 (New York, 1980), p. 258ff.

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 Food Expenditures and Economic Well-Being 91

TABLE 1
PERCENTAGE O F ENGLISH HOUSEHOLD EXPENDITURE
DEVOTED TO DIET
(1695-1978)

Poorest
All Category of
Year Household Groups Covered Number Households Household
1695 All English families n.a. 60.7% 74.1%
1787-93 English agricultural laborers 127 72.2 70.1
1794-% English agricultural and urban laborers 86 74.3 69.0
1836 Manchester working class 19 55.0 —
1841 Manchester working class 19 69.3 —
1837-38 English agricultural laborers 54 72.2 —
1890-91 "Normal" British industrial families 455 48.8 50.1
1904 United Kingdom working class 1,944 61.0 67.0
1929 Merseyside working class 154 47.0 50.6
1937-38 English industrial workers 8,905 39.5 45.4
1953-54 Cambridgeshire families 3,000 25.5 33.2
1971 United Kingdom families 7,239 26.0 30.0
1978 United Kingdom families 7,001 28.0 35.0

Source: 1695—"A First Draft of Gregory King's 'Observations' from his Notebook, 1695 and
Journal, 1696," in Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents, edited by Joan Thirsk and
J. P. Cooper (Oxford, 1972), pp. 767-68, and Gregory King, "A Scheme of the Income and
Expense of the Several Families of England Calculated for the Year 1688," Thirsk and
Cooper, pp. 780-81. 1787-93—David Davies, The Case of Labourers in Husbandry (Bath,
1795) and George Stigler, "The Early History of Empirical Studies of Consumer
Behavior," The Journal of Political Economy, 62 (1954), p. 97. 1794-96—Frederic Morton
Eden, The State of the Poor, vols. 2, 3 (London, 1797), and Stigler, "History Consumer
Behavior," 97. 1836, 1841—William Neild, "Comparative Statement of the Income and
Expenditures of Certain Families of the Working Classes in Manchester and Dukinfield, in
the years 1836 and 1841," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 4 (1841), 320-35. 1837-
38—Frederick Purdy, "On the Earnings of Agricultural Labourers in England and Wales,
1860," Ibid., 24 (1861), 328-73. 1890-91—United States, Seventh Annual Report of the
Commissioner of Labor 1891 (Washington, D.C., 1892), pp. 2000-07. 1904—Augustus D.
Webb, The New Dictionary of Recent Statistics of the World to the Year 1911 (Leipzig,
1911), p. 157. 1929—D. Caradog Jones, The Social Survey of Merseyside, vol. 1
(Liverpool, 1934), p. 216, and R. G. D. Allen and A. L. Bowley, Family Expenditure
(London, 1935), p. 32. 1937-38—The Ministry of Labour Gazette, 48 (Dec. 1940), 300-05
and J. L. Nicholson, "Variations in Working Class Family Expenditure," Journal of the
Royal Statistical Society, ser. A (general), 112 pt. IV (1949), 394. 1953-54—Dorothy Cole
and J. E. G. Utting, "Estimating Expenditures, Savings, and Income from Household
Budgets, Ibid., 119 pt 4. (1956), 321-87. 1971—Great Britain, Central Statistical Office,
Social Trends, no. 3 (1972), p. 100. 1978—Ibid., no. 11 (1981), p. 113.

small scale by social reformers or public officials during the late

eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The first major survey on
British family expenditure was undertaken in 1890 by the United States
Commissioner of Labor for comparative purposes.5
Although many of the percentages are high, nowhere does it appear
that 80 percent of expenditures went toward diet. From what is known
3
Lynn Hollen Lees, "Getting and Spending: The Family Budgets of English Industrial Workers
in 1890," in Consciousness and Class Experience in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. John
Merriman (New York, 1979), pp. 169-86, discusses the 1890-1891 survey.

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 92 Shammas

about rents, clothing costs, and the number of sundries required to live
in previous centuries, it would seem literally impossible for families
over prolonged periods to have spent four-fifths of earnings on diet. At
the same time no very clear trend surfaces until the twentieth century
when the proportion declines from 60 percent to about one quarter for
average households, and from two-thirds to one-third for the poor.
During the 1970s, the percentages begin to creep up again, suggesting
the beginning of a reversal.
There are problems, of course, with accepting all of these figures at
face value. One major difficulty is that in many of the surveys not all
types of miscellaneous expenditure were included, making the total
expenditure figure too small and hence the percentage accruing to food
inflated. This problem clearly affected the large United Kingdom
working class survey of 1904. Only a few expenses apart from clothing,
rent, and fuel were calculated so that only 4 percent of budget fell into
the miscellaneous category compared with 18!/2 percent in the 1890
survey.6 To a lesser extent, all the earlier surveys suffer from omissions
of this sort.
They also have another problem. In the years before offices were
established to compile statistics on a regular basis, individuals seldom
gathered figures except in times of crisis. In 1695, Gregory King wanted
to alert the government to the disastrous impact of the war with France
on the laboring population.7 Another war and skyrocketing food prices
at the end of the eighteenth century prompted the household budget
surveys taken by David Davies and Frederic Eden. Likewise the
economic crisis of the late 1830s and 1840s spurred local and House of
Commons investigations. The percentage of expenditures devoted to
food in these years was probably uncommonly high. Some indication of
how the percentages could seesaw within a few years' time is revealed
by the two entries for Manchester, England in 1836 and 1841. In the
latter year, the mayor, William Neild, had a survey taken of the
expenditures made by 19 working-class households in his city and
nearby Dukinfield to illustrate the effects of the depression on people in
the area. The investigators found diet absorbed 69 percent of the
workers' weekly outlays. They then figured what it would have cost in
1836 to buy the same goods and arrived at the much lower figure of 55
percent for that year. In other words, during one of these bad spells food
expenditure percentages could climb suddenly—in this case, 14 percent.
It seems possible, therefore, that the percentages in the high 60s and low
70s recorded for laborers during the late seventeenth and late eighteenth
centuries might have been in the mid-50s in better years.
6
D. Caradog Jones, The Social Survey of Merseyside, vol. 1 (Liverpool, 1934), p. 228.
7
G. S. Holmes, "Gregory King and the Social Structure of Pre-Industrial England," Transac-
tions of the Royal Historical Society, fifth series, 27 (1977), discusses the motivation behind King's
research. The method used to calculate the percentages from King's data are available from the
author.

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 Food Expenditures and Economic Well-Being 93

The scarcity and shortcomings of English budget data for the period
before the late nineteenth century suggest the need to look elsewhere
for material on food expenditures in order to learn something about
trends within the early modern period. One possible source is wage
assessments, those schedules approved by Parliament and, after 1563,
set by the local justices of the peace. Assessments fixed the maximum
wage that could be paid to artisans, agricultural workers, and servants.
For those wages paid on a daily basis, usually two figures were
promulgated—one with diet furnished by the employer and one without
diet being provided. By subtracting the wage with diet from the wage
without diet and dividing the difference by the wage without diet, one
obtains the percentage of the wage that the authorities assumed would
go for food and drink. Assessments are far from ideal documents to use
for this purpose. Some counties, such as Middlesex, did not alter their
rates much for over a century. Enforcement was undoubtedly lax at
times and masters would pay more than the set amounts. Estimates
after the mid-eighteenth century are few and far between because the
practice of employers furnishing full diet to workers died out. Further-
more, the wages were daily rates for male individuals, not family
budgets. Were workers supposed to feed a wife and several children on
this pay? Probably not. Laborers' families would have additional
sources of income from so-called secondary workers and, frequently,
the parish poor rates. According to the figures furnished by David

TABLE 2
PERCENTAGE OF WAGE DEVOTED TO DIET
ENGLAND 1420-1780
Real
Wage
Date North West East AlP Index
Laborers
1420-1514 43.4% 897"
1560-1600 61.7% 51.2% 52.7% 55.0 559
1601-1640 63.3 53.0 50.0 54.9 411
1641-1680 56.7 53.1 47.6 51.9 473
1681-1720 58.3 54.0 47.9 52.9 553
1721-1760 52.7 53.0 48.2 51.0 658
Master Carpenters
1420-1514 — — 31.9% 897"
1560-1600 48.1% 43.9% 41.4% 44.1 559
1601-1640 45.7 48.3 47.0 47.0 411
1641-1680 50.0 50.2 43.5 47.5 473
1681-1780 45.8 45.8 43.4 44.8 615

" Percentage obtained by a weighted average of North (30 percent), West (30 percent), East (40
percent).
b
Average of 1499-1514 only.
Source: 1420-1514—Coventry 1420, 1444 statute, 1445 statute, 1495-96 statute, 1514 statute; Ellen
M. McArthur, "A Fifteenth-century Assessment of Wages," English Historical Review,
13 (1898), 299-302, Victoria County History, Warwickshire (London, 1908), 11, 180;

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 94 Shammas

Frederic Morton Eden, The State of the Poor (London, 1797), 1, pp. 65, 74-75, 81; 111,
lxxxix.
1560-1600—North: Lines. 1663, Rut. 1563, York 1563, Lincoln 1563, Hull, 1570,
Doncaster, 1577, Yorks. East Riding, 1593, Lancashire 1595; West: Exeter 1564-95,
Salisbury, 1595, Devonshire 1594-95; East: Northants. 1560, 1566, 1595, Bucks., 1561,
Kent, 1563, 1565, 1589, Berks. 1563, London 1563-1580, Canterbury, 1576, 1594,
Colchester, 1583, Herts. 1591; B. H. Putnam, "Northamptonshire Wage Assessments of
1560 and 1667," Economic History Review, 1 (1927-28), pp. 124-34. R. H. Tawney and E.
Power, eds., Tudor Economic Documents (London, 1935) 1, pp. 334-38, Paul L. Hughes
and James F. Larkin, eds., Tudor Royal Proclamations (New Haven, 1969), 3 vols.,
passim.
1601-1640—North: Rut. 1610, Lincolnshire, 1621; West: Wiltshire, 1603-34, 1635,
Merrioneth, 1601, Gloucester, 1632, Herefordshire, 1632; East: Middlesex 1608-40,
Norfolk, 1610, Suffolk 1630; Walter Davies, General View of the Agriculture and Domestic
Economy of North Wales (London, 1813), pp. 500-01, William Cunningham, The Growth
of English Industry and Commerce in Modern Times (Cambridge, 1929), pt. 11, pp. 887-
93, J. C. Tingey, "An Assessment of Wages for the County of Norfolk in 1610," English
Historical Review, 13 (1898), 522-27, Great Britain, Historical Manuscript Commission
(London, 1901), pp. 160-75, Ibid., Twelfth Report, Appendix part IV, Manuscripts of the
Duke of Rutland I (London, 1888), pp. 450-52, W. A. J. Archbold, "An Assessment of
Wages for 1630," English Historical Review, 12 (April 1897), 307-11, James E. Thorold
Rogers, A History of Agriculture and Prices in England (Oxford, 1887), VI, passim; W. E.
Minchinton, ed., Wage Regulation in Pre-Industrial England (Newton Abbot, 1972), p.
203
1641-80—North: Yorkshire West Riding 1647-1670, Yorkshire North Riding 1658,
Yorkshire East Riding 1669; West: Wiltshire 1654, 1655, Gloucestershire 1655, Somerset-
shire 1651-53, 1666, 1668-70, 1671-72, 1673, Worcestershire 1663, Herefordshire, 1666,
1667, 1668-80, Warwickshire, 1672; East—Essex 1651, 1661, Middlesex 1641-80, North-
ants. 1667; Cunningham, pp. 887-93, Hist. Ms., Various 1, pp. 160-75, Rogers, VI,
passim; Putnam, pp. 124-34, Roger Kelsall, "Two East Yorkshire Wage Assessments
1669, 1679," English Historical Review, 52 (1937), 283-89, Great Britain, Historical
Manuscript Commission, Fifteenth Report, Report on Manuscripts in Various Collections
1 (London, 1901), p. 323; Eleanor Trotter, Seventeenth Century Life in the Country Parish
(Cambridge, England, 1919), pp. 161-62; A. W. Ashby, One Hundred Years of Poor Law
Administration in a Warwickshire Village (Oxford, 1912), 170-83; H. Heaton, "The
Assessment of Wages in the West Riding of Yorkshire in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth
Centuries," Economic Journal, 24 (1914), 218-35; Minchinton, ed. pp. 160-61, 203.
1681-1720—North: Yorkshire West Riding; 1703-20 West: Wilts. 1685, Warwickshire,
1684, 1710, Somersetshire 1680-85, Herefordshire, 1680-82, 1684, 1702, 1703-06, 1710,
Somersetshire, 1680-85, Herefordshire, 1680-82, 1684, 1702, 1703-06, 1707 and 1711,
1708-10, 1712-20, Devonshire, 1700-20; East—Middlesex 1681-1720, Bedfordshire, 1684,
Suffolk, 1682; Rogers VI, VII, passim; VCH, Warwickshire, 11, p. 180; Cunningham, pp.
887-93; Elizabeth W. Gilboy, Wages in Eighteenth Century England (Cambridge, Massa-
chusetts, 1934), p. 88; Minchinton, ed., pp. 160-61, 203; T. S. Willan, "A Bedfordshire
Wage Assessment of 1684," Publications of the Bedfordshire Historical Record Society,
25 (1943), 129-37.
1721-1780—North: Yorkshire West Riding 1721-32, Nottingham 1723, Lancashire,
1725, Lincolnshire 1754; West: Devonshire 1721-32, 1733-78, Herefordshire, 1732, 1733-
62, Warwickshire 1730, Shropshire 1732-39; East: Middlesex 1721-25, Kent, 1724; Rogers
VII passim; J. D. Chambers, Nottinghamshire in the Eighteenth Century (New York,
1966, orig. published 1932), pp. 280-84, Eden, 111, cvi-cix; Victoria County History,
Lincolnshire 11 (London, 1906), pp. 345-46; Minchinton, ed., pp. 204; Gilboy, p. 88;
Ashby, pp. 171-83; F. A. Hibbert, "The Shropshire Wages Assessment at Easter 1732,"
Economic Journal, 4 (1894), pp. 516-17, Elizabeth Waterman, "Some New Evidence on
Wage Assessments in the Eighteenth Century," English Historical Review, 43 (July 1928),
pp. 398-408; Cunningham, pp. 887-93.
Real wage index is in E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of
England 1741-1871 (London, 1981), pp. 642-43.

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 Food Expenditures and Economic Well-Being 95

Davies and Frederick Eden in the 1780s and 1790s, the earnings of a
household head in the majority of cases constituted less than two-thirds
of a laboring-class household's total expenditure. The food allowance in
wage assessments, therefore, is an indication of what each male worker
buying meals for himself would allot to diet. It is not a family wage out
of which meals for wife and children should also be deducted to obtain
the proportion of household expenditure devoted to food.8
Despite these difficulties, the assessments do indicate what propor-
tion of a wage contemporaries believed went towards diet, and in terms
of trends over time and variations among regions, it matters little
whether it is a laborer's wage or a family's expenditures that is
represented. In Table 2, then, are the proportions ©f wages allowed for
food and drink by time period and region. Percentages for two types of
workers are shown: laborers (mainly agricultural but some urban) and
master carpenters, the former representing those at the bottom of the
working-class hierarchy and the latter representing those near the top.
Two principal points can be made about these series. First, both the
carpenters' and the laborers' percentages for the entire period are much
lower than the proportions found in the 1695 and late eighteenth century
budgets of Table 1. Leaving aside the pre-1560 data for a moment—the
table shows laborers allotted from 47.6 percent to 63.3 percent to diet
and carpenters 43.4 percent to 50.2 percent depending upon time and
region.9
The second point involves the pattern over time. The strikingly low
percentage of wages devoted to diet in the fifteenth and early sixteenth
centuries corresponds to what has previously been described as the
effects of population size on food prices. For purposes of comparison, I
have included averages of the real wage index for each group of years.
As mentioned above, this index, on the cost side, is almost entirely (80
percent) a reflection of variations in the prices of food and drink.
Considering trends in the real wage index, what is surprising is the
rather erratic behavior of the food percentages for laborers after 1600 in
the East and the West of England. In the former, food percentages
began declining in the early seventeenth century, but did not continue
the decline in the eighteenth despite higher real wages. In the West
percentages continue to rise through 1640, as might be assumed, but no
decline occurs thereafter. Only in the North among laborers does one
see the kind of dramatic increase in food percentages in the 1560-1640

8
The standard guide to wage assessments for England is W. E. Minchinton, ed., Wage
Regulation in Pre-Industrial England (Newton Abbot, 1972). Donald Woodward, "Wage Rates and
Living Standards in Pre-Industrial England," Past and Present, 91 (May 1981), 28-46, presents
evidence that builders' wages were not their entire income.
9
Master carpenters' food percentages are probably too high because they had other sources of
income. Woodward, "Wage Rates."

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 96 Shammas

period and the sharp and continual drop after the mid-seventeenth
century that might be expected given the real wage situation.10
According to consumption theory, food is inelastic in comparison to
other goods. People have to eat, so in hard times the "real" amount
spent on diet remains constant although the nominal amount and the
food expenditure proportion might go up because of higher prices, lower
wages, or both. In good times when higher wages prevail, the amount
spent will not increase proportionally because people can only eat so
much. Consequently the percentage of the total budget devoted to diet
will go down. Here, though, with the wage assessments, the percent-
ages do not fluctuate to the degree one might assume, implying that the
amounts expended did and that diet expenditures were somewhat more
elastic among the working-class population in the early modern period
than theory would lead us to believe.
When economists examine late nineteenth-century and twentieth-
century budget data, they usually find that as workers' incomes rise the
percentage expended on food declines. When the cross-sectional house-
hold expenditure material gathered by Eden and Davies for late
eighteenth-century laborer's families is analyzed, the relationship is
precisely the reverse. The higher the income the higher the diet
percentage, while all the other categories of expenditure—clothing,
rent, and fuel—go down as total resources climb.11 The income elastic-
ity for food is over unity.12 While the figure may be partially attributed
to the impoverished state of the workers in the Davies and Eden
Studies, many budget inquiries in the modern period also excluded more
affluent wage earners or divided low-income groups into several catego-
ries according to their earnings. No such pattern as found in the 1780s
and 1790s appears, however. Food proportions are highest among the
poorest and vice versa.
Engel's law and the theory that has been built up around it came into
being at a time of rapidly falling percentages of household expenditures
devoted to food. These "laws" may not apply in all time periods. As
Table 1 shows, the percentages in the 1970s have begun to rise again.
Some of the increase may be attributed to falling real wages but there
may be other reasons as well: more meals taken outside the home, for
example. Likewise more than just Engel's law is needed to illuminate
the early modern situation.
10
The close inverse correlation between the real wage index and the food percentages for the
North is especially interesting because the data on which the index is based are from the South.
11
The tables in Stigler, "History of Consumer Behavior," p. 97, show this clearly.
12
The Eden and Davies data yield 193 usable observations and produce an elasticity for food of
1.069 (double log form with the log of household size included in the regression). N. F. R. Crafts,
"Income Elasticities of Demand and the Release of Labour by Agriculture during the British
Industrial Revolution," Journal of European Economic History, 9 (Spring, 1980), p. 157,
separating Davies and Eden and using many fewer observations, obtained slightly different results
although he also stresses high elasticity. Unlike Crafts, I used expenditures rather than income so
that my figures would be comparable to those of other budget studies.

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 Food Expenditures and Economic Well-Being 97

What particularly requires explanation is the sluggish rise and decline

in the percentage of budget devoted to food in the eastern and western
portions of England given the sharp fall and then rise in wages vis-a-vis
food prices in this period. Why does there seem to be so much elasticity
in food demand? It appears that people did cut back on "real" pounds
sterling spent on consumption in the sixteenth and early seventeenth
century everywhere, except for laborers in the North. It has been
argued that dietary standards declined in Europe during this time, with
meat, butter, and egg consumption falling to compensate for the
increased price of grains, although it has never been proven for
England, specifically.13 The elasticity implies that even laborers had
some flexibility, however dismal was the diet for which they had to
settle. The percentages for laborers in the North suggest no such
margin. In this region, starvation-caused mortality crises continued
through the 1620s, and one finds food expenditure percentages climbing
up to 63.3 percent in the early seventeenth century. Northern workers
had no place to cut their food budget and thus their expenditures show a
more inelastic pattern.
The carpenters' food percentages fall below those of laborers, as
would be assumed, yet the gap narrows over time. Also the percentages
in all regions follow the real wage index even less closely than do those
of the laborers' despite the fact that the real wage index is based upon
builders' pay. Both tendencies give aid and comfort to the supposition
that early modern food expenditures have some of the characteristics
usually associated with "luxury" spending.
How might changes in diet help account for the trend observed here?
In terms of composition, the diet of English women and men today was
set in the eighteenth century. Wheat bread and butter, sugar, tea,
coffee, chocolate, potatoes, rice, tobacco, spirits all became a normal
part of life in the early modern period. Exactly when these items came
into constant usage and how it affected food expenditures, however, is
still not well established.
Figure 1 is a display of the food and drink that found its way into the
menus and account books of poorhouses and hospitals in both the
eastern and western portions of southern England from the Elizabethan
period to the end of the eighteenth century.14 Incorporation into an
institutional bill of fare usually indicates that a commodity is firmly
entrenched in the diet of the general population although the reverse is
13
Bartolome Bennassar and Joseph Goy, "Contribution a I'Histoire de la Consommation
Alimentaire du XIVe Siecle," Annales: Economies, Societies, Civilizations, 30 (Mars-Juin 1975), p.
427; and H. J. Teuteberg, "The General Relationship between Diet and Industrialization," in
European Diet from Pre-Industrial to Modern Times, edited by Elborg Forster and Robert Forster
(New York, 1975), p. 64.
14
On differences between the diet of southern England on the one hand and the Celtic fringe on
the other, see Brinley Thomas, "Feeding England During the Industrial Revolution: A View from
the Celtic Fringe," Agricultural History, 56 (January 1982), 328-42.

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 98 Shammas

SE. ENGLAND S. ENGLAND S. ENGLAND S. ENGLAND

1570-1650 1687-1700 1725-1758 1773-1795

ANIMAL
PRODUCTS

GRAINS

VEGETABLES
Other: Turnips,
Cabbage, etc.

FRUITS Dried and Fresh

Beer
mm* wmm
DRINKS
Tea
Distilled Liquor
•IP
Hlta
Chocolate and
Coffee

Salt

OTHER Sugar

Spices

'aside from that used in Beer

| | SELDOM OR NEVER CITED

W$ffl SOMETIMES CITED

^ ^ | CONSTANTLY CITED

FIGURE 1
POORHOUSE DIETS IN SOUTHERN ENGLAND, 1570-1800

Source: 1570-1650—John Webb, ed. Poor Relief in Elizabethan Ipswich in Suffolk Record
Society, 9 (1906); "Orders Rules Directions . . . Justices of the Peace . . . Suffolk . . .
[1598] . . . Bury, Suffolk," in Frederic Morton Eden, The State of the Poor (London,
1797), pp. cxxvi-cxliii; Paul Slack, ed., Poverty in Early-Stuart Salisbury in Wiltshire

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 Food Expenditures and Economic Well-Being 99

not necessarily true. Tea, spirits, and tobacco seldom appear because of
moral objections to these substances during the eighteenth century.
Nevertheless the poorhouse rules forbidding them and evidence from
non-institutional sources demonstrate widespread consumption.
According to Figure 1, the standard menu of bread, cheese, peas,
meat or fish, beer, and vegetables in season prevailed from the sixteenth
century to the middle of the seventeenth century. The bread was usually
a mixture of grains. At the end of the seventeenth century, some of the
new commodities—rice and potatoes—began appearing occasionally.
The unprecedented heavy use of sugar was by far the most important of
the developments in these years, however, because it made puddings of
wheat, oats, or rice much more palatable. Frumenty, panado, hasty
pudding, and rice milk showed up with even greater frequency in the
1725-1758 period. Potatoes apparently disappeared, but they reemerged
with a vengeance after the 1750s in practically every workhouse menu.
The consumption of tea in England began in the last half of the
seventeenth century and had become common in the southeast by the
1720s.15 Tea as a desirable drink was another byproduct of the sugar
revolution, and together the two changed the composition of breakfasts
and suppers. Brown bread, cheese, and beer gave way to the new drink,
its sweetener, and white wheat bread with butter.
Some indication of the importance that the new commodities had
assumed in the diet of laboring people by the end of the early modern
period is revealed in the household budgets collected in the 1780s and
1790s. "Groceries," those imported foodstuffs, selected provisions, and
15
A third of inventories from East London, a poor area, contained tea and/or coffee utensils by
the 1720s. Carole Shammas, "The Domestic Environment in Early Modern England and
America," Journal of Social History, 14 (Fall 1980), p. 12, Table II.

Record Society, 31 (1975), p. 11, 111-2, 118; [Samuel Hartlib], London's Charity Inlarged
(London, 1650).
1687-1700—"St. Bartholomew's Hospital . . . 1687," in J. C. Drummond and Anne
Wilbraham, The Englishman's Food (London, 1957, second edition), pp. 104-05; Anon. A
Modest Proposal . . . Provision for the Poor (London, 1696), p. 7; E. E. Butcher, ed.,
Bristol Corporation of the Poor 1696-1834, in Bristol Record Society Publications, 3
(1932), pp. 68-69; John Cary, An Account of the Proceedings of the Corporation of Bristol
(London, 1700), p. 12.
1725-1758—Anon, An Account of Several Workhouses for Employing and Maintaining
the Poor (London, 1725) and second edition (London, 1732); R. H. Lightning, Eating and
the Poor, Ealing Local History Society member paper no. 7, typescript 1966; Anon.
Statutes, Rules and Orders for . . . County Hospital for the Sick and Lame Poor,
Northampton (Northampton, 1743); Elizabeth Melling, Kentish Sources: IV The Poor
(Maidstone, 1964), pp. 96-97; [Jonas Hanway], A Plan for Establishing a Charity-House
. . . (London, 1758), pp. 24-26.
1773-1795—Anon. Norwich and Norfolk Hospital (London, 1773), pp. 37-38; C. E.
Mullineaux, Pauper and Poorhouse: Administration of Poor Laws in a Lancashire Parish
(Pendlebury, 1966), pp. 10-12; Arthur Young, comp. Annals of Agriculture (London,
1795), vol. 23; Eden, State of Poor, vols. II, III, passim, poorhouse menus and accounts in
the South of England.

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 100 Shammas

haberdashery items sold in generalized shops, appear in nearly every

family listing. Tea, sugar, and potatoes alone constituted 12.4 percent of
food and drink expenditures, almost the same proportion as meat
purchases. The same could be said for outlays on other new commod-
ities. The competition between butter and cheese and the struggle for an
ever whiter wheat bread also gave the consumer new places to put his or
her cash. Undoubtedly some of the changes were made to save money
and certainly very few of them necessarily led to better nutrition. They
do suggest, however, some reasons for the perceived elasticity of food
expenditures in the later part of the early modern period.

II

Consumer behavior in dietary matters during the early modern period

appears to differ from that in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century
England. No dramatic fall in the proportion of household outlays
devoted to food occurred. In fact, it is likely that the percentage rose
sharply in the sixteenth century and late seventeenth and eighteenth
century declines were insufficient to bring back fifteenth century levels.
The proportions, however, fell into the 50-60 percent range for the
laboring classes rather than the 80 percent often used in cost of living
indices.
It also may be inappropriate for the early modern period to classify
spending for clothing and consumer durables as elastic and food buying
as inelastic. Outlays had to be made for rent, fuel, soap, candles, and
apparel. Flexibility was often limited. On the other hand, consumers
could change the grain and the grade of their bread, increase or decrease
their intake of meat and sugar, substitute cheese for butter or caffeine
drinks and spirits for beer. The failure of the percentage of expenditure
devoted to diet to decline further in the late seventeenth or the
eighteenth century may be due to the variety of commodities to put in
one's mouth. It may also explain why the consumer durables that
enjoyed the biggest boom in this period were eating and drinking
utensils.

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022050700029041 Published online by Cambridge University Press