That they were as well off, e.g. as the unskilled laborer of our day,
who demands from four to eight dollars a day as a wage, is evident from
the fact that while he has to pay forty cents a pound for mutton, the
workman of Edward the Third's day earned enough in four days to buy a
whole sheep and a gallon of ale. So plentiful was meat in England that
it was the ordinary diet of the poor. A preamble of an act of Parliament
of the fourteenth century in specifying beef, pork, mutton and veal
declares that these are "the food of the poorer sort." (The Thirteenth,
the Greatest of Centuries, p. 479.)
Speaking of live-stock leads to the observation that the people of
Dante's time for the most part lived in the country. Cities had not yet
become magnets. London is supposed to have had a population of
twenty-five thousand, York ten thousand four hundred, Canterbury, four
thousand seven hundred, Florence, in the year 1300, according to
Villani, a contemporary of Dante, had "ninety thousand enjoying the
rights of citizenship. Of rich Grandi, there were fifteen hundred.
Strangers passing through the city numbered about two thousand. In
the elementary schools were eight thousand to ten thousand children."
(Staley's Guilds of Florence, p.
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