to that of wheat but to that of flour; they
might settle what should be the weight of the
loaves, and the price charged for each, according
as it was white, wheaten, or household
bread. The usual allowance to the baker varied
from a shilling to eighteen-pence on the price of
a bushel of flour; and the magistrates had at all
times the power to enter his shop and bake-house,
to see whether the baker was a good
man and true in his mixings and bakings. It
was assumed by law that twenty peck loaves of
seventeen pounds six ounces each, or eighty
quartern loaves of one-fourth that weight each,
can be made from a sack or two hundred and
eighty pounds of flour (that is, about five
pounds of bread from four pounds of flour);
but a skilful baker was able to produce eighty-five
quartern loaves to the sack, and this surplus
augmented his profits, giving him one loaf to
himself out of every sixteen. Out of these
circumstances arose cheap bread, small masters, and
dirty bakehouses. A sliding scale having been
established by the authorities, which fixed the
price of a quartern loaf at eightpence when flour
was forty shillings per sack, seventeen-pence
when flour was a hundred shillings per sack, and
proportionately between these two extremes, any
one who went below these assize prices was
ranked as a cheap baker. As is usual in matters
of commercial protection, neither buyers nor
sellers were quite satisfied; the assize laws
were abolished, and now any baker may sell his
bread for what prices he pleases.

At the present time, about one-fourth of the
bakers in the metropolis are known as high-priced
bakers, living in or serving the well-to-do
neighbourhoods; the other three-fourths, the cheap
bakers, serve chiefly the middle and humble
classes. But any man, so far as the law is
concerned, may sell dear or cheap, and may
make his bread good or bad—provided he looks
to his weights and scales, and does not venture
too far into the slough of adulteration.

There is no clear evidence that bread was
made at night until the present century.
Sometimes to get more batches in a given
time, sometimes to make a batch larger than
usual, the introducers of the cheap-bread system
coaxed, or bribed, or encouraged their helpers
to work long hours. These cheap masters
themselves would in many cases labour away half
through the night, and would insist upon their
journeymen and apprentices doing the same.
And so the system spread from one cheap baker
to another, and from the cheap baker to the
full-priced baker, until it became a regular thing for
bread-makers to work very long days indeed.

What, then, is a baker's life? In what is
called the London season, and at the high-priced
shops, the men begin work at about
eleven o'clock at night, when other folks are
thinking about going to bed. They are engaged
in bread-making, with a few short intervals
(during which they try to catch forty winks),
until seven or eight o'clock in the morning:
baking the plain loaves, the fancy bread,
the rolls, &c., in certain routine. They are then
engaged several hours in carrying out bread,
with an occasional dose of biscuit-baking in the
afternoon. If they get six hours' freedom from
the shop in the evening for their main supply of
sleep, it is about as much as they can reckon
upon. Their work during the day, although in
the open air, is by no means light, for they have
to carry heavy baskets and to wheel heavy
trucks or barrows. Friday is a harder day than
the rest, because they have to provide nearly
for two days' consumption; they enter the bake-house
an hour or so earlier than on other evenings,
and make a longer night's work of it.
Saturday night is the only one on which the
poor baker feels himself at liberty to tuck
himself comfortably into bed for a good long sleep,
like a Christian; he has no batch to attend
to on that night. His Sunday is not much of a
Sunday to him, seeing that he must attend two
or three times during the day to prepare the
"ferment" and "sponge" for the night's baking
—else, as things are now managed, we should
have no hot rolls on Monday morning, and no
bread at all by Monday evening or so. Bad as
this is, the workmen employed by the cheap
bakers lead a still harder life. As most of the
bread is sold over the counter, there is very
little out-door work to do; the poor drudge
hasn't even the pleasure of taking out the basket,
which would give him an opportunity to have a
little chat with Mary the nursemaid round at
Number Four. From Thursday evening till
Saturday evening these men almost live in the
bakehouse, so great is the work done to supply
an ample stock of bread by the time when working
men and their families begin to spend the
Saturday night's wages. Then, again, working
people have baked dinners on Sunday to an
extent quite beyond the experience of families in
a better station in life; these dinners are baked
mostly by the cheap bakers, and add to the
Sunday labours of the journeymen and apprentices.
In autumn, when genteel folks go out of
town, the West-end bakers are more at leisure,
and the delivery of bread is ended by two or
three o'clock in the afternoon; this gives the
men an evening of eight or nine hours' duration
for amusement and bed. But poor families have
no out-of-town season; the cheap bakers who
supply them make about as much bread at one
time of the year as another, and the fags in the
bakehouse know of no change—except
additional heat in summer. The details differ at
different times and in different localities; but it
is admitted that, in a general way, this is not an
over-coloured picture of a baker's life. As
matters were until a recent change was made
(of which we shall speak presently), two other
evils were added to these of nightwork and long
hours. Young lads, coming from the country,
from Scotland, or from Germany, to seek their
fortune in the great world of London, were
willing to enter the service of bakers; because,
as the trade is easy to learn, they became useful
at once, and received money wages instead of
having to pay an apprenticeship premium.
Hence the proportion of boys and youths in