Bakers made bread, rolls and biscuits; a confectioner made cakes and pastries although it was common, like Caleb, for small bakeries to produce both. Many a baker also provided the important community function of cooking Sunday and Christmas dinner for poor families without ovens. Even over Christmas, wood-fired ovens were kept hot because it took too long to get an oven up to the correct temperature; a baker might as well earn a penny or two more. In summer, poor families asked the baker to cook their food as it cost more to light the range than pay the baker a penny.
In order for bread to be bought by customers starting work early in the morning, a baker worked overnight mixing and kneading dough, letting it rise again before baking it in the oven. A working day of over eighteen hours was not unusual and it was hard physical work hefting 20 stone hessian sacks of flour.
The Book of Trades 1806 explains how journeymen started at eleven at night making bread rolls with milk, not water, for sale in the morning. There was no method of regulating the oven’s heat; it was down to the baker’s skill. A bale of burning wood was placed in the oven, the door closed and the baker waited until the wood had burnt to embers. At this point, the burning ash was scraped out and the bread placed on the oven floor using a long-handled peel, an implement similar to a shovel and used from the Middle Ages. A water-soaked panel was placed in the doorway to swell in the heat and dough was plastered around the gap to seal it further. Once the dough outside was cooked, it was presumed the bread inside was ready too. As in recipes today, when bread is tapped on the bottom and sounds hollow, it is done. The expression ‘the upper crust’ comes from here – the base of bread cooked on the oven bottom was burnt black, so the top of the bread, the upper crust, was eaten by the higher social classes.
A fascinating insight into the production of biscuits at the Victualling Office, Deptford, is detailed in the Book of Trades. This was a large bakery with twelve wood burning stoves each making bread for 2,040 people, a total of 24,480 people a day – a huge enterprise and surely a precursor of factory manufacturing. A machine mixed the flour and water dough, after which a workman apportioned it between five bakers. Although the biscuits were made by hand, the operation was a slick juggling trick; the first baker formed biscuits two at a time, the second stamped them before throwing them to a third who split them down the middle and slid them under the hand of number four, who tossed peel over the top. The final baker put them in the oven. Seventy biscuits a minute were made in this fashion and the author was so obviously impressed that he failed to mention how the bakery made so much bread as well. Pay was relatively low at ten shillings a week excluding rent for living with the baker. Compare this to trades receiving three to four shillings a day.
Sanctions for dishonest practices were tough. In 1806, a baker could be pilloried and fined for selling short-weight bread. Because the penalty was so severe, the baker added a ‘vantage loaf’ – an extra roll or piece of bread – to each order, hence the expression ‘baker’s dozen’. Adding unauthorised ingredients to a loaf of bread, chalk or bone dust for instance, resulted in humiliation around the streets and ultimate expulsion from the livery company. At the time, bread was two types, white (wheaten) and household (cheaper) and had to be clearly labelled as such or, again, the baker was fined. As profit margins were so narrow, skulduggery was common.
When Sunday working was illegal, there was a potential problem with bread availability on Monday. The Bread Act of 1821 permitted London bakers within ten miles of the Royal Exchange to work on Sunday until 1.30am and make deliveries. By 1836, bakers countrywide could work Sunday. Why were these laws so important? Bread was the staple food and for centuries people ate a loaf of bread each day; the baker was a busy man! In 1871, just over 59,000 bakers were recorded in the census.
For centuries, the price of bread was fixed and people sometimes rioted when prices rose, like coal miners in the 1831 Merthyr Rising. Incidentally, this was the first time a red flag, the symbol of the working class, was hoisted. In 1919, after the bread subsidy was removed following the end of the First World War, the cost of a two-pound loaf rose to eight pence and people complained to local newspapers like the Stockport Advertiser. Although Stockport shops could charge less, I doubt they did…
The history of baking can be found on the Worshipful Company of Bakers’ website at www.bakers.co.uk, although there is little on individual bakers. Their motto ‘Praise God for all’ was the traditional grace before meals. First mentioned in the Pipe Rolls of 1155, this guild is the second oldest and nineteenth in the order of preference. The Bakers’ Company does not answer genealogical questions but their records are accessible at London Guildhall.
The volunteer-run database of Sugar Bakers and Sugar Refiners at www.mawer.clara.net/intro.html may be of interest. This includes a map of sugar refineries, information about each one and census lists of anyone involved in the industry. The database throws up interesting snippets, such as the fact that a Manchester sugar refiner, Alfred Fryer, started life as a tea dealer and by the 1861 census employed 170 men in his new enterprise. Should your ancestor have lived nearby, he may have been working at this refinery, which provided sugar for the baking, confectionery, drink industries and shops. See Brian Mawer’s excellent book on Sugar Bakers for information on working conditions and hazards. It was common in early nineteenth century London for the destitute to sleep outside a sugar bakery where they could get a vestige of warmth.
For anyone with connections to J. Lyons, the corner-house teashop and bakery, the electronic history of the company at www.kzwp.com/lyons compiled by Peter Bird might be of interest. It tells the history of the company, information on subsidiaries and, for the genealogist, a list of war dead and memorials plus recent obituaries and people’s roles within the company. The list of extended biographies is of more use as the pensioners list is merely that; a name, date of death and for which department they worked. There is also an explanation of the bakery production process, providing background information for anyone whose relative worked here.
Copies of the magazine The Baker, published from 1954, can be ordered from the British Library. For John Hearfield’s interesting personal approach on the relationship between the price of bread and income in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries see www.johnhearfield.com/History/Breadt.htm. For mills and millwrights, consider Reading-based volunteer-run The Mills Archive at www.millsarchivetrust.org. Their search engine is free but for more information, you must become a friend of the trust.
It is easy even now to tell a medieval market square; the roads leading towards it are relatively wide to accommodate the chaos of cattle, pigs and sheep driven down to be sold or slaughtered. Until the formation of the railways, all animals by necessity were brought to market live, which could mean driving them distances of up to a hundred miles, during which time they lost a lot of weight.
Stallholders set up according to where they were designated; hawkers and peddlers mingled with customers and butchers erected stalls in the shambles. The hullabaloo from the lowing, bleating and squealing as animals were slaughtered must have been deafening and indeed the Yorkshire Butchers’ guild suggests they were the original City executioners. Health, safety and hygiene were non-existent so blood, guts and offal were discarded where they fell, hence the modern meaning of the expression ‘a shambles’. The word originates from Anglo Saxon scamel meaning ‘bench’, in other words the benches or blocks where butchers set up their stalls, slaughtered the animals and displayed the meat for sale. Although shambles had disappeared in our market towns by the mid-1800s (the only surviving example can be found in Shepton Mallet), the name still appears in York, Manchester, Worcester and Stroud, among others. It is no coincidence that York Shambles is on a hill; blood could run down and away.
The legendary heart of the industry, London’s Smithfield Market www.smithfieldmarket.com, at almost ten acres, is the largest wholesale meat market in the UK and one of the largest in Europe, although at the time of writing there was a discussion about its survival. The market itself is over 140 years old but for over 800 years there has been a livestock market on this site with records showing horses, pigs and cattle were sold here from 1174. Following the Sunday Observance Act of 1672, butchers were prohibited from killing or selling meat on the Sabbath.
From 1133 to 1855, Bartholomew Fair was staged at Smithfield every August, moving to September from 1753. St Bartholomew’s Church the Great (founded 1123) and St Bartholomew’s Hospital still stand nearby. It was at Smithfield in 1381 that Wat Tyler, leader of the Peasants’ Revolt, met Richard II and was stabbed and died from his wounds. During the reign of Mary Tudor, 200 Protestants were burnt here for their religious beliefs.
Smithfield was transformed following the formation of the railway network and its own station. By 1849, one million animals arrived at Smithfield by train as carcasses having been slaughtered elsewhere. Smithfield had its own alcohol licensing laws, opening at 5.30 am after a hard night’s butchering, but originally only people working at the market could drink in its taverns.
During the frost fair of 1814 when the Thames froze over for five days, one enterprising butcher roasted a sheep, marketing it as ‘Lapland mutton’.
The butcher’s hey-day was after the Industrial Revolution when Britain was the richest country in the world. The massive rise in population and prosperity meant a consequently dramatic increase in meat consumption. Once refrigeration was available from the mid-1800s, the butcher could both slaughter and store meat and thus the butcher’s shop was born. Up to that point, meat was a fast-turn-round comestible; the only methods of preservation were salting, smoking, curing or drying. Meat was butchered in the slaughterhouse then kept away from it.
Once an animal was dead, the butcher prepared the carcass, slicing it in half, eviscerating, chopping into different cuts, boning and trimming using tools such as block, cleaver, saws, hooks (for hanging), knives and leather or whetstones to sharpen them. Old cookery books show cuts for different animals, or view demonstrations on www.eblextrade.co.uk/videos. The butcher was recognisable by his white apron, bloodied of course, and, more recently, dark blue striped apron and straw boater.
On the high street, the butcher displayed carcasses outside his shop and produced foodstuffs such as sausages, often to secret, handed-down recipes. It was not uncommon for butchers to have a secondary occupation; pub owner and landlord was popular, with the slaughterhouse behind the bar. Many butchers, like other tradesmen, lived above the shop.
There was a Butchers’ Hall in Farringdon outside London’s walls as early as 975, although the Worshipful Company of Butchers www.butchershall.com didn’t receive its Arms until 1540. Other cities such as York http://yorkbutchersgild.weebly.com had guilds, but genealogical information is scanty. Concerned with the slaughter of horses and cattle, the Knackers Act of 1786 required slaughter house keepers to be licenced annually by Quarter Sessions. The penalty for infraction was a fine, imprisonment and ‘publick or private whipping’. If registers, order books or certificates survive, they will be in the local record offices. Durham, for instance, has some order books for 1881–94. The Meat Trades’ Journal and Cattle Salesman’s Gazette has been published by Reed since 1888; the British Library has copies.