Read the excerpt from The Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England.But be careful if you adopt a partial regime: heavy fines are levied for eating meat on nonmeat days. The standard fine is £3 or three months imprisonment, but in 1561 a London butcher slaughtering three oxen in Lent is fined £20. Fines can be levied on the head of a household for every single member who breaks the fast, so if you have lots of servants, make sure they all obey the law.
Read the excerpt from The Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England.Pig farmers keep their flitches of bacon back in storage until they can get a better price for them later in the winter. Such tactics are made even more profitable by the unhappy fact that harvests can fail, causing local—and sometimes national—food shortages. Large towns are less vulnerable, being part of an international market that sees preserved foods traded long-distance; but much of the countryside is dependent on fresh food. After a poor harvest, prices for all commodities—not just grain—rise dramatically and the poor are unable to make ends meet.
Read the excerpt from The Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England.For the vast majority of yeomen in the country, it is vitally important to store hard fruit through the whole year. To do this, select faultless apples and pears without a bruise or other mark, and leave a length of stalk on them. Place them carefully in your fruit house or "hoard house” on clean dry straw, make sure they are not touching each other, and turn them very carefully every month to avoid their collecting moisture. And, most important, keep the door to the fruit house shut, "lest children make havoc there.”
Read the excerpt from The Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England.The underlying reasons for such differences are not hard to find. In a society in which people still starve to death, an orchard is not a beautiful thing in itself: its beauty lies in the fact that it produces apples and cider. A wide flat field is "finer” than rugged terrain for it can be tilled easily to produce wheat and so represents good white bread. A small thatched cottage, which a modern viewer might consider pretty, will be considered unattractive by an Elizabethan traveler, for cottagers are generally poor and able to offer little in the way of hospitality. Ranges of hills and mountains are obstacles to Elizabethan travelers and very far from picturesque features you go out of your way to see. Hills might feature in an Elizabethan writer’s description of a county because of their potential for sheep grazing, but on the whole he will be more concerned with listing all the houses of the gentry, their seats and parks.
Which of these excerpts from The Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England is related from the second-person point of view?
Read the excerpt from The Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England.Food is valuable in Elizabethan England, far more so than in the modern world. A flock of 180 sheep is worth more than the average detached house. The difficulties of transportation mean that the food supply depends heavily on what grows locally and how much surplus is available. It also depends on the season.
Read the excerpt from The Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England.But you still have producers holding back corn supplies, even though hoarding is forbidden by law. In Stratford in 1597 seventy-five townsmen are found guilty of hoarding corn, including William Shakespeare, who is hanging on to ten quarters of malt. Worse than this, "engrossers” buy up all the local supply of an important commodity, such as eggs or butter, in order to drive up the price. In the 1590s certain unscrupulous businessmen buy up to twenty thousand pounds of butter—and this is disastrous because it is an important part of people’s diet. Combined with hoarding, this has dramatic consequences for the poor. In some places the famine of 1594–97 proves as deadly as the plague of 1563.
Which ideas are implicitly stated in the excerpt? Select three options.
Read the excerpt from The Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England.There is some respite at the end of the reign: the law against eating meat on Wednesdays is repealed in 1585. At the same time, there is a general slackening of fish-eating and an increase in the consumption of meat. By the 1590s most wealthy households have dropped the strict Lenten fast and replaced it with a reduced-meat diet. In 1593 the government bows to the inevitable and reduces the punitive £3 fine to £1. Now many households begin to eat meat in Lent and on Fridays and Saturdays, if the head of the household wishes to do so, even though it is still technically against the law.
Read the excerpt from The Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England.The purpose of fasting on Wednesdays is specifically to encourage the eating of fish, to support the fishing industry. People therefore respond differently. Some households uphold the old religious fasts during Advent and Lent, as if they are still observing the religious law; others ignore Advent but observe the Lenten fast. Still others ignore Wednesdays and just fast on Fridays and Saturdays.
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