food might have seemed poor and the clothing scant to a youth brought up in an English home of a moderate degree of refinement and with every reasonable comfort, but to the English Hodge, who tilled the fields at the rate of wages prescribed by the justices of the peace, the very lowest which would enable him to earn a subsistence for his family, and in only too many cases not affording him this without the aid of the levy for the benefit of paupers, the provision made for the servant in Virginia in the most frightful year in the history of the Colony does not appear to show that his position was as mean and intolerable as it was represented to be. This was the age in which Henry IV of France had won the lasting gratitude of his countrymen, in expressing the hope that under his administration of the affairs of his kingdom every French peasant would be so prosperous that he could without extravagance have a fowl in the pot on Sunday.[1]
As early as 1661, at a time when the live stock of the Colony were far less numerous then they became in the closing decades of the seventeenth century, it was the custom in York County to give the servants rations of meat at least three times a week.[2] It could not have been many years before this allowance was extended to each day in consequence of the enormous increase in the herds of hogs and horned cattle.
The character of the clothing worn by the servants is shown in an advertisement for the recovery of two runaways, placed on record in York County in 1694. The garments of one consisted in part of a coat, made of frieze, a black hat and a pair of wooden heel shoes; of the other, of a frieze coat, a pair of leather breeches, a cap of
