The History of Bread traces a humble staple from prehistoric grain-crushing to the precision of modern flour mills, revealing bread as both nourishment and a force that shaped civilization. Drawing on archaeology, the Bible, and social history, it follows cereals from Swiss lake dwellings and ancient mealing-stones to the organized harvests of Egypt and Assyria, where sowing, threshing, grinding, kneading, and baking were already highly developed arts. The book explores Hebrew bread culture in daily life, ritual, hospitality, sanctuary worship, and the laws of gleaning, while also showing how threshing floors, harvest songs, and hand-mills bound labor to faith and community. From there, it turns to England's long struggle between plenty and hunger, recording famines, crop failures, soaring prices, hoarding, desperate substitutes, and the relief brought by imported grain. It also charts the evolution of milling, from querns and water-wheels to windmills and the intricate machinery of industrial flour production, celebrating the ingenuity that transformed grain into the bread of everyday life. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.

À propos de l'auteur

Ashton, John

John Ashton was a prolific English writer and editor of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, best remembered for his lively curiosity about social history, popular customs, and the everyday lives of ordinary people. Working in an era when readers were increasingly eager to understand the past through its material culture and human habits, he built a reputation for making scholarship accessible, entertaining, and richly detailed. His writing ranged widely across folklore, antiquarian subjects, and the histories of common practices, and he had a particular gift for turning seemingly humble topics into windows onto larger patterns of civilization. Among his most notable achievements was his influential study of bread, a subject he treated not simply as food but as a thread connecting agriculture, trade, religion, labor, and domestic life across the centuries. That broad, humane approach gives his work lasting relevance today, especially at a time when readers are again interested in sustainability, food history, and the social meaning of everyday objects. Ashton’s enduring significance lies in his ability to show that ordinary things reveal extraordinary truths about culture and continuity. Readers who enjoy social history, culinary heritage, and books that uncover the hidden stories behind daily life will find him especially rewarding.