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"The bread I eat in London is a deleterious paste, mixed up with chalk, alum, and bone ashes, insipid to the taste and destructive to the constitution. The good people are not ignorant of this adulteration; but they prefer it to wholesome bread, because it is whiter than the meal of corn. Thus they sacrifice their taste and their health .... to a most absurd gratification of a misjudged eye; and the miller or the baker is obliged to poison them and their families, in order to live by his profession."

Tobias Smollett - 'The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker'

"Bread, made in the home almost everywhere in the country - in medieval times it was sometimes baked in a manorial or communal village oven - was obtained by townspeople from quite early times, at any rate in the south, from the bakers. The trade was already organised in London in the eleventh century.
Bread was indeed the staff of life in those days and it is understandable that its quality and sale were the concern of the governing authorities. As far back as the reign of King John, there are records relating to the price of bread, and the most important date is that of the famous Assize of Bread in 1266. From that date to as late as 1822, when the first Bread Act replaced the Assize, there is a long list of changes and modifications of the regulations governing the weight and sale of bread. The original Act fixed the weight of various types of of loaves and authorised the punishment of the pillory for false weight."

from 'The Englishman's Food'
by J.C.Drummond and Anne Wilbraham - 1939