Food and dining in the Roman Empire and a pesto-like preparation, somewhat similar to pizza or focaccia. Maintaining a bread oven is labor-intensive and requires space, so apartment dwellers probably prepared their dough at home, then had it baked in a communal oven. Mills and commercial ovens, usually combined in a bakery complex, were considered so vital to the wellbeing of Rome that several religious festivals honored the deities who furthered these processes—and even the donkeys who toiled in the mills. Vesta, the goddess of the hearth, was seen as complementary to Ceres, the goddess of grain, and donkeys were garlanded and given a rest on the
Hearth tax led him to conclude that ‘the proportions of different hearth tax categories remained remarkably stable for the hundred’s six best assessments’. A decade later, Margaret Spufford cleared a path for local historians interested in studying local variations in wealth and poverty at county and parish levels, and set out the relevance of the hearth tax to architectural history and genealogy. She developed Hoskins’ argument that the numbers of hearths in a household could be equated with levels of personal wealth, and that by organising the properties into groups determined by the number of hearths, historians could assess patterns of wealth