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Title: Nineteen Centuries of Drink in England
       A History

Author: Richard Valpy French

Release Date: October 26, 2014 [EBook #47206]

Language: English

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[Pg i]
[Pg ii]
[Pg iii]

NINETEEN CENTURIES
OF
DRINK IN ENGLAND

A HISTORY

BY
RICHARD VALPY FRENCH
D.C.L., LL.D., F.S.A.
RECTOR OF LLANMARTIN AND RURAL DEAN
AUTHOR OF ‘THE HISTORY OF TOASTING’ ETC.

SECOND EDITION—ENLARGED AND REVISED

LONDON
NATIONAL TEMPERANCE PUBLICATION DEPOT
33 PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C.

All rights reserved[Pg iv]

EDINBURGH:
PRINTED BY LORIMER AND GILLIES,
31 ST. ANDREW SQUARE.[Pg v]

PREFACE.

The earlier part of this slight contribution to the literature of an inexhaustible subject has already appeared in a series of numbers in a London weekly journal. The best acknowledgment of the writer is due to the Rev. Arthur Richard Shillito, M.A. (late Scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge), who has from time to time during the progress of this work most kindly furnished him with valuable notes.

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

[Pg vi]
[Pg vii]

INTRODUCTION

The object of this work is to ascertain the part which Drink has played in the individual and national life of the English people. To this end, an inquiry is instituted into the beverages which have been in use, the customs in connection with their use, the drinking vessels in vogue, the various efforts made to control or prohibit the use, sale, manufacture, or importation of strong drink, whether proceeding from Church, or State, or both: the connection of the drink traffic with the revenue, together with incidental notices of banquets, feasts, the pledging of healths, and other relevant matter.

It must interest every thoughtful being to know how our national life and national customs have come to be what they are. They have not sprung up in a night like a mushroom. They have been forming for ages. Each day has contributed something. The great river of social life, ever flowing onward to the ocean of eternity, has been constantly fed by the tributaries of necessity, appetite, fashion, fancy, vanity, caprice, and imitation. Man is a bundle of habits and customs.

With some, it is true, life is mere routine, a round of conventionalities; literally ‘one day telleth another;’[Pg viii] with others, each day is a reality, has its fresh plan, is a rational item in the account of life. To these nothing is without its meaning; there is a definiteness, a precision, about its hours of action, of thought, of diversion, of ministering to the bodily claims of sustenance by eating and drinking. Around the latter, social life has fearfully encircled itself. The world was, and still is,—

‘On hospitable thoughts intent.’

The latter days are but a repetition of the former. ‘As it was ... so shall it be also. They did eat, they drank.’

Social life is intimately connected with the social or festive board; in short, with eating and drinking, because these are a necessity of nature. Other customs and habits may be fleeting, but men must eat, men must drink. Food ministers not only to the principle of life, but to that of brain force also. Thought is stimulated, activity is excited, man becomes communicable. He then seeks society and enjoys it. Thus has social intercourse gathered round the social board. Eating and drinking are two indispensable factors in dealing with the history of a nation’s social life. Adopting the adage by way of accommodation, ‘In vino veritas,’ truth is out when wine is in, once know the entire history of a nation’s drinking, and you have important materials for gauging that nation’s social life.

For obvious reasons, a division has been adopted of the subject into periods, in some respects artificial so far as the present inquiry is concerned. The Romano-British[Pg ix] period has been selected as the terminus a quo. It might have been speculatively interesting to penetrate further into the arcana of the past, to have inquired who were the earliest inhabitants of this country? Were they aborigines, natives of the soil, or were they colonists? Had they an independent tribal existence, or were they originally a part of that great Asiatic family who emigrated into and peopled Western Europe, and to whom the Romans gave the name of Gauls?

Had such an inquiry been relevant, the question would have been of immense importance; for drawing, as one must, considerably upon imagination in dealing with any period not strictly historic, one must either regard the primitive inhabitants as independent aborigines, and accommodate their supplies to their wants, or, regarding them as an offshoot from another nation, suppose them to have carried with them the customs of their parent tribe, and find the sought-for habits of the child in the ascertained habits of the parent.

But we are concerned with fact; and must therefore date from a period when facts, however meagre and involved, are forthcoming.

A chapter of Bibliography is appended for the benefit of any who might wish to prosecute a study, of which the present effort is a mere outline.

[Pg x]
[Pg xi]

A CONTRIBUTION TO THE BIBLIOGRAPHY OF DRINK.

[Pg 1]

NINETEEN CENTURIES OF DRINK IN ENGLAND.

CHAPTER I.

ROMAN PERIOD.

Little is known of the manners and customs of our island inhabitants before the Saxon period; hence, there can be no wonder that all is obscure before the Roman invasion. For the hints that have come to light we are indebted to such foreign historians as wrote in the century before the Christian era, the century of the invasion, and the age immediately subsequent.

These hints, utterly meagre, but generally consistent, are supplied by such writers before Christ as Diodorus and Cæsar, and such historians of the first century as Strabo, Dioscorides, and Pliny.

Diodorus (lib. v.) notes the simplicity in the manners of the British, and their being satisfied with a frugal sustenance, and avoiding the luxuries of wealth. He further observes:—‘Their diet was simple; their food consisted chiefly of milk and venison. Their ordinary drink was water. Upon extraordinary occasions they[Pg 2] drank a kind of fermented liquor made of barley, honey, or apples, and when intoxicated never failed to quarrel, like the ancient Thracians.’

Cæsar (De Bell. Gall. v.) observes that the inhabitants of the interior do not sow grain, but live on milk and flesh.

Strabo, whose description of Britain in his fourth book is barren, and not apparently independent (for he seems mainly to follow Cæsar), writes in the early part of the first century (probably about a.d. 18), that the Britons had some slight notion of planting orchards.

Dioscorides, in the middle of the same century, affirms that the Britons instead of wine use curmi, a liquor made of barley. Pliny the Elder speaks of the drinks in vogue in his time of the beer genus, variously called zythum, celia, cerea, Cereris vinum, curmi, cerevisia. These, he says (lib. xiv.), were known to the nations inhabiting the west of Europe. He exclaims against the wide-spread intemperance: ‘The whole world is addicted to drunkenness; the perverted ingenuity of man has given even to water the power of intoxicating where wine is not procurable. Western nations intoxicate themselves by means of moistened grain.’

It is important to add that Tacitus asserts (Vit. Agricol.) that the soil of this country abundantly produces all fruits except the olive, the grape, and some others which are indigenous to a warm climate.

Putting together these scattered allusions we gather,—(1) that wine was unknown to the Britons before the Roman conquest. It is absurd to suppose that a people as simple as the Britons, and holding so little intercourse with other nations, should as yet obtain from abroad such an article of luxury as wine, or prepare it from a[Pg 3] fruit not a native of the soil. Indeed, it was only about a century before the Roman invasion of England that vines were cultivated to any extent in the Roman empire; so scarce had wines been previously that the libations to the gods were directed to be made with milk.

(2) That the inhabitants of the interior used no intoxicant, unless possibly metheglin. The language of Cæsar implies this. Above the borders of the southern coast, which were inhabited by Belgæ, and by them cultivated, there were few traces of civilisation. The midlanders were unacquainted with agriculture, contenting themselves with pasture; whilst the northerners depended on the produce of the chase, or upon that which grew spontaneously. And everywhere it is the same. The earliest savage inhabitants of any district eat without dressing what the earth produces without cultivation, and drink water (dwr, ὕδωρ). Savage nature is simple and uniform, whereas art and refinement are infinitely various.

(3) That the southerners made some kind of intoxicant from grain, from honey, and from apples.

Before the introduction of agriculture, metheglin was the only strong drink known to our inhabitants, and it was a favourite beverage with them long after they had become acquainted with other drinks. The rearing of bees became an important branch of industry; and we shall find later on, that in the courts of the ancient princes of Wales the mead-maker held an important position in point of dignity.

Metheglin (Welsh Meddyglyn), also called hydromel and mead, was a drink as universal as it was ancient. Testimony is afforded to this by the Sanscrit mathu, Greek μέθυ and μέλι, Latin mel, Saxon medo and medu,[Pg 4] Danish miod, German meth. And here one must regret to demur to the suggested derivation of Metheglin from Matthew Glinn, who possessed a large stock of bees that he wished to turn into gain. The modes of the manufacture of this drink vary much in different countries. In the times to which we refer, the principal ingredients were rain-water and honey. Somewhat later it is described as wine and honey sodden together.

After the introduction of agriculture, ale (called by the Britons kwrw or cwrw) became a common drink. An early writer thus describes its manufacture: ‘The grain is steeped in water and made to germinate; it is then dried and ground; after which it is infused in a certain quantity of water, which being fermented becomes a pleasant, warming, strengthening, and intoxicating liquor.’

Cider became known to the Britons at an early date. John Beale, a seventeenth-century authority on orchard produce, thought seider to be a genuine British word; but it is generally referred to the Greek σίκερα, which, curiously enough, is rendered in Wycliffe’s version of the Bible, sydyr:—‘For he schal be gret before the Lord; and he schal not drinke wyn ne sydyr.’[1] Macpherson, in his Annals, rightly says that cider extracted from wild apples was early known to the British in common with other Northern nations, whilst Whitaker (History of Manchester) thinks that this beverage was introduced by the Romans. The opinion entertained by some that it was a Norman invention is entirely a mistake. The[Pg 5] principal cider districts of the present day are Herefordshire, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Monmouth, Somerset, and Devon. Its medicinal qualities are variously stated. Lord Bacon accounted it to promote long life. Sir George Baker considered it a cure for dropsy. On the other hand, Dr. Epps (Journal of Health and Disease) speaks of dropsy and insanity as common diseases in Herefordshire, and says it is easy to understand how diseased kidneys are produced by the acid in the cider, and how dropsy follows from these diseased kidneys.

We next inquire what kind of Inns were known to the Ancient Britons. During the time of the Druids there was an order of people called Beatachs, Brughnibhs, or keepers of open houses, established for the express purpose of hospitality. These were pretty much of the same character as the chaoultries in India, and the caravanseries in the East. In Ireland, the bruigh was a person provided with land and stock by the prince of the territory, to keep beds, stabling, and such amusements as backgammon boards. The character of these houses was, as we shall find, vastly altered in Saxon times, when their names, Eala-hus, Win-hus, &c., sufficiently betokened the rationale of their existence.

We have seen that wine was unknown in this country before the Roman occupation. But the tide of emigration soon set in from Rome to Britain. The new-comers brought with them the arts and manufactures of their own country. The importation of wines presented to our islanders a new species of luxury. Evidently contrasting the simple habits of her subjects with those of the Roman invaders, Queen Boadicea (a.d. 61), making ready for battle, appeals in an impassioned speech to[Pg 6] the heart of her troops, in which she exclaims: ‘To us, every herb and root are food, every juice is our oil, and water is our wine.’ For well-nigh three centuries of Roman occupation, wine continued to be an import. It remained for a Roman emperor to give permission to the Britons to cultivate vines and to make wine. The circumstances were these: The Emperor Domitian (a.d. 81), in order to check the growth of intemperance, issued an edict for the destruction of half the vineyards, and prohibited any more planting of vines without licence from the emperors. Probus acceded to the imperial purple, a.d. 276. This emperor, having conquered Gaul, revoked the edict of Domitian, and allowed the provinces to plant vines and make wine. Britain was included in the licence. From that time the purple grape twined around many a British homestead. But whether it ever really thrived in our soil and climate is more than conjectural. Pliny throws doubt upon the whole subject.[2] Camden regards the boon as affording shade rather than produce.[3] Still there is a chain of evidence that for centuries vineyards were planted in various districts, which would not have been the case had they been a complete failure. Five centuries after the edict of Probus, Bede testifies to their existence;[4] whilst Holinshed, in the sixteenth century, writes:—‘that wine did grow here, the old notes of tithes for wine that yet remain, besides the records of sundry sutes commenced in diverse ecclesiastical courts; ... also the enclosed parcels almost in every abbeie yet called vineyards,[Pg 7] may be a notable witnesse. The Isle of Elie also was in the first times of the Normans called le ile des vignes.’[5] Nor can we wonder at the efforts to establish the grape as a native production when we consider the almost universal attachment to the fruit in one or other of its forms. If mead was in general demand, still more so was wine. The common appetite found fitting expression in a common nomenclature, and we find the names given to wine in every country bearing a striking similarity. Compare the English wine with the Gaelic fion, the French vin, Italian vino, Welsh gwin, Danish viin, German wein, Latin vinum, Greek οἶνος, Hebrew yayin, the root term conveying the notion, according to some, of boiling up, ferment, whilst others refer it to the Hebrew verb signifying to press out.

Whether an advantage or otherwise, to the Romans undoubtedly we owe signboards. The bush, which was for ages with us the sign of an inn, we owe immediately to them. Our proverb, ‘Good wine needs no bush,’ is of course own child to the Latin ‘Vino vendibili suspensa hedera non opus est’—‘Wine that will sell needs no advertisement.’ Our sign of ‘Two Jolly Brewers’ carrying a tun slung on a long pole is the counterpart of a relic from Pompeii representing two slaves carrying an amphora.[6]

Again, our country owes to Roman influence the national custom of toasting or health-drinking.

The present writer has observed elsewhere[7] that among the Romans luxury was carried to unbounded[Pg 8] excess. Many were their forms of revelry; amongst these were comissationes, or drinking bouts pure and simple. At these no food was taken, save as a relish to the wine. Specimens of their toasting formalities will be found in several classical authors.[8]

It were idle to imagine that the Britons were uninfluenced by such marked features of social life. If these customs had not been adopted by them before the time of Agricola, it is certain that when that most diplomatic of governors held sway here, he would teach the jeunesse dorée to drink healths to the emperor, and to toast the British belles of the hour in brimming bumpers. Sensual banquets, with their attendant revelry, no less than spacious baths and elegant villas, speedily became as palatable to the new subjects as to their corrupt masters.[9]

Intemperance was no stranger to any rank of society. Not even the imperial purple was stainless.[10] Thus was [Pg 9]the soil prepared for the seed so abundantly to be sown when the Saxon, the Roman’s successor, should incorporate himself with our British population.

[Pg 10]

CHAPTER II.

SAXON PERIOD.

It is to the heroic songs of the day that we must at this period mainly look for the history of manners and of convivial life. The chieftains assembled on the mead-bench, and were diverted by the literary genius of the ‘scóp’ or poet. Whether in the capacity of household retainer or wandering minstrel, he commanded protection, respect, and admiration. He was the popular exponent of the fashion of the time, and from his productions we can form a tolerable estimate of the prodigious part which drink played in the social life of the Anglo-Saxon. In this respect it is not too much to say that we inherit from the Saxons a perfect legacy of corruption; it is therefore with considerable qualification that we can accept the eulogies passed upon our forefathers by some historians, and notably by Sharon Turner, who represents our Saxon ancestors as bringing with them a superior domestic and moral character, as well as new political, juridical, and intellectual blessings.

One record we have of the manners of the Saxons before they occupied Britain; from it we are able to gather what were their essentially individual usages, and thus are able to draw a definite line between their native customs and those derived after their settlement amongst us from the Romanised Britons.

[Pg 11]

This poem is the romance of Beowulf, the oldest specimen of Anglo-Saxon literature—indeed, the oldest epic in any modern language.[11] The scene is laid in the Cimbric Chersonese. A certain king, Hrothgar by name, determined to build a palace, ‘a great mead-hall.’ In the neighbourhood lived a giant monster who used to make nightly incursions upon the palace during the ale-carouse; on one occasion killing thirty of its inmates. Beowulf, the brother of Hrothgar, resolved to deliver them from this scourge. With fifteen of his followers he proceeded to his brother’s palace. Hrothgar and his retainers were found drinking their ale and mead. The poem describes the visit:—‘There was a bench cleared in the beer-hall.... The thane observed his office. He that in his hand bare the twisted ale-cup, he poured the bright, sweet liquor.’ Meanwhile the bard strikes up; the queen enters the hall; she serves the liquor, first presenting the cup to the king, then to the guests. Thus do the festivities continue till nightfall. Beowulf and his company sleep in the hall, ‘the wine-hall, the treasure house of men, studded with vessels.’ The giant appeared in the night, and after a struggle was slain by Beowulf. The next day there were great rejoicings at the death of the monster. ‘The lay was sung, the song of the gleeman, the noise from the benches grew loud; cupbearers gave the wine from wondrous vessels.’ The queen again presented the cup to the king and to Beowulf; the festivities were prolonged into the night. Soon, however, was vengeance on the track; the mother of the giant appeared at the [Pg 12]palace and carried off a counsellor of Hrothgar, one of the ‘beer-drunken heroes of the ale-wassail.’ Beowulf is again the deliverer, and subsequently ascends the throne of his brother. A sketch of early manners like this, in the general dearth of documentary evidence, is invaluable. It is an outline, but one we can readily fill in.

From this same Cimbric peninsula came the Saxon leader Hengist, whose feast in honour of the British king Vortigern is familiar to every one, though it rests mainly on the very questionable authority of Nennius.[12] This writer states that the Saxon chief prepared an entertainment to which he invited the king, his officers, &c., having previously enjoined his daughter to serve them so profusely with wine and ale that they might soon become intoxicated. The plan succeeded; Vortigern demanded the hand of the girl. The province of Kent was the price paid. This account, as given by Nennius, is supplemented by Geoffrey of Monmouth, a British historian, or rather romancer, of the twelfth century. The story is always worth repeating. He says[13] that when the feast was over, ‘the young lady came out of her chamber bearing a golden cup full of wine, with which she approached the king, and making a low courtesy, said to him: “Lauerd king wacht heil!” The king, at the sight of the lady’s face, was on a sudden both surprised and inflamed with her beauty; and calling to his interpreter, asked him what she said, and what answer he should make her. “She called you ‘Lord King,’” said the interpreter, “and offered to drink your health. Your answer to her must be, ‘Drinc heil!’” Vortigern accordingly answered, “Drinc heil!” and bade [Pg 13]her drink; after which he took the cup from her hand, kissed her, and drank himself. From that time to this (says the chronicler) it has been the custom in Britain that he who drinks to any one says, “Wacht heil!” and he who pledges him answers, “Drinc heil!” Vortigern, being now drunk with the variety of liquors, the devil took this opportunity to enter into his heart, and to make him in love with the damsel, so that he became suitor to her father for her.’[14]

We have seen that drink was a prominent link in the chain whereby Kent passed from British into Saxon hands. If Nennius may be trusted, it played an equally important part in the cession of East-Sex, South-Sex, and Middle-Sex. The substance of the story as told by this chronicler is, that Hengist proposed to ratify a treaty of peace with the British king Vortigern, by a feast to which he invited him and his nobles. He bade his Saxons who feasted with them, at a given signal, when the Britons were sufficiently inebriated, each to draw his knife and kill his man. The plot succeeded. Three hundred British nobles were slain in a state of intoxication, while the captive king purchased his ransom at the cost of the three above-mentioned provinces. The Welsh bard evidently alludes to this in the lines:—

When they bargained for Thanet, with such scanty discretion,
With Hors and Hengys in their violent career,
Their aggrandisement was to us disgraceful,
After the consuming secret with the slaves at the confluent stream.
Conceive the intoxication at the great banquet of mead;
Conceive the deaths in the great hour of necessity.[15]

[Pg 14]

We can judge from the above incidents the kind of influence which the Saxons would be likely to exercise upon the Romanised Briton. Not that intemperance was a new plant of Saxon setting, for we have already found that the seed sown of Roman debauchery was beginning to yield the rank crop of excess in every grade of society. Ancient British poetry affords ample proof of this indictment. One of the most important fragments of ancient Cymric literature is The Gododin of Aneurin, a poem of the sixth century, the first poem printed in the Welsh Archæology. It recounts a mighty patriotic struggle of the Britons under Mynyddawr with the Teutonic settlers in the district, which may be loosely described as lying between the Tees and Forth. The ever-recurring subject in this poem is the intoxication of the Britons from excessive drinking of mead before the battle fought at Cattraeth. A few quotations will suffice:—

The warriors marched to Cattraeth, full of words;
Bright mead gave them pleasure, their bliss was their bane.
    *    *    *    *
The warriors marched to Cattraeth, full of mead;
Drunken, but firm in array; great the shame.
    *    *    *    *
Just fate we deplore.
For the sweetness of mead,
In the day of our need,
Is our bitterness; blunts all our arms for the strife;
Is a friend to the lip and a foe to the life.
    *    *    *    *
I drank the Mordei’s wine and mead,
I drank, and now for that I bleed.[16]

Unquestionable allusion to this poem of Aneurin is made in Owen Cyveilioc’s Hîrlas, written in the twelfth [Pg 15]century:—

Hear how with their portion of mead, went with their Lord to Cattraeth,
Faithful the purpose of their sharp weapons,
The host of Mynydauc, to their fatal rest.

To the sixth century are also to be referred the poems of Taliesin, which tell of the battles between the Britons and Saxons. One is preserved which is commonly called the Mead Song, which he wrote to obtain Elphin’s release from prison. It is thus rendered[17]:—

I will implore the Sovereign, Supreme in every region,
The Being who supports the heavens, Lord of all space,
The Being who made the waters, to every body good;
The Being who sends every gift and prospers it,
That Maelgwyn of Mona be inspired with mead, and cheer us with it
From the mead horns—the foaming pure and shining liquor
Which the bees provide, but do not enjoy.
Mead distilled I praise—its eulogy is everywhere,
Precious to the creature whom the earth maintains.
God made it for man for his happiness;
The fierce and the mute, both enjoy it.
The Lord made both the wild and the gentle,
And has given them clothing for ornament,
And food and drink to last till judgment.

I will implore the Sovereign, Supreme in the land of peace,
To liberate Elphin from banishment,
The man that gave me wine, ale, and mead,
And the great princely steeds of gay appearance,
[Pg 16]And to me yet would give as usual:
With the will of God, he would bestow from respect
Innumerable festivities in the course of peace.
Knight of Mead, relation of Elphin, distant be thy period of inaction.[18]

A satire is also preserved of the same Taliesin, upon the wandering minstrels of his time. He imputes to them all kinds of vice:—

In the night they carouse, in the day they sleep;
Idle, they get food without labour;
They hate the churches, but seek the liquor houses;
From every gluttony they refrain not;
Excesses of eating and drinking is what they desire.[19]

Another early British poet, Llywarch Hên, who flourished in both the sixth and seventh centuries, affords further proof that strong drink, ale or mead, was the one thing needful. In his elegy on Urien of Reged we find—

He was a shield to his country;
His course was a wheel in battle.
Better to me would be his life than his mead.

And again—

This hearth; no shout of heroes now adheres to it:
More usual on its floor
Was the mead; and the inebriated warriors.

And here we naturally pause to inquire whether it is fair to gauge the habits of the day from extracts such as [Pg 17]these. May they not have been the heated effusions of the moment? May not these bards have cast the shadows of their own excited brains on all around? Alas! the pages of contemporary history, and the censures of the Church, too surely confirm the impressions of the poet. Thus, Gildas, the British monk, writing in the latter half of the sixth century (Epist. De Excid. Britann.), laments (§ 21) that ‘not only the laity, but our Lord’s own flock, and its shepherds, who ought to have been an example to the people, slumbered away their time in drunkenness, as if they had been dipped in wine.’ Again (§ 83), ‘Little do ye put in execution that which the holy prophet Joel hath spoken in admonishment of slothful priests, saying, Awake ye who are drunk from your wine, and weep and bewail ye all, who have drunk wine even to drunkenness, because joy and delight are taken away from your mouths.’ And once more (§ 109), ‘These are the words, that with apparent effect should be made good and approved—deacons in like manner, that they should be not overgiven to much wine.... And now, trembling truly to make any longer stay on these matters, I can, for a conclusion, affirm one thing certainly, which is, that all these are changed into contrary actions, insomuch that clerks are shameless and deceitful in their speeches, given to drinking.’

Do we wonder that this state of things was condemned? The British Church could no longer keep silent. Decrees respecting intemperance were issued in the Synod held by St. David (a.d. 569), interesting as the only legislative relic of the British Church upon this subject; unless, as Mr. Bridgett remarks in his useful little book, The Discipline of Drink, we admit the[Pg 18] monastic penance of St. Gildas the Wise (a.d. 570): ‘If any monk through drinking too freely gets thick of speech so that he cannot join in the psalmody, he is to be deprived of his supper.’

The following are among the canons of St. David:—

Enough has been adduced to prove that the lovers of debauch among the Anglo-Saxons could have found no uncongenial soil in Britain. But their settlement in our island did not tend to any moral millennium. They found matters bad; they made them ten times worse. At meals, after meals, by day, by night, the brimming tankard foamed. When all were satisfied with their dinner, says the chronicler, they continued drinking till the evening. Drinking was, in short, the occupation of the after part of the day. A cut taken from the Anglo-Saxon calendar[20] represents a drinking party. The lord and the two principal guests are sitting at the high seat, or daïs, drinking after dinner. The excess to which they yielded at banquets may be illustrated from a fragment of an Anglo-Saxon poem, entitled ‘Judith,’ which is thus translated[21]:—

[Pg 19] There were deep bowls
Carried along the benches often,
So likewise cups and pitchers
Full to the people who were sitting on couches:
The renowned shielded warriors
Were fated, while they partook thereof....
Then was Holofernes,
The munificent patron of men,
In the guest hall;
He laughed and rioted,
Made tumult and noise,
That the children of men
Might hear afar,
How the stern one
Stormed and shouted.
Moody and drunk with mead,
Thus this wicked man
During the whole day
His followers
Drenched with wine,
The haughty dispenser of treasure,
Until they lay down intoxicated,
He over-drenched all his followers
Like as though they were struck with death,
Exhausted of every good.

An important collection of Anglo-Saxon poetry is still preserved under the title of the Exeter Book, the original MS. of which is kept at Exeter: being a portion of the gift of books to the Church at Exeter by Bishop Leofric in the eleventh century. It is a medley of legends, religious songs, apophthegms, riddles, &c. These riddles, commonly called Symposii Ænigmata, were very popular among the Saxons, whether the meaning of the title be ‘Riddles composed by Symposius,’ [Pg 20]or ‘Nuts to crack after dinner.’ Two specimens will suffice. The first, probably taken from the story of Lot—

There sat a man at his wine
With his two wives,
And his two sons,
And his two daughters,
Own sisters,
And their two sons,
Comely first-born children;
The father was there
Of each one
Of the noble ones,
With the uncle and the nephew:
There were five in all
Men and women
Sitting there.

The second is a very ancient specimen of that kind of ballad of which the modern John Barleycorn is the anti-type:—

A part of the earth is
Prepared beautifully,
With the hardest,
And with the sharpest,
And with the grimmest
Of the productions of men,
Cut and ...
Turned and dried,
Bound and twisted,
Bleached and awakened,
Ornamented and poured out,
Carried afar
To the doors of people,
It is joy in the inside
Of living creatures,
It knocks and slights
Those, of whom before while alive
[Pg 21]A long while
It obeys the will,
And expostulateth not,
And then after death
It takes upon it to judge,
To talk variously.
It is greatly to seek
By the wisest man,
What this creature is.[22]

The principal drinks which the Saxons adopted were wine, mead, ale, cider, and piment.

The permission granted by the Emperor Probus to plant vines has already been mentioned, as well as the testimony to their existence by the historian Bede. John Bagford, a book collector and antiquary of the seventeenth century, says:—

But whatever amount of evidence be forthcoming that vineyards existed in the time of the Saxons, though there is no doubt that they were in the main attached to the monasteries, still it is certain that wine was not a common drink among them; but when introduced into their feasts it usually led to intemperance. It may also be added that Bede mentions warm wine as a drink. [Pg 22]But their most common beverage was mead. The extent to which this drink prevailed amongst them is curiously indicated by the nature of the fine that was imposed upon the members of their friendly societies whose conduct was called in question. It appears that for seven out of thirteen descriptions of offence, the members were fined a quantity of honey, varying in measure with the nature of the offence, e.g.—

Any member calling another names was fined a quart of honey.

For using abusive language to a non-member, one quart of honey.

A knight for waylaying a man, a sextarius of honey.

For setting a trap for any person’s injury, a sextarius of honey.

Any member neglecting when deputed to fetch a fellow-member who might have fallen sick, or died at a distance from home, forfeited a sextarius of honey. And so forth. No doubt this honey was turned into mead, and drunk on the gala days of the society.

Of ale three kinds are mentioned at this time: viz. clear ale, mild ale, and Welsh ale. Accordingly we find the Abbot of Medeshamstede letting certain land to Wulfrid upon this condition, that Wulfrid should each year deliver into the minster, among other items, two tuns full of pure ale and ten measures of Welsh ale, an agreement at which, adds the Saxon Chronicle, the king, archbishop, and several bishops were present. Welsh ale is mentioned at a much earlier date in the laws of Ine.

It was stated in a former section that cider became known to the Britons at an early date. The Anglo-Saxons knew it under the name of Æppelwin. Its origin is not fully substantiated. Africa has been suggested as its[Pg 23] birthplace, probably because the fathers SS. Augustine and Tertullian mention it. St. Jerome, too, speaks of an intoxicating drink made of the juice of apples.

Lastly, the Saxons drank piment, but not generally. This was a mixture of acid wine, honey, sugar, and spices. We find it mentioned in the romance of Arthour and Merlin, in the lines—

There was piment and claré,
To heighe lordlinges and to meyne.

Piment and wine were both at this time imports. Thus in a volume of Saxon dialogues (Tib. A. iii.), one of the characters, a merchant, describes himself and his occupation. To the question ‘What do you bring us?’ he replies, ‘Skins, silks, costly gems, and gold; various garments, pigment, wine, &c.’

Of Saxon festivals none were more celebrated than their Jule or Yule (to which corresponds our Christmas), a strange combination of conviviality and religion. It appears to be a Saxon adaptation of an ancient Celtic festival. The Celts worshipped the sun. At the winter solstice the people testified their joy that the ‘greater light’ had returned to this part of the heavens, by celebrating a festival or sun-feast, which took its name from Heol, Hiaul, Houl, dialectic varieties of the Celtic expression for ‘sun.’ The prefix of the article will account for the Gothic forms Gehul, Juul, and hence again the softened forms, Jul, Yule. Upon this heathen festival the Christians engrafted their great festival, the anniversary of the rising of the Sun of Righteousness upon a dark world.[24]

Before leaving this subject notice should be taken of [Pg 24]the grafol, or rent, paid upon lands. It furnishes some incidental details of the social life of our ancestors. Upon a certain estate in Lincolnshire we find that the following yearly rent was reserved:—(1) To the monastery, two tuns of bright ale, two oxen fit for slaughter, two mittan, or measures, of Welsh ale,[25] and six hundred loaves. (2) To the abbot’s private estate, one horse, thirty shillings of silver, or half a pound, one night’s pastus, fifteen mittan of bright and five of Welsh ale, fifteen sesters of mild ale.

Anglo-Saxon guilds, or social confederations, were associated with drink. Every member was compelled to bring a certain amount of malt or honey. The fines they imposed also imply that the materials of conviviality were not forgotten.

Amidst such surroundings it is scarcely matter for surprise that we occasionally read of profuseness in the high places of the Church as well as the State. Some of the leading ecclesiastics had been brought up in the lap of plenty. Wilfrid (consecrated Archbishop of York, a.d. 669) is described by his biographer, Eddius, as the most luxurious prelate of his age, but it should be remembered that he was the son of a Bernician noble, taught in his childhood to serve the cup in the mead-hall. [Pg 25]His fame, however, for sanctity is abundantly attested. He has been called the first patron of architecture among the Anglo-Saxons. Hexham and Ripon owe to him their sacred piles. At the dedication of the latter was a disgraceful scene of riotous festivity in which the kings Ecgfrid and Aelwin with the principal nobles were engaged. Such a scene upon such an occasion would now happily be impossible. And it is by comparisons of this kind that one is able definitely to estimate the improvement or retrogression of moral tone. It should be added by way of extenuation that such festivities were continuations of the heathen paganalia, were countenanced—indeed, with certain modifications commanded—by order of Gregory the Great (a.d. 601), to Mellitus, the abbot, who accompanied Augustine to England. His words, as given by Bede (Eccl. Hist. i. 30), are—‘On the day of dedication, or the birthday of holy martyrs, whose relics are there deposited, let the people build themselves booths of the boughs of trees, round about those churches which have been turned to that use from temples, and celebrate the solemnity with religious feasting.... For there is no doubt that it is impossible to efface every thing at once from their obdurate minds.’

[Pg 26]

CHAPTER III.

SAXON PERIOD—continued.

Amongst the kings who, in the seventh century, governed parts of Anglia, Edwin stands out prominently as a beacon of beneficent rule. Two stories concerning him are treasured from childhood, viz. his conversion to Christianity, through the bringing back to his recollection a mysterious vision by Paulinus, and the speech of the royal counsellor, who compared human life to the flitting of a sparrow through a festal hall. But one of his philanthropic measures is of special interest in the present connection. Edwin had been by compulsion a wanderer. He knew the trials of a fugitive’s life. He had experienced the hardships of long journeys on tedious roads which lacked accommodation for travellers; so, with a heart full of sympathy, he caused to be set up in the highways stakes, and ladles chained to them, wherever he had observed a pure spring. Bede remarks that he carried a tufa before him; he deserves that it be never displaced.

The entertaining of strangers seems in these times to have fallen to the clergy: hence the constant injunction to them to attend to hospitality. It is in this sense that Mr. Soames is justified in saying (Anglo-Saxon Church) that clergymen were in fact the innkeepers of those ancient times. One of the Excerpts of Ecgbright enjoins ‘that bishops and priests have an house for the entertainment of strangers, not far from the church.’[Pg 27]

It would be naturally expected that the Church should have made some effort to stem the wide-spread inebriety of the Saxon population. And such was the case. We have on record an almost continuous series of ecclesiastical canons, decrees, and anathemas bearing upon the national intemperance. Theodore, seventh Archbishop of Canterbury (668-693), decrees that if a Christian layman drink to excess, he must do a fifteen days’ penance. In the following century, Bede, in a letter to Egbert, Archbishop of York, writes: ‘It is commonly reported of certain bishops that the way they serve Christ is this—They have no one near them of any religious spirit or continence, but only such as are given to laughter, jokes, amusing stories, feasting, drunkenness, and the other snares of a sensual life—men who feed their belly with meats, rather than their souls with the heavenly sacrifice.’

In the middle of the same century, Winfrid, Archbishop of the Germans (upon whom the Pope conferred the name of Boniface), writes to Cuthbert, Archbishop of Canterbury: ‘It is reported that in your dioceses the vice of drunkenness is too frequent; so that not only certain bishops do not hinder it, but they themselves indulge in excess of drink, and force others to drink till they are intoxicated. This is most certainly a great crime for a servant of God to do or to have done, since the ancient canons decree that a bishop or a priest given to drink should either resign or be deposed. And Truth itself has said: “Take heed to yourselves lest at any time your heart be overcharged with surfeiting and drunkenness;” and St. Paul, “Be not drunk with wine wherein is luxury;” and the Prophet Isaias, “Woe to you that are mighty to drink wine, and men of strength [Pg 28]at drunkenness.” This is an evil peculiar to pagans, and to our race. Neither the Franks, nor the Gauls, nor the Lombards, nor the Romans, nor the Greeks commit it. Let us then repress this iniquity by decrees of synods and the prohibitions of the Scriptures, if we are able. If we fail, at least, by avoiding and denouncing it, let us clear our own souls from the blood of the reprobate.’

This great Anglo-Saxon missionary not only preached but practised. His Benedictine monks he describes as men of strict abstinence, who used neither flesh, wine, nor strong drink.

The Excerptions of Ecgbright date about the middle of this century. Johnson, English Canons, assigns them to 740; Sir H. Spelman to 750.

Amongst these are several sayings and canons of the fathers respecting intemperance. Thus (No. 14)—‘That none who is numbered among the priests cherish the vice of drunkenness; nor force others to be drunk by his importunity.’ (No. 18)—‘That no priest go to eat or drink in taverns.’

In the supplemental Excerptions of the same Ecgbright (MS. marked K.2, in the CCCC. Library), we have (No. 74) ‘A canon of the fathers. If a bishop, or one in orders, be an habitual drunkard, let him either desist or be deposed.’

In the same Excerpts, penal intoxication is defined—‘This is drunkenness, when the state of the mind is changed, the tongue stammers, the eyes are disturbed, the head is giddy, the belly is swelled, and pain follows.’

In 747 a council was convened by Cuthbert at Cloves-hoo. The 9th canon bids priests ‘by all means take care, as becomes the ministers of God, that they do not give to the seculars or monastics an example of [Pg 29]ridiculous or wicked conversation; that is, by drunkenness, love of filthy lucre, obscene talking, and the like.’

The 21st canon ordains ‘that monastics and ecclesiastics do not follow nor affect the vice of drunkenness, but avoid it as deadly poison.... Nor let them force others to drink intemperately, but let their entertainments be cleanly and sober, not luxuries, ... and that, unless some necessary infirmity compel them, they do not, like common tipplers, help themselves or others to drink, till the canonical, that is the ninth hour, be fully come.’

Canon 20 enacts: ‘Let not nunneries be places of secret rendezvous for filthy talk, junketing, drunkenness, and luxury, but habitations for such as live in continence and sobriety.’

In the year 793 Alcuin gave good advice to the brethren at Jarrow: ‘Absconditas comessationes et furtivas ebrietates quasi foveam inferni vitate.’

One of the Saxon drinks to which reference has been made, viz. piment, seems to have been drunk to excess in the eighth and ninth centuries. Piment was a fascinating compound; it was in fact a liqueur. The word is probably derived from pigmentarii, apothecaries who originally prepared it. The most common varieties of it were hippocras and clarry. In the year 817, the Council of Aix-la-Chapelle forbad the use of piment to the regular clergy, except on solemn festival days.

In the eighth century, taverns or ale-houses where liquor was sold had been established, and very soon fell into disrepute. Hence the injunction of Ecgbright that no priest go to eat or drink at a tavern (ceapealethelum).

A good idea of the proportionate consumption of[Pg 30] meats and drinks can be obtained from the sales and gifts of provisions to the monasteries. For instance, as has been already alluded to, we find from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that in the year 852, Ceolred, Abbot of Medeshamstede (Peterborough), and the monks let to Wulfred the land of Sempringham, on the condition that, after his decease, the land should return to the minster, and that Wulfred should give the land of Sleaford to Medeshamstede, and each year should deliver into the minster sixty loads of wood, twelve of coal, six of faggots, and two tuns full of pure ale, and two beasts fit for slaughter, and six hundred loaves, and ten measures of Welsh ale.

But the regulations of the various monasteries widely differed, as did the regulations of each monastery at different periods. It would appear that at one time the use of wine was prohibited in the monastic houses; thus, in the year 738, wine was permitted to the monks of England by a decree of Bishop Aidan, founder of Lindisfarne monastery. Sometimes a large allowance was granted; thus Ethelwold allowed his monastery a great bowl from which the obbæ of the monks were filled twice a day for their dinner and supper. On their festivals he allowed them at dinner a sextarium of mead between six of the brethren, the same at supper between twelve of them. On certain great feasts he gave them a measure of wine.

It will be necessary when dealing with the times of King Edgar to advert at some length to Benedictine Monachism, so we may postpone for the present an estimate of conventual morality.

It is instructive to observe how a courageous and virtuous soul may maintain its purity unsullied amidst surroundings the most calculated to tarnish it. To live in any century of Saxon times was a moral ordeal. To[Pg 31] possess certain tastes was to enhance the probation. The life of King Alfred furnishes us with a lesson of the type intended. His intellectual powers and tastes would have strewn the path of most men with briars, if not precipitated them into pitfalls. The love of music and poetry, the concomitants of which were the ruin of so many of his contemporaries, was conscientiously treasured by him as a talent to be occupied. At a time when the horn of mead circulated at a festival as freely as the harp; at a time when the song of the Northmen too often became the pretext for intoxication and its kindred vices, Alfred was seeking wisdom from its true source; his life was an embodiment of temperance, soberness, and chastity. Many of his renderings of the Roman philosopher Boethius, whose work, De Consolatione Philosophiæ, he translated, or rather paraphrased, display his own sentiments on such matters. In transmitting them, he has transmitted himself. In some cases the thoughts of his author are widely expanded. His description, for instance, of the golden age: ‘Oh! how happy was the first age of this world, when every man thought he had enough in the fruits of the earth. There were no rich homes, nor various sweet dainties, nor drinks. They required no expensive garments, because there were none then; they saw no such things nor heard of them. They cared not for luxury; but they lived naturally and temperately. They always ate but once a day, and that was in the evening. They ate the fruits of trees and herbs. They drank no pure wine. They knew not to mix liquor with their honey. They required not silken clothing with varied colours. They always slept out under the shade of trees. The water of the clear spring they drank.’ Such is the[Pg 32] paraphrase of the king. The following is the language of Boethius:—‘Too happy was the prior age, contented with their faithful ploughs, nor lost in sluggish luxury; it was accustomed to end its late fasts with the ready acorn; nor knew how to confuse the present of Bacchus with liquid honey; nor to mingle the bright fleece of the Seres with the Tyrian poison. The grass gave them healthful slumbers. The gliding river their drink.’

One more example may be given; the passage which treats of tyrannical kings: ‘If men should divest them of their clothes, and withdraw from them their retinue and their power, then might thou see that they be very like some of their thegns that serve them, except that they be worse. And if it was now to happen to them, that their retinue was for a while taken away, and their dress and their power, they would think that they were brought into a prison, or were in bondage; because from their excessive and unreasonable apparel, from their sweetmeats, and from the various drinks of their cup, the raging course of their luxury is excited, and would very powerfully torment their minds.’

What other king would thus have caricatured his own order? What other man would have treated his own surroundings with such persiflage? Surely here he must have blindly adhered to the text of his author. Is it so? The English of Boethius is, ‘If from the proud kings whom you see sitting on the lofty summit of the throne ... any one should draw aside the coverings of a vain dress, you would see the lord loaded with strong chains within. For here greedy lust pours venom on their hearts; here turbid anger, raising its waves, lashes the mind; or sorrow wearies her captives[Pg 33], or deceitful hope torments them.’

And yet the life of Alfred, so full of achievement as well as purpose, was brought to a premature close. He died at the age of fifty-two. The disease which had clung to him in boyhood was replaced in manhood by another, equally grievous. The protracted banquets, ‘day and night,’ of his nuptial festivities are assigned as the probable cause. His biographer, Asser, remarks:—‘His nuptials were honourably celebrated in Mercia, among innumerable multitudes of people of both sexes; and after continual feasts, both by night and by day, he was immediately seized, in presence of all the people, by sudden and overwhelming pain, as yet unknown to all the physicians.’ We further learn that this complaint attached to him for more than twenty years. If this historian intends that the king’s malady was the result of debauchery, the whole tenor of his life is a flat contradiction. The panegyric of the poet Thomson in his Seasons is unimpeachable:—

Whose hallow’d name the virtues saint,
And his own Muses love; the best of kings!

Allusion has been made to native vineyards. The vine is mentioned in the laws of Alfred, ‘Si quis damnum intulerit vineæ vel agro, vel alicui ejus terræ, compenset sicut ejus illud æstimet’ (cap. xxvi.). In the Saxon Calendar there is a set of drawings illustrating the various employments and pastimes of the year; the one attached to the month of February gives some men pruning trees, vines apparently among them. However, this proves little, for the cuts appended to the months for gathering in the vintage represent scenes of hawkings and boar-huntings; the labours of the husbandmen being evidently[Pg 34] subordinate. (A copy of this is inserted in Strutt’s Horda, vol. i. pl. xi.)

Something less than half a century from the death of Alfred brings us to the tragical end of King Edmund the Elder, for which unquestionably strong drink has to answer. Amidst much variety of statement on the part of the chroniclers, certain details seem fairly established. The day of the occurrence was the anniversary or Mass-day of St. Augustine (May 26), a day always observed among the Anglo-Saxons whose apostle he was. A banquet was held at which Leof, a noted outlaw, was present. While the cup was circulating the king observed the intruder. Heated with wine he started from his seat, seized the outlaw, and felled him to the ground. Leof grappled with the king, and with his concealed dagger stabbed his royal antagonist, a.d. 946. The event is said to have happened at Pukelechirche (Pucklechurch), in Gloucestershire, where was a palace of the Saxon kings.

Hard indeed it was for a king to escape such surroundings if even his disposition so prompted him. Of this the narrative of King Edwy affords abundant proof. On his coronation day, he retired from the revels of the banquet (linquens læta convivia), to his own apartments, much to the chagrin of the guests, who peremptorily sent to fetch him back. Dunstan and Cynesius were the agents employed. The king, probably loathing the drunkenness of a Saxon debauch, declined to return, upon which he was dragged by Dunstan from his seat to the hall of revelry. We may wonder that so distinguished an ecclesiastic should thus have urged the king to a scene of intemperance, but it is not wholly inconsistent with other details of his actions, of which the[Pg 35] following narrative will serve as an illustration. King Athelstan dined with his relative Ethelfleda. The royal providers came to see if all was ready and suitable. Having inspected all, they told her, ‘you have plenty of everything, provided your mead holds out.’ The king came with numerous attendants. In the first salutation the mead ran short. Dunstan’s sagacity had foreseen the event, and provided against it. Though the cupbearers, as is the custom at royal feasts, were all the day serving it up in cut horns and other vessels, the liquor held out. This delighted the king, and much credit redounded to Dunstan (Turn. A. S., lib. vii. c. iii. who cites MS. Cott. Cleop. B. 13).

But the very name of Dunstan at once conveys us to the arcana of Monachism, and to the consideration of some of its alleged vices. Our business is to confine ourselves to the aspersions cast upon it on the score of intemperance. Two cautions are here necessary. First, in estimating the morality of the monks, it must be remembered that in the tenth century the monastic system had acquired a vast development, some of the monasteries containing several hundred inmates, many of whom were laymen. To these latter the intemperance is attributed by some Roman Catholic writers, whilst others do not hesitate to charge the monastic orders with excesses. In the next place it was the interest of Dunstan and his party to expose the irregularities of the secular priests, whom he hated as much as he despised, and whose ejection he compassed to make room for the regular monks, his pets. The harangue of King Edgar to the council convened by Dunstan may be taken as the saint’s indictment of the clergy, of whom the king says:—‘They spend their days in diversions[Pg 36], entertainments, drunkenness, and debauchery. Their houses may be said to be so many sinks of lewdness. There they pass the night in rioting and drunkenness.’[26]

Verily, King Edgar nearly anticipated by a thousand years the legislation proposed by the United Kingdom Alliance. Strutt says of him that, by the advice of Dunstan, he put down many ale-houses, suffering only one to exist in a village or small town; and he also further ordained that pins or nails should be fastened into the drinking-cups or horns, at stated distances, so that whosoever should drink beyond these marks at one draught should be liable to a severe punishment.[27] We shall have occasion to notice, when discussing the canons of Anselm, how this very pin-drinking, devised as a prohibitive measure, became a source of drunkenness.

Bad as was Edgar in some respects, we must clear him from a charge preferred against him by Palgrave, and to some extent by Lappenberg—that the vices of the foreigners who were incorporating themselves received encouragement from the king. Whatever countenance he gave to the Danes, it was not through them that the English became drunkards; that vice they had been already schooled in, and independently. The imputation, however, of these modern writers is readily [Pg 37]traceable to the chronicles of Henry of Huntingdon and William of Malmesbury.

The Church certainly in this reign vied with the throne in checking intemperance. Thus the following canons occur in a code drawn up by Dunstan:—

In some penitential canons which Mr. Johnson assigns to Archbishop Dunstan, with the date a.d. 963, occur in canon vi. the words, “I confess Intemperance in eating and drinking, early and late.”

The following injunctions occur in Elfric’s canons:—

Other enactments may be discovered by the curious, scattered about the pages of early synods, e.g. nunneries were not to be houses of gossiping and drunkenness, and beds of luxury, but of sober and pious livers. An injunction this, evidently necessary, for Fosbroke (British Monachism, p. 22) speaks of the nuns of Coldingham as using oratories for feasting, drinking, and gossiping. The same author introduces us to the austere rule, as followed by the Britons, of Pachomius, that singular institutor of the cenobitic life in Upper Egypt in the fourth century. Abstinence seems to have been in force; at any rate there was a clause forbidding wine and liquamen (probably cider or perry) out of the infirmary. The inmates were also prohibited taverns[29] when necessity called them abroad. On such occasions they were restricted to ‘consecrated’ places. We have already seen that taverns at this time were anything but respectable, so ordinary travellers rarely used them; hence the propriety of this inhibition.

The requirements of Fulgentius, the African anchorite and bishop, were less severe. Among regulations of diet we find: ‘To have no more meat, drink, or clothes, than the rule allowed.’ ‘Not to eat or drink but at stated times.’ ‘No one to take any meat or drink before [Pg 39]the abbot.’ The monastic rules of Dunstan were certainly laxer. The ordinary times for drinking were not too few, whilst special solemnities called for special refreshment. In the latter category we become acquainted with their caritates or charities—that is, cups of wine, to drink which the monks were summoned by sound of bell into the refectory, and which must have been rendered peculiarly palatable by their listening to the collation, which signified a reading of the lives of the fathers or devout books; from which edification late suppers have derived their name. These charities varied in their composition: sometimes they consisted of beer, sometimes a kind of honey compôte. Such indulgences or allowances of drink were also called misericord.

In the great monasteries the Poculum Caritatis was placed at the upper end of the refectory, on the abbot’s table. It was nothing more nor less than the old wassail-bowl, the latter word obtaining its name from the verbal formality adopted in health-drinking.’[30]

Enough has been said to correct the very common impression that the Benedictine orders were self-mortifying ascetics. Wealthy and learned, at times useful to souls as well as bodies, their virtues have often been overstated, whilst their vices no less frequently have been palliated or denied.

The canons of King Edgar’s reign furnish an almost complete epitome of the manners of the time. His twenty-eighth canon enjoined strict temperance at[Pg 40]

Church Wakes.

Much confusion has been displayed by various writers in treating of the origin and rationale of these observances. Sir H. Spelman saw in them such occasions of gross intemperance, that he derives the word ‘wake’ from a Saxon word meaning drunkenness. But the derivation is to be found in the fact that wake and watch are the same words. The feast obtained its name from the night spent in watching—waking. Mr. Bourne rightly remarks[31] that at the conversion of the Saxons by Augustine, the heathen Paganalia were continued among the converts, with certain regulations, by order of Gregory the Great. This pope enjoined that on the day of dedication, or the birthday of holy martyrs, whose relics are there placed, the people should make to themselves booths of the boughs of trees, round about those very churches which had been the temples of idols, and should observe a religious feast; that beasts be no longer sacrificed to the devil, but for eating, and for God’s glory; that when the people were satisfied, they should return thanks to the Giver of all good things.[32] Here is the origin of the wake. The abuse of the original solemnity followed in accordance with the moral law of gravitation. At first, all was decorum; the people assembled at the church on the vigil or evening before the saint’s day, with burning candles, where they [Pg 41]were wont devotionally to wake during the night. In process of time ‘the pepul fell to letcherie, and songs, and daunses, with harping and piping, and also to glotony and sinne; and so tourned the holyness to cursydness; wherefore holy faders ordeyned the pepull to leve that waking, and to fast the evyn. It is called vigilia—that is, waking in English—and eveyn, for of eveyn they were wont to come to churche.’[33] We shall find that in the reign of Edward III. Archbishop Thoresby adopted drastic measures to remedy such like abuses; whilst about the same time Chaucer, in his Ploughman’s Tales, censures the priests for caring more for pastimes than for their duty. He says they were expert

At the wrestlynge, and at the wake,
And chief chantours at the nale.[34]

The end of all this was that they were suppressed, and fairs were instituted on or near the saint’s day, to which the original name attaches in many villages.

Upon the whole, the action of King Edgar was favourable to the cause of temperance, and the perpetuation of his name on a tavern sign in the city of Chester, which, according to the legend, has existed ever since his time, could only be regarded as a piece of irony, were it not that it treasures the memory of the Saxon king being rowed down the Dee, as some report, by eight tributary kings.

An incident in the reign of Edward, the son and successor of Edgar, is especially worthy of note as introducing us to the origin of the custom called pledging in drinking. Strutt (Manners and Customs of the Ancient [Pg 42]Britons), who evidently accepts the opinion of William of Malmesbury, gives us the old form or ceremony of pledging, as follows:—The person who was going to drink asked the one of the company who sat next to him whether he would pledge him, on which he, answering that he would, held up his knife or sword to guard him whilst he drank; for while a man is drinking he necessarily is in an unguarded posture, exposed to the treacherous stroke of some secret enemy. Thus a pledge was a security for the safety of the person drinking. This is said to have dated from the death of King Edward (commonly called Edward the Martyr), a.d. 978, who was murdered by the treachery of his step-mother Elfrida. The motive for her act is well known. Of the two claimants to the throne, Edward and Ethelred, she had preferred the latter, her own son, to his elder half-brother, her stepson. The story is told very differently by the chroniclers Gaimer, William of Malmesbury, and others; but the general purport is that Edward, when out hunting, determined to visit Elfrida, who was living with her son Ethelred at Corfe Castle. The queen went out on his arrival, received him with hypocritical kindness, and pressed him to alight, which he declined. ‘Then drink while you are on horseback,’ said the queen. ‘Willingly,’ said the king, ‘but first you will drink to me.’ The butlers filled a horn of claret and handed it to her. She drank the half of the filled horn, and then handed it to the king. While he was eagerly drinking from the cup presented, the dagger of an attendant pierced him through. Dropping the cup, he spurred his horse and fled. Soon he fainted through loss of blood, and fell from his saddle. His feet hung in the stirrups, by which he was dragged till life [Pg 43]was extinct. It is only right to state that Mr. Brand (Popular Antiquities) takes a different view of the meaning of pledging. He imagines the phrase ‘I pledge myself’ to mean simply ‘I follow your example.’ But while most writers refer the custom to the Saxon incident of Edward’s death, Dr. Henry, in his History of Great Britain, refers the custom to the fear of the Danes; while Francis Wise, in his Further Observations upon the White Horse, with eclectic caution remarks: ‘The custom of pledging healths, still prevalent among Englishmen, is said to be owing to the Saxons’ mutual regard for each other’s safety, and as a caution against the treacherous inhospitality of the Danes when they came to live in peace with the natives.’

CHAPTER IV.

DANISH PERIOD.

It was at the close of this tenth century that the Danes made their determined resolve to invade this kingdom. Here again we shall see how closely the destinies of our country have been associated with strong drink and its surroundings. It was at a riotous banquet that Sweyne vowed to kill or expel King Ethelred. The mode in which a Scandinavian heir took possession of his heritage was this: he gave a banquet, at which he drank to the memory of the deceased, and then seated himself in the daïs which the previous master of the house always occupied. In conformity with this usage, Sweyne gave a succession banquet. On the first day of the feast he filled a horn and drank to his father’s memory, making at the same time a solemn vow that before three winters had passed he would sail with a large army to England, and either murder Ethelred or drive him out of the country. After all the guests had drunk to King Harold’s memory, the horns were again filled and emptied in honour of Christ. The third toast was given to Michael the Archangel, and so on. There is much in this to shock, and still more when we know that this custom was perpetuated. But Mr. Mallet (Northern Antiquities, p. 113), speaking of one of the religious ceremonies of the North, says: ‘They drank immoderately; the kings and chief lords drank first, healths in honour of the gods; every one drank afterwards, making some vow or prayer to the god whom he named.’ Hence came that[Pg 45] custom among the first Christians in Germany and the North, of drinking to the health of our Saviour, the Apostles, and the Saints: a custom which the Church was often obliged to tolerate.

May we infer that retributive justice was at work, and found its expression in the vow of Sweyne? The character of Ethelred transpires in the official message sent by the Danish settler Turkill (called also Turketul), to Sweyne, inviting him to England. In this he lures him by describing the country as rich and fertile, the king a driveller, wholly given up to wine, &c., hateful to his own people, and contemptible to foreigners.

Under such a king we cannot wonder at the Danes landing and plundering at will. Nor are we surprised, knowing their character for excesses, that the Danes should have acted as they did with barbarous atrocity to one of the holiest saints whose name adorns the pages of the Roman martyrology. St. Elphege had for some few years been transferred from the see of Winchester to the primacy. The Danes took Canterbury by storm, and massacred the inhabitants, in spite of the earnest protests of the archbishop. Nor did their vengeance spare the mediator; after brutally ill-treating him they confined him in irons in a filthy dungeon. After the lapse of several months they offered him freedom upon the payment of a ransom. This he stoutly refused, predicting at the same time the downfall of their usurpation. Thereupon the Danish chiefs, drunken with wine from the South, hurled at their victim stones, bones, and the skulls of oxen, and felled him to the earth with the back of their battle-axes. One of his converts mercifully released him from his misery on the 19th of April, 1012. The parish church of Greenw[Pg 46]ich, named in his honour, marks the site of his martyrdom.[35]

But the deeds of blood with which drink is connected, and which signalise this reign, are not yet all told. Two of the noblest thanes of the Danish burghs were accused of treachery to the king, at a grand political congress held at Oxford in the year 1015. In the banquet chamber, when, as Malmesbury states, they were drunk to excess, they were slain by attendants prepared for the purpose, with the assent of Ethelred. The horrible massacre of the Danes by this king in 1002 is commonly thought to have originated the holiday known as Hoke-day or Hock-day. This is a mistake, as will be shown in treating of this festivity in connection with the death of Hardicanute.

Not only did strong drink minister to the conviviality of the time, but it is evident that then, as ever, virtue was conceived to attach to its use. The medical knowledge of the time was almost confined to superstitious recipes; and in these ale was often an ingredient, as was wine. For the cure of sore eyes a paste of strawberry plants and pepper was prescribed, to be diluted for use in sweet wine.[36] Again, patients, while sitting in a medicated bath, were to drink a decoction of betony and other herbs, which were to be boiled in Welsh ale. To betony were ascribed extraordinary virtues. Its fresh flowers are said to have an intoxicating effect. Ale also formed an ingredient in religious charms, e.g. ‘Take thrift-grass, yarrow, elehtre, betony, penny-grass, carruc, fane, fennel, [Pg 47]church-wort, Christmas-wort, lovage; make them into a potion with clear ale, sing seven masses over the plants daily,’ &c. This was a recipe for a person labouring under a disease caused by evil spirits, and was to be administered in a church bell.

Ethelred’s life scarcely harmonised with his laws. In the year 1008, it is ordered, among other monitions, that diabolic deeds be shunned, ‘in gluttony and drunkenness.’ Again, at the council of Enham, the 28th ordinance cautions to the same effect. The Church also spoke out boldly. Thus, in the 13th injunction of Theodulf’s Capitula, we read, ‘It very greatly concerns every mass-priest to guard himself against drunkenness; and that he teach this to the people subject to him. Mass-priests ought not to eat or drink at ale-houses.’ One piece of the then legislation is worthy of attention to-day; an ale-house was regarded as a privileged spot; quarrels that arose there were more severely punished than elsewhere.[37]

Whether or no the custom of pledging in drinking, to which reference has already been made, originated in consequence of the treacherous murder of Edward, certain it is that the usage owed its revival and perpetuation to the perfidious inhospitality of the Danes when they gained a footing in England. Shakespeare alludes to their dastardly practice of stabbing the English while drinking, when he makes Apemantus say:—

‘If I
Were a huge man, I should fear to drink at meals,
Lest they should spy my windpipe’s dangerous notes:
Great men should drink with harness on their throats.’[38]

[Pg 48]

So haughty were the Danes at first that they would not brook the English drinking in their presence unless invited; indeed, they are said to have punished such an act of supposed discourtesy with death. No wonder, then, that our people would not venture to lift the cup until the Danes had guaranteed their safety by a pledge.

The absurd custom of toasting received from the Danes a mighty impulse. The drinking of healths was an important element in their civil and religious banquets. After their conversion to Christianity, the toast of the saints took the place of that of their gods Odin and Thor. Thus, to take an example from the life of St. Wenceslaus, ‘Taking the cup, he says with a loud voice, “Let us drink this in the name of the holy Archangel Michael, begging and praying him to introduce our souls into the peace of eternal exaltation.”’[39] St. Olave, to whom they owed their conversion, was another favourite toast. St. John the Baptist was also thus commemorated. The old expressions, Drink-heil, Was-heil, had given place to Pril-wril,[40] the precursors of the more modern hob-nob, a term which now is used to denote close and familiar friendship, but which once under the form of ‘habbe or nabbe’ denoted ‘have or have not,’ and then became narrowed in meaning to the convivial question whether a person will have a glass to drink, or not, and so passed to its present intention.[41]

The chronicler, John Brompton, is right in saying, ‘by nature the Danes are mighty drinkers,’ but he errs like the rest of them in saying that they left that quality as [Pg 49]a perpetual inheritance to the English. The Saxons had already done this. And it is a question whether in this respect the Danes did not learn quite as much as they taught. Iago was probably right in his dialogue with Cassio, ‘Your Dane, your German, and your swag-bellied Hollander, drink, oh! are nothing to your English.’[42] At any rate, the Danish kings adopted the Saxon drinks—ale, cider, mead, wine, morat, and pigment, and half the Danish dynasty adopted them to their ruin.

The tragical end of Hardicanute is characteristic of the age in which he lived, and was in keeping with his life. A wedding-feast was given at Lamhithe (Lambeth) by Osgod Clapa, a great lord, in celebration of the marriage of his daughter Githa with Tovi Pruda, a Danish nobleman; when, according to the Saxon Chronicle, the king Harthacnut, as he stood at his drink, suddenly fell to the earth with a terrible convulsion ... and after that spake not one word. Others add that he fell in the act of pledging the company in a huge bumper.[43] Smollett attributes his immediate end to over-eating at this banquet, at the same time asserting that he was particularly addicted to feasting and drinking, which he indulged to abominable excess. To the same effect, Rapin writes: ‘All historians unanimously agree, he spent whole days and nights in feasting and carousing.’

We cannot leave this short-reigned votary of the cup without noticing the celebrated antiquarian hoax played upon Richard Gough, the famous English antiquary of the last century, by the fabrication of an inscription [Pg 50]purporting to record the death of the Saxon king, Hardicanute. Steevens, as an act of revenge, obtained the fragment of a chimney slab, and scratched upon it the inscription in Anglo-Saxon letters, of which all I can make is, ‘Here Hardnut cyning gedronge vin hyrn’—i.e. ‘here Harthcanute, king, drank wine horn,’ &c.[44]

It was alleged to have been discovered in Kennington Lane, where the palace of the monarch was said to be situated, and the fatal drinking bout to have taken place. Gough fell into the trap, exhibited the curiosity to the Society of Antiquaries; Mr. Pegge, F.S.A., wrote a paper on it; the society’s draughtsman, Schnebbelie, drew the inscription, and it was engraved in the Gentleman’s Magazine.

A curious festival is said to commemorate King Hardicanute’s death. John Rouse relates that the anniversary of it was kept by the English as a holiday in his time, four hundred years afterwards, and was called

Hock-day.

This festival in its various intentions is found variously described as hoke-day, hock-tide, hob-tide, hog’s-tide, hawkey, hockey, horkey. As numerous as its names are the derivations suggested for them. Thus, Dr. J. Nott, in a note to Herrick’s Ode, The Hock-Cart, speaks of Hock-tide or Heag-tide as signifying high-tide, the height of merriment (from heag or heah, high). Bryant (cited in Nares’ Glossary) derives it from the German hoch, high. Fosbroke (Encyc. Antiq.) speaks of the hocking on St. Blaze’s Day (Feb. 3) as taken from the women who were[Pg 51] torn by hokes and crotchets mentioned in his legend. Verstegan (Restitution of Decayed Intelligence, 1634) derives Hoc-tide from Heughtyde, which, he says, means in the Netherlands a festival season. Sir H. Spelman derives it from the German hocken, to put in heaps: a derivation which would well suit the application of the term to a harvest festival, as would the German hocke, a heap of sheaves. But surely S. D. Denne is right (Hist. Particulars of Lambeth) in deriving it from hochzeit, wedding. As it was at the celebration of the feast at the wedding of a Danish lord Canute Pruden with Lady Pitha that Hardicanute died suddenly, our ancestors had certainly sufficient grounds for distinguishing the day of so happy an event by a word denoting the wedding-feast, the wedding-day, the wedding Tuesday. And if the justness of this conjecture shall be allowed, may not the reason be discovered why the women bore rule on this celebrity, for all will admit that at a wedding the bride is the queen of the day.

If we refer the original of this festival to the eleventh century, two occasions present themselves as claimants for the honour. The first is the massacre of the Danes under Ethelred, 1002. The old Coventry play of Hock-Tuesday points to this date. This play, which was performed before Queen Elizabeth in 1575, represented a series of skirmishes between the English and Danes, in which the latter, after two victories, were overcome, and many led captive in triumph by the women. This play the men of Coventry explained to be grounded on story, and to be an old-established pageant. The custom may, at any rate, be traced back to the thirteenth century. Two objections are lodged against the reference of the festival to this occurrence. In the first place it do[Pg 52]es seem a valid objection that a holiday could never have been instituted to commemorate an event which afforded matter rather for humiliation than for mirth and festivity. The measure was unwise as it was inhuman, for Sweyn terribly retaliated the next year, and inflicted upon the country unparalleled misery and oppression. The second objection is that of Henry of Huntingdon, who thinks the dates cannot be made to fit, the massacre of the Danes being on St. Brice’s Day (Nov. 13), and the death of Hardicanute June 8. But this difficulty would be removed if we accepted the statement of Milner (Hist. Winchester), that by an order of Ethelred, the sports were transferred from November to the Monday in the third week after Easter. And here the question opens as to the day of the week upon which the feast was celebrated. Dr. Plot (Hist. Oxon.) makes Monday the principal day; on the other hand Tuesday is of general acceptance: hence the special designations, Hock-Tuesday, Binding-Tuesday. The fact is, that the Monday was the vigil of the festival, and soon came to be kept in common with the festival.

In Ellis’s edition of Brand’s Popular Antiquities will be found a number of financial extracts of ancient records referring to this feast—e.g. in the parish registers of St. Lawrence, Reading, in the year 1499, we find recorded:—

‘Item, received of Hock money gaderyd of women, xxs.

‘Item, received of Hok money gaderyd of men, iiijs.’

In the St. Giles’s parish register, under date 1535: ‘Hoc money gat[Pg 53]heryd by the wyves, xiijs. ixd.’

In the register of St. Mary’s parish, 1559: ‘Hoctyde money, the men’s gathering, iijs. The women’s, xijs.’

These hoc-tydes came to be scenes of revelry and excess, causing their inhibition, in 1450, by the Bishop of Worcester. This would simply apply to his own diocese. They were still apparently in vogue in the seventeenth century; thus Wyther[45]:—

Because that once a yeare
They can affoord the poore some slender cheere,
Observe their country feasts or common doles,
And entertain their Christmass wassaile boles,
Or els because that, for the Churche’s good,
They in defence of Hock-tide custome stood,
A Whitsun-ale or some such goodly motion, &c.

The custom has now long been abolished.

One feature of the social life of the Saxons is especially interesting, in which we see the precursor of the modern club. Voluntary associations, or sodalitates, were frequently formed, the objects of which were variously, protection, conviviality, and relief, both for soul and body. Turner mentions a gild-scipe (guild-ship) at Exeter, which purported to have been made for God’s love and their soul’s need. The meetings were three times a year, besides the holy-days after Easter. Every member was to bring a certain quantity of malt, and every cniht was to add a less quantity and some honey. The fines of their own imposition imply that the materials of conviviality were not forgotten.[46]

Historians are for once unanimous in depicting the general character of the Anglo-Saxons. Perhaps none have painted it in blacker colours than Niebuhr. England, he says, at the time of the Conquest was not only [Pg 54]effete with the drunkenness of crime, but with the crime of drunkenness. The soldiery, as was natural, shared in the general demoralisation. They laboured under a greater deficiency than any which can result from the want of weapons or of armour. Stout, well-fed, and hale, the Anglo-Saxon when sober was fully a match for any adversary who might be brought from the banks of the Seine or the Loire. But they were addicted to debauchery, and the wine-cup unnerves the stoutest arm.[47] These were the troops who fortified themselves for the fatal battle of Hastings with strong drink, and whose cries of revelry resounded throughout the night. In the quaint language of Fuller, ‘The English, being revelling before, had in the morning their brains arrested for the arrearages of the indigested fumes of the former night, and were no better than drunk when they came to fight.’[48]

CHAPTER V.

NORMAN PERIOD.

We have now arrived at a period which introduces a new element in the formation of our national social life. Information respecting the habits of the Normans is derivable not only from the chroniclers and historians of the period, but from illuminated manuscripts, Anglo-Norman fabliaux, the Bayeux tapestry, wood and other carvings in sacred edifices, and even from chessmen.[49]

The Norman historians insist that their countrymen introduced greater sobriety, and are ever contrasting their own morality with that of the Saxons to the disparagement of the latter. William of Malmesbury speaks of the Saxon nobility as given up to luxury and wantonness: ‘Drinking in parties was a universal practice, in which occupation they passed entire nights as well as days. The vices attendant on drunkenness, which enervate the human mind, followed; hence it arose that when they engaged William, more with rashness and precipitate fury than military skill, they doomed themselves and their country to slavery, by one, and that an easy, victory.’[50] Some of our later writers, making little allowance for the national bias of Norman historians, have even intensified this contrast. Thus, a modern gleaner of English literature ventures to assert that the brutal intemperance to which the Saxon was so prone, [Pg 56]the Norman was free from. But scenes and incidents which are ready to hand from Norman history must lead us to modify such an opinion, or at any rate compel the acknowledgment that the Normans very soon accommodated themselves to the luxurious habits of the English.[51] Among the many conspiracies formed in the reign of the first William, one at least was organised and developed amidst the surroundings of excess, which cost one of its noble projectors his life. The king had refused to give his consent to the alliance by marriage of the noble houses of Norfolk and Hereford. Opportunity was taken of the king’s absence from the country to cement the union. A splendid banquet marked the event. Among the many distinguished guests was Earl Waltheof. Norfolk and Hereford, fearing the anger of the king at their disobedience, formed a scheme to depose him, and communicated the same to their guests as soon as they saw them heated with wine. Waltheof, who had well drunk, readily entered into the conspiracy; but on the morrow, when the fumes of the drink were dispersed, he repented his rash precipitation. Betaking himself to Lanfranc he confessed all—he urged in extenuation that his intemperance on the occasion had prevented due reflection, and craved his mediation. All was of no avail; he was apprehended and publicly beheaded. Thus fell another of the long roll of victims to drink.

A scene in lower life is depicted in the life of Hereward. The hero in disguise is taken into King William’s kitchen to entertain the cooks. After dinner the wine and ale were freely distributed, and the result was a[Pg 57] violent quarrel between the cooks and Hereward; the former used the tridents and forks for weapons, while he took the spit from the fire as a still more formidable weapon of defence.[52] On another occasion, when Hereward secretly returned to his paternal home, which had been taken possession of by a Norman intruder, he was aroused in the middle of the night by sounds of boisterous revelry and merriment. Stealthily approaching, he saw the new lord of Brunne with his knights overcome by deep potations, and enjoying the coarse songs and brutal jests of a wandering minstrel.

An anecdote producing the same kind of impression is told of Wulstan, Bishop of Worcester. In the time of the Conqueror he was obliged to retain a large retinue of men-at-arms through fear of the Danes. He would not dine in private, but sat in his public hall with his boisterous soldiers; and while they were drinking for hours together at dinner, he would keep them company to restrain them by his presence, pledging them, when it came to his turn, in a tiny cup which he pretended to taste, and in the midst of the din ruminating to himself on the Psalms.[53]

The illuminated manuscripts of the period abound with illustrations of banquets, cupbearers, servants in cellars, &c., that suggest that the life then was not more than either meat or drink. Rightly did John of Salisbury remark that William would have deserved more renown had he rather promulgated laws of temperance to a nation which he would not have subdued by arms had it not already been conquered by excess of luxury.[54]

[Pg 58]

As late as the year 1070 we are reminded of the intemperate propensity of the Danes. During that year Sweyn visited this country. According to the Saxon Chronicle they rifled the minster of Peterborough, put out to sea with the spoil, and were arrested by a storm which scattered their ships in all directions. Some of the spoil, it appears, was brought back for safety, and placed in the identical church. Then afterwards, continues the Chronicle, ‘through their carelessness and through their drunkenness, on a certain night the church and all that was within it was consumed with fire. Thus was the minster of Peterborough burnt and harried.’

We have already enumerated the drinks adopted by the Saxons and the Danes. They were principally ale, wine, mead, cider, morat, and pigment. To these their Norman successors added clarré, garhiofilac, and hippocras. Wine was perhaps more used than formerly, being chiefly imported from France; but ale and mead were the common drinks. The innumerable entries in Domesday Book show how large a proportion of the productions of the country at this time consisted in honey, which was used chiefly for the manufacture of mead.

New plantations of vines seem to have been made about the time of the Conquest, e.g. in the village of Westminster, at Chenetone in Middlesex, Ware in Hertfordshire, Hanten in Worcestershire. They are measured by arpents (arpenni). Holeburne had its vineyard, which came into the possession of the Bishops of Ely, and subsequently gave its name to a street which still exists. In Domesday Book (1086), among the[Pg 59] lands of Suein in Essex, is an entry respecting an enclosure of six arpents, which in good seasons (si bene procedit) yielded twenty modii of wine.

Vineyards were attached to the greater abbeys, especially in the south. This is easily accountable: (1) The situation was in well sheltered valleys, (2) Many of the monks were foreigners, and would know the best modes of culture. Canterbury Church and St. Augustine’s Abbey had vineyards; so had Colton, St. Martin’s, Chertham, Brook, Hollingburn, and Halling, also Santlac near Battle, and Windsor.

William of Malmesbury, speaking of the fertility of the Vale of Gloucester, and the spontaneous growth of apple-trees, adds that vineyards were more abundant there (vinearum frequentia densior) than in any other district of England, the crops more abundant, and the flavour superior. Moreover, the wines were very little behind those of France. Mr. Barrington is clearly in error (Archæol. iii. p. 77) in imagining that Malmesbury intends orchards and cider, not vineyards and vines. Surely he would have used the terms then in use for these—viz. pomeria and poma. Indeed, in another passage, Malmesbury, speaking of Thorney in the Isle of Ely, says it was studded on the one side with apple-trees, on the other covered with vines, which either trail or are supported on poles. Knight remarks that this question of the ancient growth of the vine in England was the subject of a regular antiquarian passage-at-arms in 1771, when the Hon. Daines Barrington entered the lists to overthrow all the chroniclers and antiquaries from Malmesbury to Pegge, and to prove that English grapes were currants and that the vineyards of Domesday Book were nothing but gardens. The Antiquarian[Pg 60] Society inscribed the paper pellets shot on the occasion as The Vineyard Controversy.

Speaking of the Windsor vines, William Lambarde says that tithe of them was yielded in great plenty, ‘accompts have been made of the charges of planting the vines that grew in the little park, as also of making the wines, whereof some parts were spent in the household and some sold for the king’s profit.’

The list of religious houses to which vineyards, and in many cases orchards likewise, were attached might be indefinitely extended. There is a record of a vineyard at St. Edmundsbury. The Saxon Chronicle states that Martin, Abbot of Peterborough, planted another. William Thorn, the monastic chronicler, writes that in his abbey of Nordhome the vineyard was profitable and famous. But notwithstanding all this, vine cultivation in this country could never commercially compete with France; and wine would have been to the mass of the people an unattainable luxury, had not the ports of Southampton and Sandwich been open to foreign exports.

A glance at the occupations of the servants will afford some idea of the monastic life of the period; e.g. in the time of William Rufus, the servants at Evesham numbered five in the church, two in the infirmary, two in the cellar, five in the kitchen, seven in the bakehouse, four brewers, four menders, two in the bath, two shoe-makers, two in the orchard, three gardeners, one at the cloister gate, two at the great gate, five at the vineyard, four who served the monks when they went out, four fishermen, four in the abbot’s chamber, three in the hall.[55]

[Pg 61]

The name of the second William is one of the blots on our regal history. He possessed, as is believed, his father’s vices without his virtues. Rapin observes that William I. balanced his faults by a religious outside, a great chastity, and a commendable temperance, but that his son was neither religious, nor chaste, nor temperate; whilst Malmesbury tells that he met with his tragical end in the New Forest after he had soothed his cares with a more than usual quantity of wine. In his reign excess and sensuality prevailed amongst the nobility as everywhere, unchecked and well-nigh unrebuked; the voice even of the Primate being stifled for the moment in the general profligacy, for, failing of the co-operation of his suffragans, he quitted the kingdom, powerless to cope with the depravity of the times.

An earnest desire on the part of Henry to curry favour and popularity with the people was the cause of the recall of the archbishop from his retirement at Lyons. His efforts after a reformation of manners were at once renewed. Among the canons of Anselm, decreed at Westminster 1102, appears the following:—‘That priests go not to drinking bouts, nor drink to pegs (ad pinnas).’[56] It will be remembered that Archbishop Dunstan had ordained that pins or nails should be fastened into the drinking-cups at stated distances, to prevent persons drinking beyond these marks. This well intended provision had been terribly perverted, and the pegs intended for the restriction of potations became the provocatives of challenges to drink, and thus the instruments of intemperance. This abuse, at first an occasional sport, developed into a custom, and was called [Pg 62]pin-drinking or pin-nicking, and to it we owe the common slang, ‘He is in a merry pin.’ The cups thus marked with pins, usually called peg-tankards, held two quarts. Inside was a row of eight pegs, one above the other from top to bottom; thus was there half a pint between each peg. Each person in turn drank a peg-measure; thus, while the capabilities of the persons drinking were variable, the draughts were a fixed quantity, so this inevitably gave rise to intemperance, more especially as the tankards were renewed ad libitum.

The asceticism of Anselm met with the usual opposition. One of Queen Matilda’s letters to the Primate contained a strong effort to dissuade him from such a habit. She urged the comfortable advice to Timothy, besides quoting Greek and Roman philosophers. Nor would his views be palatable to many of the clergy, who in this respect fell under the impeachment of the chroniclers, whilst even the high places of the Church were open to animadversion. The story is told of Ralph Flambard, Bishop of Durham, that when lodged in the White Tower he freed himself by stratagem. He provided himself in prison with stores of wine. Among the casks sent in was one which a confederate had filled, not with wine, but with a coil of rope. The gaolers he plied with drink, till overcome by it they left him free to act. Thus did the Bishop make his escape.

From incidental notices we gather that strong drink was used in profusion. Thus in the king’s progresses, when too often wholesale spoliation marked the action of his retinue, we read of his followers burning provisions, washing their horses’ feet with the ale or mead, pouring the drink on the ground, or otherwise wasting it.

[Pg 63]

The tragedy of the reign was the loss of the ‘Blanche Nef.’ King Henry and his heir, Prince William, embarked at Harfleur for England on the same night in separate vessels. The prince, to make the passage agreeable, took with him a number of the young nobility. All was mirth and joviality. The prince ordered three casks of wine to be given to the ship’s crew. The mariners were in consequence many of them intoxicated when they put out to sea at nightfall. It was the great desire of the prince to overtake his father, who had sailed considerably earlier, and this emulation was one of the causes of the disaster. The vessel, which was sailing dangerously fast, struck upon a rock and began to sink. The prince would, however, have been saved in a boat that was lowered, but, putting back in response to the cries of his half-sister, the boat sunk beneath the load of the numbers who tried to avail themselves of its succour. Of some three hundred passengers aboard the White Ship, only one escaped to tell the mournful tale. The king, it is said, was never after seen to laugh, though he survived the dismal wreck about fifteen years. Personally, he was a man of strictly regular habits. Never was he known to be guilty of any excess in eating or drinking, except that which cost him his life. A surfeit of lampreys is said to have hastened his end; but for this, all history endorses the testimony of the chronicler that he was plain in his diet, rather satisfying the calls of hunger than surfeiting himself by variety of delicacies. He never drank but to allay thirst, execrating the least departure from temperance both in himself and in those about him.

Allusions abound in this Norman period to convivial meetings o[Pg 64]f the middle and lower classes in inns or private houses. The miracles of St. Cuthbert, as related by Reginald of Durham, give an insight to their private life in the earlier part of the twelfth century. Thus, a parishioner of Kellow, near Durham, is described as passing the evening drinking with the parish priest. Returning home late he was pursued by dogs, and reaching his own house in terror, shut the door upon them. He then mounted to a garret window to look at his persecutors, when he was seized with madness, and his family being roused carried him into the court and bound him to the seats (sedilia). On another occasion, a youth and his monastic teacher are represented as going to a tavern, and passing the whole of the night in drinking, till one of them becomes intoxicated, and cannot be prevailed on to return home.

Hospitality in these troublous times was freely exercised. The monasteries had their open guest-houses; the burgesses in the towns were in the habit of receiving strangers as private lodgers, in addition to the accommodation afforded in the regular taverns (hospitia).

Sir Walter Scott would be ready to defend the clergy, as we found him shielding the Norman nobles from any such imputation. The dialogue in Ivanhoe will be remembered. ‘An’ please, your reverence,’ said Dennet, ‘a drunken priest came to visit the sacristan at St. Edmund’s.’ ‘It does not please my reverence,’ answered the Churchman, ‘that there should be such an animal as a drunken priest, or, if there were, that a layman should so speak of him. Be mannerly, my friend, and conclude the holy man only wrapped in meditation, which makes the head dizzy and foot unsteady, as if the stomach were filled with new wine. I have felt it myself.’

[Pg 65]

For reasons to be mentioned immediately, home vineyards were beginning to be less cultivated, though they were not by any means discontinued. William of Malmesbury tells of a vineyard attached to his monastery, which was first planted in the eleventh century by a Greek monk who settled there. The Exchequer Rolls contain a discharge of the sheriffs of Northampton and Leicester, in the fifth year of Stephen, for certain expenses incurred on account of the royal vineyard at Rockingham.

The acquisition of the Duchy of Guienne (1152) naturally led to an interchange of commodities between England and France. Wine traffic with Bordeaux was at once established; and from this time our statutes are laden with ordinances concerning the importation of French wine, most of which, in conformity to the mistaken notions of political economy in those times, fix the maximum of price for which they were to be sold.

CHAPTER VI.

PLANTAGENET PERIOD.—HENRY II. TO THE DEATH OF RICHARD I.

The period on which we now enter, called, in compliance with usage, the Plantagenet, might for our present purpose more strictly be named The Light Wine Period. And it is instructive; and might have served for instruction to certain of our legislators in the present reign, who first tried beer (houses) to put down spirit drinking, and then tried wine to put down spirits and beer. The facts of English history were disregarded, and these remedial expedients were adopted, in the light of which the irony of the Spartans pales, who to put down drunkenness made their slaves drunk, and then exhibited them as hideous examples.

We have seen that the traffic of wines with Bordeaux was brought about through the marriage of Henry II. with Eleanor of Aquitaine. That ‘great Provence dower,’ as Dante calls it, was the secret of the new trade with Guienne and Gascony, provinces which had both been erected into the dukedom of Aquitaine in the preceding century. The Normans were the great carriers. In the centre of the vessels that brought home the produce of the new English possessions in France were large fixed tanks (Pipæ gardæ), and right well did the sailors understand the process known as ‘sucking the monkey,’ or, in plain English, furtively drawing off the wine from its receptacle in course of transit. And they must have had plenty of choice, for amongst the wines imported [Pg 67]were Muscadell, Malmsey, Rhenish, Dele, Stum, Wormwood, Gascony, Alicant, Canary, Sack, Sherry, and Rumney.

At the very time that the English were enjoying the wines of France, our French neighbours were reciprocally appreciative. William FitzStephen, in his Life of Thomas à Becket, states that when he went as chancellor into France to negotiate a royal marriage, two of the waggons which accompanied him were laden with beer in iron-bound casks for presents to the French, ‘who admire that kind of drink, for it is wholesome, clear, of the colour of wine, and of a better taste.’

To this period many writers refer the origin of

Distillation.

And, as in many other cases, when the inventors are unknown, the Arabians are at once accredited with the discovery. The argument probably runs thus—Alcohol, alchymy, alchymist, alembic, have all something in common; moreover, they all begin with al, and al is the Arabic article, therefore alcohol was invented by the Arabians. So high an authority as Gibbon (Decline and Fall) is of opinion that ‘they first invented and named the alembic for the purpose of distillation.’ Indeed, it is the commonly received opinion that their visionary hope of finding an elixir of immortal health led them to the discovery of alcohol, and entailed upon mankind a beverage which has proved to some a blessing, but to millions a curse.

But the derivation of the words is the history of their origin. Alembic is the Greek ἄμβιξ, a beaker, with the Arabic prefix al, which is intensive. Alcohol is the Hebrew Kaal (Chaldaic cohal), with the sa[Pg 68]me prefix, and signifies something highly subtilised, pure spirit.[57] The Arabians owed much to other countries; they were rather restorers and improvers than inventors. They formed the link which unites ancient and modern literature; but their superstitious reverence for antiquity checked originality of ideas and freedom of thought. In respect of the discovery in question, it is certain that the invention preceded the days of the Saracens. Pliny very nearly described the process. Thus, he details the mode of obtaining an artificial quicksilver by distillation; and in another book (xv.), he speaks of the vapour arising from boiling pitch being collected on fleeces of wool spread over pots, and afterwards extracted from them by expression. Galen, the famous medical writer of the second century, speaks of distillation per descensum; while Zosimus, a writer of the fifth century, has given figures of a distilling apparatus which Borrichius has copied in his Hermetis et Ægyptiorum Chemicorum Sapientia.

The sobriety of the country can be tolerably gauged from a comparison of such contemporary writers as John of Salisbury, Giraldus Cambrensis, and Peter of Blois. The former of these, in a letter to a friend, writes:—‘You know that the constant habit of drinking has made the English famous among all foreign nations.’ In another letter, sent by him to this country: ‘Both nature and national customs make you drunkards. I[Pg 69]t is a strife between Ceres and Bacchus. But, in the beer which conquers, and reigns, and domineers with you, Ceres prevails.’ Again, in his Polycraticus, he distinguishes between vulgar feasts, when the mightiest tippler is considered the best man, and polite feasts, where sobriety becomes joyous, and plenty does not lead to excess. Giraldus Cambrensis, Archdeacon of Brecknock at the close of the twelfth century, describes a dinner with the Prior of Canterbury where were a variety of wines such as piment and claret, besides mead, &c. Of the Irish clergy, he says, ‘you will not find one who, after all his rigorous observance of fasts and prayer, will not make up at night for the labours of the day, by drinking wine and other liquors beyond all bounds of decorum.’ Peter of Blois observes, in one of his letters:—‘When you behold our barons and knights going on a military expedition, you see their baggage horses loaded, not with iron but wine, not with lances but cheeses, not with swords but bottles, not with spears but spits. You would imagine they were going to prepare a great feast, rather than to make war.’

The greatest genius of the reign of Henry II. was Walter Mapes, the king’s chaplain, best known under the names of ‘Map,’ and the ‘jovial archdeacon.’ This last title is an anachronism, inasmuch as he was not made Archdeacon of Oxford till the reign of Henry’s son Richard, when he was no longer an author. His powerful satire was directed against the growing corruptions of the Church. Never were abuses more sweepingly exposed than in his famous Apocalypse of Golias—Bishop Golias being an imaginary impersonation of ecclesiastical profligacy. In estimating the personal qualifications of Mapes to sit in judgment on his clerical brethren, it[Pg 70] should be remembered that he was the author of a celebrated drinking ode in Leonine verse, which has a singularly Bacchanalian ring about it. Camden alludes to the author as one who filled England with his merriments, and confessed his love to good liquor, with the causes, in this manner:—

Mihi est propositum in taberna mori;
Vinum sit appositum morientis ori:
Ut dicant, cum venerint, angelorum chori,
Deus sit propitius huic potatori.

Poculis accenditur animi lucerna,
Cor imbutum nectare volat ad superna;
Mihi sapit dulcius vinum in taberna
Quam quod aqua miscuit præsulis pincerna.

Suum cuique proprium dat natura munus,
Ego nunquam potui scribere jejunus;
Me jejunum vincere posset puer unus,
Sitim et jejunium, odi tanquam funus.

Unicuique proprium dat natura donum,
Ego versus faciens, vinum bibo bonum,
Et quod habent melius dolia cauponum,
Tale vinum generat copiam sermonum.

Tales versus facio, quale vinum bibo,
Nihil possum scribere, nisi sumpto cibo,
Nihil valet penitus quod jejunus scribo,
Nasonem post calices carmine præibo.

Mihi nunquam spiritus prophetiæ datur,
Nisi tunc cum fuerit venter bene satur,
Cum in arce cerebri Bacchus dominatur,
In me Phœbus irruit, ac miranda fatur.

Of which the following, by Robert Harrison, is an ‘Imitation.’

[Pg 71]I’m fixed:—I’ll in some tavern lie,
When I return to dust;
And have the bottle at my month,
To moisten my dry crust:
That the choice spirits of the skies
(Who know my soul is mellow)
May say, Ye gods, propitious smile!
Here comes an honest fellow.

My lamp of life ‘I’ll’ kindle up
With spirits stout as Hector;
Upon the flames of which I’ll rise
And quaff celestial nectar.
My lord invites me, and I starve
On water mix’d with wine;
But at The Grapes, I get it neat,
And never fail to shine.

To every man his proper gift
Dame Nature gives complete:
My humour is—before I write,
I always love to eat;
For, when I’m scanty of good cheer,
I’m but a boy at best:
So hunger, thirst, and Tyburn-tree
I equally detest.

Give me good wine, my verses are
As good as man can make ‘em;
But when I’ve none, or drink it small,
You’ll say, The devil take ‘em!
For how can anything that’s good
Come from an empty vessel?
But I’ll out-sing even Ovid’s self
Let me but wet my whistle.

With belly full, and heart at ease,
And all the man at home,
I grow prophetic, and can talk
Of wondrous things to come.
When, on my brain’s high citadel,
Strong Bacchus sits in state,
[Pg 72]Then Phœbus joins the jolly god,
And all I say is great.[58]

Others have tried their hand at a translation. S. R. Clarke (Vestigia Anglicana) thus renders the first stanza:—

Well, let me jovial in a tavern die,
And bring to my expiring lips the bowl,
That choirs of angels, when they come, may cry,
Heaven be propitious to the toper’s soul.

The late Mr. Green gives the following version:—

Die I must, but let me die drinking in an inn!
Hold the wine-cup to my lips sparkling from the bin!
So, when angels flutter down to take me from my sin,
‘Ah, God have mercy on this sot,’ the cherubs will begin![59]

It only remains to add that this enigmatical character well earned the title of ‘the Anacreon of his age.’

The habits of the king were abstemious, an example which his sons disregarded. So dissolute and hot was Geoffrey in his youth, remarks Giraldus, that he was equally ensnared by allurements, and driven on to action by stimulants. The ‘nappy ale’ and the cup of ‘lambswool,’ well known to the readers of the pretty ballad entitled ‘King Henry II. and the Miller of Mansfield,’ were the ruin of the royal prince, so prematurely cut off. It might have been well for the three brothers, Geoffrey, Richard, and John, had the sumptuary laws of their father extended to drinks as well as meats. But in forming an estimate of individuals much is to be taken into account; and in the present instance, in addition to youth and, perhaps, propensity, it must [Pg 73]be remembered that the surroundings of the court and the conviviality of the times acted and reacted. Everything that could was made to minister to appetite. Religion itself was made subservient to the vulgar taste. Its festivals were accommodated to the vulgar craving. The feast of the Saviour’s nativity was among the primitive Christians ushered in by the display of calm devotional feeling, unalloyed with the counterfeit of sensual enjoyment, but soon it degenerated into a scene of boisterous activity. Such it was during the Anglo-Saxon period. Such it continued under the line of Norman kings, with the one redeeming feature of the assembling of the prelates and nobles of the realm for deliberating upon the affairs of the country. As a relief, however, to these grave deliberations the guests were feasted with a series of banquets. The part played by Cœur de Lion at such entertainments is thus alluded to in one of the metrical romances of the period:—

Christmas is a time full honest;
King Richard it honoured with great feast,
All his clerks and barons
Were set in their pavilions,
And served with great plenty
Of meat, and drink, and each dainty.

In the same way the festival of St. Martin was degraded. The old calendars of the Church state, in the order of the day: ‘The Martinalia, a genial Feast; wines are tasted of, and drawn from the lees; Bacchus in the figure of Martin.’ While (says John Brady) it generally obtained the title of the second Bacchanal among old ecclesiastical writers:—

[Pg 74]Altera Martinus dein Bacchanalia præbet;
Quem colit anseribus populus multoque Lyæo.

A little old ballad tells the same tale, which begins:—

It is the day of Martilmasse,
Cuppes of ale should freelie passe.

Days spent in this medley of feast and deliberation gave place to nights of revelry, at which masques and mummings formed some of the features of the entertainments. A continual round of revelry was thus maintained during the whole of the twelve days forming the feast of Yule, and seldom until the expiration of the closing night’s debauch did they return to a more sober course. A capital insight into the manners of the times of the first Richard is supplied by Sir Walter Scott in his historical romance Ivanhoe. From it we gather the forms of pledging then adopted: thus Cedric is represented as addressing Sir Templar:—‘Pledge me in a cup of wine, and fill another to the Abbot, while I look back some thirty years to tell you another tale.’ ‘To the memory of the brave who fought’ at Northallerton! ‘Pledge me, my guests.’ After ‘deep drinking’ a further toast is proposed:—‘Knave, fill the goblets—To the strong in arms, be their race or language what it will.’ On another occasion we find the hermit bringing forth ‘two large drinking-cups, made out of the horn of the urus, and hooped with silver. Having made this goodly provision for washing down the supper, he seemed to think no farther ceremonious scruple necessary on his part; but filling both cups, and saying in the Saxon fashion, ‘Waes Hael, Sir sluggish knight!’ he emptied his own at a draught. ‘Drink Hael, Holy Clerk of Copmanhurst!’ answered the warrior. Another story is given in which Cedric welcomes King Richard with the same salutation.

[Pg 75]

The heads of religious houses are probably caricatured with truth. There is exquisite satire in the letter which Conrad is made to read from Prior Aymer:—‘Aymer, by divine grace, Prior of the Cistercian house of St. Mary’s of Jorvaulx, to Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert, a knight of the holy order of the Temple, wisheth health, with the bounties of King Bacchus and my Lady of Venus.... I trust to have my part when we make merry together, as true brothers, not forgetting the wine cup. For, what saith the text? Vinum lætificat cor hominis.’ The capacity of Friar Tuck is gauged by the king (chap. xli.) at ‘a but of sack, a runlet of malvoisie, and three hogsheads of ale, of the first strike. If,’ says the king, ‘that will not quench thy thirst, thou must come to court, and be acquainted with my butler.’

The Chronicles of St. Edmundsbury abound with the irregularities of this time. For instance, we read of a tournament held near St. Edmund, after which eighty young men, sons of noblemen, were asked to dine with the Abbot. After dinner, the Abbot retiring to his chamber, they all arose and began to carol and sing, sending into the town for wine, drinking, screeching, depriving the Abbot and convent of sleep, and refusing to desist at the command of the superior. When the evening was come they broke open the town gates, and went out. The Abbot solemnly excommunicated them. Very few years after this (a.d. 1197) we find the cellarer, at the same St. Edmundsbury, turned out for drunkenness. The next year his successor committed a crime, for which the Abbot restricted him to water. In the case of another official,[60] his goods were seized for gross irregularities.

[Pg 76]

The clergy seem to have needed public admonition. The eighteenth of Hubert Walter’s Legislative Canons at York enjoins: ‘Because, according to the Word of the Lord, if the priest offend he will cause the people to offend; and a wicked priest is the ruin of the people; therefore the eminence of their order requires that they abstain from public bouts and taverns.’

The tenth canon of the same archbishop, at Westminster, a.d. 1200, ordained ‘that clerks go not to taverns or drinking bouts, for from thence come quarrels, and then laymen beat clergymen, and fall under the Canon.’

When such was the condition of the clergy, it would be vain to look for a high standard of morality among the people. Richard of Devizes, the chronicler of the acts of Richard I., exposes the intemperance of the king’s troops engaged in Palestine, and its influence upon their allies. He remarks: ‘The nations of the French and English, so long as their resources lasted, no matter at what cost, feasted every day in common sumptuously, and, with deference to the French, to something more than satiety; and preserving ever the remarkable custom of the English, at the notes of clarions, or the clanging of the trumpet or horn, applied themselves with due devotion to drain the goblets to the dregs. The merchants of the country, who brought the victuals into the camp, unaccustomed to the wonderful consumption, could hardly credit that what they saw was true, that a single people, and that small in number, should consume three times as much bread, and a hundred times as much wine, as that on which many nations of the heathen, and each of them innumerable, lived. The hand of the Lord[Pg 77] deservedly fell upon these enervated soldiers.’[61]

Allusion has already been made to the personal habits of King Richard I. The immediate cause of his death was an arrow which pierced his shoulder upon the occasion of his laying siege to the castle of Limosin. Some have blamed the unskilfulness of the surgeon in attendance; others have said, the king himself by his intemperance did not a little help to inflame the wound.[62]

The Edwardian romance, entitled ‘Richard Cœur de Lion,’ contains abundant allusions to conviviality. In the following quotation, the occurrence of the term costrel, by which is intended an earthen or wooden flask, is the occasion of a paragraph in Chaffer’s valuable work on pottery.[63]

Now, steward, I warn thee,
Buy us vessel great plente,
Dishes, cuppes and saucers,
Bowls, trays and platters,
Vats, tuns, and costrel.

The same romance tells that it was a female minstrel, an Englishwoman, who betrayed the knight-errant king on his return from the Holy Land. It is worth quoting as illustrative of minstrel life which in these times formed so prominent a feature:—

When they had drunken well a fin,
A minstralle com therein,
[Pg 78]And said, ‘Gentlemen, wittily,
Will ye have any minstrelsey?’
Richard bade that she should go.
The minstralle took in mind,
And saith, ‘Ye are men unkind;
And if I may, ye shall for-think
Ye gave neither meat nor drink,
For gentlemen should bede
To minstrels that abandon yede,
Of their meat, wine, and ale.’[64]

In the reign of King John occurs

The Earliest Statute on the Foreign Wine Trade.

It was enacted (1200) that the wines of Anjou should not be sold for more than 24s. a tun, and that the wines of Poitou should not be higher than 20s. The other wines of France were limited to 25s. a tun, ‘unless they were so good as to induce any one to give for them two marks or more.’ Twelve honest men in every town were to superintend this assize. This ordinance, Holinshed says, could not last long, for the merchants could not bear it; and so they fell to, and sold white wine for eightpence the gallon, and red, or claret, for sixpence. The king claimed, out of every imported cargo, one tun before the mast, and another behind it, under the name of prisa or prisa recta, and officers were appointed to collect and account for the same. From the entries of this reign we discover that the principal wines then consumed in England were—those of Anjou, chiefly white and sweet; Gascon wine, wine of Saxony, and wine of Auxerre, which came from the territory of the Duke of Burgundy.[65]

[Pg 79]

The introduction of these wines soon began to manifest its effects. Roger de Hoveden, whose annals date as far as the third year of John, says: ‘By this means the land was filled with drink and drinkers.’

That the English had a wide-spread fame for heavy drinking we incidentally learn from an on-dit of Pope Innocent III. When the case of the exemption of the Abbey of Evesham from the Bishop of Worcester was being argued before the pope, the bishop’s counsel said, ‘Holy father, we have learnt in the schools, and this is the opinion of our masters, that there is no prescription against the rights of bishops.’ The pope replied, ‘Certainly, both you and your masters had drunk too much English beer when you learnt this.’

King John founded the Abbey of Beaulieu, which had a famous vineyard. Possibly the imported wines did not please the palate of the monks. Their standard may have been that of a writer of the period who has given the world an enumeration of the qualities of good wine, which he says should be as ‘clear as the tears of a penitent, so that a man may see distinctly to the bottom of his glass. Its colour should represent the greenness of a buffalo’s horn. When drunk, it should descend impetuously like thunder, sweet-tasted as an almond, creeping like a squirrel, leaping like a roebuck, strong, like the building of a Cistercian monastery, glittering like a spark of fire, subtle as the logic of the schools of Paris, delicate as fine silk, and colder than crystal.’[66]

CHAPTER VII.

PLANTAGENET PERIOD (continued).—JOHN, TO THE DEATH OF EDWARD II.

A curious anecdote is told of King John in a book of anecdote,[67] that upon his last visit to Nottingham he called at the house of the mayor, and at the residence of the priest of St. Mary’s. Finding neither ale in the cellar of one, nor bread in the cupboard of the other, his majesty ordered every publican in the town to contribute sixpennyworth of ale to the mayor yearly, and that every baker should give a halfpenny loaf weekly to the priest. This custom was continued in the time of Blackner, the Nottingham historian, who wrote in 1815. The king, like his brothers, was fond of drink. Sir Walter in his Ivanhoe, while pleading for the general manners of his subjects, admits that John, and those who courted his pleasure by imitating his foibles, were apt to indulge to excess in the pleasures of the trencher and the goblet, and adds, ‘indeed, it is well known that his death was occasioned by a surfeit upon peaches and new ale.’ D’Aubigné, in his History of the Reformation, referring to this king, says that he drank copiously of cider, and died of drunkenness and fright. As his authority for this, he gives in a footnote a Latin extract from Matthew Paris to the effect that his sickness was increased by his pernicious gluttony; he surfeited himself with peaches and new cider, which greatly aggravated the fever in him.

[Pg 81]

The action of the Church in this reign to suppress intemperance brings us into contact with one in particular of many kindred species of sources of excess, namely,

Scot Ales.

First of all, what is the derivation of this compound term? ‘Scot’ (Saxon sceat, a part) signifies a portion of money assessed or paid—hence any payment. Thus ‘scot-free’ means no payment. ‘Ale’ signifies a merry gathering, a feast, a merry-making. We find it variously combined with prefixes which mostly explain themselves, as bid-ale, bride-ale, church-ale, clerk-ale, Easter-ale, give-ale, help-ale, lamb-ale, leet-ale, Midsummer-ale, scot-ale, tithe-ale, weddyn-ale, Whitsun-ale. In each of these a festival is denoted, at which ale was the predominant drink. In this sense Ben Jonson uses the term in the lines:—

And all the neighbourhood, from old records
Of antique proverbs, drawn from Whitsun lords,
And their authorities at wakes and ales.

And again:—

And then satten some and songe at the ale![68]

Scot-ales accordingly denote a gathering at which the company share the drinking expenses. But the first act of legislation on the subject presents to us the expression with a narrowed, but none the less definite, sense. In the year 1213 King John in his absence had appointed Fitzpiers, and Peter (the Bishop of Winchester), regents of the kingdom. They summoned a council at St. Albans, in which, among other matters, it was proclaimed to the sheriffs, foresters, and others, as they [Pg 82]loved their life and limbs, not to make any violent extortions, nor dare to injure any one, or to hold scot-ales anywhere in the kingdom, as they had been wont to do. This legislation was clearly levelled at the foresters, or officers of the forests, who kept ale-houses and drew customers by intimidation. Mr. Bridgett has clearly exposed their oppression. He says, ‘It will be remembered that royal forests, or uncultivated lands, formed, at that time, no small part of England, and that they were not subject to common law. The king’s officers took advantage of this immunity to exercise great tyranny over the people, and, previous to this period, sought to raise money by setting up taverns and drinking assemblies, which the country people were compelled to frequent for fear of incurring the displeasure of their petty tyrants. Modes of raising money, different in form, though similar in their nature and consequences, are by no means unknown to publicans at the present day; and labouring men, in order to get hired, have sometimes to purchase the good-will of the master of the beer or gin shop in which workmen assemble and wages are paid. It will be a happy day when a new Magna Charta shall rescue the nation from the tyranny of the “liquor interest,” whether it be that of the great brewers and distillers, or of the petty vendors.’[69]

But scot-ales were by no means confined to the foresters. The evil spread; the country was infested with them, and of this the language of councils and synods throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is ample evidence.

[Pg 83]

In these ecclesiastical prohibitions the word ‘scotallum’ is scot-ale dog-latinised, a nut which many a foreign reader has failed to crack.

In the year 1220, Richard de Marisco, Bishop of Durham, decreed: ‘We forbid announcements of scot-ales to be made by a priest or any one else in the church. If priest or cleric do this, or take part in a scot-ale, he will be punished canonically.’

In 1223, Richard, Bishop of Sarum, orders, ‘that no announcement of scot-ales be made by laymen in the church, and neither in the churches nor out of the churches by priests or by clergymen.’

In 1230, Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, writes to his archdeacons: ‘We strictly command that you prohibit in your synods and chapters those drinking assemblies which are commonly called scot-ales; and every year, in every church of your archdeaconries, this prohibition must be several times made known; and if any presume to violate this prohibition, canonically made, you must admonish them canonically, and proceed against them by ecclesiastical censures.’

In 1237, Alexander Stavenby, Bishop of Coventry, forbids under penalty any priest to go to a tavern, or to keep a tavern or scot-ale.

In 1240, Walter of Cantilupe, Bishop of Worcester, decreed: ‘We forbid the clergy to take part in those drinking parties called scot-ales, or to keep taverns. They must also deter their flocks from them, forbidding by God’s authority and ours the aforesaid scot-ales, and other meetings for drinking.’

In 1255, Walter de Kirkham, Bishop of Durham, wrote: ‘We adjure all priests, by Him who lives for ever, and all the ministers of the Church, especially those in holy orders, that they be not drunkards, nor [Pg 84]keep taverns, lest they die an eternal death; moreover, we forbid scot-ales and games in sacred places.’

In 1256, Giles of Bridport, Bishop of Salisbury, decreed: ‘We confirm the prohibition of scot-ales, which has been made for the good both of souls and bodies; and we command rectors, vicars, and other parochial priests that, by frequent exhortations, they earnestly induce their parishioners not rashly to violate the prohibition.’

For another century occasional decrees are issued upon the same subject. One of the last admonitions respecting scot-ales is to be found proceeding from the Synod of Ely in 1364.

It will have been observed how vigorous was the action of the Church in the reign of Henry III. But all is not yet told. Archbishop Langton, in his Constitutions, 1222, decrees (canon 30) that archdeacons, deans, rural deans, and priests abstain from immoderate eating and drinking. Again (canon 47), that neither monks nor canons regular spend time in eating or drinking, save at the stated hours. They may by leave quench their thirst in the refectory, but not indulge.

In the Constitutions of Archbishop Edmund, 1236, the sixth canon forbids clergymen ‘the ill practice by which all that drink together are obliged to equal draughts, and he carries away the credit who hath made most drunk, and taken off the largest cups; therefore, we forbid all forcing to drink.’

Bishop Grosseteste, to whom reference has lately been made, turned his attention to the indirect as well as the direct occasions of excess. He suppressed the May games in his diocese of Lincoln, from which date the practices of the day have gradually changed. The nature of the[Pg 85] festivities may be guessed from the fact that the Maypole used to be called ale-stake.[70]

The action of the civil power was still limited in its scope. Regulation of tariff was among the most prominent of its efforts. Thus in the fifty-first year of Henry III. (1266), it was enacted that when a quarter of wheat is sold for 3s. or 3s. 4d., and a quarter of barley for 1s. 8d., and a quarter of oats for 1s. 4d., then brewers in cities ought and may well afford to sell two gallons of beer or ale for a penny; and out of cities to sell three or four gallons for a penny. These regulations are indicative that the manufacture of ale had become of much consequence.

The quality of this drink was questionable. Matthew Paris describes it as very weak.

Henry of Avranches, a Norman poet of the period, has some coarse banter upon it. The lines as translated begin thus:—

Of this strange drink, so like the Stygian lake,
Men call it ale, I know not what to make.

The criticism of the barons of Snowdon on London ale counts for what it is worth, for nothing satisfied them. Quartered at Islington, when they accompanied Llewellyn to England, they could neither drink the wine nor ale of London; neither mead nor Welsh ale could be obtained; the English bread they refused to eat, and all London could not afford milk enough for their daily requirement. Hard to please they clearly were; nevertheless, their complaint of the ale was justifiable. It was made indiscriminately of barley, wheat, and oats, sometimes of all combined. Without the hop, the ale[Pg 86] must have been insipid. To remove its mawkish flatness, they flavoured it with spices and other ingredients, especially long pepper.

Home-made cider was evidently in repute, since we find in this reign of Henry III. a gentleman holding his manor in Norfolk on condition of supplying the king, annually, at his exchequer, with two mites of wine, made of pearmains (a species of apple).

Again, before the close of this thirteenth century, Edward I. orders the Sheriff of Southamptonshire to provide 400 quarters of wheat, and to convey the same in good ships from Portsmouth to Winchelsea. Also to put on board the said ships 200 tuns of cider.

Still, whatever were the merits of the home vineyards and breweries, historians began to observe the growing fondness for foreign wines. They accounted for it in various ways: the listlessness of the people, home and foreign wars, crusades, and that ever-recurring cause of new phenomena, ‘change of circumstances.’ So argues Twyne, a man, according to history, of extraordinary knowledge in the antiquities of England.[71]

A new custom of one penny for every tun, called guage, was levied on all wines imported. From the duty collected between a given date in 1272 and 1273, at the ports of London, Portsmouth, Southampton, and Sandwich, we find that there were imported 8,846 tuns, in addition to the prisa not liable to the new impost.

Vinous preparations of a fancy character were much in use. We read of an order for the delivery of two tuns of white and one of red wine to make garhiofilac and clarry for the king’s table at York. The names[Pg 87] of some of these preparations are painfully significant. Recipes are found for making Bishop, Cardinal, Pope.

Whether in consequence of the royal statute upon ale, or for some other reason, the first mention I can find of the Crown as an inn sign occurs in this reign. The tavern was in that part of Cheapside called, after the inn, Crown Field. The king was evidently a moderate, plain-living man; the only festivities that he seemed to care for being those at Christmastide.

Inns, even at this time, were uncommon. In the time of Edward I. Lord Berkeley’s farmhouses were used instead. Travellers would not only inquire for hospitable persons, but even go to the king’s palaces for refreshment. Knights were known to lodge in barns. But, though few in number, they had already proved a nuisance. In the statutes for the regulation of the city of London in the time of Edward I., it is stated that ‘divers persons do resort unto the city:’ some who had been banished, or who had fled from their own country, also foreigners and others, many of them suspicious characters; and ‘of these, some do become brokers, hostlers, and innkeepers, within the city, as freely as though they were good and lawful men of the franchise of the city; and some do nothing but run up and down through the streets, more by night than by day, and are well attired in clothing and array, and have their food of delicate meats and costly; neither do they use any craft or merchandise; nor have they any lands or tenements whereof to live, nor any friend to find them; and through such persons many perils do often happen in[Pg 88] the city.’ In addition to this, it was complained that ‘offenders, going about by night, do commonly resort and have their meetings, and evil talk in taverns more than elsewhere, and there do seek for shelter, lying in wait and watching their time to do mischief.’ To do away with this grievance, taverns were not allowed to be opened for the sale of wine and ale after the tolling of the curfew.

In the first year of Edward I.’s reign was abolished the old impost called Prisage, and in its place a duty imposed of 2s. on every tun of wine imported. This tax afterwards obtained the name of Butlerage, because it was paid to the king’s butler. It was abolished in 1311, in consequence of a petition urged upon Edward II. for the redress of this and many other grievances.

It was stated above that ale was made of various cereals. In 1302, barley-malt was rated at 3s. 4d. per quarter, and from the cheapness of wheat the brewers malted that grain also. The beer made from barley was 3d. or 4d. a gallon, while that from wheat was only 1½d., wheat being then only about 2s. the quarter.[72] This caused a proclamation prohibiting the malting of wheat, lest it should prevent the encouragement of its growth for bread, and give the advantage to corn and other grain.

The Church made herself heard during the long reign of Edward I. in the Constitutions of Archbishop Peckham, 1281, and in a synod at Exeter, 1287. In the former, immoderate love of the pleasures of the table, both in eating and drinking, was condemned. In the latter, instructions were issued against the keeping or frequenting of taverns by the priesthood; and su[Pg 89]ch instructions were doubtless needed. Nor did the satirists spare the clergy. One of these, writing at the close of the thirteenth century, thus exposes a new order to which is attached the name of ‘Fair-Ease.’ Speaking of the particulars in which this new order imitated other orders, he adds: ‘Of Beverly they have taken a point, which shall be kept well and accurately; to drink well at their meat, and then afterwards until supper; and afterwards at the collation each must have a piece of candle as long as the arm below the elbow, and as long as there shall remain a morsel of the candle to burn, the brethren must continue their drinking.’ And again: ‘A point they have taken from the Black Monks, that they love drinking, forsooth, and are drunk every day, for they do not know any other way of living.... Also it is provided that each brother drink before dinner and after;’ and much more to the same effect.

At a visitation at St. Swithin’s Priory at Winchester, it appears that the monks claimed to have, among other articles of luxury, ‘vinum tam album quam rubeum, claretum, medonem, burgurastrum.’ This was in the year 1285. In the following year a benefactor grants to the said convent ‘unam pipam vini’ for their refection.[73]

Another satire on the corruptions in the Church, entitled ‘The Land of Cockaigne,’ is assigned to the latter part of the thirteenth century. The name signifies ‘kitchen-land.’ In this popular poem the land of animal delights is painted as the happy land of monks who had turned their backs upon the higher life to [Pg 90]which they were devoted. A line or two will give an idea.

In Cokaygne is met and drink
Without care, how, and swink.
The met is trie, the drink is clere,
To none, russin, and sopper.

Which Professor Morley interprets:—

In Cockaigne is meat and drink
Without care, trouble, and toil.
The meat is choice, the drink is clear,
At dinner, draught, and supper,

and explains russin to be wine between meals, often condemned of old; and connects with it the terms rouse and carouse, which, says he, denote emptying of the wine-cup, quoting, ‘The queen carouses to thy fortune, Hamlet.’ But the words are generally referred to gar aus, all out. ‘Russin,’ in the eastern counties, still denotes drink at odd hours.

The household roll of the Countess of Leicester, widow of Simon de Montfort, reveals some secrets of the private life of the English towards the end of this thirteenth century. Among the wines in use in that family, Gascon and Bastard are prominent. Bastard was a sweet Spanish wine, of which there were two sorts, white and brown. Little is told in the roll of the price of wine. Nine shillings and twopence was paid for twenty-two gallons.

We are able to get a comparative view of the prices of food at this time from a list of articles supplied by his tenants when the Archbishop of Canterbury visited his lands at Tarrings in Sussex, about 1277. The prices seem very low.[Pg 91]

The quantity of beer consumed in the household of the countess was immense. On April 18, they brewed five quarters of barley and four of oats; on the 25th of the same month they bought 188 gallons of beer, and on the 29th brewed again. Cider is mentioned once, but was not especially relished. One tun was distributed among 800 paupers. Cordials were in demand.[74]

In the ‘Squire of Low Degree,’ probably of early fourteenth century date, the King of Hungary offers to provide for his daughter wines from all manners of countries—

Ye shall have Rumney and Malmesyne,
Both Hippocras and Vernage wine,
Mount Rose and wine of Greke,
Both Algrade and despice eke,
Antioche and Bastarde,
Pyment also and garnarde;
Wine of Greek and Muscadell,
Both claré, pyment, and Rochell,
The reed your stomake to defye,
And pottes of Osey sett you bye.[75]

The constant mention about this time of Hippocras (Ipocras, Ypocrasse) demands some notice. It was a most favourite drink of the middle ages, a compound of wine and aromatics. A curious recipe for it is given in Pegge’s Form of Cury—‘Ypocrasse for lords with gynger, synamon, and graynes, sugour, and turesoll; and for [Pg 92]comyn pepull, gynger, canell, longe peper, and claryffyed hony.’ Another recipe is found, much in vogue at wedding festivals, ‘introduced at the commencement of the banquet, served hot; of so comforting and generous a nature that the stomach would be at once put into good temper.’ It was constantly served with comfits; thus we find Elizabeth Woodville ordering up ‘green ginger, comfits, and ipocras.’ Katharine of Arragon gave ipocras and comfits for the voide. In a satire upon Wolsey, entitled, ‘Why come ye not to the Court?’ we find it in the company of sweetmeat—

Welcome, dame Simonia,
With dame Castimergia,
To drynke and for to eate,
Swete ipocras, and swete meate.

It is strange that Pepys should have thought it unintoxicating. Thus October 9, 1663, he went to Guildhall, met there some friends; wine was offered, ‘and they drunk, I only drinking some hypocras, which do not break my vowe, it being, to the best of my present judgment, only a mixed compound drink, and not any wine. If I am mistaken, God forgive me! But I hope and do think I am not.’ It differed from clarry (claré), wine mixed with honey and spice. Hence Fournier mistakes in thinking that hippocras was wine spiced ‘ou édulcoré avec le miel’ (Le Vieux-Neuf, vol. ii.).

We hear very little of home vineyards at this time, and, but for incidental allusions, it might be imagined that the foreign trade was a monopoly. At the same time, such allusions as we have are convincing that native wine was a rarity. Lambarde states that the Bishop of Rochester sent to King Edward II. when he was at Bockingfield ‘a present of his drinks, and [Pg 93]withal both wines and grapes, of his own growth, in his vineyard at Hallings.’

The days when bishops were identified with the contents of the cellar are buried in the sepulchre of the long past, but we are now speaking of a time when a bishop’s induction to his see was often a disgrace to civilisation. It is incredible, remarks Godwin, in his notice of the installation of Bishop Stapleton to the See of Exeter (1308), how many oxen, tuns of ale and wine, are said to have been usually spent at this kind of solemnity.

We have already mentioned that the duty on wine was taken off in the year 1311. Four years later, a proclamation was issued prohibiting the malting of wheat.[76] In 1317, merchants who were not of the freedom of the city were forbidden to retail wines or other wares within its precincts or suburbs. Thus much for the legislation of the reign.

The hospitality of the time must have been unbounded. Stowe gives a curious instance, taken from the accounts of the Earl of Lancaster’s steward for the year 1313. The items, which included 369 pipes of red wine, amounted to 7,309l., which is more than 20,000l. of our money, and, making the due allowance for the relative prices of food, would represent something like 100,000l. sterling.

The terrible fate of Edward II. almost forbids hars[Pg 94]h criticism of his life. He was certainly fond of the pleasures of the table, and is said to have given way to intemperance. Had not the banqueting-room been oftener employed than the council-chamber, opportunities might not have occurred for the rebellion of favourites, for which the festal board was answerable.

CHAPTER VIII.

PLANTAGENET PERIOD (continued).—EDWARD III. TO RICHARD III.

For a picture of the social life of the remainder of the fourteenth century, we turn of necessity to one who was the ornament of two of the most brilliant courts in the annals of England, viz. those of Edward III. and his successor, Richard II. We are for ever indebted to him for exquisite pictures of genuine English life and character in its infinite phases. And it may be here noticed, as bearing upon our subject, that this

Geoffrey Chaucer

was the son of a wine merchant; that by circumstance and ability he won for himself the patronage of Edward III.; that he was made controller of the customs of wine and wool in the port of London, and had a pitcher of wine daily from the royal table. Towards the close of the century he is supposed to have retired to pass the calm evening of his active life at Woodstock, where he is said to have composed his immortal Canterbury Tales.

The prologue, whether written by Chaucer or not, states that he was going to pass the night at the Tabarde Inn, in Southwark, previous to setting out on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Thomas à Becket at Canterbury. A number of pilgrims, twenty-nine sundry folk, meet at this hostelry in good fellowship. There they sup together; after which ‘mine hoste’ proposes that[Pg 96] they shall journey together to Canterbury; that, in order to beguile the way, each shall tell a tale to and fro, and whoever tells the best shall have a supper at the expense of the rest; of course at his hostelry. The company assent. ‘Mine hoste’ is appointed judge and reporter of the stories. The pilgrims, or characters composing the social party, are, to all intents, an inventory of English society as it existed at that day. We seem actually to see the daily life of each reflected in the marvellous mirror. Allusions to drink abound. Thus, in the prologue, he describes a Prioress, and her delicacy of manners at table, as becomes a gentlewoman:—

Hire overlippè wiped she so clene,
That in hire cuppe was no ferthing sene
Of gresè, whan she dronken hadde hire draught.

He describes the Frankelein or country gentleman, who was ambitious of showing his riches by the profusion of his table, but whose hospitality often degenerated into excess.

For he was Epicure’s owen sone,
That held opinion, that plein delit
Was veraily felicite parfite.

An householder, and that a grete was he;
Seint Julian he was in his contree.
His brede, his ale, was alway after on;
A better envyned man was no wher non.
    *    *    *    *
It snewed in his hous of mete and drinke.

London ale must have been then in repute, for among the accomplishments of one of the party who was less a pilgrim than a cook, it is noted:—

[Pg 97]

Well coude he knowe a draught of London ale.

Thomas Tyrwhitt, in a note on this line, remarks, ‘Whether this was a different sort of ale from that of the provinces, or only better made, I know not; but it appears to have been in request about a century after Chaucer. In the account of the feast of Archbishop Warham, in 1504, we find that London ale was higher priced than Kentish by 5s. a barrel.’

The true British sailor of Chaucer’s time exhibited nearly the same strong traits as our own brave tars. That his conscience was not too finely drawn appears in his conduct at Bordeaux, where he drew full many a draught of wine while the chapman slept:—

The hote sommer hadde made his hewe al broun,
And certainly he was a good felaw.
Full many a draught of win he hadde draw
From Burdeux ward, while that the chapman slepe;
Of nice conscience toke he no kepe.

The description of the Sompnour, or Ecclesiastical Apparitor, is not an inviting one. Church officials temp. Chaucer were not all they might have been.

A sompnour was ther with us in that place, 625
That hadde a fire-red cherubinnés face,
For sausefleme he was, with eyen narwe;
As hote he was, and likerous as a sparwe,
With scalled browes blake, and pilled berd:
Of his visage children were sore aferd. 630
    *    *    *    *
Wel loved he garlike, onions, and lekes, 636
And for to drinke strong win as rede as blood.
Than wolde he speke, and crie as he were wood.
And whan that he wel dronken had the win,
Than wold he speken no word but Latin. 640
A fewe termes coude he, two or three,
That he had lerned out of som decree;
[Pg 98]No wonder is, he herd it all the day.
And eke ye knowen wel, how that a jay
Can clepen watte, as wel as can the pope. 645
But who so wolde in other thing him grope,
Than hadde he spent all his philosophie,
Ay, Quæstio quid juris, wolde he crie. 648

Among others of the Sompnour’s iniquities which the poet lashes was his sale of silence. He would countenance the worst deviation from rectitude for a quart of wine. Quotation is withheld.

Before the pilgrims started from the Tabarde Inn, they had well drunk, as appears from Prologue, lines 749-752.

Gret chere made oure hoste us everich on,
And to the souper sette he us anon:
And served us with vitaille of the beste;
Strong was the win, and wel to drinke us leste.

Nor was this all. After some conversation with mine host, and certain suggestions made by him as to their behaviour on the way, we read in Prologue, lines 819-823:—

Thus by on assent
We ben accorded to his jugement,
And therupon the win was fette anon.
We dronken, and to reste wenten eche on,
Withouten any lenger tarying.

It was just as well they did.

Pass we on to the Canterbury Tales themselves. There is nothing in the Knighte’s Tale, as indeed we should have expected nothing from this ‘veray parfit gentil knight,’ apropos of our subject. But directly the Knighte’s Tale was ended, and mine host had requested the Monk to follow suit, the Miller strikes in, and insists on telling his tale, a very improper one indeed. This is the description of the drunken miller and his conduct—[Pg 99]

The Miller that for-dronken was all pale, 3123
So that unethes upon his hors he sat,
He n’old avalen neither hood ne hat, 3125
Ne abiden no man for his curtesie,
But in Pilates vois he gan to crie,
And swore by armes, and by blood, and bones,
I can a noble tale for the nones,
With which I wol now quite the knightes tale. 3130
Our Hoste saw that he was dronken of ale,
And sayd; abide, Robin, my leve brother,
Som better man shall tell us first another:
Abide, and let us werken thriftily.
By Goddes soule (quod he) that wol not I, 3135
For I wol speke, or elles go my way.
Our Hoste answerd; Tell on a devil way;
Thou art a fool; thy wit is overcome.
Now herkeneth, quod the Miller, all and some:
But first I make a protestatioun, 3140
That I am dronke, I know it by my soun;
And therefore if that I misspeke or say,
Wite it the ale of Southwerk, I you pray. 3143

There is nothing very specially to the point in the Millere’s Tale, but one or two facts show the universal part that drink played in the period. Thus when Absalom, the parish clerk, wishes to ingratiate himself with Alison, the carpenter’s wife,

He sent hire pinnes, methe, and spiced ale,
And wafres piping hot out of the glede:
And for she was of toun, he profered mede.
Lines 3378-3380.

or can the carpenter and his lodger carry on a conversation without the introduction of ‘a large quart of mighty ale’ (line 3497).

The Reve’s Tale, which is probably founded upon a[Pg 100] similar story in the Decameron of Boccaccio, largely turns upon drink—e.g., two Cantabs are going to sup and sleep at the miller’s:—

The miller the toun his doughter send 4134
For ale and bred, and roasted hem a goos, 4135
    *    *    *    *
They soupen, and they speken of solace, 4144
And drinken ever strong ale at the best. 4145
Abouten midnight wente they to rest.

But not, as we are told in a later verse, till ‘that dronken was all in the crouke,’ by which time all of the party had had too much. Their condition is described:—

Wel hath this miller vernished his hed,
Ful pale he was, for-dronken, and nought red.
He yoxeth, and he speketh thurgh the nose,
As he were on the quakke, or on the pose. 4150
To bed he goth, and with him goth his wif;
As any jay she light was and jolif,
So was hire joly whistle wel ywette. 4153
    *    *    *    *
This miller hath so wisly bibbed ale, 4160
That as an hors he snorteth in his slepe.

In the Man of Lawes Tale we have the account of a messager being so drunk that, ‘while he slept as a swine,’ his letters were stolen from him by the king’s mother, and changed to spite her daughter-in-law. His orgies are thus described:—

This messager drank sadly ale and wine, 5163
    *    *    *    *
He dranke, and wel his girdel underfight. 5209

Our poet thus apostrophises the sorry fellow:—

[Pg 101]

O messager, fulfilled of dronkenesse, 5191
Strong is thy breth, thy limmes faltren ay,
And thou bewreiest alle secrenesse;
Thy mind is lorne, thou janglest as a jay;
Thy face is tourned in a new array; 5195
Ther dronkenesse regneth in any route,
Ther is no conseil hid withouten doute. 5197

A virtuous mediæval commentator has written in the margin of a MS. copy of Chaucer in the Cambridge Library the following excellent Latin remarks:—

Query—Are these words merely the commentator’s effusion and outcome, or are they a quotation from some Latin writer? If the latter, they would probably have been the basis of Chaucer’s lines here. They say a good deal in a few words.

The ‘Wif of Bathe’ is one of Chaucer’s equivocal characters. Her remarks are usually incisive. Her attainments, upon her own confession, were mainly dependent on the brimming cup; as in the lines—

Tho coude I dancen to an harpe smale,
And sing ywis as any nightingale,
When I had dronke a draught of swete wine.

The same impression is produced in the engravings of the lady in Knight’s Old England. Chaucer continues:—

Metellius, the foule cherle, the swine,
That with a staf beraft his wif hire lif,
For she drank wine, though I had been his wif,
Ne shuld he not have daunted me fro drinke.

The story about Metellius beating his wife for drinking is told by Pliny (Nat. Hist. xiv. 13) of one Mecenius, bu[Pg 102]t Chaucer probably followed Valerius Maximus (vi. 3).

A little further on is a line full of truth—

In woman vinolent is no defence,

which may have been suggested by the couplet in Romaunt de la Rose:—

Car puisque femme est enyvrée
Et n’a point en soy de deffence.

The Sompnour, or, in other words, the summoner (so called from delivering the summonses of the archdeacons), vows vengeance on the Frere (friar) for telling a tale so palpably levelled at his profession, and, giving him a Roland for his Oliver, thus describes the Frere of the period:—

Fie on hir pompe, and on hir glotonie,
And on hir lewednesse; I hem defie. 7510
Me thinketh they ben like Jovinian,
Fat as a whale, and walken as a swan
Al vinolent as botel in the spence;
Hir praier is of ful gret reverence;
Whan they for soules say the Psalm of Davit, 7515
Lo, buf they say, cor meum eructavit.

Tyrwhitt informs us that Jovinian was ‘perhaps the supposed emperour of that name in the Gesta Romanorum, c. lix., whose story was worked up into a Morality, under the title of “L’orgueil et présomption de l’Empereur Jovinien—à 19 Personages.”’

The following lines, still from the Sompnour’s Tale, are not Chaucer’s own, but a quotation or paraphrase from Seneca:—

A lord is lost if he be vicious 7630
And dronkennesse is eke a foule record
Of any man, and namely of a lord. 7632
    *    *    *    *
[Pg 103] For goddes love drinke more attemprely. 7635
Win maketh man to lesen wretchedly
His mind, and eke his limmes everich on. 7637

The Marchante’s Tale abounds with allusions. Wine played no unimportant part at the marriage of January and May. It was not spared at the wedding. As we read in line 9596:

Bacchus the win hem skinketh al aboute.

The aged bridegroom primed himself by its aid—

He drinketh Ipocras, clarré, and vernage
Of spices hot, to encresen his corage.
Lines 9681, 9682.

And in the morning when ‘that the day gan dawe,’ we read that ‘then he taketh a sop in fine clarré’—line 9717.

All this, no doubt, is drawn from the marriage customs of Chaucer’s days.

In these times of luxury and excess what an example does the ‘poure widewe’ furnish in the Nonnes Prestes Tale. Truly idyllic!—

Full sooty was hire boure, and eke hire halle,
In which she ete many a slender mele.
Of poinant sauce ne knew she never a dele.
No deintee morsel passed thurgh hire throte;
Hire diete was accordant to hire cote.
Repletion ne made hire never sike;
Attempre diete was all hire physike,
And exercise, and hertes suffisance.
The goute let hire nothing for to dance,
No apoplexie shente not hire hed.
No win ne dranke she, neyther white ne red:
Hire bord was served most with white and black,
Milk and broun bred, in which she fond no lack,
Seinde bacon, and somtime an ey or twey;
For she was as it were a maner dey.

[Pg 104]

Could she have divined that one day Professor Mayor would give to the world ‘Modicus cibi medicussibi’?

In the Manciple’s Prologue we find the following lines. The Manciple is chaffing the ‘coke’ for having had too much to drink. Inter alia, he remarks, lines 16993, 16994:—

I trow that ye have dronken win of ape,
And that is whan men playen with a straw.

These are worth quoting for the sake of Tyrwhitt’s note on 16993. ‘Wine of ape,’ he says, ‘I understood to mean the same as vin de singe in the old Calendrier des Bergiers. Sign 1. ii. b. The author is treating of physiognomy, and in his description of the four temperaments he mentions, among other circumstances, the different effects of wine upon them. The choleric, he says, a vin de Lyon; cest a dire, quant a bien beu veult tanser, noyser et battre. The sanguine a vin de singe; quant a plus beu tant est plus joyeux. In the same manner the phlegmatic is said to have vin de mouton, and the melancholick vin de porceau.’

In the Manciple’s Prologue, lines 17043 to 17050, we have the following praise of wine as a reconciler:—

Then gan our hoste to laughen wonder loude,
And sayd: I see wel it is necessary
Wher that we gon good drinke with us to cary;
For that wol turnen rancour and disese
To accord and love, and many a wrong apese.
O Bacchus, Bacchus, blessed be thy name,
That so canst turnen ernest into game:
Worship and thonke be to thy deitee.

If Laudibus arguitur vini vinosus Homerus be a true rule, we might say that Chaucer liked his glass.

[Pg 105]

In the Persones Tale, under heading De Gulâ, we read, ‘After avarice cometh glotonie, which is expresse agenst the commandement of God. Glotonie is unmesurable appetit to ete or to drinke.... This sinne hath many spices. The first is dronkennesse, that is the horrible sepulture of manne’s reson: and this is dedly sinne.’

The Rime of Sire Thopas is tantalising. It breaks off just as we are assured that Sire Thopas

Himself drank water of the well,
As did the knight Sire Percivell
So worthy under wede,
Till on a day——

Hiatus valde deflendus! Yet we find with strange inconsistency in lines 13801-13803—

And ther he swore on ale and bred
How that the geaunt should be ded,
Betide what so betide.

Lines 13693, 13694 show the early use of the nutmeg with liquor—

And notemuge to put in ale,
Whether it be moist or stale:

as in the old song—

What gave thee that jolly red nose?
Nutmegs and cloves.

This ample history of manners from one of our greatest poets scarcely needs to be supplemented. Indeed, little can be added even from that withering satire of Robert Longlande, entitled the Vision of Pierce Plowman, who, lashing everybody, did not spare the corruptions of the Church. To this vision has been commonly annexed a poem, called ‘Pierce the Plowman’s Crede,’ a satire on the Mendicant Friars. These last had sprung up in the preceding century. They were,[Pg 106] indeed, a necessity of the time, so far had the monastic orders degenerated from their primitive simplicity, so wholly were they abandoned to luxury and indolence. In the following lines of the ‘Crede’ a Franciscan is defending his order:—

Of al men upon mold we Minorites most sheweth
The pure Aposteles lif, with penance on erthe,
And suen [follow] hem in sanctite, and sufferen wel harde.
We haunten not tavernes, ne hobelen abonten
At marketes and miracles we medeley us never.

The Early English Text Society has done good service in publishing one of the many mediæval handbooks of the same kind, called Instructions for Parish Priests. The book is by John Myrk, a canon regular of St. Austin. Amongst these instructions the priest is bidden to eschew drunkenness, gluttony, pride, sloth, and envy. He must keep from taverns, trading, wrestling, shooting, hunting, hawking, and dancing. Dr. Cutts infers from Chaucer’s description of the poor parson of a town, that these instructions were not thrown away upon the mediæval parish priests.

The legislation of the fourteenth century, so far as it concerns our subject, was of an in-and-out character. It enacted and repealed, repealed and enacted. In 1330 it was ordained: ‘Because there are more taverners in the realm than were wont to be, selling as well corrupt wines as wholesome, and have sold the gallon at such price as they themselves would, because there was no punishment ordained for them, as hath been for them that sell bread and ale, to the great hurt of the people,’ that wine must be sold at reasonable prices, and that the wines should be tested twice a year—at Easter and Michaelmas, oftener if needful—and corrupt win[Pg 107]es poured out, and the vessels broken.

In 1338 wine was taxed, on a great emergency. Edward III. wanted a vast sum to pay the subsidies which he had granted to his foreign allies. The great men granted him a moiety of their wool, which sold for 400,000l.; besides a duty of 2s. a tun upon wine, added to the usual customs paid by all foreign merchants.

The preamble of the Act of 1365 deserves special attention:—‘The King wills of his grace and sufferance that all merchant denizens that be not artificers, shall pass into Gascoign to fetch wines thence, to the end and intent that by this general licence greater liberty may come, and greater market may be of wines within the realm; and that the Gascoigns and other aliens may come into the realm with their wines, and freely sell them without any disturbance or impeachment.’

By the 42nd Edward III., c. 8, rigour was again imposed, and wines forbidden to be brought into England save by Gascons and other aliens. In the next year the previous Act was renewed at the request of his son the Prince, who found the subsidies and customs of wines diminished in his principality of Aquitaine, by reason of the falling off of the wine trade with England. A revival of the trade ensued. Froissart states that in 1372 a fleet arrived at Bordeaux from England of not less than two hundred sail of merchantmen in quest of wines.

In 1378 foreigners were allowed to sell wine in gross but not in retail.

The same contradictions manifest themselves in the Acts of Richard II.’s reign as in those of his predecessor; e.g.—

In 1381 no sweet wines or claret could be sold ret[Pg 108]ail. In the following year the price of foreign wines was again regulated. It was enacted that the best wines of Gascony, Osey, and Spain, and Rhenish wines should be sold for 100 shillings, and the best Rochelle wines at 6 marks the tun; and by retail, the former at 6d., the latter at 4d., a gallon. Marvellous to relate, Holinshed states that, before the close of the reign, so abundant was the article that it was sold at the maximum price of 20s. a tun.

In 1387, it was enacted that no wine be carried out of the realm.

It is curious to observe how our sumptuary laws recognised certain seasons, and exempted them from their operation. Christmas, for example, had not only been set apart for sacred observance, but had become a time of feasting and revelry. When Edward III., in his tenth year, tried to restrain his subjects from over luxury, exception was made in the case of the great feasts of the year—‘La veile et le jour de Noel, le jour de Saint Estiephne, le jour de l’an renoef [New Year’s Day], les jours de la Tiphaynei et de la Purification de Notre Dame.’

We have already found that attention was drawn to taverns in the time of Edward I. In the reign of Edward III. only three taverns were allowed in the metropolis. Publicans were already compelled by law to put up a sign. Thus, in 1393, Florence North, a Chelsea brewer, was ‘presented’ for not putting up the usual sign. The penalty was the forfeiture of their ale. With other trades it was optional. Conversely, the taking away of a publican’s licence was accompanied by the removal of his sign—

[Pg 109]

For this gross fault I here do damn thy licence,
Forbidding thee ever to tap or draw;
For instantly I will in mine own person
Command the constables to pull down thy sign.[77]

By the gradual institution of inns, where travellers could obtain food and lodging, the old methods of hospitality began to pass away. ‘The convenient chamber for guests,’ which we find in the inventories of a country parson’s house in the middle ages, was becoming a relic of the past. This, and the more public hospitium, or guest-house, within the walls of the monasteries, had for ages furnished the shelter and provender which could only thus be gotten.

In the time of Richard II. the Little Park at Windsor was used as a vineyard for home consumption. Thus Stowe (Chronicle, p. 143) says that among the archives of the Court of Pleas of the Forest and Honours at Windsor, is to be seen the ‘yearly account of the charges of the planting of the vines that in the time of Richard II. grew in great plenty within the Little Park, as also the making of the wine itself, whereof some part was spent in the king’s house, and some part sold to his profit, the tithes whereof were paid to the Abbot of Waltham.’

But the inutility of home vineyards is demonstrated from the cheapness of foreign wines at this time. In 1342 the price of Gascon wines in London was 4d., and that of Rhenish, 6d. per gallon; and in 1389, foreign wine was only 20s. per tun for the best, and 13s. 4d. for the second—that is, about three halfpence a dozen.

But to turn to the king himself. The pageant, or royal entertainment, on the accession of Richard II. is described by the chronicler Walsingham. The city was most richly adorned, and the conduits ran with wine for three hours. In the upper end of the Cheap was e[Pg 110]rected a castle with four towers, on two sides of which ran forth wine abundantly. In the towers were placed four beautiful girls dressed in white, who, on the king’s approach, blew in his face leaves of gold, and filling cups of gold with wine at the spouts of the castle, presented them to the king and his nobles.

The citizens had signified their joy in much the same way before, when Edward I. returned from the Holy Land. Maitland, in his London, seems to have regarded with wonder the fact that the very conduits in the streets through which the cavalcade passed ran with wine; but it happened before, and happened very often afterwards. Mr. Morewood (Hist. Ineb. Liq.) fell into the same error, and exclaims, ‘To this extravagance there are few parallels, except that of Polemkin, when he gave a magnificent feast to the Empress Catherine, at his palace in the Taurida, when the conservatory fountains were filled with champagne and claret, and served to the company by means of silver pumps applied to those reservoirs.’

The king was young when he came to the throne, extravagant, and fond of luxury. His Christmases seem to have been kept with especial splendour, and this to the very close of his unfortunate reign. In 1399 there was a royal Christmas at Westminster, when the consumption was prodigious. In the previous Christmas, at Lichfield, where the pope’s nuncio and other foreigners were present, they got rid of two hundred tuns of wine and two thousand oxen. But the king had a profligate set about him—De la Pole, De Vere, &c.; while he was grossly misled by the advice of Robert Tresylian, his Chief Justice of the King’s Bench; and no better epitome of the king’s ill star can be give[Pg 111]n than a stanza from the tragedy of The Fall of Robert Tresylian (1388):

Thus the king, outleaping the limits of his law,
Not reigning but raging, as youth did him entice,
Wise and worthy persons from court did daily draw,
Sage counsel set at nought, proud vaunters were in price,
And roisters bear the rule, which wasted all in vice:
Of riot and excess grew scarcity and lack,
Of lacking came taxing, and so went wealth to rack.

Henry IV. came to the throne in 1399. A pageant of the kind already mentioned was held. Froissart notices that there were seven fountains in Cheapside, and other streets he passed through, which perpetually ran with white and red wines. Profusion reigned supreme in high quarters; among the articles which furnished the breakfast table of the nobility were—for a gentleman and his lady, in Lent, a quart of beer and the same quantity of wine. And a gallon of beer and a quart of wine at their liveries, a repast taken in their bedrooms immediately before going to roost.

In looking through bills of entertainments at this period, one cannot help observing the contrast between the relative costs of the meats and drinks then and now. Then, the wine, ale, &c., were about one third of the entire cost, now the drink is oftener much the heavier item. This would be misleading, did we not take into consideration how much strong drink is made to yield to the revenue. The relative price of meats and drinks at that time wholly differ from the present relation. But wine was gradually becoming a dearer commodity. Malmsey in the reign of Henry IV. used to fetch the average price of 280 gallons for 5l. That sum would scarcely have bought half the amount in the reign of[Pg 112] Richard III.

The dissipated life led by the youth of the time appears in the reminiscences of the poet Occleve of his own conduct. If youth needs a warning against folly, he can do little better than study La male regie de T. Hoccleve, or Occleve’s Misrule. The tavern sign was to him an irresistible temptation. Westminster Gate was then noted for its taverns and cook-shops, at which the lavishness of Occleve made him a welcome guest. To this he alludes—

Wher was a greater maister eek than Y,
Or bet acqweynted at Westmynster Gate,
Among the taverners namely (especially)
And cookes? Whan I cam, eerly or late,
I pynchid nat at hem in mine acate (purchase of provisions),
But paied hem as they axe wolde;
Wherfore I was the welcomer algate (always),
And for a verray gentilman yholde (regarded).

And again—

The outward sign of Bacchus and his lure
That at his doore hangeth day by day,
Exciteth folks to taste of his moisture
So often that men cannot well say nay.

Of him that haunteth tavern of custume,
In shorte wordes the profit is this,
In double wise: His bag it shall consume,
And make his tonge speak of folk amis;
For in the cuppe seldom founden is
That any wight his neighbour commendeth.
Behold and see what avantage is his
That God, his friend, and eke himself offendeth[Pg 113]
    *    *    *    *
Now let this smart warninge to thee be,
And if thou mayst hereafter be relieved
Of body and pursé, so thou guidé thee
By wit that thou no moré thus be grieved.
What riot is, thou tasted hast and preeved.
The fire, men sayn, he dreadeth that is brent;
And if thou so do, thou art well y—meeved (moved),
Be now no longer fool, by mine assent.

Notwithstanding the arguments adduced by a modern historian to the contrary, the weight of evidence is overwhelming that the early life of Henry V. was a course of dissipation. His active spirit (in the language of Hume) broke out in extravagances of every kind; and the riot of pleasure, the frolic of debauchery, the outrage of the wine, filled the vacancies of a mind better adapted to the pursuits of ambition and the cares of government. Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Henry IV. the reflection upon his son—

Whilst I ...
See riot and dishonor stain the brow
Of my young Harry.

The abandoned Falstaff looked at the matter from another point of view, of course. He is represented as saying, ‘Hereof comes it, that Prince Harry is valiant; for the cold blood he did naturally inherit of his father, he hath, like lean, steril, and bare land, manured, husbanded, and tilled with excellent endeavor of drinking good, and good store of fertile sherris, that he is become very hot and valiant. If I had a thousand sons, the first human principle I would teach them should be, to forswear their potations, and addict themselves to sack.’ Yet even Falstaff could tell the truth sometimes, for in the early part of the same sentence, amidst a hurricane of rubbish, he tells that wine makes the blood ‘course from the inwards to the parts extreme.’ One fancies one is[Pg 114] reading Dr. B. W. Richardson as he tells, ‘wine propels the blood violently from the heart to the extremities.’ But Henry V. found place for repentance. His life as king was widely different from his life as prince. Among his troops at Agincourt drunkenness was counted a disgrace. So impressed was he with the bane of it, that he would gladly have cut down all the vines in France.

In the Liber Albus, compiled in this reign by John Carpenter, common clerk, and Richard Whittington, mayor, appears in full the oath of the ale-conners. These were officers appointed to look after the quality of ale, beer, and bread, to whom allusion is made in the Cobler of Canterburie:—

A nose he had that gan show
What liquor he loved I trow;
For he had before long seven yeare,
Beene of the towne the ale-conner.

The following is the oath—

So it is to be feared that there were some black sheep in the trade then, as now. Others certainly not so, for in this same fifteenth century we find that a licence was granted to John Calcot, landlord of the ‘Chequers,’ a tavern in Calcot’s Alley, Lambeth, to have an oratory in the house, and a chaplain for the use of his family and guests, so long as the house should continue orderly and respectable, and adapted to the celebration of Divine service.[78]

The jurisdiction of the ale-conners extended to offences of omission as well as commission. Thus we find them presenting one Thomas Cokesale, for refusing to sell ale to his neighbours while he had some on sale, and even while the sign (the ale-stake) was out. He was fined 4d.

On the other hand, in 1461, one Lentroppe was presented for having, contrary to the order, brewed three times under one display of the sign or ale-stake. For this he had to pay 6d. The man offended by brewing three times, and only making one signal of brewing. This, if he had not been detected, would have enabled him to sell two brewings without the liquor having been tasted by the proper officers, and the public might have had ale sold to them ‘not sufficiently mighty of the corn, or wholesome for man’s body.’[79] Another local law, mentioned in Scrope’s History of Castle Combe, was that no one was to brew in 1461 at the same time as the Churchwardens were brewing the church-ale for th[Pg 116]e profit of the church, under pain of 13s. 4d.; nor to brew or sell till all the ale brewed for the church was entirely sold. This was brewed for the benefit of the common fund for the relief of the poor in 1590. We pause here to consider the institution known as a

Church-ale,

of which Easter-ales and Whitsun-ales are simply species. And first, their origin. The idea is without any doubt taken from the Agapæ, or Love Feasts, so famous in the early Church. Many of the features of these feasts were revived in the wakes of the middle ages, of which such was the popularity that the officers of parishes conceived that some things novel in name and character, but preserving the elements which made the wakes so popular, would answer the purpose and promote the objects they had in view.

There is an old pre-Reformation indenture in Dodsworth’s MSS., which not only shows the design of the church-ale, but explains the particular use and application of the word ale. The parishioners of Elveston and Okebrook in Derbyshire agree jointly ‘to brew four ales, and every ale of one quarter of malt, betwixt this and the feast of St. John Baptist next coming. And that every inhabitant of the said town of Okebrook shall be at the several ales. And every husband and his wife shall pay two pence, every cottager one penny, and all the inhabitants of Elveston shall have and receive all the profits and advantages coming of the said ales, to the use and behoof of the said church of Elveston, and the inhabitants of Elveston shall brew eight ales betw[Pg 117]een this and the feast of St. John Baptist, at the which ales the inhabitants of Okebrook shall come and pay as before rehersed, and if he be away at one ale to pay at the other ale for both.’[80]

Before the Reformation there were no poor rates. In their place were the charitable dole given at the religious houses, voluntary assessments towards church repairs, and the church-ale. The latter fell in best with the humour of the people; for a time it was tolerated because probably innocent, and in it a ready method was discovered for maintaining the fabric of the church, and furnishing its necessary ornaments. Stubbs, in his Anatomie of Abuses (1585), thus describes them:—

That these ales were eminently productive, the churchwardens’ accounts of many parishes attest. Thus in Kingston-upon-Thames, the proceeds of the church-ale in 1526 are entered as 7l. 15s., not much short of 100l. as money goes now.

[Pg 118]

We find them satirised in Pierce Plowman thus:—

I am occupied everie daye, holye daye, and other,
With idle tales at the ale, and other while in churches.

In churches. Though they were not usually, if ever, held there, but in a place called the church-house. Thus Carew (Survey of Cornwall) says: ‘Whitsontide, upon which holidays the neighbours meet at the church-house, and there merily feed on their owne victuals, contributing some petty portion to the stock, which, by many smells, growth to a meetly greatness.’

In process of time of course they degenerated. The pulpits of the sixteenth century freely denounced them. A typical sermon on the abuses of the day is that of William Kethe, preached at Blandford in 1570, at which time ales must have been kept in his neighbourhood on Sunday, ‘which holy day the multitude call their revelyng day, which day is spent in bul-beatings, beare-beatings, bowlings, dicyng, cardyng, daunsynges, drunkenness, and whoredome.’ And when we remember that it is recorded of an old song, that

It hath been sung at festivals,
On ember eves and holy ales,

we shall the better appreciate the nature of the fall. ‘Desinit in piscem mulier formosa supernè.’

Efforts were made in this reign of Henry VI. for the better observance of Sunday; and, here and there, there are indications that efforts were made locally to bring about ‘Sunday closing.’ Mr. Bridgett has adduced a few examples. In 1428 the corporation of Hull made an order for the observance of the Sunday. No market was to be kept, under penalty of 6s. 8d. for sellers, and 3s. 4d. for buyers; no butchers were[Pg 119] to expose meat for sale, nor cooks to dress or sell except to strangers, and to them only before seven o’clock; no tradesmen to keep shops open; no vintners nor ale-house keepers to deliver or sell ale, under the same penalties. London made an attempt to suppress Sunday trading, but it was ineffectual. In the year 1444 ‘an Act was made, by authority of the Common Council of London, that upon the Sunday should no manner of thing, within the franchise of the city, be bought or sold, neither victual nor other things; nor none artificer should bring his ware to any man to be worn or occupied that day, as tailor’s garments or cordwainer’s shoes; and so likewise of all other occupations; the which ordinance held but a while.’

There was very little legislation upon these matters in Henry VI.’s reign. The planting of hops was prohibited. They were used by the brewers in the Netherlands early in the fourteenth century; and the use of them in beer was brought into England from Artois. But there will be more occasion to speak of them later on, when we shall find that privileges were granted to hop-grounds. In this reign the Brewery Company was incorporated, and we can readily believe that its brew was duly appreciated by John Lydgate, the monk of Bury.

Beer had risen immensely in price from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century. When the Archbishop of Canterbury visited his land at Tarring, in Sussex, in 1277, four gallons of the best beer were to be charged only 1d.; whereas a tariff of 1464 shows an extraordinary advance.[Pg 120]

A century later it had again risen fifty per cent.

In the archives of Ely Cathedral we have the following account of the produce of a vineyard:—

In an ordinance for the household of George, Duke of Clarence (Dec. 9, 1469), the sum of 20l. is allowed for the purveying of ‘Malvesie, Romenay, Osey, Bastard, Muscadelle, and other sweete wynes.’ This Romenay or Rumney has nothing to do with Rome or the Romagna, but was probably made from Greek vines, as Henderson suggests, derived from Rum-ili, a name given by the Saracens to Greece. The Osey above mentioned, or Auxois, was in old time a name for Alsace. It was richly and highly flavoured.

The mention of the Duke of Clarence brings up the spectre of his untimely end. A shroud of mystery veils its entire circumstances. He was charged with high treason and condemned to death. Ten days afterwards it was announced that he had died in the Tower. Was he first murdered and then drowned, as Shakespeare thought,[82] or is the old story to be believed, that he was drowned in a butt of malmsey? Since the death of his dearly loved wife, Isabel of Warwick, he had abandoned himself to intemperance, to drown his grief. With [Pg 121]such a habit contracted, with vexed conscience, in the despair of condemnation, and with a butt of his favourite drink by his side, what more natural than to suppose him to have been a miserable suicide? However, the weight of testimony leans to the other theory—that he was stabbed by Richard’s order, and the body thrown into the malmsey to make believe that he had unwittingly drowned himself under the influence of drink.

Mr. Martin Leake gives the origin of the term Malmsey: Monemvasia, now an island connected with the coast of Laconia by a bridge. This name, derived from its position (μόνε ἐμβασία, single entrance), was corrupted by the Italians to Malvasia; this place, celebrated for its fine wines, had its name changed to Malvoisie in French, and Malmsey in English, and came to be applied to many of the rich wines of Greece, the Archipelago, &c.[83]

The consumption of strong drink at public entertainments was something prodigious in the fifteenth century. At the banquet upon the occasion of the installation of George Neville, Archbishop of York, in 1464, no less than 300 tuns of ale and 100 tuns of wine were consumed. In the household of Archbishop Booth, his predecessor, it is stated that about 80 tuns of claret were consumed annually.

The usages of assay were at this time remarkable. Every cup of drink served to the great man of the house was assayed twice, once in the buttery and again in the hall. In the buttery the butler was required to drink, under the marshal’s eye, some of every vessel of liquor sent to the high table; and at the same time the marshal covered with its lid every cup, before committing it to the [Pg 122]lord’s cupbearer. It was treason for a cupbearer to raise the lid of a vessel thus confided to him, on his way from the buttery to the table; but he sipped it before his lord took a draught. On serving his master the cupbearer knelt, removed the lid, and poured some of the drink into the inverted cover. When he had drunk this, the servant handed the cup to his master, who, when he saw the liquor assayed before his eyes, accepted it as a liquor of credence which he might drink trustfully.[84]

But here we must stay for a while and inquire what action the Church had been taking for the past century to check intemperance. In the year 1359, Archbishop Islep, in his Constitution, informs Michael de Northburg, Bishop of London, that though it is provided by sanctions of law and canon that all Lord’s days be venerably observed from eve to eve, so that neither markets, negotiations, nor courts be kept, nor any country work done, that so every faithful man may go to his parish church to worship and pray, yet ‘we are, to our great heart’s grief, informed that a detestable, nay damnable, perverseness has prevailed, insomuch that in many places, markets, unlawful meetings of men who neglect their churches, various tumults and other occasions of evil are committed, revels and drunkenness, and many other dishonest doings are practised, ... wherefore we strictly command you that ye without delay canonically admonish, and effectually persuade in virtue of obedience, those of your subjects whom ye find culpable, that they do wholly abstain from markets, courts, and the other unlawful practices for the future,’ &c.

In a constitution held three years later, the same[Pg 123] Archbishop Islep lays intemperance to the charge of some of the priests, and imposes strenuous penalties in default of amendment.[85] In 1363 Archbishop Thoresby complains that it had become common for persons to meet in churches on the vigils of saints, and offend against God by their practices; that in the exequies of the dead, some turned the house of mourning and prayer into the house of laughter and excess to the great peril of their own souls. These were strictly forbidden to continue such practices.

In the year 1468 the Prior of Canterbury and the commissaries made a visitation (the see being then vacant); and it was ordered that potations made in the churches, commonly called give-ales or bride-ales, should be discontinued, under penalty of excommunication.[86]

Bride-ale

was so called from the bride’s selling ale on the wedding day, and friends contributing what they liked in payment of it. Brand imagines that the expense was defrayed by the friends of the married pair when circumstances were such as to need help. It was also called bride-stake, bride-wain, and bride-bush; the bush sufficiently signifying the nature of the gathering, inasmuch as it was the ancient badge of a country ale-house. Before the festivities proper began on the return from the bridal ceremony, it appears that a curious drinking custom prevailed in the church. Wine, with sops immersed, was there drunk, and bowls were kept in the church for [Pg 124]this purpose. Thus, in an inventory of goods belonging to Wilsdon church in the sixteenth century, occurs the item, ‘two masers (mazers) that were appointed to remayne in the church for to drink in at bride-ales.’ Shakespeare alludes to this custom in his Taming of the Shrew, where Petruchio

Calls for wine:—‘A health,’ quoth he ...
... Quaff’d off the muscadel,
And threw the sops all in the sexton’s face.

The practice continued in force for a long time, for we find allusion to the same custom in the year 1720 in the Compleat Vintner:—

What priest can join two lovers’ hands,
But wine must seal the marriage-bands?
As if celestial wine was thought
Essential to the sacred knot,
And that each bridegroom and his bride
Believ’d they were not firmly ty’d
Till Bacchus with his bleeding tvn,
Had finished what the priest begun.

The wine thus drunk is called by Ben Jonson a ‘knitting cup.’ After the ceremony they retired to a tavern or went home, and then the orgies begun. In the words of an old writer, ‘When they come home from the church, then beginneth excess of eatyng and drynking, and as much is waisted in one daye as were sufficient for the two newe-maried folkes halfe a year to lyve on.’

But these customs are not peculiar to England only. The Scotch have their ‘penny bride-ale’ to help those who cannot pay the expense of the wedding feast. In Germany, when a window was put in or altered, was the fenster-bier (window-beer). At the churchings of women was the kark-bier (church-beer). At funerals w[Pg 125]as the grab-bier (grave-beer), beer forming an essential part of all such observances.

Edward IV. died in 1488, the victim of mortified ambition. His habits of life were licentious and intemperate. He died under a violent fever aggravated by excess. We can only hope that he died, as it is reported, a penitent. An account is given in the Paston Letters (cccxliv.) of an intended progress of the king, probably to facilitate his benevolences. In this, Sir John Paston is urged to warn William Gogney and his fellows ‘to purvey them of wine enough, for every man beareth me in hand that the town shall be drank dry, as York was when the king was there.’

In this reign the Earls of Warenne and Surrey possessed the privilege of licensing ale-houses. Mention has already been made of the ‘Crown,’ in Cheapside. In 1467 this house was kept by one Walter Walters, who in harmless pleasantry gave it out that he would make his son ‘heir to the “Crown.”’ This so displeased his Majesty Edward IV. that he ordered the man to be put to death for high treason.

One piece of legislation remains to be told before closing the period. In the first year of Richard III. (c. 13), it was enacted that malmsey should in future be imported only in butts of 126 gallons. This measure was for the prevention of frauds on the revenue. It was repealed by an Act of George IV.

CHAPTER IX.

TUDOR PERIOD.

The legislative enactments of the reign of Henry VII. demand minute attention. With a certain modification, it is true that the direct legislative sanction of the liquor traffic dates from this reign. The revival of the trade of England was a great object with this monarch. The greater part of the foreign trade of England had hitherto been carried on by foreigners in foreign vessels of burden. Henry was sensible that this prevented the increase of English ships and sailors; so, to remedy this in part, he got a law passed in his first Parliament, that no Gascony or Guienne wines should be imported into any part of his dominions, except in English, Irish, or Welsh ships, navigated by English, Irish, or Welsh sailors, which obliged them to build ships and go to sea, or to lack their favourite liquor. This law was enforced and enlarged by an Act made in his third Parliament (1487), when it was enacted that no wines of Gascony or Guienne, or woads of Tholouse, should be imported into England, except in ships belonging to the king or some of his subjects; and that all such wines and woads imported in foreign bottoms should be forfeited.

By 7 Henry VII., c. 7, it was enacted (in order to counteract the duty of four ducats a tun lately imposed by the Venetians) that ‘every merchant stranger (except Englishmen born) bringing malmseys into this realm, should pay 18s. custom for each butt, over and above the custom aforetime used to be paid.’ The price of the butt was fixed at 4l.

[Pg 127]

Of far more importance was the Act of 1496, passed ‘against vacabonds and beggars.’ This empowers two justices of the peace ‘to rejecte and put away comen ale-selling in townes and places where they shall think convenyent, and to take suertie of the keepers of ale-houses of their gode behavyng, by the discrecion of the seid justices, and in the same to be avysed and aggreed at the time of their sessions.’

Leland gives in his Collectanea a wine list which indicates the comparative prices of wines at this time:—

We get a good notion of the daily routine of court living in this reign from the ordinances of the royal household. There is nothing whatever in them indicative of excess, but they are interesting as matters of history, and records of etiquette. ‘When the king cometh from evensong into his great chamber on the even of the day of estate, the chamberlain must warn the usher before evensong that the king will take spice and wine in his great chamber.... Then shall the gentleman usher bring thither the esquire, and especially the king’s server (officer who set, removed, tasted, &c.) to bring the king’s spice plate.... And when the usher cometh to the cellar door, charge a squire for the body with the king’s own cup.’ This is simply a specimen of pages of like directions.

[Pg 128]

Entries in the Household Book of Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, furnish details of a nobleman’s style of living at the beginning of the sixteenth century. On the Feast of the Nativity 290 persons dined and supped at Thornbury Castle, on which occasion were consumed eleven pottles and three quarts of Gascony wine, and 171 flagons of ale. This was not excessive for the times, the vices of which are admirably pictured in William Dunbar’s remarkable poem, The Dance. He describes a procession of the seven deadly sins in the lower regions. Gluttony brings up the rear:—

Then the foul monster Gluttony,
Of wame [belly] insatiable and gredy,
To dance he did him dress:
Him followed mony foul dronkart,
With can and collop, cup and quart,
In surfett and excess.
Fully many a wasteful wally-drag [outcast],
With wames [bellies] unwieldable did forth wag,
In creische [fat] that did incress:
Drink, aye, they cried, with mony a gape,
The fiends gave them hait leid to lap [hot lead to lap]
Their levery [reward] was no less.

The Household Book of the Earl of Northumberland is another capital illustration of the table life of the higher nobles. In reading the estimates, it must be taken into account that the household consisted of 166 persons. The allowance of grain per month gave 250 quarters of malt at 4s., two hogsheads to the quarter. This allowance may be thought to speak more for the temperance of the retainers than for the liberality of the lord. The wine was dispensed more liberally. An annual consumption showed ten tuns and two hogsheads of Gascony. A breakfast bill of fare appears thus: ‘Breakfastis for my lorde and my ladye. Furst a loof[Pg 129] of brede in trenchers, two manchets, one quart of bere, a quart of wine, half a chyne of muton, ells a chyne of beif boyled.’

A searching visiting of monasteries, indeed of all ecclesiastics within the dominion, was entrusted by Henry VII. to his vicar-general and vice-gerent, Thomas Cromwell. The scrutiny was intended mainly for the monasteries. The eighty-six articles of instruction compass a large field of minute inquiry. The commissioners were doubtless much indebted to monastic factions and animosities for some of the information which they gained. The scrutiny revealed terrible irregularities in some cases, prominent among which were the vices of gluttony and drunkenness. The result of this official investigation was the dissolution of the smaller monasteries. And thus good was effected; for, however much we discount the charges alleged, for the reasons above suggested, the lives of the inmates had become a far and wide scandal. Innocent VIII. sent a bull to Archbishop Morton in 1490, in which he informs him that he had heard with great grief from persons worthy of credit, that the monks of all the different orders in England had grievously degenerated, that giving themselves up to a reprobate sense they led dissolute lives. But the archbishop was fully aware of the evil, for in 1487 he had convened a synod of the prelates and clergy of his province, for the reformation of the manners of the clergy. In this convocation many of the London clergy were accused of spending their whole time in taverns. But there is no disguising the fact that profuseness of living was countenanced in the highest places of the Church; which, if it does not excuse, at any rate explains the excesses of the ‘i[Pg 130]nferior clergy.’ As late as 1504, when William Warham was enthroned as Archbishop of Canterbury, a feast was given for which was procured—fifty-four quarters of wheat, six pipes of red wine, four of claret, one of choice white, one of white for the kitchen, one butt of Malmsey, one pipe of wine of Osey, two tierces of Rhenish wine, four tuns of London ale, six of Kentish ale, and twenty of English beer.

It is curious how many of our tavern signs originated from incidents in the history of our sovereigns. The ‘Red Dragon’ was in compliment to Henry VII., who adopted this device for his standard at Bosworth Field. It was in old times the ensign of the famous Cadwaller, the last of the British kings, from whom the Tudors descended. The field of Bosworth furnished matter for another sign. The hawthorn-bush crowned was adopted by Henry VII. in allusion to the crown of his predecessor which was found hidden in a hawthorn-bush after the battle. But the seventh Henry escaped the honour (?) conferred upon his successor and perpetuated, of being immortalised by his portrait as Bluff Harry on scores of tavern signboards. It is stated in the History of Signboards that at Hever, in Kent, one of these rude portraits of Henry VIII. may be seen. Near this village the Bolleyn, or Bullen, family held possessions, and old people in the district still show where Henry used to meet Anne Bolleyn. Anyhow, years after the sad death of Anne, the village ale-house had for its sign, ‘Bullen Butchered.’ When the place changed hands, the name of the house was altered to the ‘Bull and Butcher,’ which sign existed till recently, but was altered at the request of the clergyman of the parish, who suggested the ‘King’s Head,’ and the village painter was com[Pg 131]missioned to make the alteration. The bluff features of the monarch were drawn; and in his hands was placed an axe, and so the sign remains at present.

In the collection of ordinances for the Royal Household we have an account of the ceremony of wasselling, as was practised at Court on Twelfth Night in the reign of Henry VII. The ancient custom of pledging each other out of the same cup had given place to the use of different cups. Moreover, ‘when the steward came in at the doore with the wassel, he was to crye three tymes, “Wassel, wassel, wassel,” and then the chappell (chaplain) was to answere with a songe.’ The custom of ‘toasting’ was in full force. Shakespeare’s King Henry VIII. contains several such allusions. Thus in act i., scene 4, the king exclaims—

Let’s be merry.
Good my lord cardinal, I have a half a dozen healths
To drink to these fair ladies.

Malmsey (pronounced by Shakespeare to be ‘fulsom’) competed with sack to be the favourite drink of the period; it was the only sweet wine specified in the ordinances of the household of Henry VIII. Malmsey was a strangely generic term for sweet wines from almost every vine-growing district. Candia, Chios, Lesbos, Tenedos, Tyre, Italy, Greece, Spain, all yielding the Malmsey, which we found to have proved so fatal to

Maudlin Clarence in his Malmsey butt.

Some believe it to have been first made at Napoli de Malvasia, in the Morea. Certainly the principal part of that which was so extensively imported in the middle ages came from the Archipelago. When subject to Venetian rule Candia and Cyprus supplied[Pg 132] Europe with their finest wines, the former island alone being said to have exported 200,000 casks of Malmsey annually.

Sack is another generic term for sweet wine,[87] and is not of necessity, as Nares describes it, ‘the same wine which is now named sherry;’ a statement which the rest of his own remarks contradict. Thus we find not only sherry-sack, but canary-sack, Malaga-sack, rumney-sack, palm-sack, &c.[88] The derivation of the word is much disputed; the town Xique, and the Spanish saco, a bag, have been suggested; but sack, also written seck, is undoubtedly the French sec, the Latin siccus, dry. It continued a popular wine for another two centuries, as we find from Tom D’Urfey’s ballad on the ‘Virtues of sack’ (1719). Redding states that the term ‘sack’ was applied to sweet and dry wines of canary, Xeres, or Malaga. Vines are said to have been first planted in the Canary Islands in the reign of Charles V., imported thither from the Rhine. Canary was much drunk formerly; the bibbers of it were dubbed ‘canary-birds,’ and the wine ‘canary-sacke.’[89] An old writer growls, ‘sacke is their chosen nectar; they love it better than their own souls; they will never leave off sacke, until they have sackt out all their silver; nay, nor then neither, for they will pawn their crouds for more sacke.’

The following receipt for beer, taken from Arnold’s [Pg 133]Chronicle, published in 1521, reminds that by this time hops were in use, ‘ten quarters of malt, 2 of wheat, 2 of oats, with 11lbs. of hops for making 11 barrels of single beer.’ This is the first I can find with hops as an ingredient. The old distich, of which there are two versions,

Hops, reformation, bays, and beer,
Came into England all in one year,

and

Hops and turkeys, carp and beer,
Came into England all in a year,[90]

would fix the introduction of hops to the time of Henry VIII. But there is a difficulty here, inasmuch as the use of this plant in brewing was known long before, and Henry VIII., who interfered in everything from religion to beer-barrels, forbade his subjects to put hops in their ale.

Spirits were beginning to acquire a reputation in England. Numbers of Irish settled in Pembrokeshire in this reign, and employed themselves in the distillation of their national beverage, usquebaugh, which had a large sale in this country.

But, to pass from the drinks to the drinkers, the habits of Henry VIII. are well known. He was constantly intoxicated, and kept the lowest company. His right hand, Wolsey, was actually put in the stocks by Sir Amias Powlett, when he was Rector of Lymington, for drunkenness at a neighbouring fair. Why should not such punishments be revived as either the stocks or the ‘drunkard’s cloak’? In this latter, drunkards were paraded through the town, wearing a tub instead of a cloak, a hole being made for the head to pass thro[Pg 134]ugh, and two small ones in the sides, through which the hands were drawn.

Experience is a good master. No one could look after the monks better than Wolsey. It appears that a system of misericords had found place in monasteries. These misericords were exoneration from duties granted by the Abbots to the monks. This privilege in course of time they abused. The Augustinian canons absented themselves from the choir and cloister, sometimes for whole weeks; whereupon Wolsey ordered that these canons should recreate themselves not singly, but in a number together, supervised by the superior, and accompanied; that they should repair not to the towns, villages, and taverns, but to sunny places near their houses; that they should not go to houses of laymen to eat and drink without leave, but carry their provisions with them.

One of the most magnificent pageants on record welcomed Anne Boleyn to the city of London in 1533. At Gracechurch Corner was erected ‘the Mount Parnassus, with the fountain of Helicon.’ It was formed of white marble. Four streams rose an ell high and met in a cup above the fountain which ran copiously till night with Rhenish wine. At the great Conduit in Cheap, a fountain ran continuously, at one end white wine, at the other claret, all the afternoon. Anne had been maid of honour at court. The household books of the kings describe the allowance and rules of the table of the ladies of the household. A marvellous picture of the times! A chine of beef, a manchet, and a chet loaf was a breakfast for the three. To these was added a gallon of ale.

[Pg 135]

Gascon wine was now in favour for court consumption. The Losely MSS. supply the items of Sir Thomas Carden’s purchases for Anne of Cleves’ cellar.[91] Among these were 3 hogsheads of Gascoigne wine at 3l. each; 10 gallons of Malmsey at 20d. a gallon; 11 gallons of Muscadel at 2s. 2d. a gallon; and 10 gallons of sack at 16d. a gallon. A pipe of Gascon wine was also the bribe which Lady Lisle sent to the Countess of Rutland, to secure her good offices in obtaining the post of maid of honour for her daughter, Miss Basset.

We are able to form a rough estimate of the quantity of liquor kept in stock at this time, from a return which was made by order, on the occasion of the visit of the Emperor Charles V. to the king. The city authorities appear to have been afraid of being drunk dry by the swarming Flemings in the emperor’s train. To avoid such a calamity, a return was made of all the wine to be found at the eleven wine merchants and the twenty-eight principal taverns then in London; the sum total of which was 809 pipes.[92]

The corruptions of court life were fearlessly exposed by a contemporary, John Skelton, in his Bowge of Court. Bowge (bouche, mouth) denoted the courtier’s right of eating at the king’s expense. The Bowge of Court was an allegorical ship with court vices on board. Ecclesiastics in high places were mercilessly satirised in his Colin Clout, e.g. (a) their hurry from the house of God to get drink—

But when they have once caught
[Pg 136]Dominus vobiscum by the head,
Then run they in every stead (place),
God wot, with drunken nolls (heads),
Yet take they cure of souls.

(b) Their unconcern at the tragedy of the Saviour’s passion—

Christ by cruelty
Was nailed upon a tree;
He paid a bitter pension
For manne’s redemption,
He drank eysell and gall
To redeem us withal.
But sweet hippocras ye drink,
With ‘Let the cat wink!’

(c) Their logomachies under the excitement of drink—

They make interpretation
Of an awkward fashion,
And of the prescience
Of Divine essence,
And what hypostasis
Of Christe’s manhood is.
Such logic men will chop,
And in their fury hop
When the good ale-sop
Doth dance in their foretop.

If Sir T. Elyot (1534) was correct in speaking of temperance as a new word, the virtue was old enough, even though the practice was rare. In the most corrupt times virtue has ever had its witnesses, even as the epoch of the dissolute Henry had its Sir David Lindsay, and its Earl of Surrey. The latter, amongst the means to attain a happy life, could name

The mean diet, no delicate fare;
True wisdom joined with simpleness;
[Pg 137]The night discharged of all care;
Where wine the wit may not oppress.

The legislation of this reign did little more than affect details. The repeal of a certain law is worthy of note. From a remarkable clause in a statute of Henry III. it might be supposed that England was much fallen from the flourishing condition of preceding times. It had been enacted in the time of Edward II. that no magistrate, in town or borough, who by his office ought to keep assize, should during the continuance of his magistracy sell, either in wholesale or retail, any wine or victuals. This law seemed equitable in order to prevent fraud in fixing the assize. It was in this reign repealed. The following piece of legislation affected the price of wines: By 23 Henry VIII., c. 7, the wines of Gascony and Guienne were forbidden to be sold above eightpence the gallon, and the retail price of ‘Malmeseis, romeneis, sakkes, and other swete wynes,’ was fixed at 12d. the gallon, 6d. the pottle, 3d. the quart, and directions were given to the authorities ‘to set the prices of all kynde of wines in grosse.’ The merchants, however, evaded or neglected the law and raised the price; this aroused the vintners, who presented a remonstrance, in answer to which it was enacted that the commissioners appointed previously should have the discretionary power of increasing or diminishing the prices of wines sold in gross or by retail, as occasion should require.

By an Act of 1531, every brewer was forbidden to take more than such prices and rates as should be thought sufficient, at the discretion of Justices of Peace within every shire, or by the mayor and sheriffs in a city.

An effort, only partly successful, was made at this time to reduce holidays, which had degenerated into occasions of excess. Complaint was made that the number of such days was excessively increased, to the[Pg 138] detriment of civil government and secular affairs; and that the great irregularities and licentiousness which had crept into these festivals by degrees, especially in the churches, chapels, and churchyards, were found injurious to piety, virtue, and good manners, therefore both statutes and canons were made to regulate and restrain them, and by an act of convocation, passed in 1536, their number was reduced.[93]

Perhaps nothing strikes one so much in connection with intemperance in pre-reformation time as the abuses that gathered about religious ceremonies. Everything of the kind was made a public occasion of excess. At weddings especially was this notorious. Writing upon the subject, a 16th century author observes, ‘Early in the morning the wedding people begynne to excead in superfluous eatyng and drinkyng, and when they come to the preachynge they are halfe droncke, some all together.’[94]

It is not to be wondered at. The court was rotten, and its influence filtered then, as always, to the masses. Even the pledge of temperance introduced on the continent about this time was no safeguard. It is told how Henry himself contrived to make an envoy of the German court, who was an associate of a temperate order, break his pledge, assuring him that if his master would only visit England he would not lack boon companions.

Foreigners visited England. They came, they saw, they reported. A certain Master Stephen Perlin, a French physician who was in England just after Henry’s death, records for the benefit of his countrymen: ‘The English, one with the other are joyous, and are very fond of music; they are also great drinkers. Now remember if you please that in this country they generally use vessels of silver when they drink wine; and they will [Pg 139]say to you usually at table, “Goude chere,” and they will also say to you more than one hundred times, “Drind oui,” and you will reply to them in their language, “I plaigui” (I pledge you).’

One of our own writers, Philip Stubbes, who was ridiculed by Nash for ‘pretending to anatomize abuses and stubbe up sin by the rootes,’ asserts that the public-houses were crowded in London from morning to night with inveterate drunkards, whose only care appears to have been as to where they could obtain the best ale, so totally oblivious to all other things had they become.[95]

And what a flood of light is thrown not only on the universal drinking, but upon the respectability of the same, in the fact that a bishop, Bishop Still, a Bishop of Bath and Wells, and previously Master of St. John’s College, Cambridge, and Master also of Trinity, whose portrait still hangs in the College hall of the latter, should be the author of the following drinking song, which Warton calls the first Chanson à Boire of any merit in our language, and apologises for introducing a ballad convivial and ungodlie.

I cannot eate but lytle meate,
My stomacke is not good,
But sure I thinke that I can drinke
With him that wears a hood.
Though I go bare, take ye no care,
I nothing am a colde,
I stuff my skyn so full within,
Of joly good ale and olde.

Chorus. Backe and syde go bare, go bare,
Booth foote and hand go colde,
But belly, God send thee good ale ynoughe,
Whether it be new or olde.
[Pg 140]
I have no rost, but a nut brawne toste,
And a crab laid in the fyre;
A little breade shall do me steade,
Much breade I not desyre.
No frost nor snow, nor winde, I trowe,
Can hurt mee, if I wolde,
I am so wrapt and throwly lapt
Of joly good ale and olde.
Chorus. Backe and syde go bare, go bare, etc.

And Tyb my wife, that, as her lyfe,
Loveth well good ale to seeke,
Full oft drynkes shee, tyll ye may see
The teares run downe her cheeke.
Then doth she trowle to me the bowle,
Even as a mault-worme sholde,
And sayth, sweete harte, I took my parte
Of this joly good ale and olde.
Chorus. Backe and syde go bare, go bare, etc.

Now let them drynke, tyll they nod and winke,
Even as goode fellowes sholde doe,
They shall not mysse to have the blisse
Good ale doth bring men to;
And all poore soules that have scowred bowles,
Or have them lustily trolde,
God save the lives of them and their wives,
Whether they be yonge or olde.
Chorus. Backe and syde go bare, go bare, etc.[96]

Is there any wonder that his ‘stomacke was not good’? Imagine some of his successors in that See having composed it! Fancy the author of ‘Glory to Thee, my God, this night’ (Bishop Ken), having written it! Mark, too, the insinuation of the fourth line as to the clergy of the period! The authorship is vouched for by Thomas Park. The song begins the second act of ‘Gammer Gurton’s Needle,’ a comedy written in 1551, [Pg 141]and acted at Christ’s College, Cambridge. Warton mentions that in the title of the old edition it is said to have been written ‘by Mr. S., Master of Artes.’ Which, being interpreted is, Still; afterwards Bishop of Bath and Wells.

It was about this time that that pernicious habit arose of transacting business over drink. We find constant allusions in the Tudor period to the principal men of the boroughs in this manner concluding a bargain. Thus we find an entry of Mr. William Tudbold, Mayor of Lyme, 1551, to this effect:—’Item, paid at Robert Davey‘s when we new agreed with Whytte the mason, vi d.’

These taverns were some of them kept by the clergy. Bishop Burnet states that so pillaged were the ecclesiastics of their property, that many clergymen were obliged for a subsistence to turn carpenters or tailors, and some kept ale-houses.

Hitherto there had been no civil legislation whatever against drunkenness. The crime is not mentioned in the Statute Book till the fifth year of Edward VI. From this time we shall find a number of statutes framed for the purpose of its prevention or punishment.

The Act, 5th and 6th Edward, c. 25, is entitled, ‘An Acte for Keepers of Ale-houses to be bounde by Recognizances.’ The following is a brief epitome of the Act:—Forasmuch as intolerable hurts and troubles to the commonwealth do daily grow and increase through such abuses and disorders as are had and used in common ale-houses and other houses called tippling-houses, it is enacted that Justices of Peace can abolish ale-houses at their discretion, and that no tippling-house can be opened without a licence. That these houses be supervised by the taking surety for the maintenance of good[Pg 142] order and rule, and for the suppression of gaming. Moreover, special scrutiny was made into the forfeiting of such recognisances. Breaches of the Act were punished with imprisonment and fine.

Two years later, an Act was passed to avoid the great price and excess of wine. ‘For the avoiding of many inconveniences much evil rule and common resort of mis-ruled persons used and frequented in many taverns, of late newly set up in very great numbers in back lanes, corners, and suspicious places within the city of London, and in divers other towns and villages within this realm,’ it was enacted, subject to certain exceptions of rank and income, that none should be allowed to keep any vessel of Gascony, Guienne, or Rochelle wine for the use of his family exceeding 10 gallons under forfeiture of 10l.; none could be retailed without a licence, and only two taverns could be licensed in a borough, with the following exceptions, forty in London, three in Westminster, six in Bristol, four in Canterbury, Cambridge, Chester, Exeter, Gloucester, Hull, Newcastle, and Norwich; three in Colchester, Hereford, Ipswich, Lincoln, Oxford, Salisbury, Shrewsbury, Southampton, Winchester, and Worcester. The retail price was fixed, and none could retail wines to be drunk within their respective houses.

Vastly important was this legislation; its consequences were manifest, and would have been much more so, had not so much of it been permitted to become a dead letter. At any rate it paved the way for the very important Act of Philip and Mary in the Irish Parliament which renders obligatory a licence for the manufacture of Aqua Vitæ, and which brought about so great a reduction in the use of ardent spirits in that country.

[Pg 143]

The consort of Queen Mary soon found out the favourite English drink. Philip courted popularity. He gave it out that he was come to England to live like an Englishman, and in proof thereof drank some ale for the first time at a public dinner, gravely commending it as the wine of the country. Queen Mary at the time of her coronation was single, so Philip missed the usual pageant, the running of the conduits at Cornhill and Cheapside with wine, and the oration at St. Paul’s School, of Heywood, the Queen’s favourite poet, who ‘sat under a vine.’ It is to be hoped that Heywood made himself more intelligible than in some of his enigmatical epigrams, of which that on ‘Measure’ is a specimen.

Measure is a merry meane,
Which filde with noppy drinke,
When merry drinkers, drinke off clene.
Then merrily they winke.

Measure is a merry meane,
But I meane measures gret,
Where lippes to litely pitchers weane,
Those lippes they scantly wet.

The pastoral visit of Bishop Ridley to Queen Mary reminds us of a curious feature of old English hospitality, that of drinking before leaving. Persons of quality were either taken into the cellar for a draught of ale or wine fresh from the cask, as was the Duke of Buckingham into Wolsey’s cellar, or it was brought to them last thing as they mounted their horses, and was called from this the stirrup-cup.

Boy, lead our horses on when we get up,
Wee’l have with you a merry stirrup cupp.[Pg 144]

Ridley was introduced to the cellar by Sir Thomas Wharton, the steward of the household. When he had drunk, he said he had done wrong to drink under a roof where God’s Word was rejected.

The opinions that have been ventured upon the relative sobriety of the Elizabethan period are as conflicting as they are various. The most reliable contemporary who can be cited in favour of the sobriety of the period is William Harrison, whose opinion may be gathered from two passages of his work. He says, ‘I might here talke somewhat of the great silence that is used at the tables of the honourable and wiser sort generallie over all the realme, likewise the moderate eating and drinking that is daily seene, and finallie of the regard that such one hath to keepe himselfe from note of surfetting and drunkennesse (for which cause salt meat, except beefe, bacon, and porke, are not anie whit esteemed, and yet these three may be much powdered). But as in the rehearsall thereof I should commend the nobleman, merchant, and frugall artificer, so I could not cleare the meaner sort of husbandmen of verie much bobbling (except it be here and there some od yeoman), with whom he is thought to be the meriest that talketh of most ribaldraie, or the wisest man that speakest fastest among them, and now and then surfeiting and drunkennesse, which they rather fall into for want of heed-taking, than wilfullie following or delighting in those errours of set mind and purpose. It may be that divers of them living at home with hard and pinching diet, small drinks, and some of them having scarce enough of that, are soonest overtaken when they come unto such banquets, howbeit they take it generallie as no small disgrace if they happen to be cup-shotten, so that is a grefe unto them, though now sans remédie sith the thing is done and pas[Pg 145]t.’ The passage that follows certainly suggests that in some respects our ancestors were wiser than their descendants:—

But there is a vast mass of evidence on the other side that must be examined before the conflicting judgments can be put into the scale. And first, the preambles to the Acts of Parliament testify that the national taste was intensifying. Thus the preamble to Act 1 Eliz. c. ii. states that of late years much greater quantity of sweet wines had been imported into the kingdom than had been usual in former times. Again, in 1597, an Act was passed to restrain the excessive use of malt. The preamble asserts that greater quantity of malt is daily made than either in times past or now is needful. It must be remembered, however, that during the time of Elizabeth the export of beer had become a valuable branch of commerce. The queen herself, in her right of purveyance, a prerogative then inherent in the crown, caused quantities of beer so obtained to be sold on the Continent for her own emolument. Further than this, honest efforts were made in some directions to keep down the home consumption. For instance, it is stated the Lord Keeper Egerton, in his charge to the[Pg 146] judges when going on circuit in 1602, bade them ascertain, for the queen’s information, how many ale-houses the justices of the peace had pulled down, so that the good justices might be rewarded and the evil removed.

One more Act of this reign must be noticed, the exact or full purport of which might be mistaken. It was nominally against the danger of fire, but in reality it was intended to prevent tipplers from having the means of conducting furtive brewings. The Act bears the date of 1590. By 22 Eliz. it was enacted ‘that no innkeeper, common brewer, or typler shall keep in their houses any fewel, as straw or verne, which shall not be thought requisite, and being warned of the constable to rid the same within one day, subpœna, xxs.’

In the next place we must take into account the extraordinary variety of wines now drunk. Holinshed observes, ‘As all estates doo exceed herin, I meane for number of costlie dishes, so these forget not to use the like excesse in wine, insomuch as there is no kind to be had, whereof at great meetings there is not some store to be had’ (Holinshed, Chronicles). The writer further speaks of the importation of 20,000 or 30,000 tuns a year, notwithstanding the constant restraints put upon it. After detailing about fifty-six sorts of ‘small wines,’ such as claret, &c., he speaks of ‘the thirtie kinds of Italian, Grecian, Spanish, Canarian, &c., whereof vernage (a sweet Italian wine, so called from the thick-skinned grape or vernaccia used in its manufacture), cate, piment (vin cuit), raspis, muscadell, romnie, bastard, tire (Italian, from the grape tirio), oseie, caprike, clarcie, and malmeseie, are not least of all accompted of because of their strength and valure.’

[Pg 147]

The monasteries were noted for having the best wine and ale, the latter of which they specially brewed for themselves. The author just quoted mentions that the best wine was called theologicum, because it was had ‘from the cleargie and religious men, unto whose houses manie of the laitie would often send for bottels filled with the same, being sure that they would neither drinke nor be served of the worst, or such as was anie waies mingled or brued by the vintner. Naie, the merchant would have thought that his soule should have gone streight waie to the devill, if he should have served them with other than the best.’

Besides all these kinds of wines, of which the strongest were most in request, distilled liquors were manufactured in England, the principal of which were rosa solis and aqua vitæ. Ale and beer were also in request. There was single beer, or small ale, and double beer, also double-double beer, dagger ale, and bracket. But the favourite drink was a kind of ale called huf-cap, which was highly intoxicating; thus in Harrison’s England we read, ‘These men hale at huf-cap till they be red as cockes, and little wiser than their combs.’ And again, the Water Poet,—

There’s one thing more I had almost forgot,
And this is it, of ale-houses and innes,
Wine marchants, vintners, brewers, who much wins
By others losing, I say more or lesse,
Who sale of huf-cap liquor doe professe.

This drink (huf-cap) was also called mad-dog, angels’ food, and dragon’s milk. The gentry brewed for their own consumption a generous ale which they did not bring to table till it was two years old. This was called March Ale, from the month in which it was brewed. Al[Pg 148]e was often richly compounded with various dainties. Often it was warmed, and mixed with sugar and spices; sometimes with a toast; sometimes with a roasted crab or apple, making the beverage known as Lamb’s wool.

Sometimes lurk I in a gossip’s bowl,
In very likeness of a roasted crab;
And when she drinks, against her lips I bob,
And on her wither’d dew-lap pour the ale.[97]

Now crowne the bowle
With gentle lambs-wooll,
Add sugar, and nutmegs, and ginger.[98]

The strength of the ale as commonly sold transpires from many incidental notices in the history of the time. Thus Leicester writes to Burleigh that at a certain place in her Majesty’s travels ‘there was not one drop of good drink for her.... We were fain to send forthwith to London, and to Kenilworth, and divers other places where ale was; her own here was so strong as there was no man able to drink it.’

The sobriety of this queen has never been called in question, although one author, in commenting on the Kenilworth pageant, remarks that many such entertainments were accepted by this queen, who professed to restrain luxury and extravagance, and issued sumptuary edicts, but did not ennoble precept by example. This is ill-natured. It is incidental to high position to accept a profusion of hospitality, for which it can scarcely be held responsible. And unquestionably on this occasion the hospitality was profuse. It is stated that no less than 365 hogsheads of beer were drunk at it, in addition to the daily complement of 16 hogsheads of wine. The entertainment lasted nineteen days. Notwithstanding [Pg 149]such exceptional receptions, there is no doubt that the queen did bring influence to bear in refining the manners of her court; and among the many changes effected, none were more apparent than in the festive entertainments of the time. Harrison draws particular attention to the fact that the swarms of jesters, tumblers, and harpers, that formerly had been indispensable to the banquet-room, were now discarded. He further mentions another valuable change of custom. The wine and other liquors were not placed upon the tables with the dishes, but on a sideboard, and each person called as occasion required for a flagon of the wine he wanted, by which means ‘much idle tippling was avoided.’ When the company had done feeding, what remained was sent to the servants, and when these were satisfied the fragments were distributed among the poor who waited without the gate.

To the minstrel these innovations were practically ruin. He who had been in past times the soul of the tournament, and a welcome guest at every banquet, was now a street ballad-singer, or ale-house fiddler, chanting forth from benches and barrel-heads to an audience consisting of a few gaping rustics, or a parcel of idle boys; and, as if the degradation of these despised and unhoused favourites of former days had not been enough, the stern justice of the law made them doubly vile, obliging them to skulk into corners, and perform their merry offices in fear and trembling. Minstrels were now classed in the statute with rogues and vagabonds, and made liable to the same pains and penalties. Already it might be said,

[Pg 150]

No longer courted and caress’d,
High placed in hall, a welcome guest,
He pour’d, to lord and lady gay,
The unpremeditated lay:
Old times were changed, old manners gone.[99]

What has just been observed of the queen, applies to more than one of her renowned courtiers. Burleigh was a man given to hospitality, occasionally to conviviality, if there is any truth in the lines known as The Islington Garland, which thus describes him and his friend,—

Here gallant gay Essex, and burly Lord Burleigh,
Sate late at their revels, and came to them early,

alluding to the inn at Islington. But rather than read the man in an ephemeral lampoon we would turn to his sole literary production, and find the impress of his mind in his work addressed to his son Robert Cecil, entitled Precepts or Directions for the Well Ordering and Carriage of a Man’s Life, in which he offers the following advice:—

A more striking lay homily than even this upon the [Pg 151]evils of drink is to be found in the writings of another notable of the period, Sir Walter Raleigh. His words are letters of gold.

Such is the language of the man who founded the ‘Mermaid’ in Bread Street, the first of the long succession of clubs started in London,[100] and connected with which were such as Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont, and Fletcher. And, coming from such a man, it is convincing that the vitiation of the national taste had forced itself upon common observation, and, of course, engraved itself upon the pages of history. Thus Camden, speaking of the year 1581 (though the earlier part of his observation displays imperfect acquaintance with previous history), remarks, ‘The English, who had[Pg 152] hitherto, of all the Northern nations, shown themselves the least addicted to immoderate drinking, and been commended for their sobriety, first learned in these wars with the Netherlands to swallow a large quantity of intoxicating liquor, and to destroy their own health by drinking that of others.’ And as a confirmation of the latter part of his assertion, it may be noticed that the barbarous terms formerly used in drinking matches are of Dutch, German, or Danish origin.[101]

To the same effect the chronicler Baker observes that during the Dutch war the English learnt to be drunkards, and brought the vice so far to overspread the kingdom that laws were fain to be enacted for repressing it. The satirist Tom Nash, who lived at this time, describes, as only he could, the various classes of drunkards as they presented themselves to his observation:—‘The first is ape-drunk, and he leaps and sings and hollows and danceth for the heavens; the second is lyon-drunk, and he flings the pot about the house, breaks the glass windows with his dagger, and is apt to quarrel.... The third is swine-drunk, heavy, lumpish, and sleepy, and cries for a little more drink and a few more clothes; the fourth is sheep-drunk, wise in his own conceit when he cannot bring forth a right word; the fifth is maudlen-drunk, when a fellow will weep for kindness in the midst of his drink.... The sixth is martin-drunk, when a man is drunk, and drinks himself sober ere he stir. The seventh is goat-drunk, when in his drunkenness he hath no mind but on lechery. The eighth is fox-drunk, as many of the Dutchmen be, which will never bargain but when they are drunk. All these species, and more, I[Pg 153] have seen practised in one company and at one sitting.’

The various methods of raising money for the Church and poor have already been examined under the heading of Ales. It will be necessary in forming the estimate of manners at this time to trace how the system developed, The use and abuse will be both apparent. For the use we turn to the Survey of Cornwall,[102] where we read that:—

The next author to be cited gives both use and abuse; thus Philip Stubs (or Stubbes), who has been already quoted, after speaking of the contributions of malt by parishioners for church-ales, goes on to say:—

Speaking of the manner of keeping wakes, he says they were the sources of ‘gluttonie and drunkenness,’ and that many spend more at one of these than in all the year besides.

For the unqualified abuse of such a system we turn to a sermon preached in the same reign (1570) at Blandford by William Kethe, from which it appears that these church-ales were kept on the Sunday, ‘which holy day,’ says he, ‘the multitudes call their revelyng day, which day is spent in bul-beatings, beare-beatings, bowlings, dicyng, cardyng, daunsynges, drunkenness, and whoredome.’[103]

Even this picture is utterly eclipsed by the ghastly description of the excesses at a church dedication festival, as given by the contemporary Naogeorgus:—

The dedication of the church is yerely had in minde,
With worship passing catholicke, and in a wond’rous kinde;
    *    *    *    *
Then sundrie pastimes do begin, and filthy daunces oft;
When drunkards they do lead the daunce with fray and bloody fight,
That handes and eares and head and face are torne in wofull plight.
The streames of bloud runne downe the armes, and oftentimes is seene
The carkasse of some ruffian slaine is left upon the greene.
Here many for their lovers sweete some dainty thing do true,
And many to the taverne goe and drinke for companie,
Whereat they foolish songs do sing, and noyses great do make;
Some in the meanewhile play at cardes, and some the dice do shake.
Their custome also is the priest into the house to pull,
Whom, when they have, they thinke their game accomplished at full;
He farre in noyse exceedes them all, and eke in drinking drye
[Pg 155]The cuppes, a prince he is.[104]

Such a description is of itself an ample justification of the censure of the clergy in the injunctions of Elizabeth, among which we find: ‘The clergy shall not haunt ale-houses or taverns, or spend their time idly at dice, cards, tables, or any other unlawful game.’

But amidst all these dissipated distractions, influences of a qualifying character were also at work. The powerful pen of Bacon was writing, ‘All the crimes on the earth do not destroy so many of the human race, nor alienate so much property, as drunkenness.’ George Gascoigne was holding up an honest old-fashioned mirror, true as steel, to the faults and vices of his countrymen.[105] In his curious treatise, the full title of which is ‘A Delicate Diet for Daintie Mouthde Droonkards; wherein the fowle abuse of common carousing and quaffing with heartie draughtes, is honestly admonished,’ he vigorously inveighs against the popular drinks: ‘We must have March Beere, dooble-dooble Beere, Dagger-Ale, Bragget, Renish wine, White-wine, French wine, Gascoyne wine, Sack, Hollocke, Canaria wine, Vino Greco, Vinum amabile, and al the wines that may be gotten. Yea, wine of itselfe is not sufficient; but Sugar, Limons, and sundry sortes of spices must be drowned therein.’ Spenser was teaching the virtues of temperance in that marvellous production in which chivalry and religion are so matchlessly blended, his Faery Queen. The second book contains the legend of Sir Guyon, or of Temperance. The knight is sent upon an adventure by the Fairy Queen, to bring captive to her court an enchantress named Acrasia, in whom is [Pg 156]imaged the vice of Intemperance. The various adventures which he meets with by the way are such as show the virtues and happy effects of temperance, or the ill consequences of intemperance. But before claiming for the sons of Rechab a patron in Spenser, it must be told that the same author in his Epithalamion harps on other strings. There we read:—

Pour out the wine without restraint or stay,
Pour not by cups but by the bellyful.
Pour out to all that wull,
And sprinkle all the posts and walls with wine,
That they may sweat and drunken be withal.

These are dissimilar strains to those of the good Sir Guyon,

In whom great rule of Temperance goodly doth appear.

And shall we here stop short? Certainly not. The Bard of Avon, William Shakespeare, offers many a caution to the falling and fallen. To attempt to quote him fully would be beside the present purpose. It must suffice to gather from his works five or six prominent reflections.[106]

I. The constant use of strong drink impairs its remedial effect.

Thus in the Tempest, act ii. scene 3, Stephano is made to say, ‘He shall taste of my bottle; if he have never drank wine afore, it will go near to remove his fit.’

II. That strict temperance is a source of health.

[Pg 157]

Thus in As You Like It, act ii. scene 3, Adam declares—

Though I look old, yet I am strong and lusty;
For in my youth I never did apply
Hot and rebellious liquors in my blood,
Nor did not with unbashful forehead woo
The means of weakness and debility;
Therefore my age is as a lusty winter,
Frosty, but kindly.

III. That the Danes had an established character for deep drinking. Thus Hamlet, act i. scene 4:—

Hamlet. The king doth awake to-night and takes his rouse,
Keeps wassel, and the swaggering upspring reels;
And, as he drains his draughts of Rhenish down,
The kettle-drum and trumpet thus bray out
The triumph of his pledge.

Hor. Is it a custom?

Ham. Ay, marry, is’t;
But to my mind—though I am native here
And to the manner born—it is a custom
More honour’d in the breach than the observance.
This heavy-headed revel, east and west,
Makes us traduced and taxed of other nations:
They clepe us drunkards, and with swinish phrase
Soil our addition; and indeed it takes
From our achievements, though perform’d at height,
The pith and marrow of our attribute.

‘They clepe us drunkards.’ And well our Englishmen might, for in Queen Elizabeth’s time there was a Dane in London, of whom the following mention is made in a collection of characters, entitled Looke to it, for Ile stab ye (no date):—

You that will drinke Keynaldo unto deth,
The Dane that would carouse out of his boote.

[Pg 158]

Mr. W. Mason adds that ‘it appears from one of Howell’s letters, dated at Hamburg in the year 1632, that the then King of Denmark had not degenerated from his jovial predecessor. In his account of an entertainment given by his majesty to the Earl of Leicester, he tells us that the king, after beginning thirty-five toasts, was carried away in his chair, and that all the officers of the court were drunk.’

See also the Nugæ Antiquæ, vol. ii. p. 133, for the scene of drunkenness introduced into the court of James I. by the King of Denmark in 1606.

Roger Ascham, in one of his letters, mentions being present at an entertainment where the Emperor of Germany seemed in drinking to rival the King of Denmark: ‘The emperor,’ says he, ‘drank the best that ever I saw; he had his head in the glass five times as long as any of us, and never drank less than a good quart at once of Rhenish wine.’

IV. That Shakespeare regarded English drunkenness as influenced by our intercourse with the Low Countries. Thus, Merry Wives of Windsor, act ii. scene 2, Mistress Page calls Falstaff a Flemish drunkard. The Variorum Edition of 1803 has the following note:—

V. That whatever the Danes were, the English were worse.

In Othello we have a terrible reputation. Thus:—

Act ii. scene 3. The double-dyed Iago has tempted honest foolish Cassio to drink with him, in spite of Cassio’s very honest confession, ‘I have very poor and unhappy brains for drinking: I could well wish courtesy would invent some other custom of entertainment.’ But Cassio is weak. On Iago’s urgent pressing, he says, ‘I’ll do it; but it dislikes me.’ He had just before remarked, ‘I have drunk but one cup to-night, and that was craftily qualified too, and behold what innovation it makes here [striking his forehead]: I am unfortunate in the infirmity, and dare not task my weakness with any more.’

They passed to the revel. Iago, who is seasoned, calls out:—

Some wine, ho!
And let me the canakin clink, clink;
And let me the canakin clink:
A soldier’s a man;
A life’s but a span;
Why, then, let a soldier drink.
Some wine, boys. [Wine brought in.

How like is human nature at all periods! Iago’s drinking song reminds us of the half-gay, half-melancholy campaigning song, said to have been composed by General Wolfe, and sung by him at the mess-table on the eve of the storming of Quebec, in which he fell so gloriously:—

Why, soldiers, why
Should we be melancholy, boys?
Why, soldiers, why,
Whose business ‘tis to die?
For should next campaign
Send us to Him who made us, boys,
We’re free from pain;
But should we remain,
A bottle and kind landlady
Will set all right again.

This song was a favourite with Sir Walter Scott—see Washington Irving’s Abbotsford and Newstead.

VI. The bane of ardent spirits and of that to which they conduce—intemperance. Thus Othello, act ii. scene 3:—

And again—

[Pg 161]

And—

Two customs which are alluded to in Shakespeare’s works are worthy of note. Merry Wives of Windsor, act ii. scene 2.

According to Malone, it seems to have been a common custom at taverns, in our author’s time, to send presents of wine from one room to another, either as a memorial of friendship, or (as in the present instance) by way of introduction to acquaintance. Of the existence of this practice the following anecdote of Ben Jonson and Bishop Corbet furnishes a proof: Ben Jonson was at a tavern, and in comes Bishop Corbet (but not so then) into the next room. Ben Jonson calls for a quart of raw wine, and gives it to the tapster. “Sirrah,” says he, “carry this to the gentleman in the next chamber, and tell him, I sacrifice my service to him.” The fellow did, and in those words. “Friend,” says Dr. Corbet, “I thank him for his love; but ‘pr’ythe tell him from me that he is mistaken; for sacrifices are always burnt”’ (Merry Passages and Jeasts, MSS. Harl. 6395).

This practice was continued as late as the Restoration. In the Parliamentary History, vol. xxii. p. 114, we have the following passage from Dr. Price’s Life of General Monk: ‘I came to the Three Tuns before Guildhall, where the general had quartered two nights before. I entered the tavern with a servant and portmanteau, and asked for a room, which I had scarce got into, but wine followed me as a present from some citizens, desiring leave to drink their morning’s draught with me.’

The other custom to be noted is that of taking night-caps[Pg 162]. Macbeth, act i. scene 2.

It appears from this passage as well as from many others in our old dramatic performances, that it was the general custom to take possets just before bed-time. So in the first part of King Edward IV., by Heywood: ‘thou shalt be welcome to beef and bacon, and perhaps a bag-pudding; and my daughter Nell shall pop a posset upon thee when thou goest to bed.’ Macbeth has already said:—

Go bid thy mistress, when my drink is ready,
She strike upon the bell.

Lady Macbeth has also just observed:—

That which hath made them drunk, hath made me bold.

And in The Merry Wives of Windsor Mrs. Quickly promises Jack Rugby a posset at night. This custom is also mentioned by Froissart.

One more quotation I cannot refrain from adding. It is not from Shakespeare, but from one who had studied him, and who, if nothing else, could certainly parody the ‘seven ages of man’ (As You Like It, act ii. scene 7).

Stages of Drunkenness.—All the world’s a pub,
And all the men and women merely drinkers;
They have their hiccoughs and their staggerings;
And one man in a day drinks many glasses,
His acts being seven stages. At first the gentleman,
Steady and steadfast in his good resolves;
And then the wine and bitters, appetiser,
And pining, yearning look, leaving like a snail
The comfortable bar. And then the arguments,
Trying like Hercules with a wrathful frontage
[Pg 163]To refuse one more two penn’orth. Then the mystified,
Full of strange thoughts, unheeding good advice,
Careless of honour, sudden, thick, and gutt’ral,
Seeking the troubled repetition
Even in the bottle’s mouth; and then quite jovial,
In fair good humour while the world swims round
With eyes quite misty, while his friends him cut,
Full of nice oaths and awful bickerings;
And so he plays his part. The sixth stage shifts
Into the stupid, slipping, drunken man,
With ‘blossoms’ on his nose and bleery-eyed,
His shrunken face unshaved, from side to side
He rolls along; and his unmanly voice,
Huskier than ever, fails and flies,
And leaves him—staggering round. Last scene of all,
That ends this true and painful history,
Is stupid childishness, and then oblivion—
Sans watch, sans chain, sans coin, sans everything.

It is impossible to dismiss Shakespeare without some notice of the man himself. But how little is known apart from his works![107] Go to Stratford-on-Avon, visit ‘the birthplace;’ bear those good ladies who show it tell you of the eight villages immortalised by their supposed connection with the poet; hear them repeat the lines ascribed by tradition to Shakespeare himself:—

Piping Pebworth, dancing Marston,
Haunted Hillborough, hungry Grafton,
Dudging Exhall, Popish Wickford,
Beggarly Broom, and drunken Bidford.

Hear them tell the story of Shakespeare’s crab-tree, how that the young poet was one of a party who accepted a challenge for a drinking bout from certain topers at [Pg 164]Bidford, how that the hero became so overcome that when he started home he could proceed no further than the crab-tree, and so lay down there and sheltered for the night.[108] Hear, too, of ‘y^e Falcon Tavern,’ close to the grammar school where the poet was almost certainly educated. And this is all that the present limit allows.

How died he? We turn to the pages of an inimitable diary, and read thus:

So passed away William Shakespeare, whose influence cannot be better summed up than in the words of a very thoughtful writer:—

[Pg 165]

The same cannot be said of his friend, Ben Jonson, who, like so many of the dramatists of the period, as Marlowe, Greene, and Nash, was a notoriously free liver. His naturally passionate disposition, so unlike that of his famous friend, was rendered more hasty and vindictive by his addiction to drink. He goes near to condemn himself in his apostrophe ‘To Penshurst’:—

Whose liberal board doth flow
With all that hospitality doth know!
Where comes no guest but is allowed to eat
Without his fear, and of my lord’s own meat;
Where the same beer and bread, and self-same wine,
That is his lordship’s shall be also mine.
And I not fain to sit—as some this day
At great men’s tables—and yet dine away.
Here no man tells my cups.

To him canary was

The very elixir and spirit of wine.

He could say, though not in the original intention,

Wine is the word that glads the heart of man,
And mine’s the house of wine. Sack, says my bush,
Be merry and drink sherry, that is my posie.

[Pg 166]

The following are

Ben Jonson’s Sociable Rules for the Apollo.

Let none but guests, or clubbers, hither come.
Let dunces, fools, sad sordid men keep home.
Let learned, civil, merry men, b’invited,
And modest too; nor be choice ladies slighted.
Let nothing in the treat offend the guests;
More for delight than cost prepare the feast.
The cook and purvey’r must our palates know;
And none contend who shall sit high or low.
Our waiters must quick-sighted be, and dumb,
And let the drawers quickly hear and come.
Let not our wine be mix’d, but brisk and neat,
Or else the drinkers may the vintners beat.
And let our only emulation be,
Not drinking much, but talking wittily.
Let it be voted lawful to stir up
Each other with a moderate chirping cup;
Let not our company be or talk too much;
On serious things, or sacred, let’s not touch
With sated heads and bellies. Neither may
Fiddlers unask’d obtrude themselves to play,
With laughing, leaping, dancing, jests, and songs,
And whate’er else to grateful mirth belongs,
Let’s celebrate our feasts; and let us see
That all our jests without reflection be.
Insipid poems let no man rehearse,
Nor any be compelled to write a verse.
All noise of vain disputes must he forborne,
And let no lover in a corner mourn,
To fight and brawl, like hectors, let none dare,
Glasses or windows break, or hangings tear,
Whoe’er shall publish what’s here done or said
From our society must be banishèd;
Let none by drinking do or suffer harm,
And, while we stay, let us be always warm.

In one of his plays he absurdly compares the host of the ‘New Inn’ to one of those stone jugs called ‘Long Beards.’

[Pg 167]Who’s at the best some round grown thing—a jug
Fac’d with a beard, that fills out to the guests.

These stone vessels may be recognised as glazed, of a mottled brown colour, with a narrow neck and wide-spreading belly, a rudely executed face with a long flowing beard, and a handle behind. Mr. Chaffers, from whom this description is taken, says that these vessels were in general use in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries at public-houses, to serve ale to the customers. The largest size held eight pints. Some of them bore coats-of-arms. They were also called Bellarmines, after the celebrated cardinal who so opposed the progress of the reformers that he incurred the hatred of the Protestants, who manifested their rancour by satire such as this bottle, which figured a hard-featured son of Adam.

In the Cynthia’s Revels of Ben Jonson, occurs an allusion to that hideous custom, the practice of which he attributes to a representative lover stabbing himself, drinking a health, and writing languishing letters in his blood. In the Humorous Lieutenant of Beaumont and Fletcher, allusion is made to the same practice of gentlemen cutting and stabbing themselves, and mingling their blood with the wine in which they toasted their mistresses. In the Merchant of Venice the Prince of Morocco, with the same meaning, speaks of ‘making an incision for love.’ Jonson occupied the president’s chair in the Apollo room in the Devil Tavern (on the site of which is Child’s bank), surrounded by the ‘eruditi, urbani, hilares, honesti,’ of that age. A contemporary dramatist, Shakerly Marmion, describes him thus:—

The boon Delphic god
Drinks sack, and keeps his Bacchanalia,
And has his incense and his altars smoking,
And speaks in sparkling prophecies.

[Pg 168]

The tavern to which Ben gave such a lasting reputation had for a sign the Devil, and St. Dunstan twigging his nose with a pair of hot tongs. Over the chimney inside were engraved in black marble his leges conviviales, and over the door some verses by the same hand, which wind up with a eulogistic encomium upon wine.

Ply it, and you all are mounted,
‘Tis the true Phœbian liquor,
Cheers the brains, makes wit the quicker;
Pays all debts, cures all diseases,
And at once three senses pleases.[110]

Two authors, who would well bear comparison, remain to be mentioned—Barnabie Googe and Thomas Tusser. The latter was a georgical poet of great popularity in the sixteenth century. His poems were faithful pictures of the domestic life of the English farmer of his day. He concerns us now simply for his belief in the strengthening virtues of the hop. Among his ‘Directions for Cultivating a Hop Garden,’ we find:—

The hop for his profit I thus do exalt,
It strengtheneth drink, and it favoureth malt;
And being well brewed, long kept it will last,
And drawing abide—if ye draw not too fast.

His entire poem, after considerable expansion, appeared under the title of Five Hundreth Points of Good Husbandrie.

Googe wrote upon the same subject.[111] We can glean from him some useful information upon the culture of the vine in England. He says:—

CHAPTER X.

STUART PERIOD.

In entering upon this period it will be necessary to consider, in the first place, what were the drinks chiefly in use. A pamphlet, bearing the date 1612, enumerates a number of the wines then popular:—

That Spanish wines of the Sacke species were now especial favourites, is evident from an ordinance of James I.:—

The fashion of Malmsey had passed away, and the Hungarian red wine (Ofener) had taken its place. It came by Breslau to Hamburg, whence it was shipped to England. Very little Hungarian wine used to be made with a view to exportation. Now many sorts find their way to this country, notably the Carlowitz. The wine-jurors of the 1862 Exhibition reported:—‘Great expectations have been formed of the capability of Hungary as [Pg 171]a wine supplying country. The produce is large, amounting to nearly 250,000,000 gallons yearly. Many of the wines are good, but more careful treatment is generally required.’ At one time only imperial Tokay was known in England as the produce of that country.[113]

Hock was also in high repute:

What wine is it? Hock,
By the mass, brave wine.[114]

Besides wine, beer and spirits were both adopted. Spirits used to be called strong waters, and comfortable waters; thus, when Sir George Summers of Lyme, in 1609, was driven before a hurricane, which led to his discovery of the Bermudas, there appeared no hope of saving the ship, so waterlogged was she. In this extremity, those who had ‘comfortable waters’ drank to one another as taking their last leaves.

Ale and beer were both in common use. But a new kind arose in competition. Dr. Butler, physician to James I., and, according to Fuller, the Æsculapius of that age, invented a kind of medicated ale, called Dr. Butler’s Ale, which used to be sold at houses that had the ‘Butler’s Head’ for a sign.[115]

But to pass from the quid to the quatenus, as Bishop Andrewes would say. Were these liquors drunk to excess? We should suspect that such would be the case, knowing the example of the Court, and remembering that not a little of the literature of the time abetted free living, whilst, at the same time, legislative restriction and ecclesiastical monition were rife, and in certain quarters, both clerical and lay, these excesses were vehemently anathematised.

[Pg 172]

Yes, the legislative, we shall find, was active, far more active than the executive, as appears from the renewal of an important statute in the same reign, just as though it had utterly ceased to be in force. The king showed great desire to enforce several statutes, but the difficulty lay in the fact that he was the first to infringe them. In fact, as Green does not hesitate to aver, the king was known to be an habitual drunkard; ladies of rank copied the royal manners, and rolled intoxicated in open court at the king’s feet.[116] His tutor, Buchanan, was a great drinker; and his nurse is said to have been a drunkard,[117] which latter circumstance gave him a predisposition to drink; the relation of cause and effect in such cases being established. Dr. Mitchell, one of the Lunacy Commissioners, stated in evidence before the Select Committee on Habitual Drunkards in 1872: ‘It is quite certain that the children of habitual drunkards are in a larger proportion idiotic than other children, and in a larger proportion themselves habitual drunkards.’[118] The king’s hereditary tendency was not improved by his connection with Denmark. In the carouses with which that Court celebrated the royal nuptials, James increased that proclivity for heavy drinking to which most of his follies may be traced. He dates his letters ‘From the castle of Cronenburg, quhaire, we are drinking and driving our in the auld manner.’ The same influence followed him to his own dominions. A tavern sign, ‘The King of Denmark,’ perpetuates to this day a royal visit which was celebrated with unparalleled orgies. It will [Pg 173]be remembered that James I. married a sister of Christian IV., king of Denmark.[119] In 1606 the Danish king, Christian, paid a visit to this country. He and his brother-in-law, James, were invited to a festival at Theobalds, the seat of the Prime Minister Cecil, Earl of Salisbury. The revellings there were disgraced by scenes of intemperance which have acquired historical notoriety. The queen was by necessity absent at the time when the kings were abandoning themselves to unrestrained excess. Mr. Samuelson, in his History of Drink, has fallen into the error of certain writers of the last century who have accused Queen Anne of the derelictions from propriety committed on this occasion by a certain queen, who, having taken too much, reeled against the steps of King Christian’s throne. But, as is pointed out by Strickland, this queen was only the Queen of Sheba, personated by a female servant of the Earl of Salisbury, and not the Queen of Great Britain, as any one may ascertain who reads Sir John Harrington’s letter, the sole document on which is founded the mistaken accusation of intemperance against the queen of James I. The story has been often told in whole or part, but it may be well to produce the original.[120]

Much more is told, but one sentence is pregnant: ‘The gunpowder fright is out of all our heads, and we are going on hereabouts, as if the devil were contriving every man should blow up himself by wild riot, excess, and devastation of wine and intemperance.’

The queen was not present; indeed, she was not even a guest of the earl at this time, but was confined to her chamber sick and sad at Greenwich Palace. At a banquet on the Thames, however, given soon after by her royal brother, the queen was present. They pledged each other to continued friendship. To each pledge, drum, trumpet, and cannon were responsive. Shakespeare describes a similar scene:

No jocund health that Denmark drinks to-day,
But the great cannon to the clouds shall tell.

Such pledges of friendship seem almost typical of the happy event of 1863, to which Jean Ingelow so exquisitely alludes in her ‘Wedding song.’

Come up the broad river, the Thames, my Dane,
My Dane, with the beautiful eyes.
    *    *    *    *
[Pg 175] And they said, ‘He is young, the lad we love,
The heir of the Isles is young;
How we deem of his mother, and one gone above,
Can neither be said nor sung.
He brings us a pledge—he will do his part
With the best of his race and name;’
And I will, for I look to live, sweetheart,
As may suit with Thy mother’s fame.

But, taking leave of the court, let us proceed to discover the manners of the people, from contemporary authors and dramatists. Much is to be gleaned from the voluminous writings of Thomas Decker, whose pamphlets and plays, the Quarterly Review once said, would furnish a more complete view of the habits and customs of his contemporaries in vulgar and middle life than could easily be collected from all the grave annals of the times. His Seven Deadly Sins of London, published in 1606, is a mighty invective against the iniquity of the day. It has been well remarked in the introduction to Arber’s reprint of the work, how much the mind of the writer was imbued with the style of the old Hebrew prophets, and how sure he was that that style would find a response in the hearts of his readers. For instance, how like the ‘burden of the Word of the Lord’ is his apostrophe to London—‘O London, thou art great in glory, and envied for thy greatness. Thou art the goodliest of thy neighbours, but the proudest, the wealthiest, the most wanton.... Thou sit’st in thy gates heated with wines.’ In his account of the third deadly sin, he speaks of wines, Spanish and French, meeting in the cellar, conspiring together to lay the Englishman under the board. Perhaps his finest effort of prosopopæia is his impersonation of sloth, whom he represents as giving licences to all the vintners to ‘keepe open house, and to emptye their hogsheades to all commers, who did so, dyeing their grates into a drunkard’s blush (to make them knowe from gates of a prison) lest customers should[Pg 176] reele away from them, and hanging out new bushes, that if men at their going out could not see the signe, yet they might not lose themselves in the bush.... And as drunkennesse when it least can stand, does best hold up ale-houses, so sloth is a founder of the alms-houses, ... and is a good benefactor to these last.’ To call attention to this author’s notices of such rules of drunkenness as Vpsy-Freeze, Crambo, Parmizant, &c., would be beside the present object; but the book will amply repay study, and serve as a commentary on Defoe’s Plague of London. Several other of his works bear upon the present theme, e.g. The Batchelor’s Banquet, Lanthorne and Candle Light, and English Villanies prest to Death.

A writer quite as voluminous, and equally with Decker a scourge of iniquity, was George Wyther (persistently called by so many—Hazlitt and Brand among the number—Wythers). In 1613 he brought out his satirical essays, Abuses Stript and Whipt, the truth and beauty of which, to his honour be it said, touched the heart of Charles Lamb, who observes:[121]

Reference has already been made to the allusion in [Pg 177]this work of Wither to the custom of Hock-tide. He ridicules the notion of such an observance and that of ales subserving the devotion of youth, and indignantly asks,—

What will they do, I say, that think to please
Their mighty God with such fond things as these?
Sure, very ill.

In this same work occurs an allusion to the then common practice of inserting toast into ale with nutmeg and sugar:—

Will he will drinke, yet but a draught at most,
That must be spiced with a nut-browne tost.

The origin of the word toast is much disputed, as is elsewhere observed, and no better account of it is forthcoming than that the word was taken from the toast which was put into the tankard, and which still floats in the loving cup. Hence the person named was the toast or savour of the wine, that which gives the draught piquancy.

Many other of the drinking customs of the day are criticised, but not all with censure. The ode to Christmas, for instance, contrasts strongly with his later puritanical sentiments. Neither sectarian gloom nor civil struggles had yet enveloped the author when he wrote,—

Drown sorrow in a cup of wine,
And let us all be merry.
Hark how the roofs with laughter sound!
Anon they’ll think the house goes round,
For they the cellars’ depth have found,
And there they will be merry,

which introduces a stanza upon wassailing. A change must have come over his [Pg 178]dream before he wrote his second ode on the same subject, which alone would entitle him to the encomiums of Hazlitt or any other critic.[122]

Far more unqualified denunciation of seventeenth century excess is to be found in a volume by Thomas Young (1617), entitled England’s Bane, or the Description of Drunkennesse. He says,—

Scarcely less absurd than these laws of drunkenness, are the laws of health-drinking as described by Barnaby Rich in his work published 1619, the title of which is an excellent preface to the subject-matter, ‘The Irish Hubbub, or the English Hue and Crie; briefly pursuing the base conditions and most notorious offences of this vile, vaine, and wicked age. No less smarting than tickling,’ &c. The following is his description of toasting laws:—

It appears from another author, that this method was accounted a procedure in order, for he adds, ‘It is drunke without order when the course or method of order is not observed, and that the cup passeth on to whomsoever we shall appoint.’ Drink is the burden of the songs of this hilarious writer, who is usually, known by the sobriquet of Drunken Barnaby (or Barnabea) from the titles he himself employed. It is curiously illustrative of the hold that convivial phrases had upon the popular mind that we find a pious divine solemnly quoting the words of a suffering Christian, one Lawrence Saunders, to this effect,—‘My Saviour began to mee in a bitter cup, and shall not I pledge Him?’ [i.e. drink the same cup of sorrow]. The divine just alluded to, Dr. Samuel Ward, of Ipswich, in his sermon (1685) entitled ‘Woe to Drunkards,’ anathematises toasting: ‘Abandon that foolish and vicious custome, as Ambrose and Basil call it, of drinking healths, and making that a sacrifice to God for the health of others, which is rather a sacrifice to the devil, and a bane of their owne.’

But this kind of appeal was by no means confined to the pulpit. Robert Burton, the famous author of the Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), who cannot be accused of being strait-laced (at any rate, Anthony Wood sp[Pg 180]eaks of his company as very merry, facete, and juvenile), in his pungent chapter on Dyet as a cause of melancholy, exclaims,—

Again, in his chapter on ‘Mirth and Merry Company,’ he warns,—

[Pg 181]

If such were the avowed expressions of Burton, we shall not wonder to find such men as George Herbert and Bishop Hall vehement in denunciation of the same bane.

This passage is quoted to call attention to the words italicised (not by Herbert), ‘because it is the most popular vice;’ an independent confirmation of the excessive drinking in the reign of James I.

Again, in The Parson in Journey, chapter xvii.,—

The meaning of the words italicised is mistaken by the occasional annotator to Bohn’s edition, who explains it, ‘A repository or store-room for certain provisions.’ But in Elizabethan and Jacobean times, buttery always meant the place where the beer (or wine) was kept. Evidence is forthcoming from our dramatists of those periods. Thus:—

(1) Maria, in Twelfth Night (act i., scene 3), says to the unfortunate butt Sir Andrew Ague-cheek, ‘I pray you bring your hand to the buttery bar and let it drink.’

[Pg 182]

(2) Middleton, in A Trick to Catch the Old One (Ed. Dyce, vol. ii.), has a clear proof, in the words, ‘Go, and wash your lungs i’ th’ buttery.’

From Herbert’s Jacula Prudentum may be extracted—

A drunkard’s purse is a bottle.
Choose not a house near an inn.
Take heed of the vinegar of sweet wine.
The wine in the bottle doth not quench thirst.
A morning sun, and a wine-bred child, and a
Latin-bred woman, seldom end well.

Once more, from the Church Porch,—

Drink not the third glasse, which thou canst not tame
When once it is within thee; but before
Mayst rule it, as thou list: and poure the shame,
Which it would poure on thee, upon the floore.
It is most just to throw that on the ground
Which would throw me there, if I keep the round.

He that is drunken may his mother kill
Bigge with his sister: he hath lost the reins,
Is outlaw’d by himselfe; all kinde of ill
Did with his liquor slide into his veins.
The drunkard forfets Man, and doth divest
All worldly right, save what he hath by beast.

Shall I, to please another’s wine-sprung minde,
Lose all mine own? God hath giv’n me a measure
Short of his canne, and bodie.
    *    *    *    *
Be not a beast in courtesie, but stay,
Stay at the third cup, or forego the place.
Wine above all things doth God’s stamp efface.

Bishop Hall was unsparing in his lashes of the vices of his time, and amongst these of intemperance. We hear him in verse and prose, in critique and sermon. Thus, in his Satire on the Stage,[125]—

[Pg 183]Soon as the sun sends out his piercing beams
Exhale out filthy smoke and stinking streams,
So doth the base and the fore-barren brain,
Soon as the raging wine begins to reign.

In his Contemplation on Lot he remarks, ‘Drunkenness is the way to all bestial affections and acts. Wine knows no difference either of persons or sins.’ In his sermon preached at Paul’s Cross, on Good Friday, 1609, we find ‘Every of our sins is a thorn, and nail, and spear to Him; while thou pourest down thy drunken carouses, thou givest thy Saviour a portion of gall.’ Why are not the preachers of to-day equally outspoken? One of his apophthegms can scarcely be forgotten:[126] ‘When drinke is in, wit is out; but if wit were not out, drinke would not be in;’ and, lastly,—

But it is time to pass from precept to law.

In 1603 the power of licensing inns and ale-houses was granted by letters patent to certain persons, in which it was enacted that no victualler could sell less than one full quart of the best ale for one penny, and two quarts of the smaller sort for the same. The preamble of the statute of 1604 is most valuable for the information it affords as to what the ancient Parliaments considered to be the legitimate use of a tavern.

The statute of 4th James imposes punishment for drunkenness:—

Therefore a fine of five shillings was imposed for intoxication, or confinement in the stocks for six hours, and for the first offence of remaining drinking in a person’s own neighbourhood, a fine of three shillings and fourpence, or the stocks, the penalty being increased for further offence. The fine, it must be remembered, was worth several times the same amount imposed now for intoxication, and the high road to it, tippling, is now passed over. The time prescribed in the stocks was fixed at six hours, because by that time the statute presumed the offender would have regained his senses, and not be liable to do mischief to his neighbours.[127]

Little success can as yet have attended legislation, for in 1609, the statute, admitting that ‘notwithstanding all former laws and provisions already made, the inordinate and extreme vice of excessive drinking and drunkenness doth more and more abound,’ enacts that offenders convicted against the two last Acts shall be deprived of their licence. Again has this statute to be [Pg 185]renewed in 1623, as though the executive had slept. Among the grievances that the Parliament of 1621 examined was one that patents had been granted to Sir Giles Mompesson and Sir Francis Michel, for licensing inns and ale-houses; that great sums of money had been exacted under pretext of these licences; and that such innkeepers as presumed to continue their business without satisfying the rapacity of the patentees, had been severely punished by fine, imprisonment, and vexatious prosecutions. The patentees were denounced as criminals. They fled for refuge. Sentence was passed upon them, which, in the case of Mompesson, was commuted. Many useful hints might be learnt from purely local legislation from time to time. Indeed, a most useful code might be formed from a digest of borough enactments. Let one illustration suffice. We find a local law at Lyme, about this time, to the effect that no retailer of beer was to sell to any craftsman or servant of the town, unless he was in company with a stranger. In 1612 it was there ordered that no one should tipple any one day above one hour in any house. It merely remains to be noticed that in Cott. MSS. Titus B. III. Codex chartaceus, in folio, Constans fol. 281, may be found—

The reign of Charles I. very nearly covers the second quarter of the seventeenth century. If we had to select a single author as our guide to the social habits of the time, we should probably at once fix upon Thomas Heywood, the busiest of dramatic writers, ‘a sort of prose Shakespeare,’ as Charles Lamb makes bold to say. Of his numerous works, one is a direct exposure of the then drinking customs.[129] The immense variety of drinking-cups, as well as the intrinsic value of many of them, speaks volumes. He describes them as ‘some of elme, some of box, some of maple, some of holly, &c., mazers, broad-mouth’d dishes, moggins, whiskins, piggins, cruizes, ale-bowles, wassell-bowles, court-dishes, tankards, kannes, from a bottle to a pint, from a pint to a gill. Other bottles we have of leather, but they are most used amongst the shepheards and harvest-people of the countrey; small jacks wee have in many ale-houses, of the citie and suburbs, tip’t with silver, besides the great black jacks and bombards at the court, which when the Frenchmen first saw, they reported at their returne into their countrey, that the Englishmen used to drinke out of their bootes: we have besides, cups made of horns of beasts, of cocker-nuts, of goords, of the eggs of estriches, others made of the shells of divers fishes brought from the Indies and other places, and shining like mother of pearl. Come to plate, every taverne can afford you flat bowls, prounet cups, beare bowles, beakers; and private householders in the citie, when they make a feast to entertain their friends, can furnish their cupboards with flagons, tankards, beere-cups, wine-bowls, some white, some percell gilt, some gilt all over, [Pg 187]some with covers, some without, of sundry shapes and qualities.’

In the same books occurs the following curious satire:—‘There is now profest an eighth liberal art or science, called Ars Bibendi, i.e. the Art of Drinking. The students or professors thereof call a greene garland, or painted hoope hang’d out, a colledge, a sign where there is lodging, man’s-meate, and horse-meate, an inne of court, an hall or an hostle, where nothing is sold but ale and tobacco, a grammar schoole; a red or a blue lattice, that they terme a free schoole for all comers.... The bookes which they studdy, and whose leaves they so often turne over are for the most part three of the old translation and three of the new. Those of the old translation—1, The Tankard; 2, The Black Jacke; 3, The Quart-Pot, Rib’d, or Thorondell. Those of the new be these: 1, The Jugge; 2, The Beaker; 3, The Double or Single Can, or Black Pot.’ The same author gives a list of slang phrases then in use, signifying the being intoxicated. ‘He is foxt, hee is flawed, he is flustered, hee is suttle, cupshot, he hath seene the French king, he hath swallowed an havie or a taverne-token, hee hath whipt the cat, he hath been at the scriveners, and learn’d to make indentures, hee hath bit his grannam, or is bit by a barne-weesell,’ &c. In another of his productions, Shipwreck by Drink, he describes a drunken scene which took place in a house that he was passing in which a feast was being held:—

In the height of their carousing, all their brains
Warmed with the heat of wine.

[Pg 188]

And a marvellous piece of description it is. The guests imagine themselves to be rocked in a vessel during storm, climb bedposts as though they were masts, turn out the furniture as if casting ship-lading overboard; another bestrides his fellow to escape, Arion-like, on the dolphin’s back. The staff of the constable who enters is considered to be Neptune’s trident, and so forth.

But enough of this author. The habits of his time had evidently impressed him, and he constantly revives his impression. But it was no self-formed phantom. Abundance of corroboration is forthcoming. A political economist of the same date (1627) remarks, ‘This most monstrous vice is thus defined:—“Drunkenness is the privation of orderly motion and understanding.” ... But I need not stand much about the definition of drunkenness, for, with grief I speak it, the taverns, ale-houses, and the very streets are so full of drunkards in all parts of this kingdom, that by the sight of them it is better known what this detestable and odious vice is than by any definition whatsoever.’[130]

Regarding it then as established, that the intemperance of the times of Elizabeth and James I. was still perpetuated, it is natural to inquire to what it is to be attributed.

(1) The attractiveness of the drinks themselves, a constant factor in all periods.

Of wines, Canary and sack were in most demand, though these were constantly terms indifferently used; thus,—

[Pg 189]

Some sack, boy.
Good sherry-sack, sir?
I meant Canary, sir; what, hast no brains?[131]

The following is the explanation of the confusion in terms:—

and renders intelligible the following:—

Two kinsmen near allied to sherry sack,
Sweet Malligo and delicate Canary.[133]

It is extolled in Beaumont and Fletcher:—

Give me a cup of sack
An ocean of sweet sack.

Canary was in great esteem. John Howell praises it as ‘accounted the richest, the most firm, the best bodied, and lastingest wine: while French wine pickles meat in the stomach, this is the wine that digests, and doth not only breed good bloud, but it nutrifieth also, being a glutinous substantial liquor. Of this wine, if of any other, may be verified that merry induction, that good wine makes good blood, good blood causeth good humours, good humours causeth good thoughts, good thoughts bring forth good works, good works carry a man to heaven; ergo good wine carrieth a man to heaven. If this be true, surely more English go to heaven this way than any other, for I think there is more Canary brought to England than to all the world besides.’[134]

But probably no kind of drink came amiss.

[Pg 190]

The Russ drinks quass; Dutch, Lubeck beer,
And that is strong and mighty;
The Briton, he metheglin quaffs,
The Irish aqua vitæ;
The French affects the Orleans grape,
The Spaniard tastes his sherry;
The English none of these can ‘scape,
But he with all makes merry.[135]

(2) The prevailing habit of toasting may be set down as a second cause, and a powerful factor it must have been in national corruption, if the case is not overstated by William Prynne,[136] who wrote his startling book to prove ‘the Drinking and Pledging of Healthes to be Sinfull and utterly Unlawful unto Christians.’ In his Epistle Dedicatorie to King Charles I. he urges that his Majesty’s health is an occasion, apologie, pretence, and justification of excesse.

Following upon this is an appeal ‘To the Christian Reader,’ in which he offers six reasons ‘why men are so much infatuated with the odious sinne of drunkennesse. (a) The inbred corruption and practice of humane nature. (b) The power of the Prince of the ayre, who hath lately gotten such high predominance in the souls of vitious men, that they doe not only glory in their drunkennesse, proclaiming it unto the world, but set themselves against the God of Heaven, violating the very lawes of nature and the very rules of reason. (c) The third reason is, the popular titles given to abettors of intemperance, e.g., good fellow, sociable, joviall boon [Pg 191]companion, good natured, &c.; whilst mottoes of ignominy are applied to the temperate, e.g., Puritanisme, discourtesie, coynesse, singularitie, stoicisme, &c. (d) The fourth reason is the negligence and coldnesse of justices, magistrates, &c., in the faithful execution of those pious statutes enacted by the State against this sinne. “If justices were as diligent to suppresse drunkennesse and ale-houses as they are industrious to patronise them, the wings of drunkenness would soon be clipt, whereas now they spread and grow, because the sword of execution clipse them not.” (e) The fifth cause why this gangrene doth so dilate is the ill example of gentlemen, great men, magistrates, and ministers, who either approve excesse, or tolerate it in their misgoverned families, “which are oftentimes made the very theatres of Bacchus, and the seminaries, sinkes, and puddles of ryot and intemperance, under pretence of hospitality.” (f) The sixth cause assigned is, “Those common ceremonies, wiles, and stratagems which the deuill and his drunken rowt have invented, of purpose to alure, force, and draw men on to excesse of wine.” ... There is no such common bayte to entice men to intemperance as this idle, heathenish, and hellish ceremonie of beginning, seconding, and pledging healthes.’

Prynne then proceeds in the book proper to give fifteen arguments against health-drinking, drawn out in syllogistic form. Perhaps the most useful part of the book is the array of quotations from ‘the Fathers’ against occasions of intemperance; SS. Augustine, Basil, and Ambrose being most frequently quoted. He vindicates Luther from a charge laid against him by the Papists, which cannot be omitted. They put it about ‘that Luther once made a great feast at his hou[Pg 192]se, to which he invited the chiefest Professours of the Universitie, and among the rest one Islebius. Dinner being ended, and all of them somewhat merry, Luther, after the Germane custome, commanded a great glasse divided with three kindes of circles to be brought unto him; and out of it he drunke an health in order to all his guesse. When all of them had drunke, the health came at last to Islebius. Luther then, in the presence of all the rest, takes this glasse, being filled up, into his hand, and, shewing it to Islebius, saith: “Islebius, I drinke this glasse full of wine unto thee, which containes the tenne commandements to the first circle; the Apostles’ Creed to the second, the Lord’s Prayer to the third, and the Catechisme to the bottom.” When he had spoken, he drinkes off the whole glasse at a draught; which being replenished with wine, he delivers it to Islebius, that he might pledge him all at a breath, who takes the glasse and drunke it off onely to the first circle, which did containe the Decalogue—it being impossible for him to drink any deeper—and then sets downe the glasse on the table, which hee could not behold againe without horrour: then said Luther, “I knew full well before, that Islebius could drinke the Decalogue, but not the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Catechisme.”’

He further cites some canons from ancient Councils; the most important being Canon xv. of the Council of Lateran, 1215:—‘Let all clergymen diligently abstain from surfeitings and drunkenness. For which let them moderate wine from themselves, and themselves from wine. Neither let any one be urged to drink, since drunkenness doth banish wit and provoke lust. For which purpose we decree that that abuse shall be utterly abolished, whereby, in divers quarters, drinkers bi[Pg 193]nd one another to drink healths or equal cups, and he is most applauded who quaffs off most carouzes. If any shall offend henceforth in this, let him be suspended from his benefice and office.’ Again, in the Provincial Council of Colin, 1536, is the order—‘All parish priests or ministers are chiefly prohibited, not only surfeiting, riot, drunkenness, and luxurious feasts, but likewise the drinking of healths, which they are commanded to banish from their houses by a General Council.’

Thus much for the habit of toasting; but—

(3) We may assign as the third reason for the prevalent excess—Convivial Literature. The name that first suggests itself is that of Herrick. It is not only in poems avowedly of this description, such as ‘The Wassail’ and ‘The Wassail Bowl’ but it is a vein running through the entire seam of his songs. With him, at Christmas-time,—

My good dame, she
Bids ye all be free,
And drink to your heart’s desiring.

In his New Year’s Gift, he bids Sir Simeon Steward—

Remember us in cups full crowned,
And let our city health go round.

Is he singing of Twelfth Night? No sooner is the question of king and queen settled than their health must be drunk:—

And let not a man be seen here,
Who unurged will not drink,
To the base from the brink,
[Pg 194]A health to the king and queen here.

Next crown the bowl full
With gentle lamb’s wool;
Add sugar, nutmeg, and ginger,
With store of ale too;
And thus ye must do
To make the wassail a swinger.

Of course, ‘True Hospitality’ would be impossible without the favourite ingredient:—

But as thy meat, so thy immortal wine
Makes the smirk face of each to shine,
And spring fresh rosebuds, while the salt, the wit,
Flows from the wine, and graces it.

The pretty superstition that wassailing the trees will make them bear, is included among the Christmas Eve ceremonies in his Hesperides:—

Wassaile the trees, that they may beare
You many a plum and many a peare;
For more or lesse fruits they will bring,
As you do give them wassailing.

The day of this ceremony varies in different localities. In Devonshire the eve of the Epiphany is chosen; there the farmer and his men proceed to the orchard with a huge jug of cider, and forming a circle round a well-bearing tree, drink the toast,—

Here’s to thee, old apple tree,
Whence thou mayst bud, and whence thou mayst blow!
And whence thou mayst bear apples enow!
Hats full! caps full!
Bushel, bushel, sacks full,
And my pockets full too; huzza![137]

Total sustenance (not abstinence) was part of his religion. In his exquisite little poem entitled ‘A Thanksgiving for his House’—only to be[Pg 195] approached (of its kind) by Bishop Wordsworth’s hymn, ‘Who givest all’—he thanks God, amongst other mercies, for the wassail bowl:—

Lord, I confess too, when I dine,
The pulse is Thine,
And all those other bits that be
There placed by Thee.
The worts, the purslain, and the mess
Of water-cress,
Which of Thy kindness Thou hast sent:
And my content
Makes those, and my beloved beet,
To be more sweet.
‘Tis Thou that crown’st my glittering hearth
With guiltless mirth;
And giv’st me wassail bowls to drink,
Spiced to the brink.

With Herrick must be coupled in this connection the name of Cowley, of whom Dr. Johnson said, that ‘if he was formed by nature for one kind of writing more than for another, his power seems to have been greatest in the familiar and the festive.’[138] He was perfectly at home with Anacreontics. That on ‘Drinking’ will be remembered:—

Nothing in nature’s sober found,
But an eternal health goes round.
Fill up the bowl then, fill it high.
Fill all the glasses there, for why
Should every creature drink but I?
Why, men of morals, tell me why?

As will also ‘The Epicure’—the ‘bibamus, moriendum est’ of Seneca:—

Fill the bowl with spicy wine,
Around our temples roses twine,
And let us cheerfully awhile
Like the wine and roses smile.
[Pg 196]     *    *    *    *
To-day is ours; what do we fear?
To-day is ours, we have it here.
Let’s banish business, banish sorrow;
To the gods belong to-morrow.

Cowley’s death was accelerated by intemperance if we can rely upon the authority of Pope. The event occurred while Dean Sprat was his guest. They had visited in company a neighbour of Cowley’s, who too amply refreshed them. ‘They did not set out for their walk home till it was too late, and had drunk so deep that they lay out in the fields all night. This gave Cowley the fever that carried him off.’

To the same convivial school belongs Sir Richard Fanshawe, to whom the distress of the monarch provided occasion for a toast:—

Come, pass about the bowl to me;
A health to our distressed king!
Though we’re in hold, let cups go free,
Birds in a cage do freely sing.[139]

And Alexander Brome, whose Mad Lover exemplifies the tyranny of excessive drinking:—

I have been in love and in debt and in drink
This many and many a year;
And those three are plagues enough, one would think,
For one poor mortal to bear.
‘Twas drink made me fall into love,
And love made me run into debt;
And though I have struggled and struggled and strove,
I cannot get out of them yet.

There’s nothing but money can cure me
And rid me of all my pain.
‘Twill pay all my debts
And remove all my lets,
And my mistress that cannot endure me
[Pg 197]Will love me, and love me again;
Then I’ll fall to loving and drinking amain.

(4) A fourth cause of the intemperance of the time was the profusion of taverns. Decker writes that ‘a whole street is in some places but a continuous ale-house, not a shop to be seen between red lattice and red lattice.’[140]

The Lord-keeper Coventry thus speaks of them:—‘I account ale-houses and tippling-houses the greatest pests in the kingdom. I give it you in charge to take a course that none be permitted unless they be licensed; and for the licensed ale-houses, let them be but few and in fit places; if they be in private corners and ill places, they become the den of thieves—they are the public stages of drunkenness and disorder. Let care be taken in the choice of ale-house keepers, that it be not appointed to be the livelihood of a large family. In many places they swarm by default of the justices of the peace.’[141] It may be remarked that by this time inns had become representative; that is, for the most part each inn attracted a particular species of customer. This did not escape the notice of that keen observer Heywood:—

The gentry to the King’s Head,
The nobles to the Crown,
The knights unto the Golden Fleece,
And to the Plough the clown;
The Churchman to the Mitre,
The shepherd to the Star,
The gardener hies him to the Rose,
To the Drum the man of war;
To the Feathers, ladies, you; the Globe
The seamen do not scorn;
The usurer to the Devil, and
The Townsman to the Horn;
[Pg 198]The Huntsman to the White Hart,
To the Ship the merchants go,
But you that do the Muses love
The sign called River Po;
The bankrupt to the World’s End,
The fool to the Fortune hie,
Unto the Mouth the oyster-wife,
The fiddler to the Pie;

The drunkard to the Vine,
The beggar to the Bush, then meet
And with Sir Humphrey dine.

Bishop Earle, whose Microcosmography is accounted a faithful delineation of characters as they existed in the seventeenth century, has bequeathed the following account of a tavern of his date:—‘A tavern is a degree, or (if you will) a pair of stairs above an ale-house, where men are drunk with more credit and apology. If the vintner’s nose be at the door, it is a sign sufficient, but the absence of this is supplied by the ivy-bush. It is a broacher of more news than hogsheads, and more jests than news, which are sucked up here by some spongy brain, and from thence squeezed into a comedy. Men come here to make merry, but indeed make a noise, and this music above is answered with a clinking below. The drawers are the civillest people in it, men of good bringing up, and howsoever we esteem them, none can boast more justly of their high calling. ‘Tis the best theatre of natures, where they are truly acted, not played, and the business as in the rest of the world, up and down; to wit, from the bottom of the cellar to the great chamber. A melancholy man would find here matter to work upon, to see heads, as brittle as glasses, and often broken. Men come hither to quarrel, and come here to be made friends. It is the common consumption of the afternoon, and the murderer or the maker away of a rainy[Pg 199] day. It is the torrid zone that scorches the face, and tobacco the gunpowder that blows it up. Much harm would be done if the charitable vintner had not water ready for the flames. A house of sin you may call it, but not a house of darkness, for the candles are never out; and it is like those countries far in the north, where it is as clear at midnight as at midday. After a long sitting it becomes like a street in a dashing shower, where the spouts are flushing above, and the conduits running below. To give you the total reckoning of it, it is the busy man’s recreation, the idle man’s business, the melancholy man’s sanctuary, the stranger’s welcome, the inns-of-court man’s entertainment, the scholar’s kindness, and the citizen’s courtesy. It is the study of sparkling wits, and a cup of comedy their book, whence we leave them.’

(5) A fifth cause was the perpetuation of Wakes. Complaints were made in all directions of their evil tendency. The author of the Life of John Bruen (1641) laments that ‘Popery and Profannes, two sisters in evil, had consented and conspired in this parish, as in many other places, together to advance their idols against the arke of God, and to celebrate their solemne feastes of their Popish saints by their wakes and vigils, ... in all riot and excesse of eating and drinking.’

The outcry, it is evident, arose rather from the Puritan than the Temperance party, and became so irrepressible that at the Exeter assizes (1627), Chief Baron Walter and Baron Denham made an order for suppression of all wakes. Judge Richardson made a like order for the county of Somerset, 1631. But on Laud’s demurrer the King commanded this order[Pg 200] to be reversed; which the judge declining to do, a report was required by the bishop of the diocese how the feast days, church-ales, wakes, and revels were observed within his jurisdiction. On receipt of these instructions the bishop advised with seventy-two of the most able of his clergy, who certified that on these feast days the service of God was more solemnly performed than on any other days, that the people desired their continuance, as did also the ministers, for that they preserved the memorial of the dedication of their several churches, civilised the people, composed differences, tended to the increase of love and unity, and to the relief of the poor. On the delivery of this certificate Judge Richardson was cited, and peremptorily commanded to reverse his former order. After this, King Charles I. gave new force to his father’s declaration:—

It should here be stated that malice even has not dared to impeach the private morals of Charles I. Chaste and temperate are epithets constantly applied to him. The most convincing testimony to the latter virtue is the statement of A. Wood, that the vintners illuminated at his death, made bonfires, and drank lusty carouses. He had evidently not favoured their trade; but the justice of his cause and the injustice of his treatment were engraven on many a publican’s sign[Pg 201], to which the ‘Mourning Crown and Mitre’ bore witness. The Mourning Bush was the sign set up by John Taylor, the ‘Water-Poet,’ over his tavern in Long Acre, to express his grief at the beheading of the King. But he was compelled to away with it; when, in its place, he put up the Poet’s Head, his own portrait, with this inscription:—

There is many a head hangs for a sign,
Then, gentle reader, why not mine?

The following is the testimony of Clarendon:—

The following lines occur on the signboard of the inn near Hardwicke House, close to Caversham, where Charles I. was kept a prisoner:—

Stop! traveller, stop! In yonder peaceful glade
His favourite game the Royal Martyr played:
Here, stripped of honours—children—freedom—rank,—
Drank from the bowl, and bowled for what he drank;
Sought in a cheerful glass his cares to drown,
And changed his guinea, ere he lost his crown.

But, along with so many incentives to excess, were there no counteractive agencies at work? Th[Pg 202]e reply is that there were. Precept and law were neither silent nor inoperative. It was not for nothing that men like Jeremy Taylor and Usher, Milton and Crashaw, lived and wrote.

Of the first-named writer (chaplain to the king) two quotations must suffice.

Archbishop Usher, treating of the seventh commandment, asks,—

Of Milton, Johnson says that—

But we should certainly infer, pace the good Doctor, that in his earlier years at least he was fond of wine, from his sonnet to Mr. Lawrence, which seems redolent of Horace in his Bacchanalian moods. The sonnet is intensely classical:—

To Mr. Lawrence.

Lawrence, of virtuous father virtuous son,
Now that the fields are dank and ways are mire,
Where shall we sometimes meet, and by the fire
Help waste a sullen day, what may be won
From the hard season gaining? Time will run
On smoother, till Favonius re-inspire
The frozen earth, and clothe in fresh attire
The lily and rose, that neither sow’d nor spun.
What neat repast shall feast us, light and choice,
Of Attic taste, with wine, whence we may rise
To hear the lute well touched, or artful voice
Warble immortal notes and Tuscan air?
He who of those delights can judge, and spare
To interpose them oft, is not unwise.

Also in L’Allegro we are rather disposed to think our poet shows that he was not altogether superior ‘to the spicy nut-brown ale.’ On the other hand, his—also Horatian—sonnet to Cyriac Skinner seems to suggest a somewhat similar idea to Cowper’s ‘cups that cheer but not inebriate,’ though they may refer to moderate drinking:—

To Cyriac Skinner.

Cyriac, whose grandsire, on the royal bench
Of British Themis, with no mean applause
Pronounced and in his volumes taught our laws,
Which others at their bar so often wrench;
[Pg 204]To-day deep thoughts resolve with me to drench
In mirth that after no repenting draws.

On the other hand, he could be no friend to excess who in Paradise Lost, book i., thus speaks of Belial:—

In courts and palaces he also reigns,
And in luxurious cities, where the noise
Of riot ascends above their loftiest towers,
And injury and outrage; and when night
Darkens the streets, then wander forth the sons
Of Belial, flown with insolence and wine.

And again:—

Intemperance on the earth shall bring
Diseases dire, of which a monstrous crew
Before thee shall appear!

What an advocate of prohibition was he who could write,—

Richard Crashaw, of whom it was writ,—

Poet and saint! to thee alone are given
The two most sacred names of earth and heaven,

reckons amongst his many efforts of genius, Temperance, or the Cheap Physician, where, after ridiculing the doctors’ mystic compositions, he asks,—

And what at last shall gain by these?
Only a costlier disease.
That which makes us have no need
Of physic, that’s physic indeed.

It may be remembered that this poet was the author of the epigram whose last line runs,—

[Pg 205]

Lympha pudica Deum vidit, et erubuit.
The modest water saw its God, and blushed.

This epigram was composed by Crashaw when Dryden was an infant, so should not be attributed to the latter.

Some noble lines of the poet James Nicholson are well worthy of record:—

Our homes are invaded with dark desolation,
There’s danger wherever the wine-cup doth flow;
Then pledge your fair hands to resist the temptation,
Nor stain your red lips with those waters of woe.
Lift up your bright glances, put on all your beauty—
Your holy affections—your God-given dower;
Such weapons are mighty—awake to your duty,
The trophies you gather will add to your power.

And, once more,—

I’ll pledge thee not in wassail bowl,
With rosy madness filled;
But let us quaff the nobler wine,
By Nature’s hand distilled.
Where to the skies the mountains rise
In grandeur to the view,
Where sparkling rills leap down the hills,
Our Scotia’s mountain dew.

Thomas Weaver, 1649, writes,—

The harms and mischiefs which th’abuse
Of wine doth every day produce,
Make good the doctrine of the Turks,
That in each grape a devil lurks.

Divines like Hugh Peters declaimed from the pulpit against intemperance. Archbishop Harsnet, founder of Chigwell School, left the regulation respecting the head master, that he be ‘no tippler, no haunter of ale-houses, no puffer of tobacco.’

In addition to abundance of precept, some legislative action is noticeable.

[Pg 206]

In 1627 (3 Charles I.) a fine of twenty shillings, or whipping, is imposed for keeping an ale-house without licence.

In 1687 the vintners were called upon to submit to a tax of a penny a quart upon all the wine they retailed. As they repudiated the demand, a decree was passed in the Star Chamber forbidding them to sell or dress victuals in their houses. Two years after, they were questioned for the breach of this decree, and to avoid punishment they consented to lend the king six thousand pounds, subsequently entering into a composition to pay half the duty which was at first demanded of them.

An Act of 1688 prohibits the retailing of wine in bottles—an Act which must have fostered adulteration. Light wines will not keep long in the cask, and if not bottled at the proper time become useless. The dealer, to avert loss, adopts preventive measures. The door is at once open to fraud and adulteration. Complaints of the latter became now common.

Wines had risen greatly in price. An order in Council of 1633 directs that Canary, Muskadells, and Alligant should be sold in gross at 17l. a pipe, and at 12d. the quart by retail; Sacks and Malaga at 10d. the quart; the best Gascoigne and French wines at 6d. the quart.

In 1643 was established the excise, which was introduced, on the model of the Dutch prototype, by the Parliament after its rupture with the Crown. Originally established in 1643, its progress was gradual, being at first laid upon those persons and commodities where it was supposed that the shoe would least pinch—viz. the makers and venders of ale, beer, cider, and perry. The Royalists at Oxford followed the example set them at Westminster, and imposed a similar duty; both sides protesting that it should be continued no longer than [Pg 207]to the end of the war, and then be abolished. But the Parliament soon after extended its application to many other commodities, and in course of time these champions of liberty declared the impost of excise to be the most easy and indifferent levy that could be laid upon the people, and so continued it during their usurpation. It was afterwards made hereditary to the Crown. Mr. Pymme is considered to have been the father of this impost.

Doubtless there was great occasion for the committee of 1641, which inquired into the general state of the clergy. That there was intemperance in many quarters cannot be denied; but something must be put down to the spirit of the time. Drink was an accessory of everything, and self-restraint was not a constant factor; there could be only one result. The tree was bad, the fruit was bad. That the following extract is now regarded as a curiosity, is itself a proof of very altered manners. The items are taken from the Darlington parochial registers:—

We here pause for a moment to listen to some very thoughtful remarks of Howell, contained in a long epistle to Lord Cliffe, upon the subject of comparative drinkdom.[Pg 208] He writes:—

The condition of things underwent no material change during the Commonwealth and Protectorate, notwithstanding the special pleading of political partisanship.[Pg 209] The state of morals in England and its capital is accurately described in a letter to a French nobleman during the Protectorate:—

And later on, in order to contrast the two countries, the writer adds:—

Other writers of the time notice the participation of the women in the general drinking. M. Jorevin, another French author, writes of a Worcester hotel:—

John Evelyn tells of the execrable habit of making servants drunk. He remarks, under date July 19, 1654:—

The same sort of thing happened to Evelyn again, March 18, 1669:—

[The italics are not Evelyn’s.]

A writer, by name Joseph Rigbie, slashingly exposes intemperance and its incentives, the tavern and toasting:—

The tap-house fits them for a jaile,
The jaile to the gibbet sends them without faile;
For those that through a lattice sang of late
You oft find crying through an iron grate.

And again:—

Yea every cup is fast to others wedged.
They always double drink, they must be pledged.
He that begins, how many so’er they be,
Looks that each one do drink as much as he.

And further on, to the same effect:—

Oh! how they’ll wind men in, do what they can,
By drinking healths, first unto such a man,
Then unto such a woman! Then they’ll send
[Pg 212]An health to each man’s mistresse or his friend;
Then to their kindreds or their parents deare,
They needs must have the other jug of beere;
Then to their captains and commanders stout,
Who for to pledge they think none shall stand out;
Last to the king and queen they’ll have a cruse.
Whom for to pledge they think none dare refuse.[147]

‘We seem,’ wrote Reeve in his Plea for Nineveh, quoted in Malcolm’s Manners and Customs of London, i. p. 286, ‘to be steeped in liquors, or to be the dizzy island. We drink as if we were nothing but sponges ... or had tunnels in our mouths.... We are the grape-suckers of the earth.’

That the ignorant and thoughtless should have been swept into this vortex of dissipation is not surprising, but one marvels that a man of power, and in some sort a philosopher, should have stooped to translate an utterly frivolous and worthless poem of St. Amant, of which a mere quotation is sickening:—

Wine, my boy; we’ll sing and laugh,
All night revel, rant, and quaff;
Till the morn stealing behind us,
At the table sleepless find us.
When our bones (alas!) shall have
A cold lodging in the grave;
When swift death shall overtake us,
We shall sleep and none can wake us.
Drink we then the juice o’ the vine,
Make our breasts Lyæus’ shrine;
Bacchus, our debauch beholding,
By thy image I am moulding,
Whilst my brains I do replenish
With this draught of unmixed Rhenish;
By thy full-branched ivy twine;
By this sparkling glass of wine;
By thy thyrsus so renowned,
By the healths with which th’art crowned;
[Pg 213]    *    *    *    *
To thy frolic order call us,
Knights of the deep bowl install us;
And to shew thyself divine,
Never let it want for wine.

It would be thoroughly to the liking of such a patient that Dr. Tobias Whitaker (1638) should publish his Blood of the Grape, ‘proving the possibility of maintaining Life from Infancy to Old Age without Sickness, by the Use of Wine.’

In point of sobriety the Cavaliers have often been unfavourably contrasted with the Roundheads. The evidence for this, apart from mere recrimination (which in this case is a two-edged sword), has yet to be produced. The manners of the two factions were doubtless diverse. ‘Your friends, the Cavaliers,’ said a Roundhead to a Royalist, ‘are very dissolute and debauched.’ ‘True,’ replied the Royalist, ‘they have the infirmities of men; but your friends the Roundheads have the vices of devils—tyranny, rebellion, and spiritual pride.’ We would fain hope that they were sober all round, and that Cromwell’s description of his troops was unassailable. The mother of Cromwell set up the brewery at Huntingdon which is still flourishing. It was this slight connection with ‘the trade’ which gained for Cromwell the agnomen of ‘the brewer.’

The story is told, ‘a tradition’ (Hume), that one day sitting at table, the Protector had a bottle of wine brought him, of a kind which he valued so highly that he must needs open the bottle himself; but, in attempting it, the corkscrew dropt from his hand. Immediately his courtiers and generals flung themselves on the floor to recover it. Cromwell burst out laughing. ‘Should any fool,’ said he, ‘put in his head at the door, he would fancy, from your posture, that you were seeking the Lord, and you are only seeking a corkscrew.’ One[Pg 214] sees here that Cromwell is addressing his ‘men of religion.’ There was much of it real or unreal; and a curious monument of the fashion then prevalent of giving sacred names to everything and everybody is furnished by the tavern sign of the ‘Goat and Compasses,’ which reveals the naked truth that ‘Praise God Barebones’ preferred drinking his tankard of ale at the tavern whose sign was ‘God encompasseth us’ to any other ale-house. On the other hand it should be noted that, according to the late Thomas Carlyle’s Letters and Speeches of Cromwell, ‘the stories of his wild living while in town ... rest exclusively on Carrion Heath.... Of evidence that he ever lived a wild life about town, or elsewhere, there exists no particle.’

The funeral of the Protector is thus described by Evelyn:—

Club life was becoming more and more unfavourable to sobriety. The ‘Everlasting Club,’ instituted during the Civil War, was especially bibulous and riotous. So much so, that a good-for-nothing devotee of the bottle was satirically dubbed a member of that club. A writer cited by Timbs notes that ‘since their first institution they have smoked fifty tons of tobacco, drank thirty thousand butts of ale, one thousand hogsheads of red port, two hundred barrels of brandy, and one kilderkine of small beer.’ They sat night and day, one party relieving another. The fire was never allowed to go out, being perpetuated by an old woman in the nature of a Vestal. The delight of the members was in ‘old catches which they sang at all hours, to encourage one another to moisten their clay, and grow immortal by drinking.’

[Pg 215]

But Eastern products were soon to create a revolution in the national diet. Sir Anthony Shirley, one of the celebrated trio of brothers, travellers, when he arrived at Aleppo in 1598, first tasted a drink that he described as being made of a seed which will ‘soon intoxicate the brain,’ and which, though nothing toothsome, was wholesome: this was coffee. In 1650 was opened at Oxford the first coffee-house by Jacobs, a Jew, at the Angel, in the parish of St. Peter in the East; and there it was, by some who delighted in novelty, drunk. Hence the antiquary Oldys is incorrect in stating that the use of coffee in England was first known in 1657.

Of course it was a panacea for all ills. An original handbill of Rosee’s, headed, ‘The Vertue of the Coffee Drink,’ thus sounds its praises:—

And indeed its virtues must have been generally conceded, for it became fashionable in the reign of Charles II., and is thus alluded to by Pope, who attributes to it an additional virtue:—

Coffee, which makes the politician wise,
And see through all things with his half-shut eyes.[149]

The authors of the History of Signboards state that the ‘Rainbow,’ in Fleet Street, opposite Chancery Lane, is the oldest coffee-house in London:—

The presentation here alluded to is still preserved among the records of St. Sepulchre’s church. It says:—

Roger North, attorney-general to James II., says:—

[Pg 217]

Chocolate was advertised as a new drink in 1657:—

The reputation of chocolate upon its introduction was fluctuating. This appears in the letters of Madame de Sévigné, who at one time recommends it to her daughter with all fervour, whilst at other times she decries it as the root of all evil.

But however much the introduction into our country of such drinks was destined to discover a rival to intoxicants, the fact remains that the public taste had by the habit of long ages become vitiated, and England had earned for herself the distinction of the ‘land of drunkards.’

True it is that the Protector strove to repress intemperance by fines and punishments. The rigid restrictions of the republican rule were manifested in the strict surveillance maintained over the people, with the view of securing temperance. Convictions for drunkenness were of daily occurrence; and it was often the practice to remove all doubts of the sufficiency of testimony by producing the delinquent in court under the influence of drink. Many are the instances in which it is recorded by the convicting justice that some offender was ‘drunk in my view.’ They were in the habit, moreover, of making nice distinctions as to the grades of intoxication.

The ‘drunkard’s cloak’ was an instrument of punishment [Pg 218]then in use, which might with advantage be revived. It was a cask with a hole at the top, through which the drunkard’s head protruded, and one on each side for either hand. The legs were free for the offender to perambulate with the instrument of disgrace about him.[152]

Some strong language was uttered from the pulpit against drunkenness. Dr. Robert Harris, President of Trinity College, Oxford, in the dedication to the Drunkard’s Cup, a sermon, speaks of the ars bibendi as having become a great profession:—

In the sermon he speaks of ‘the strange saucinesse of base vermine, in tossing the name of his most excellent Majesty in their foaming mouthes, and in daring to make that a shooing-horne to draw on drink by drinking healths to him.’[153]

Dr. Grindrod draws attention in his Bacchus to a prominent appeal of about the same date entitled, The Blemish of Government, the Shame of Religion, the Disgrace of Mankind: ‘or, a charge drawn up against Drunkards, and presented to his highness the Lord Protector, in the name of all the sober party in the three nations,’ by R. Younge. The book is not procurable; but assuming the quotation to be correct the statistic is astounding:—

[Pg 219]

Presuming that Younge’s statement is at all within the mark, it will account for the effort put forth at the London sessions in 1654, wherein it was ordered that ‘no new licences shall be granted for two years.’

Great was the magnificence of the pageant upon the restoration of King Charles II. The conduits flowed with a ‘variety of delicious wines.’ At the Stocks was a fountain, of the Tuscan order, ‘venting wine.’ The event was commemorated at Charing Cross by the sign of the Pageant Tavern, which represented the triumphal arch there and then erected, and which remained some time after. Various were the forms that exuberance assumed. At the rejoicings at Edinburgh for the Restoration, at the Lord Provost’s return he was at every bonfire complimented with the breaking of glasses—one of the concomitant formalities of toasting.

Beyond the natural outburst of rejoicing at so great an occasion, there is abundant corroboration of the remark of Fosbroke, that ‘drinking healths was uncommonly prevalent, and productive of much intemperance, immediately after and on account of t[Pg 220]he Restoration.’ Royalty will be always prominently recognised at our public rejoicings, as a matter of course, and of right. May the health of the Sovereign and Royal Family always be proposed! Always, when the concomitant of drinking it has become obsolete.[154] What a volume could be written on the customs which have gathered about the toasting of our monarchs alone! One of these comes at once to mind in connection with the Second Charles. Pepys, in his Diary (1662-3), describes his own dining at ‘Chirurgeons’ Hall.’ He tells that:—

Another curious circumstance will be mentioned presently in connection with the toasting his successor, James.

But it is time again to review the material of all this rejoicing. At this period of the seventeenth century the importation of French wines into England was two-fifths of her consumption.[155] Mr. Cyrus Redding states that in 1675, there came to England 7,495 tuns of French wine to 20 of those of Portugal; and in 1676 no less than 9,645 French, to 83 Portuguese; soon after which date French wines were prohibited for seven years.[156]

Navarre wine, which the same author mentions among other wines of the Basses Pyrénées as of good [Pg 221]quality, was coming into fashion. Pepys mentions his dining at Whitehall with the Duke of York, who did ‘mightily commend some new sort of wine lately found out, called Navarr wine, which I tasted, and is, I think, good wine.’ Bacharach was becoming a favourite Rhenish wine. Redding tells that German writers pretend that this Bacharach derived its name from the deity of wine, a stone still existing in the river, which they call Bacchus’ altar.

The famous author of Hudibras introduces us to the names of some of these wines which had recently come into vogue:—

Those win the day that win the race;
And that which would not pass in fights,
Has done the feats with easy flights,
Recover’d many a desp’rate campaign
With Bordeaux, Burgundy, and Champaign;
Restor’d the fainting high and mighty
With brandy, wine, and aqua vitæ;
And made ‘em stoutly overcome
With Bacchrach, Hockamore, and Mum.

What a satirist was Butler, of drink, drinkers, everybody!

Of drink:—

Drink has overwhelmed and drowned,
Far greater numbers on dry ground,
Of wretched mankind, one by one,
Than e’er the flood before had done.

Of drinkers—e.g. ‘on a Club of Sots’:—

The jolly members of a toping club,
[Pg 222]Like pipestaves, are but hooped into a tub,
And in a close confederacy link
For nothing else but only to hold drink.

Of everybody (to whom he was politically opposed)—appealing to the Muse:—

Thou that with ale, or viler liquors,
Didst inspire Withers, Prynne, and Vickers,
And force them, though it was in spite
Of Nature, and their stars, to write.[157]

Other light wines are sung of in John Oldham’s Works (1684):—

Let wealthy merchants when they dine,
Run o’er their witty names of wine:
Their chests of Florence and their Mont Alchine,
Their Mants, Champaigns, Chablees, Frontiniacks tell;
Their aums of Hock, of Backrag, and Mosell.

No wonder that the doctors complained that their efforts would be fruitless to patch up constitutions so utterly weather-beaten by heat and wet, as we find from Sir Charles Sedley’s The Doctor and his Patients, where it is told of the family Æsculapius:—

One day he called ‘em all together,
And, one by one, he asked ‘em whether
It were not better by good diet
To keep the blood and humours quiet,
With toast and ale to cool their brains
Than nightly fire ‘em with Champains.

And whilst these wines were injurious to their bodies they failed to give any real or permanent relief to their minds, as even the licentious tragedian of the period, Etheridge, admitted:—

At the plays we are constantly making our court,
And when they are ended we follow the sport
To the Mall and the Park,
[Pg 223]Where we love till ‘tis dark;
Then Sparkling Champagne
Puts an end to their reign;
It quickly recovers
Poor languishing lovers;
Makes us frolic and gay, and drowns all our sorrow;
But alas! we relapse again on the morrow.[158]

We obtain an incidental estimate of the market price of French wine from the Tatler, No. 147, where we read:—

These wines were sold by the candle—i.e. the property was put up by the auctioneer, an inch of candle was lighted, and the last bidder when the light went out was the purchaser.

English vineyards were still here and there attempted. Thus Evelyn (Diary, 1655) ‘went to see Col. Blount’s subterranean warren, and drank of the wine of his vineyard, which was good for little.’

The consumption of French Brandy was very great, and discontent was excited from the notion that the country was suffering from the lack of encouragement to home distillation; permission was accordingly granted to a company to distil brandy from wine and malt.

Besides wine and brandy, ale was drunk in various forms.

Chamberlayne states that in 1667 no less than 1,522,781 barrels of beer were brewed in the city of London, each of them containing from 32 to 36 gallons, and that the amount yearly brewed in London had since risen to nearly 2,000,000 barrels; and that the excise for London was farmed out for 120,000l. a year.[159]

[Pg 224]

Jorevin de Rochefort, whose travels were published at Paris in 1672, says:—‘The English beer is the best in Europe’ (Antiquarian Repertory, vol. iv. p. 607). At Cambridge he had a visit from the clergyman, ‘during which,’ says he, ‘it was necessary to drink two or three pots of beer during our parley; for no kind of business is transacted in England without the intervention of pots of beer.’

At this time people frequently ate no supper but took buttered ale, composed of sugar, cinnamon, butter, and beer brewed without hops. It was put into a cup, set before the fire to heat, and drunk hot.

Cider was again coming into fashion. Butler (Hudibras) tells of Sidrophel that he knew—

... in what sign best sider’s made.

The manufacture being of sufficient moment for reference to astrology.

A new liquor now introduced from Brunswick was a sort of strong beer called Mum, or, sometimes, Brunswick Mum. The word has been derived from mummeln, to mumble, or from the onomatopœic mum, denoting silence, and from Christian Mummer by whom it was first brewed. It was brewed chiefly from malt made from wheat instead of barley. Pope writes of it:—

The clamorous crowd is hush’d with mugs of mum,
Till all, tuned equal, send a general hum.

This foreign drink was rivalled by Dorset beer.[160]

Lastly, we hear still of Metheglin. Pepys (1666) describes his dining with the king’s servants from meat that came from his Majesty’s table, ‘with most brave drink, cooled in ice; and I, drinking no wine, had metheglin, for the king’s own drinking, which did please [Pg 225]me mightilye.’ It was an article of excise.

A good deal has been made of what is termed the reaction in morals after the republican spell. For instance, Mr. Samuelson says (Hist. of Drink):—

One would almost imagine from this, and kindred statements, that vice was unknown to the Protector and his adherents; whereas it is matter of history that Cromwell’s early life was dissolute and disorderly, and that he consumed in gaming, drinking, debauchery, and country riots, the more early years of his youth.[161] The Roundheads liked ale as well as the Cavaliers. Does not Pepys tell of Monk’s troops (Feb. 13, 1659):—‘The city is very open-handed to the soldiers; they are most of them drunk all day’? Surely, then, bias must have possessed Lord Macaulay when he would have us believe that ‘in the Puritan camp no drunkenness was seen.’ Some prefer the evidence of a contemporary.

It is possible to contrast the Courts of the two Charleses, and the contrast is terrible; but was no one responsible besides Charles II. for his wandering life, when he herded with inferiors? If he was a creature of frailty and vice, he was also a creature of circumstance.

Thus much prefaced, let it be freely admitted that drunkenness prevailed in every rank of society, and that the king set the example. Mr. Samuelson adduces from [Pg 226]Evelyn, as an instance, a supper given by the Duke of Buckingham when the Prince of Orange was over on a visit, on which occasion the king made the prince drink hard (though he could not have required much making), under the influence of which, the Dutchman broke the windows of the chambers of the maids of honour, with other mischiefs.

Nor does the famous story in the Spectator impress us with his bias towards temperance. The king had been dining with the Lord Mayor at Guildhall, where his cups did not prevent his observing that conviviality had occasioned familiarity; whereupon, with an abrupt farewell, he left the banquet. The mayor pursued the monarch, overtook him in the courtyard, and swore that he should not go till they had ‘drunk t’other bottle!’ The airy monarch looked kindly at him over his shoulder, and, with a smile and graceful air, repeated the line of the old song:—

And the man that is drunk is as great as a king!

and immediately turned back and complied with his host’s bidding.

But the veil is more thoroughly lifted by Pepys, who notes:—

Again he writes (1661):—

Two of the notables about Court have already been alluded to. Rochester—that is, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester—in the language of Dr. Johnson, ‘blazed out his youth and his health in lavish voluptuousness,’ dying at the age of thirty-three. Some lines of his favour the notion that the origin of the term toasting, as given in the Tatler, may be the correct one. They are:—

Make it so large that, fill’d with sack
Up to the swelling brim,
Vast toasts on the delicious lake,
Like ships at sea, may swim.

A confirmation of the same may be derived from a verse of Warton:—

My sober evening let the tankard bless,
With toast embrown’d, and fragrant nutmeg fraught,
While the rich draught, with oft-repeated whiffs,
Tobacco mild improves.

Of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, the criticism of Dryden must suffice—lines well known:—

Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong,
Was everything by starts and nothing long.
[Pg 228]But in the course of one revolving moon,
Was chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon.
Then all for women, paintings, rhyming, drinking,
Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking.

Another drinking notoriety was Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset (n. 1637, ob. 1684).

Lord Macaulay, in his History of England, chap. vi. has the following description of the same disgraceful event:—

It is perfectly clear that the higher motives for restraint were lacking, though expediency acted as a curb upon occasions. The following passage from Evelyn’s Diary will serve as an illustration:—

[Italics not in the original.]

From the same author we find that the same vice beset women of rank. The Duchess of Mazarine, he observes, is reported to have hastened her death by intemperate drinking of strong spirits.

The Lower House of Parliament seems to have been infected with the moral distemper. Evelyn writes:—

(What made this worse was that Sir Allen Brodericke was an official—Surveyor-General in Ireland to his Majesty.)

But there was a vast amount of drinking that is really intemperance, though it passes under another name. Very apposite are the words of a contemporary, Sir William Temple:—

It is refreshing in reading Johnson’s Lives to come upon a poet really free from a suspicion of fondness for drink. Such a one was Edmund Waller, born 1605, died 1687. Would he have lived so long had he been a drink-hard? Johnson remarks of him:—

An excellent companion for the poet would have been Guy, Earl of Warwick, in whose ‘Tragical History’ occur the lines:—

[Pg 231]

Phillis. Give me some bread. I prithee, father, eat.

Guy. Give me brown bread, for that’s a pilgrim’s meat.

Phillis. Reach me some wine; good father, taste of this.

Guy. Give me cold water, that my comfort is.
I tell you, Lady, your great Lord and I
Have thought ourselves as happy as a king,
To drink the water of a christal spring.

Coffee came into general use in England, according to John Evelyn (Diary), about 1667. But he records, under date May 1637, that ‘one Nathaniel Conopios, out of Greece, from Cyrill, the Patriarch of Constantinople, was the first he ever saw drink coffee.’

Tea became a fashionable beverage in England soon after the marriage of Catharine of Braganza with Charles II. It was not exactly introduced by her, as it was procurable in London some months, at any rate, before her marriage; for Pepys writes:—‘Sept. 28, 1660.—I did send for a cup of tea (a China drink), of which I never had drank before.’ Yet she set the fashion for the use of it. Strickland rightly considers that the use of these simple luxuries, tea, coffee, and chocolate, had gradually a beneficial influence on the manners of all classes of society, by forming a counter-charm against habits of intoxication. Waller wrote a complimentary poem on the queen, commending tea, in which are the lines:—

The best of Queens and best of herbs we owe
To that bold nation, who the way did show
To the fair region where the sun doth rise.

All sorts of things have been scribbled about it, good, bad, and indifferent. The same Waller writes:—

The Muses’ friend, Tea, does our fancy aid,
Repress the vapours which the head invade,
An[Pg 232]d keeps the palace of the soul serene.

Young could write, on the other hand:—

Tea; how I tremble at thy fatal stream!
As Lethe, dreadful to the love of fame.
What devastations on thy banks are seen!
What shades of mighty names which once have been!
A hecatomb of characters supplies
Thy painted altars’ daily sacrifice.

In sympathy with Young would be Dr. Parr, in the well-known line of gallantry:—

Nec tea-cum possum vivere, nec sine te.

or, in mother tongue—

When failing tea, my soul and body thrive,
But failing thee, no longer I survive.

The epigram is still more severe:—

If wine be poison, so is Tea—but in another shape—
What matter whether we are kill’d by canister or grape?

We still plump for tea.

One word before leaving the drink of the Restoration. Some may be curious to inquire the nature of their cups. Pepys, telling of his dining at the Lord Mayor’s banquet, says:—

Chaffers remarks that probably pitchers and large pots were usually made of earth and leather, while the cups, or dishes, out of which the liquor was drunk, were of ash; or sometimes, among the more opulent, from cups or tankards of silver:—

His cupboard’s head six earthen pitchers graced,
Beneath them was his trusty tankard placed.
[Pg 233]Dryden’s Juvenal.

It may be here mentioned that Dryden immensely prided himself on his Bacchanalian song entitled Alexander’s Feast. He wrote to his publisher, ‘I am glad to hear from all hands that my ode is esteemed the best of all my poetry.’ Stanza III. is a sufficient specimen:—

The praise of Bacchus then the sweet Musician sung,
Of Bacchus ever fair and ever young:
The jolly god in triumph comes;
Sound the trumpets; beat the drums!
Flush’d with a purple grace
He shows his honest face.
Now give the hautboys breath; he comes, he comes!
Bacchus, ever fair and young,
Drinking joys did first ordain:
Bacchus’ blessings are a treasure,
Drinking is the soldiers’ pleasure:
Rich the treasure,
Sweet the pleasure,
Sweet is pleasure after pain.

Legislation.

The Wine Acts of Car. II. were those known as 12 Charles and 22 & 23 Charles. Early in his reign he issued that remarkable proclamation, which could not but reflect on his favourite companions and strongly mark the moral disorders of those depraved times.[163] It is against ‘vicious, debauch’d, and profane persons,’ who are thus described:—

Blackstone, speaking of the king’s ordinary revenue, observes that a seventh branch might also be computed to have arisen from wine licences, or the rents payable to the Crown by such persons as are licensed to sell wine by retail throughout England, except in a few privileged places. These were first settled on the Crown by the statute 12 Car. II. c. 25, and, together with the hereditary excise, made up the equivalent in value for the loss sustained by the prerogative in the abolition of the military tenures, and the right of pre-emption and purveyance; but this revenue was abolished by 30 Geo. II. c. 19, and an annual sum of upwards of 7,000l. per annum, issuing out of the new stamp duties imposed on wine licences, was settled on the Crown in its stead.[164]

The prices of wines were fixed anew. By 12 Car. II. it was provided that no canary, muskadel, or aligant, or other Spanish or sweet wines, should be sold by retail for over 1s. 6d. the quart; Gascoigne and French wines limited to 8d. the quart, Rhenish wines to 12d.

We form an idea of the Ingredients put into wines from the order of 12 Car. II. c. 25:—

The excise duties on superior beer was 1s. 3d.; on inferior, 3d.; on a hogshead of cider or perry, 1s. 3d.; on a gallon of mead, ½d.; on a gallon of aqua-vitæ, 1d.; on a gallon of coffee, 4d.; on a gallon of chocolate or tea, 8d. In 1670, brandy had a duty imposed on it of 8d. a gallon when imported.

Upon the accession of

James II.

after the dinner at Guildhall, their Majesties were beset with numerous crowds whose shouts declared their joy. When they reached Ludgate, a rank of loyal gentlemen stood in a balcony, charged with full glasses, which they discharged in such excellent order, that caused all the guards to answer them with a huzza![166]

John Evelyn was ordered by the sheriff to assist in proclaiming the king. He thus describes the event:—

Here is an answer to the question, ‘What is a yard of ale?’ Before the standard measures were in general use, ale was measured out in this ale-yard, which was a [Pg 237]flint-glass a yard long, of sufficient capacity to admit a saccharometer which was a test of its strength and quality.

Many of the old ceremonies observed at the coronation banquets of the early kings were revived by James. Amongst these, the following usage may be noted. After thrice flinging down the gauntlet, the champion made his obeisance to the king, who drank to him from a gilt bowl, which he then returned with the cover. The champion then pledged his Majesty, and rode out of the hall, taking bowl and cover as his fee.

But such ceremonies are not to be taken as any indication of a proneness of the king to high living. Hard drinking he hated. A contemporary writes that:—

Much light has been thrown upon the general habits of the period by Lord Macaulay, who, in describing the English country gentleman of 1688, remarks:—

Mr. Lecky observes:—

More bluntly, of course, than Macaulay, did that scourge of iniquity, Jeremy Collier, express himself. Satirising dinner invitations, he writes:—

That the delights of the table were the one thing needful is well illustrated by a cross-examination recorded by Mr. Jeaffreson[168]:—

The habit of toasting had much to do with the excesses then so common. At the birth of the male heir to the throne, claret was drunk at the expense of the Crown, and endless glasses broken in drinking the health of their Majesties and the Prince Stuart at the Edinburgh town cross. Even the malcontent city of York drank deep potations.

Rhyming toasts were then in fashion. A Court gossip writes to Lady Rachel Russell:—‘I know not whether you have heard a health that goes about, which is new to me just now, so I send it you:—

The King God bless,
And each princess,
The Church no less,
Which we profess,
As did Queen Bess.’

No doubt great abuses attended this habit of health-drinking, or we should not find Dekker, Thomas Hall, and, indeed, the moralists almost to a man, inveighing against the custom. It was only a few years before this reign that the Lord Chief Justice, Sir Matthew Hale, left the injunction to his grandchildren:—

[Pg 240]

What a contrast does Justice Hale present to the merciless Judge Jeffries, whose habitual intemperance may account for his actions. Nor should it be forgotten that Sir Henry Bellasyse, whose widow the king was so anxious to marry, was killed in a duel whilst in a state of intoxication.

A very important reminder is to be found in an Act of 1685, to the effect that—

An event which occurred in this short reign immortalised a roadside inn. The Revolution House, at Whittington, obtained its name from the accidental meeting of the Earl of Danby, the Earl of Devonshire, Lord Delamere, and Mr. John D’Arcy, one morning in 1688, on Whittington Moor, near Chatsworth, to consult about the Revolution, then in agitation. A shower of rain happening to fall, they removed to the village for shelter, and finished their conversation at a public-house called The Cock and Pynot.[169]

A fashionable spirit in this and the following reign was Jamaica Rum. When the Duke of Monmouth was being brought to London as a prisoner, in 1685, he took for a bad cold, at Romsey, while staying on his saddle, a hot glass of rum and eggs. Hot coffee would probably have done him more good. We have already noticed that it came into use in Charles II.’s time. Sir Anthony [Pg 241]Shirley described it as made of a seed which, though nothing toothsome, was wholesome. Pope went further, writing in his Rape of the Lock—

Coffee, which makes the politician wise,
And see through all things with his half-shut eyes.

Upon the accession of

William III.

the usual pageant was observed in London. The conduits ran with wine. The same reception greeted the king shortly after at Oxford. The drinking habits of the monarch are well known, though Evelyn speaks of him as naturally averse to drink. After the death of the queen, he became more addicted to his favourite drink, Hollands gin. The banqueting-house at Hampton Court, which was used by him as a drinking and smoking room, has been described as a royal gin-temple. Enemies he had in abundance, and so intense was their hatred, that, in their hours of debauch, they drank to the health of Sorrel, meaning the horse that fell with the king, and, under the appellation of the ‘little gentleman in velvet,’ toasted the mole that raised the hill over which the horse had stumbled.[170] Let us hope that it was the same hostility that accused the queen of fondness for drink. However this may be, it is certain that her physicians warned her most plainly against a strong spirituous cordial to which she resorted in large doses when ill.

From highest to lowest intemperance raged in the reign of William and Mary. De Foe remarks:—

[Pg 242]

From highest to lowest, we repeat, intemperance raged. Andrew Fletcher, of Saltoun, writing upon the curse and terrorism of mendicancy, complains that many thousands of beggars ‘meet together in the mountains, where they feast and riot for many days; and at country weddings, markets, burials, and the like public occasions, they are to be seen, both men and women, perpetually drunk, cursing, blaspheming, and fighting together.’[172]

The dissoluteness of the time found its expression, not only upon the stage, but among the actors themselves. Terribly significant is the following note by Derrick on a play written by Higden, to whom Dryden wrote a poetical epistle:—

Even the offices of religion enjoyed no immunity. Apart from the annual item of ‘communion wine,’ a by no means uncommon charge upon the parish was ‘wine for the vestry.’ A dignitary of the Church, evidently of the Mapes and Still species, thought it not beneath the dignity of his office to compose the bibulous epigram:—

Si bene commemini, causæ sunt quinque bibendi;
Hospitis adventus; præsens sitis; atque futura;
Et vini bonitas; et quælibet altera causa.[174]

which has been rendered into English:—

If all be true that I do think,
There are five reasons we should drink:
Good wine, a friend, or being dry,
Or lest we should be by-and-by,
Or any other reason why.

Plenty of voices were raised against the current vice. By far the most powerful warning was uttered by the Rev. Dr. William Assheton, Fellow of Brasenose,[175] who opens his discourse thus fearlessly:—

He reminds that the Act of Parliament calls the sin of drunkenness ‘odious and loathsom.’ He urges:—

He refers to Isaiah v. 11, 22, Prov. xxiii. 29, Luke xxi. 34, Rom. xiii. 13. He dilates on the sad consequence of excess to soul, body, estate, and good name. He asks:—

And again:—

A medical writer, Dr. Richard Carr, inveighed, not only against strong drink, but against tobacco, milk, and nurses![176] And something may even be learnt from the once famous Tom Brown, classed by Thackeray with Thomas D’Urfey and Ned Ward, a writer of libels and [Pg 245]ribaldry, but a man of humour and learning, from whose Laconics many a useful maxim may be culled. The following extract is not unworthy of Joseph Hall:—

Before estimating the causes of the prevalent declension of morals, it will be necessary to examine the legislation at the close of this seventeenth century, with which it was intimately associated.

Partly through hostility to France, and partly to encourage the home distilleries, the Government of the Revolution, in 1689, prohibited the importation of spirits from all foreign countries, and threw open the distillery trade, on payment of certain duties, to all its subjects. These measures laid the foundation of the great extension of the English manufacture of spirits.[177] Any person was permitted to set up a distillery, on giving ten days’ notice to the excise. The consequence of this was a general thriving of the distillery business, with a corresponding deterioration of the people. Indeed, legislative modification was soon found to be absolutely necessary to counteract the influence of these baneful measures upon health, sobriety, and public order.

We scarcely wonder that the king enthusiastically encouraged the new distilleries, although the measure was a reversal of all previous policy. From the Norman period downwards, the laws of the land had prohibited [Pg 246]the conversion of malt into spirit, except a trifling quantity for medicinal uses. Elizabeth had so strictly enforced this statute as to treat an infringement of it as a moral offence.

A change so disastrous could not escape condemnation. The discursive Whiston, in his autobiographical Memoirs, laments:—

By the 5th & 6th of William and Mary, the duties were raised in 1694 to 4s. 9d. on strong, and 1s. 3d. on table beer. In 1695, the Commons resolved that a sum not exceeding 515,000l. should be granted for the support of the civil list for the ensuing year, to be raised by a malt tax, and additional duties upon mum, sweets, cyder, and perry. In 1691, owing to the tension with France, further supplies were raised by impositions which included in their number a duty of sixpence a bushel on malt, and a further duty on mum, cyder, and perry.

The price of claret rose rapidly when war with France broke out. Soon the clarets were exhausted. A substitute had to be found, and was discovered in the red wine of Portugal, then imported for the first time.

‘Some claret, boy!’—‘Indeed, sir, we have none.
Claret, sir.—Lord! there’s not a drop in town.
[Pg 247]But we have the best red port.’—‘What’s that you call
Red port?’—‘A wine, sir, comes from Portugal;
I’ll fetch a pint, sir.’

The next quotation throws light upon its composition:—

Mark how it smells. Methinks, a real pain
Is by its odour thrown upon my brain.
I’ve tasted it—‘tis spiritless and flat,
And has as many different tastes
As can be found in compound pastes.[179]

We are now in a position to determine the causes of the prevalent intemperance at the close of the seventeenth century:—

1. The Act to encourage distillation.

2. The exhaustion of light wines.

3. The influence of the Court.

4. The development of toasting.

5. Club life.

It remains only to notice the last two of the causes.

Toasting was carried to an utter absurdity. Chamberlayne thus accounts for the fashion:—

An observant Frenchman, M. Misson, who in 1698 published his observations on England and the English, referred particularly to the custom of toasting—a custom [Pg 248](as he declared) almost abolished amongst French people of any distinction. He noticed that, with ourselves, to have drunk at table without making it the occasion of a toast would have been considered an act of gross discourtesy. The mode of observing the ceremony was that the person whose health was drunk remained perfectly motionless from the moment his name was uttered until the conclusion of the health. Or, as Misson sarcastically describes it:—

It is questionable if Misson was strictly correct in stating that health-drinking had gone out in good French society. Not long before this, Pepys had made this entry in his Diary:—

On a sort of progress through the country that William III. made in 1695, he was entertained, among other places, at Warwick Castle, by Lord Brook. ‘Guy’s Tower was illuminated. A cistern containing a hundred [Pg 249]and twenty gallons of punch was emptied to his Majesty’s health.’[182]

A good specimen of the convivial songs of the Jacobites at this time is to be found in Sir Walter Scott’s collection. It is entitled:—

Three Healths.

To ane king and no king, ane uncle and father,
To him that’s all these, yet allowed to be neither;
Come, rank round about, and hurrah to our standard;
If you’ll know what I mean, here’s a health to our landlord!

To ane queen and no queen, ane aunt and no mother,
Come, boys, let us cheerfully drink off another;
And now, to be honest, we’ll stick by our faith,
And stand by our landlord as long as we’ve breath.

To ane prince and no prince, ane son and no bastard,
Beshrew them that say it! a lie that is fostered!
God bless them all three; we’ll conclude with this one,
It’s a health to our landlord, his wife, and his son.

To our monarch’s return one more we’ll advance,
We’ve a king that’s in Flanders, another in France;
Then about with the health, let him come, let him come, then,
Send the one into England, and both are at home then.[183]

And, lastly, the Clubs. Such was their influence that Doran even wrote:—‘The Clubs ... were the chief causes that manners were as depraved as they were.’[184] But it must be remembered that they were effect as well as cause. The Calves’ Head Club was probably as bad as any. Out of a calf’s skull filled with wine, the company drank ‘to the pious memory of those worthy patriots who killed the tyrant.’ An anniversary anthem was sung. That for the year 1697 concludes thus:—

[Pg 250]

Advance the emblem of the action,
Fill the calf’s skull full of wine;
Drinking ne’er was counted faction,
Men and gods adore the wine.
To the heroes gone before us,
Let’s renew the flowing bowl;
While the lustre of their glories
Shines like stars from pole to pole.[185]

Another famous club was supposed to obtain its name from the custom of pledging favourites after dinner. Thus, Arbuthnot writes:—

Whence deathless Kit-kat took his name,
Few critics can unriddle;
Some say from pastry-cook it came,
And some from Cat and Fiddle.

From no trim beaus its name it boasts,
Grey statesmen or green wits,
But from this pell-mell pack of toasts
Of old Cats and young Kits.

In the year 1703, which was the second year of

Queen Anne,

the famous Methuen treaty was formed; war between England and France again driving us to Portuguese vintages. And thus was cancelled one of the effects of the Peace of Ryswick, which allowed the reopening of trade with France. It was during this short open-trade period that Farquhar produced his aptly named tragedy, Love and a Bottle. In this comedy we are for the first time introduced to champagne as a vin mousseux, or sparkling wine. In act ii. scene 2, the lodgings of Mockmode, a country squire, are represented; he is conversing with his landlady, Widow Bullfinch:—

[Pg 251]

The widow having retired, Club, Mockmode’s servant, re-enters with a bottle and glasses.

Evident allusion is here to the effervescence of champagne.

In his Constant Couple, we have:—

Malice ne’er spoke in generous Champaign.

But champagne, we have said, suffered like other French wines from the War of Succession and the Methuen treaty. By this treaty we were bound to receive Portuguese wines in exchange for our woollen [Pg 252]goods, and to deduct from the duty on importation one-third of the rate levied on French wines. The new demand led to an extension of Portuguese vineyards. The demand continued to increase; the supply was forthcoming, but too often with an article grossly mixed and adulterated. Counterfeits poured into this country, especially from Guernsey, and home manufactures of spurious wine abounded. Mr. Cyrus Redding, an acknowledged authority, in his treatise on French wines, inveighs against what he considers the short-sighted policy of our ministers in this reign. He says:—

Of the manners of the time we have abundant sources of information. An interesting description is given by Grose of the little country squire of about 300l. a year in Queen Anne’s days:—

But Christmas was not what it had been. It struggled, almost in vain, to overcome the check it had sustained during the Commonwealth. Private hospitality and festivities were recovering, but the pageants and masks in the royal household and at the Inns of Court had received a death-blow. At the close of the century, a revel, which would once have been regarded as routine, was thought worthy to be recorded in a diary. Evelyn notes a riotous Christmas at the Inner Temple as late as 1697.

Such a falling off formed a common lament of the poets:—

Gone are those golden days of yore,
When Christmas was a high day;
Whose sports we now shall see no more,
‘Tis turn’d into Good Friday.[188]

To the same effect:—

Black jacks to every man
Were filled with wine and beer;
No pewter pot nor can
In those days did appear.

Good cheer in a nobleman’s house
Was counted a seemly show;
We wanted no brawn nor souse,
[Pg 254]When this old cap was new.[189]

Perhaps the most sensible festivities of this period were certain annual feasts in London for natives of the several counties. The London Gazette, for May 30 to June 3, 1700, advertises ‘the annual feast for gentlemen of the county of Huntingdon.’ Another number announces ‘the anniversary feast for the gentlemen, natives of the county of Kent.’ On such occasions, bygone times would be recounted, mutual friends discussed, and the absent not forgotten in a toast.

Burton ale was celebrated at least as early as 1712. So remarks a writer who had probably found in the Spectator, No. 383, the remark:—‘We concluded our walk with a glass of Burton ale, and a slice of hung beef.’ Had he forgotten that the author of Ivanhoe carries back the fame of Burton ale to a date before the time of Richard I.? And the accuracy of Sir Walter is remarkable, for, in 1295, Matilda, daughter of Nicholas de Shobenhale, ‘released to the Abbot and Convent of Burton-on-Trent that service and custody of their abbey gate, together with the custody and annual rent thereto belonging, and all the tenements within and without the town of Burton which came to her by inheritance from Walter de Scobenhale.... For which release they granted her daily for life two white loaves from the monastery, two gallons of conventual beer, or cider, if they drank it, and one penny; also seven gallons of beer for the men,’ &c. These ales were brewed on the abbey premises, where probably the abbots had their own maltings: as it was a common covenant in leases of mills, where were abbey property, for the malt of the lords of the manor to be ground free.[190]

It is truly sad to contemplate the stream of talent[Pg 255] which was polluted at this time by unrestrained indulgence in strong drink. The infernal compounds which were substituted for the light wines of a previous age played infinite havoc, not only with the Mohocks of aristocracy, but with the giants of intellect. Of the Court itself, Macaulay writes:—

Of Harley, Earl of Oxford, who was successively Speaker of the House of Commons, Secretary of State, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Lord High Treasurer, and who will always be remembered as the collector of the Harleian Manuscripts, the same author, Macaulay, writes, that he was in the habit of ‘flustering himself daily with claret, which was hardly considered as a fault by his contemporaries.’[192]

Among the reasons given by the queen to the cabinet for dismissing her Lord Treasurer, she alleges that he neglected all business, was seldom to be understood; that when he did explain himself, she could not depend upon the truth of what he said; that he never came to her at the time she appointed: that he often came drunk.[193]

Notorious as a drunkard in high places was Lord Mohun, who was twice tried for committing murder whilst in a state of intoxication. The duel between this lord and the Duke of Hamilton—the wives of whom were sisters at variance—is spoken of as probably the last of the kind where the seconds were expected to engage [Pg 256]as well as the principals, and fight to the death.

There is a wide discrepancy between the writings and the reputed actions of Joseph Addison. He was fond of wine, and indulged in it. His contemporary, Swift, acknowledges the weakness. Dr. Johnson does not conceal it. Macaulay laments the fact, Thackeray glories in it.[194] His biographer, Miss Aikin, is almost singular in trying to defend him from the imputation. She refers to the tone and temper, the correctness of taste and judgment, of his writings in proof of his sobriety, and doubts whether a man stained with the vice of intoxication would have dared to write the essay on drunkenness in the Spectator [No. 569]. But the facts leave no room for doubt. He was from his youth a great man for toasts. Verses are extant, in honour of King William, from which we learn that it was his custom to toast that king in bumpers of wine. In a letter written at the age of 31 (1703), ‘to Mr. Wyche, his Majesty’s Resident at Hambourg,’ he says:—

So much from himself. Dr. Johnson remarks of him:—

[Pg 257]

And yet this was the man who could declare that ‘temperance and abstinence, faith and devotion, are in themselves, perhaps, as laudable as any other virtues.’[195] His essay on Drunkenness, in the Spectator, might well have proceeded from the pen of Hall or Taylor, Decker or Wither. He exclaims:—

And more to the same effect. But a passage of his, to be found elsewhere, is far more terribly telling:—

Addison did another good service in exposing, in the Tatler,—

Adulteration.

He says (No. 131):—

[Pg 259]

But adulteration was no new expedient. In the reign of Edward III., a law was enacted, imposing penalties on adulterations, and directing that an essay of all the wines imported should be made, at least twice a year in every town.

In 1426, Sir John Rainewell, mayor, received information that the Lombard merchants were guilty of malpractices in the adulteration of wines; upon inquiry, he ascertained that the charge was well founded, and ordered that the noxious compound, to the quantity of 150 butts, should be thrown into the kennel.

In the sixteenth century, a similar enactment was passed in the fifth year of Mary. Much dread is expressed of adulteration of good wine, either with inferior wines or water, the penalty on discovery being the loss of their whole stock.

In the seventeenth century Sir William Hawkins writes:—

Henderson observes that according to the Custom House Books of Oporto, for the year 1812, 135 pipes and 20 hogsheads of wine were shipped for Guernsey. In the same year, there were landed at the London Docks alone 2,545 pipes and 162 hogsheads from that island, reported to be port wine.

The subject of adulteration is much too large to attempt to do any justice thereto; it must suffice to draw attention to one or two specimens. The authorities shall be disinterested.

The following receipt for Port is from a wine guide:—

In the Mechanics’ Magazine is given the chemical analysis of a bottle of cheap Port:—

Mr. Cyrus Redding, in his work on Modern Wines, lets us into the secrets of cheap Sherry:—It ‘is mingled with Cape wine and cheap brandy, the washings of brandy casks, sugar candy, bitter almonds, &c. The colour, if too great, is taken out by the addition of a small quantity of lamb’s blood; it is then passed off for best sherry.’

[Pg 261]

Professor Mulder, in his Chemistry of Wine, tells that during the process of wine-clearing such aids as albumen, blood, cream, gypsum, marble, nutgalls, lime, salt, gum-arabic, sulphuric acid, &c., are furnished.

The scientific writer Dunovan, in his Domestic Economy, makes us acquainted with a few of the drugs with which beer is doctored.

But the subject is, like the frauds practised, without a limit; references can only be subjoined.[196]

The principal writer in the Tatler, that censor morum, Richard Steele, was a prominent figure in the convivial circle. Wine and extravagance were his bane. He loved drink and was fond of acknowledging it. The author of the Christian Hero wrote his devotional treatise in drink and in debt. The arrival of a hamper of wine could interrupt his moments of tenderest grief. The emotions were forgotten as he sent for his friends, [Pg 262]who join him in drinking ‘two bottles apiece, with great benefit to themselves, and not separating till two o’clock in the morning.’

A story told of him by Dr. Hoadley is characteristic of the man:—

One of his own letters to Mrs. Scurlock reveals the man:—

Matthew Prior, the poet, demands a notice. Whether he was the son of a vintner or a joiner is a moot point. He was certainly nephew to Samuel Prior, landlord of the Rummer Tavern at Charing Cross, at which house, in 1685, was held the annual feast of the nobility and gentry living in the parish of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. By this uncle he was brought up and sent to Westminster School, after which he was employed, it is said, at his uncle’s as server. Taken up by Lord Dorset, his career was remarkable, as author, as secretary to successive embassies, as member of Parliament, as favourite of the king. Dr. Johnson remarks that a survey of Prior’s life and writings may exemplify a sentence which he doubtless understood well when he read Horace at his uncle’s:—

Mrs. Barbauld informs us, that having spent the evening with Oxford, Bolingbroke, Pope, and Swift, he would go to Long Acre and there drink a bottle of ale with a common soldier and his wife. Thus does the dog return to his vomit. Swift has left us a lively picture of manners in his descriptive breakfast with my Lady Smart at 11 a.m. Lord Smart, who was absent at the levee, returns to dinner at 3 p.m. to receive the guests. Seven of them dined, and were joined by a country baronet, who had no appetite, having already eaten a beefsteak and drunk two mugs of ale, besides a tankard of March beer when he got up in the morning. They drank claret, which the host said should always be drunk after fish, and my Lord Smart particularly recommended some cider to my Lord Sparkish. When the host called for wine, he nodded to one or other of his guests, and said, ‘Tom Neverout, my service to you.’ After the first course came pudding. Wine and small beer were drunk during this second course.... After the puddings came the third course.... Beer and wine were freely[Pg 264] imbibed during this course, the gentlemen always pledging somebody with every glass which they drank.... After the goose, some of the gentlemen took a dram of brandy. Dinner ended, Lord Smart bade the butler bring up the great tankard full of October to Sir John. The great tankard was passed from hand to hand and mouth to mouth; but when pressed by the noble host upon the gallant Tom Neverout, he said, ‘No faith, my lord, I like your wine, and won’t put a churl upon a gentleman. Your honour’s claret is good enough for me.’ The cloth removed, a bottle of Burgundy was set down, of which the ladies were invited to partake before they went to tea. When they left, fresh bottles were brought, the ‘dead men’—meaning the empty bottles—removed, and ‘D’you hear, John? bring clean glasses,’ my Lord Smart said. On which the Colonel said, ‘I’ll keep my glass; for wine is the best liquor to wash glasses in.’

It was at this time that the works were published of one who was at once the creature and exponent of the times, Edward (better known as Ned) Ward. Campbell observes that ‘his works give a complete picture of the mind of a vulgar but acute cockney. His sentiment is the pleasure of eating and drinking.’[197] Ward possessed two qualifications for his depiction of manners; he was a tavern-keeper, and a poet. At any rate his doggerel secured him notice in the Dunciad. His Secret History of Clubs is the authority for that kind of life at the beginning of the eighteenth century. His London Spy describes the coffee-houses of the day:—‘In we went (says he), where a parcel of muddling muckworms were as busy as so many rats in an old cheese-loft; some going; some coming; some scribbling, some talking,[Pg 265] some drinking, some smoking, others jangling; and the whole room stinking of tobacco, like a Dutch scoot or a boatswain’s cabin.’

Some of the famous taverns are also described in this work, such as the ‘Angel’ in Fenchurch Street, ‘where the vintner, like a double-dealing citizen, condescended as well to draw carman’s comfort, as the consolatory juice of the vine.’ The ‘Rose,’ in the Poultry, has gained a reputation:—‘There in a snug room, warmed with brash and faggot, over a quart of good claret, we laughed over our night’s adventure.’

Convivial life at the Universities may find its illustration in the person of Bentley.

The following is told about Lord Cartaret and Bentley, in Monk’s Life of Bentley, vol. ii. p. 324 (2nd edit. 1833).

Lord Cartaret was a great scholar, and, being an old Westminster boy, especially fond of Terence, which Dr. Bentley had edited. Kippis relates this anecdote, in the Biographia Britannica, vol. ii. p. 280:—

Kippis, however, ought not to have called Lord Cartaret’s mother Lady Granville, as her son was the first Lord Granville, to which title he was not yet appointed. She was the Dowager Lady Cartaret.

[Pg 266]

Bentley himself ‘is stated to have been an admirer of good port wine, while he thought contemptuously of claret, which, he said, “would be port if it could.”’[198]

We infer also that Bentley did not despise ale. At any rate a great quantity was drunk at the lodge of the Master.

In 1710, when the Fellows appealed against Bentley to the Visitor of Trinity, the Bishop of Ely, this was one of the counts:—

The Fellows greatly protested against all this. And Dr. King, an old opponent of Bentley’s, made great stock of the immense consumption of bread, beer, and fuel in Bentley’s lodge:—

What the excellent bishop describes as ‘an immeasurable rotundity of person’ seems to have been far from uncommon in the Universities in these high days. We [Pg 267]read in a note in Monk’s book, vol. ii. p. 394:—

We have certainly in Pope’s Dunciad also an allusion to Bentley’s love of port (book iv.) in the following lines:—

As many quit the streams[201] that murmuring fall,
To lull the sons of Margaret and Clare-hall,
Where Bentley late tempestuous wont to sport
In troubled waters, but now sleeps in port.[202]

Pope always seemed to have disliked Bentley. But these lines, and, still more, Pope’s note, rather imply that Bentley liked his port.

But everybody was not a bon-vivant. Many were in the world, but not of it. What a contrast to the authors quoted was John Philips, the author of Cyder, a Poem.[203] And it is a poem worth reading. Johnson calls it a Georgic after the manner of Virgil, nor does it suffer from the comparison. The advice contained in it is excellent. It praises use, it condemns abuse. It well serves temperance. Thus in book ii., after praising Nature for her annual gifts, which tend to the exhilaration of languid minds, he continues:—

Within
The golden Mean confined: beyond, there’s naught
[Pg 268]Of health, or pleasure. Therefore, when thy Heart
Dilates with fervent joys, and eager soul
Prompts to persue the sparkling glass, be sure
‘Tis time to shun it; if thou wilt prolong
Dire compotation, forthwith Reason quits
Her Empire to Confusion, and Misrule,
And vain Debates; then twenty Tongues at once
Conspire in senseless Jargon, naught is heard
But din, and various clamour, and mad Rant:
Distrust, and Jealousie to these succeed,
And anger-kindling Taunt, the certain Bane
Of well-knit Fellowship. Now horrid Frays
Commence, the brimming glasses now are hurled
With dire intent; Bottles with Bottles clash
In rude Encounter.
    *    *    *    *
Nor need we tell what anxious cares attend
The turbulent Mirth of Wine; nor all the kinds
Of Maladies, that lead to Death’s grim cave,
Wrought by Intemperance: joint-racking Gout,
Intestine stone, and pining Atrophy,
Chill, even when the sun with July Heats
Frys the scorch’d soil; and Dropsy all afloat,
Yet craving Liquids.

When a poet could thus write, there is no wonder that divines should have used still stronger language. John Disney, in a powerful treatise,[204] agitates for the execution of the laws against immorality. His remarks on the Sunday closing of public-houses are especially applicable now:—

Bishop Beveridge, who died in Anne’s reign, wrote an important sermon on ‘The Duty of Temperance and Sobriety.’[205] He says:—

The legislation of the reign was not important. The 1st Anne permitted tradesmen whose principal dealings were in other goods to sell spirits by retail, without a licence, provided they did not allow tippling in their shops or houses.

Another law enacted in this reign allowed French wines and other liquors to be imported in neutral bottoms. Without this expedient it was believed that the revenue would have been insufficient to maintain the government.