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

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]

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.

[Pg vi]
[Pg vii]

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]

[Pg 1]

NINETEEN CENTURIES OF DRINK IN ENGLAND.

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]

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]

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.’

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]

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.

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]

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.

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.