- So, it's my great pleasure tonight
to introduce Dr. Caroline Boswell.
She is an Associate Professor and she's also
Chair of the Humanistic Studies unit at UW-Green Bay.
She came here from Brown University,
where she received her PhD in Early Modern British History.
At UWGB she offers several history courses on Europe,
and the Atlantic World, as well as interdisciplinary courses
on European Culture, and the Digital and Public Humanities.
She's doing some great work on Digital Humanities here.
Her research delves into the intersections
between the politics of everyday life,
such as interpersonal squabbles and neighborly one-upping
and larger political and social crises.
Her forthcoming book, "Disaffection and Everyday Life
in Interregnum England,"
explores such issues in England,
when, after having executed King Charles I,
England became a commonwealth and then a protectorate
under Oliver Cromwell.
At the local ale houses and taverns across the country,
former rituals of comradery and sociability
became wrought with tensions and strife
as civil war and revolution undermined
the age-old practices of sociability,
such as drinking a health to the king.
Today's talk will draw on her research
as Caroline discusses the political and social lives
of these early drinking establishments
which are the precursors to the famous and beloved
English pubs.
And I had the great pleasure of hearing Caroline
talk about this earlier at her presentation
at the Neville Museum, and what struck me
about that presentation and why I know
that you're going to enjoy her talk tonight,
is the enthusiasm and the passion
she has for her chosen field of scholarship.
It's always a sincere pleasure for me to hear
faculty members talk about their work
with such great enthusiasm.
Caroline is another great example of the quote
by William Wordsworth, who describes the faculty so well:
"What we [have] love[d] others will love
and we will show them how."
So please join me in welcoming Doctor Caroline Boswell
as she shows us how to love what she loves,
Old English Pubs.
(applause)
- Thank you, Sue.
That's such a nice introduction.
Thank you all for coming today.
So as Sue mentioned, I'm a historian of what's called
"Interregnum England," which is the period after
they execute the king, in which they're experimenting
with various governments.
And, in fact, I am not a historian of drinking,
though I'm often introduced as such.
It's just because I do have a chapter that deals with
the politics of drinking during this very tremulous time.
And necessarily then, I have embraced my personal interest
in social drinking houses.
And so today what I'm hoping to do
is kind of combine that personal interest
with my academic expertise to offer you
a broader study of what these institutions were like
during the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period.
And, in fact, right away, let's talk a little bit
something about the name.
Public house, they weren't owned by the state,
despite the fact they're called public houses.
They were public houses because they were open
to the public. Right?
And so, therefore, they had to provide
very specific services to be licensed.
And that's where the name "pub" comes from.
It's a short version of "public house."
And many public houses across England
claim to be the first public house ever.
"The Guinness Book of World Records" awards it to
Ye Olde Fighting Cocks, right.
And the claim comes from the foundations actually.
So, what they're claiming is that part of the foundation
comes from the 8th century.
So be careful, if you're ever in England.
If they're claiming they're of a certain date,
they're probably talking about one tiny cornerstone
of their foundation being from the 8th, 9th,
10th or 11th century, but most likely,
the building itself is much, much older.
And in fact, the name should right away tell you
that this is not the original name.
During the Medieval and Early Modern Period
they would not call anything "Ye Olde."
That is a Victorian affectation.
When Victorians became very fascinated with the past,
the folklore of English history, they decided to reinvent
Middle and Old English and they totally bastardized it.
So, just so you know, anyplace that's claiming,
Ye Olde Tavern has been around, right away
you should say since maybe the 19th century.
But of course, these places are iconic.
If you've potentially been to one or if you've been
to a replica of one in the United States,
you know that these are vital to the social lives
of English people and it was the case during
the Medieval and early Modern Period as well,
but potentially, for some similar and different reasons.
One of the reasons these places existed
was because drink, as they called alcoholic beverages,
were an everyday necessity.
Quite literally, everyone drank,
except the poorest of the poor.
And a lot of historians have argued
that everyone drank, it was because water was impure.
And therefore, beer was safer to drink.
But in order for beer to be safe they had to,
of course, purify the water, so that's not really the case.
Sure, there were some problems with the water,
but the problem was that water was tinged with poverty.
It was only the poorest of the poor
who couldn't afford drink.
And therefore, most people drank some kind of
alcoholic beverage, and in England that was largely beer,
unhopped ale, cider, or perry.
And there were different strengths of drink at this time.
You had small beer, which would be a weaker beer,
often brewed by pouring additional hot water
on top of the original mash from the first brew.
You had middle beer, which would be, you know,
the first batch of relatively strong beer.
And then you had strong beer.
And this was really what we would call high-gravity beer.
And of course, people at the time drank all three kinds
depending on the time of day it was.
You probably drank small beer in the morning,
and then maybe middle and strong beer
over the course of your day.
And a lot of it depended on your occupation.
For a long time, historians assumed that poor people
and especially day laborers, perhaps farm hands,
drank only small beer, but in fact, they often
drank strong beer because, part of the reason
drink was an everyday necessity, was that it's,
as we know, high in calories, right.
And so, actually, land owners would fight
for the best farm hands by offering the strongest beer
because that would actually be part of your pay.
And this would be, you know, legendary
or it would be passed down by rumor
that such-and-such a farm, if you labored there,
had the strongest beer on offer.
And now, people have asked me, how exactly was it
that people were able to be productive
if they were drinking particularly strong beer?
And that is a question that historians
have not quite answered yet.
(laughter)
But there's a lot of evidence
that the beer was brewed quite strong.
In fact, there's one historian who's claimed
that the beer was the fuel
of the Early Modern English economy,
because it was an agrarian society
and it was men who powered it, right.
And so, beer was their fuel.
So there's quite a bit of evidence
that they actually did drink their beer quite strong.
And so, part of the reason these places
were so prolific at this time,
and I mean prolific, there were many of these places,
was because they offered necessities.
And in fact, to be licensed, as I mentioned,
they had to.
I don't know if you know this,
but we have the third number,
or we have the third-highest rating
when it comes to the ratio of taverns per capita
across the United States.
So I think maybe some of you probably thought
it was number one, we're number three.
And it's about one tavern per every 1,800 individuals.
And that's a lot, but in the Early Modern Period
it was much, much higher and part of that, of course,
is because of the way in which these places
were offering necessities.
And part of it, of course, is the problem of traveling.
We can travel a little bit farther now in our cars
than they could have in the Late Medieval
and Early Modern Era.
So what brought these people to taverns, pubs?
And in fact, I'm gonna go ahead and stop using
the term pub because it's a bit anachronistic.
Even though the idea of a public house existed
in the Medieval and Early Modern Era,
they didn't call them that until the late 18th,
early 19th centuries.
They very specifically had three different types
of drinking establishments.
They had inns, they had taverns,
and they had ale houses.
And they did serve different clientele,
though, of course, there would be overlapping.
And they had different purposes.
So first, let's start with the inns
which were kind of on the top of the social scale.
Inns were large establishments.
Innkeepers were relatively wealthy.
Sometimes they even participated in local politics.
And they catered to a wealthier clientele.
So we're talking about merchants here,
Yeoman farmers, the well-to-do, what's called
the middling class, during this time.
You're not going to find your dukes or kings here.
The toffs don't go to where the ordinary people hang out.
But still, you're gonna be talking about
relatively wealthy people.
And they're going to be attending inns
largely because they need sustenance, right,
and they need a place to stay.
So inns, in order to be licensed, obviously
had to offer accommodations to people.
They had to have stables, which again, suggests
they're wealthy clientele if you can afford a horse.
And, of course, you had to have food.
But additionally, what people wanted
was access to private rooms.
Not just to sleep, but to socialize
because they didn't necessarily want to mix
with the general population that might be attending
the inn at any given time.
And so, they very much cater to a specific,
more elite class and as such they offer
more beverages than, say, an ale house.
They're gonna offer wine in addition
to beer, ale, and potentially cider and perry,
depending on what part of England you're in.
Part of the reason they also catered to merchants, too,
is because merchants would like to do a lot
of back-door dealing, trading at the inns
versus having to do it out in an open market
in order to make more money.
So merchants were big fans of the inn.
Next on, I guess you could say, the social ladder,
would be taverns, right.
And this is closer to what we conceive of
when we think of pubs, or public houses.
Taverns, again, catered to relatively well-to-do,
as they would call them, people in the Early Modern Period.
They specifically sold wine, though you could, of course,
purchase beer there as well, but you went to the tavern
to purchase wine.
And wine was more expensive in England than beer
because it was not produced there.
For those of you who know anything about agriculture,
yeah, you probably don't wanna buy wine from England.
They can't produce good wine there
and so they largely got their wine
from Spain and France at this time.
Depending on who they were at war with,
it actually fluctuated where it was coming from.
And so, it was again, wealthier merchants
who would be able to afford this.
So they're largely going there to purchase their wine.
And in fact, sometimes you would go just to simply
purchase it and take it home, right, because most people
did not make their own wine.
In fact, the vast majority of people did not.
But, of course, they would also be going there
to meet with people who are of similar interest to them,
potentially same occupation,
you know, potentially neighbors who are of a similar
social class, though this is not necessarily the case.
I do wanna say that even though there is some
social stratification when we're talking about these places,
there's gonna be a lot of social blurring
when it comes to who hangs out
at which drinking establishments,
which, of course, causes a lot of consternation
for officials whose power relies upon
a very stratified society.
Oh, one of the things I wanted to mention,
is that taverns, much like inns,
also had to offer a degree of accommodations,
though that wasn't their primary purpose like an inn.
And in fact, I find it fascinating that, of course,
it's, shall I say the hipsters, who have decided
that they want to try to reinvent
this cultural institution and so they have created taverns
that also have accommodations, very much mirroring
the Early Modern Period.
So a couple of places I've been
that I've noticed have taken up this tradition
is Longman & Eagle in Chicago
and the Holy Grale in Louisville, Kentucky,
where they're offering not only kind of
the finest beers or wines of available,
but they're also offering people a place to sleep.
So, evidently, 17th-century taverns are back in style.
But here we go, the lowest and most prolific
of all of these kind of drinking establishments
was the ale house.
And in fact, in England, arguably there were as many
unlicensed ale houses as there were ale houses
over the course of the 17th century.
Ale houses were far less permanent structures
than taverns or inns.
Often times, they were simply someone's house
that had opened up as an ale house
in part to supplement income.
And they would be family businesses as such.
So potentially, if the husband was off conducting his trade
or potentially farming, wives and daughters
would actually be serving ale to customers
within their own house.
Sometimes ale houses were simply one room.
Sometimes, especially in cities,
they might be multiple rooms
and again, offer some accommodations,
but they were definitely much smaller,
less affluent places.
And their primary purpose, of course,
was to offer beer.
Originally they offered ale, but ale had more or less
been replaced, since ale is unhopped beer in England.
It had been replaced by the time you get
to the 17th century.
But this is the Medieval image and you can see
what's going on here, is this woman, who is an ale wife,
when she runs an ale house, is welcoming her new customer,
who is clearly a monk, who is quite thirsty,
very happy to see that she has ale available before him.
And how does he know this?
Well, at this time, if you were going to sell ale
and you didn't do it regularly, the way which you signaled
the fact that you had a fresh brew ready
was that you put the ale stake at the top of your house.
Which in this case is this broom, so it's an ale stake,
hanging out to signal to passers by:
"Hey, we're open for business today.
Come on in, we've got a fresh brew."
And this, obviously, is the precursor of the pub sign,
which becomes a more permanent fixture in the future.
But this was how ale houses tended to operate
in the Medieval Era.
Eventually, they'll become more permanent structures,
but the illegal ones, kind of in and out,
as you might imagine, depending on when
they were unearthed by the local authorities.
So ale houses, they did offer other things
besides simply ale or beer.
They did, as I mentioned, at times offer accommodations
for people lower down the social scale.
In fact, if you were a servant to someone
who was staying at the inn, often you got ditched off
at the ale house, right, because you weren't going
to be staying at the inn.
They also offered some victuals or some food
to the people who would come.
And one of the most important things they offered
in the city was a hearth.
So there were some poor people who actually
did not have a hearth in their dwellings,
and so in order to make their own food
they would go to ale houses and they purchased ale
and have the right to use the hearth at the ale house.
They would actually cook their food there.
And so these served many purposes for people
further down the social scale, but again,
a lot of social blurring happened at these places.
And you could find people, such as,
a member of the Officers of the Royal Navy,
Samuel Pepys, regularly visited ale houses,
and I mean regularly visited ale houses across London.
And so here's just a couple of more examples
again to show you the significance of the ale stake.
You can see in this more Medieval image
that they're impermanent.
But by the time you get to the Early Modern Period
they become kind of a fixed part of, you know,
the ale house, right,
advocating for your ale,
making sure people come to visit you.
And we could talk about pub signs,
but there's not enough time.
So, obviously, there was these practical reasons
that these places exist.
And in fact, that's the only way you could get a license.
They served very specific purposes in Early Modern
and Medieval society, but of course, they're more than that.
Arguably, these were the centers of sociability
in Early Modern communities.
Now, the Puritans would be very angry with me
for saying this because, of course, they believed
that it would be the parish church.
And in fact, there were people who thought
that these two institutions were in conflict
with one another and, arguably, that is not the case.
But you might be able to understand their point of view.
And we'll explain that as we go forward.
So, in addition, of course, to providing daily necessities:
ale, beer, food, warmth of a hearth, a place to stay,
they also provided opportunities to socialize.
And many people took advantage of this.
And part of the problem was often that happened on a Sunday.
And it happened on a Sunday why?
Because you have to work every other day of the week.
And so this was part of the tension.
But of course, at least in this image,
this is a famous Dutch image.
I have to say almost all of the paintings that I show
are Dutch or Flemish because they just had
a beautiful way of painting the history of everyday life
and the English didn't have that, so I don't want
to have to use their paintings.
But you can see here multiple forms of sociability
going on here, both between men and women,
men and men, and of course, women and women.
Dancing, singing, the relating of news.
And of course, weddings would take place here.
Many ceremonies would take place
at the drinking establishments across England
depending on your social class,
where they might be located, of course,
I mean the celebrations versus the actual wedding itself.
And so there are many other elements
to drinking establishments besides the fact
that they offered daily necessities.
And this is where things could get messy.
One of the things that many men, in particular,
went to the ale house for was the fact
there were games and particularly they could gamble.
In the sources, you see a lot of men
reflecting about unhappy home life.
Wanting to be able to go to the ale house to vent;
to be able to socialize with their male peers;
and, of course, to be able to gamble,
whether you're talking about cards
or, lest we judge, dice, right.
(laughter)
They would do this.
And unfortunately, this doesn't normally mean
that it's gonna heal the breaches at home.
In fact, it could lead to bigger problems
as men would go home, potentially inebriated,
angry, and violence could happen as a result.
And so for this reason, some historians have claimed
that drinking establishments should be gendered male.
Like, they're largely male institutions
during the Medieval and Early Modern Eras,
but that's not necessarily the case.
I do think, for sure, that the experience
of being at a drinking establishment was very different
depending on your gender, just as much as it was different
depending on your class.
But certain parts of the experience
were definitely gendered, and playing cards
or playing games or playing nine pins,
the Early Modern version of bowling,
was definitely gendered male.
But as this painting, again, another 17th-century
Dutch painting shows, many other activities took place.
But, as you might be able to also guess from this painting,
not everyone necessarily thought that these were
acceptable activities, right.
So you had dancing, but potentially a little bit
too boisterous dancing.
You have the intermixing of the genders
in a way that might be seen as problematic.
And in fact, if you remember, I said
that some of these institutions had private rooms
that you could use...
Well, they did.
And in fact, these were often policed by the owners,
unless the owner actually thought this was an opportunity
to make some money.
And in fact, this was a consistent problem.
People associated certain drinking establishments
with what we would call brothels or whorehouses.
And so, if you were the owner of an establishment
you had to police this behavior.
There's no actual police force
and so this is on you
and if you don't do it, you're gonna gain the reputation
of having a disorderly ale house and you could be shut down.
But of course, this kind of behavior
is very hard to regulate.
People are hanging out in corners doing things
that you can't necessarily see, nor do you want to see
because they pay you custom.
So these tensions were real at this time,
trying to insure that you're offering the services
that were required by law,
but that you're also catering to the needs and desires
of your clientele.
It's not exactly an easy balance to strike.
And as I said, and hopefully that image reflected,
that women did, of course, go to taverns, inns,
and ale houses, but they had to follow a separate set
of normative customs, and if they didn't follow those
they would lose their reputation, common fame,
or good name.
And let's start at the beginning with those
who actually owned these institutions.
So whether they owned them outright,
which happened infrequently, but could happen.
Widows often inherited them.
Sometimes, daughters, on rare occasions
might inherit an inn or an ale house or a tavern.
But often, as I said, these were family enterprises,
so wives would be working, daughters
and then, of course, the maid servants
of the families, as well.
And in this image, this is a later 18th century image,
we see a very beautiful ale wife offering
a frothy cup to a patron who is somewhat enamored with her.
But she's largely painted here as, you know,
a beautiful woman who is not necessarily proposing anything.
But of course, the way he's looking at her is suggestive.
And in fact, at this time, wives accused ale wives, so
wives who sent their husbands, or allowed, I should say,
their husbands to go off, accused ale wives
of purposely flirting and potentially even
ensnaring or entrapping their husbands
to go and waste their money on games and drink
in the ale house.
And so, even women who were just doing their job,
risked their reputation, at times, depending upon what
the clients were doing,
which of course, is largely out of their control.
And so, you also have depictions such as this.
So here we have another ale wife.
She's from a couple of centuries earlier
and this reflects that kind of darker side.
The cultural reputation garnered to these women
who were seen as peddlers of drink
to men who should know better.
They're again, kind of ensnaring them,
convincing them to waste their badly needed pay
at the ale house versus going home
to take care of their families.
And so, it's almost as if these women are
the ones that are causing the bouts of drunkenness
and that ultimately will send men home
who might actually end up beating their wives.
And so, these reputations are endemic to society
at this time.
It's difficult to disassociate yourself from them
if you actually work at an ale house.
And so this is why it's so imperative
for women who worked in these places
to ensure that those taverns, inns, or ale houses
did not gain that reputation of being disorderly
because they would immediately be associated with that,
often be accused of being a whore,
or if you owned it, of being a bawd or a whore monger.
So this was difficult for women.
However, it's somewhat ironic because at the same time
women were seen as, at least according to some historians,
the founders of brewing in England.
So women originally brewed ale in England,
and it wasn't until the hops were introduced
into the brewing process, and that came from the continent,
from Germany and from the Netherlands,
that women got pushed out of the brewing industry.
A part of it had to do with the equipment required
and part of it had to do with the guild system.
Brewers were part of a guild.
And so women got pushed out of this,
despite the fact that they, arguably, were
at front and center in the original brewing process
in England.
And New Glarus Beer, "Two Women," if you've ever had it,
it's a lager, it's actually dedicated to that.
It has a little description on the side of the bottle
about telling you the history of women
in the brewing process.
And so I applaud them for that even though
it's not my favorite beer personally,
but I applaud them for that
because it's definitely tapping into
an important part of history.
And so, yes, women did go to drinking establishments,
but they had to toe the line and they had to go there
under certain restrictions.
For example, a woman who went into an ale house alone
was risking her reputation.
In cities, maybe not quite so much, but you can see it,
here in this image, on what would be your right,
you can see that this woman who is in a hidden corner,
drinking with a man, who potentially she did not come with,
we're not sure, is being spied on by another woman
whose reputation is also at stake depending on
what's going to happen in this corner
of the drinking establishment.
And so, yes, women did go to these drinking establishments,
but they were supposed to go with their husbands.
They were supposed to go with fellow, you know,
friends and family, recognizable to everyone.
You are with people you know.
They are going to protect you,
and that actually was another real concern
that women might actually be assaulted
in some of these places.
And so, they were able to socialize
in drinking establishments, but under
much more difficult conditions.
And they risked far more if they broke away
from the gender codes at the time than men did by far.
And this was most obvious when it came to women
who overindulged.
Nobody appreciated a drunkard at this time.
This was a time of high regulation of morals.
But women who overindulged were seen
as particularly problematic.
And actually, this leads to a big problem
for those who chose to frequent drinking establishments
over the course of the 16th and 17th centuries in England.
There was a growing number of people
who were very concerned about the behavior.
And of course, they focused very specifically
on that illicit behavior that might take place
from time to time.
These are people that we all know as the Puritans.
Now, that's a little bit of an over-generalization.
There were other people who were obviously concerned
about morals besides the Puritans.
But with the rise of the Puritans you also
do see a correlative rise of regulation of social behavior.
And you can see this here.
They're even trying to adopt the form of the ballad.
And ballads were notoriously sang at inns,
Posted on their walls, or at ale houses.
And here, of course, they're trying to adopt that
so they can reach a broader public,
but instead of being about having a good old time
at ale house and toasting your king,
it's about a looking glass for drunkards.
So it's a bit of a downer of a ballad,
but they're doing what they can to try
to intercede in what they see is a real problem.
If society is, you know, drifting down
towards deeper and deeper immorality,
they believe this is a reflection
on the entire godly community.
And of course, they didn't refer to themselves
as Puritans, that was a slanderous term at the time,
they referred to themselves as the Godly
and they felt they had a mission, right,
to advance godly behavior across the nation.
And this became a particularly important
as they increasingly gained political power,
and ultimately many Puritans would rise
to power after they execute King Charles I.
So this is how the Puritans viewed most behaviors
at a drinking establishments.
You see the couple in the back, over there,
they're coming out of one of the private rooms.
You can see that there's a bed back there.
It's not too subtle.
You have musicians.
You have actors.
Puritans thought that actors were highly immoral.
They way the behaved on the stage was highly problematic.
In fact, in the 1640's, they outlawed plays completely.
And so, they're very concerned about this behavior.
The mixing of the genders.
You can see this man fondling a woman.
And so they wanted to regulate these places.
They thought, by far, England had too many.
They should eliminate the licenses
and only provide them to those who, you know,
offered the necessary services that the English need,
and are on visible roads, and in major centers of cities.
Otherwise, take away the lodge, right, because this is
the kind of behavior they promote.
This is hard though.
How do you regulate thousands upon thousands
of drinking establishments when you don't have
a modern police force?
Well, it comes down to either informants--
so your buddy's informing on you for misbehaving
at the ale house--
or it comes down to the poor, lonely constable,
who is someone who is elected by their community
to regulate the community.
So it could be any one of us being forced
to have to enforce laws that we might not
necessarily agree with.
This is a later image.
This comes from the 18th century of a constable
who has to enforce a proclamation against drunkenness.
But this is a difficult job.
You might not even agree with the law itself,
let alone do you necessarily want to go into
your local ale house and tell everyone
it's time to go home.
Or you've overindulged.
Or don't do that in the corner.
Or stop playing that game.
This is a difficult situation to be in.
And so you can imagine how difficult it was
to regulate this behavior.
So what they started to do was crack down
on constables who didn't actually do their jobs.
So now you have to choose between alienating
your friends and family, going against your own conscious
or being prosecuted by law and paying a heavy fine.
So this is a difficult time for the poor constable,
and if we ever go back to that system
do not elect me, please.
(laughing) I do not want to be constable.
And so, this was difficult behavior to actually police.
In fact, in my own research, I have so many
hilarious stories of people who tried
to get around the system.
So, when the night watch or the constable would come by,
they would, for example, capture them and put them
in a closet,
Lock them there until closing time,
and then let them go.
There were a series of ways in which you could let people
know that the constables have arrived so that those
that were in private rooms would actually exit
out the window and try to run away.
And there were even ale house owners
who hired, what I would call bouncers,
but they weren't bouncing away,
maybe they were also bouncing away disorderly people,
but they were meant to bounce off the constables.
To physically force them out of the ale house.
Because without the actual eye witness of the constable,
no one could be prosecuted.
So they're were pretty crafty at trying
to get around these regulations.
(sigh)
However, it wasn't just, of course,
that there was this kind of illicit sexual activity,
problematic gambling going on.
It went deeper than that.
The Puritan moralist and general buzz kill,
John Downame, also believed that drinking
led to other dangerous tendencies.
As he says here, "When a drunkard is seated upon
"the ale bench and hath got himself between
"the cup and the wall, he presently becommeth
"a reproover of Magistrates, a controller of the State,
"a murmurer and repiner against
"the best established government."
In other words, drinking makes poor people
talk about politics and that's bad.
(laughing) Right?
We don't want that.
And of course, they believed that poor people
were not capable of actually thinking rationally
about the political system.
Their purpose in life was to be deferential
and loyal to the king and to of course,
all of the correlative government, local and national.
And so this was tied into this larger reform movement.
You really can't divorce the social and the political here.
It all matters.
And this was particularly problematic
when we get to the period that I study, the revolution.
One of the things that happens,
amidst a political revolution,
are people are very anxious and excited
to get the latest news.
And so you have a rise in literature
being disseminated all across the country.
And the place to go if you cannot afford a subscription
to a newspaper, you do not have the connections
to get a newsletter written to you,
was the inn, the tavern, or the ale house.
In fact, in order to be competitive,
increasingly, owners of these establishments
had to subscribe to newspapers to bring in clientele.
And so, this was a burgeoning of a news culture.
Arguably, some historians say this is the emergence
of a modern public sphere, in which
the public sphere exists as a political force,
is in these spaces.
Because you have, of course, the intersection
of interest, news, and people.
And so, these places were, arguably, becoming
increasingly politicized over the course
of the 17th century.
And when you have the emergence of revolution
in the middle of the century, it's just going to
increasingly be the case.
As I mentioned, right, even if you're not literate,
it doesn't mean that you can't be politically aware.
I've already referenced ballads, and yes,
we had the Puritan ones, but most of them
were not puritanical.
Most of them, actually, well, a lot of them,
were just about drinking and having a good time,
to be honest with you, but some of them
would be political and this is important
because it's a way of communicating news
to people who are not literate.
Ballad mongers would come sing it.
You could obviously hear it.
And the way in which they're written,
they're meant to be sung and repeated
without the actual sheet.
It would be posted on the wall,
and so if you could read it, that's great,
but it wasn't a necessity.
This was very much a part of ballads:
they were specifically were speaking
to a non-literate audience.
And so this is disconcerting,
not only to the Puritan or the general reformers
who want to purify and reform society,
but also increasingly to local and national officials.
In fact, the link between treasonous speech
and drinking runs so deep that, here, this is
an image that comes from the Folger Shakespeare Library
in Washington DC.
We see the famous, or should I say, infamous Guy Fawkes,
one of the men who plotted the famous gunpowder plot
of 1605 in which they were gonna blow up
the entirety of Parliament:
king, lord, and commons.
It failed and he really was a pawn,
but you see him here with a tankard,
because, of course, drinking leads to treason,
drinking leads to sedition.
So this was a part of the cultural fabric of the times.
Drinking had these potential negative connotations.
And of course,
drinking had its rituals, just like any other
cultural practice.
And offering a Health was a very, you know,
a very,
I should say, inscribed part of the drinking culture
in many Early Modern English drinking houses.
So drinking a Health meant that you were
offering up a Health to someone.
You were offering someone's Health.
And it got to the point that they were
even using the word in a way that doesn't make sense.
It makes more sense to us in the term of a toast.
So most obviously you would drink to the health of the king.
And these were rituals that were about
forming bonds and allegiances amongst good companies
of drinkers.
For example, healing all wounds.
Do you remember the beer summit?
Drinking and toasting is a way of creating bonds
and healing wounds, right.
Creating a sense of comradery.
It is, to a large degree,
at least in the Early Modern period very masculine.
It was largely men that participated in this ritual.
But I want you to think about how these actually function
and how they can actually can be a path towards
some political agency.
When you offer up a Health,
so if you ask someone to pledge a Health
that you've offered, you're also asking that person
to show friendship to you, to allegiance to you.
And so for them to deny it, and to deny it in public,
it's a slight.
It damages the sense of community and comradery
it was set up to create.
And this can be really problematic when people
start to make political toasts.
So I won't make you do any today
for that very specific reason.
But when you're talking about a period
in which toasting was often associated
with monarchical government,
yet you've just executed the king,
you've really problematized a major social ritual.
And the Puritans knew this.
Now this is a bit of a long quote, but I'll read it for you.
The Puritans have been attacking toasts
since the early 17th century and this is because
they promote drunkenness.
And so Barnabe Rich is mocking the ritual.
And I want you to think about what he's saying
as I go ahead and read this.
"He that begins the health, hath his prescribed orders:
"first uncouvering his head, hee takes a full cup
"in his hand, and setling his countenance
"with a grave aspect, hee craves for audience:
"silence being once obtained
"hee begins to breath out the name,
"peradventure of some Honorable Personage,
"that is worthy of a better regard,
"then to have his name polluted at so unfitting a time,
"amongst a company of Drunkards:
"but his health is drunke to, and hee that pledgeth,
"must likewise take off his cap, kisse his fingers
"and bowing himselfe in the signe of reverent acceptance;
"when the Leader sees his Follower thus prepared,
"he soups up his brouth, turnes the bottom of the cup
"upward, and in ostentatious,"--
I don't even get this part--
makes the cup go phillip and twango."
I don't know what that means, I'm not going to lie to you. (laughter)
Though I'd like to actually experiment some time
if I actually had a tankard that does that.
But you can see that they're mocking
the entire ritual.
They're saying, "How is this respectful to someone?
"You're forcing a whole group of people to drink
"and drink rapidly.
"And you're almost, to some degree,
emulating The Lord's Supper, right."
So they see this as sacrilegious, in particular.
You're taking off the hat.
You're bowing before a cup.
And, though I can't substantiate this,
'cause I get it from a Victorian folklorist
and they're kind of iffy with their evidence.
Originally, the idea of Pledging a Health,
was the idea that when a warrior, in particular,
offered up a Health in front of a company
of armed men, of course,
he needed someone to pledge it
because as he tossed the drink back
his neck was actually exposed,
and so you needed someone to take a knife up
and protect the neck,
to make sure that no one actually went up
and killed the person.
Now, I can't verify that that's actually,
there's any truth in that story.
But it's interesting because the idea of pledging it,
is interesting to me, I don't think we see it that way.
So Puritans took issue with this in large part
because they thought it promoted drunkenness.
That was, of course, something that they railed against.
But beyond that, when you're talking about
a time in which they're in power
and the king has been executed,
how do you stop people from celebrating
rituals of comradery that actually have very little
to do, arguably, with politics, but are embedded
in the cultural fabric?
How do you stop people from drinking
a Health to the king?
It's very difficult.
And in fact, I think that many savvy drinkers knew this.
And that this was a way in which they could articulate
dissent against a regime that did not approve.
Against a regime that was trying to regulate
the social spaces in which they socialized
by forcing the hand of their company--
and company is what they called people
who gathered together in comradery--
to take health to the king, despite the fact,
of course, it was seditious and potentially treasonous.
It was embedded into the cultural fabric.
You cannot just eliminate it despite
what the Puritans wish to do.
And so, in fact, when King Charles II returns to England
in 1660, drinking a Health is a sign of loyalty,
And now, far from trying to get people to stop drinking
so much, suddenly, drinking as much as you can,
is a sign of loyalty to the king.
And in fact, this becomes somewhat problematic
in the 1660's.
During all the Restoration celebrations
when Charles returns to the throne
quite literally his supporters are flooding
the conduits with wine and beer.
And people are offering toasts across the,
and this is in London, across the entire city.
And so, people very much start to associate
drinking with loyalty and it's probably not too surprising
to hear that yes, the Puritans did not win this battle.
And of course, pubs are still vibrant centers
of sociability to this day, despite their attempt
to regulate them to the point
of almost eliminating them.
And so, I don't think that this is
the only existence of a connection
between politics and drinking.
And I'll leave you with this here.
I don't know how many of you've seen this before,
but, as people have attempted at least,
to ascribe political identities on certain drinks,
I'm not sure if you would agree with it,
depending on what you drink and where you lie,
but I do think that there is a long history
of linking politics and drinking.
And it does, arguably, not necessarily start,
but continue in the drinking houses
of Early Modern England.
Thank you, thank you for coming tonight.
This was fun. I really appreciated it.
(applause)