by Iain Gately
. . . And so these halls
Are empty, and this red curved roof now sheds
Its tiles, decay has brought it to the ground,
Smashed it to piles of rubble, where long since
A host of heroes, glorious, gold-adorned,
Gleaming in splendor, proud and flushed with wine,
Shone in their armor, gazed on gems and treasure. . . .
—“The Ruin,” The Exeter Book of Anglo-Saxon Verse
In AD 369, the Christian poet Decimius Ausonius composed his magnum opus—Mosella, or the Moselle—an ode dedicated to the river of the same name. The ode describes at length the beautiful villas and vineyards that line the river’s banks and pays tribute to the civilizing forces that had combined to produce so charming a scene. Ausonius, a native of Bordeaux, was an exemplary neo-Roman. He wrote impeccable Latin, held estates and vineyards, exchanged homoerotic poetry with Bishop Paulinus of Nola, was tutor to the emperor Gratian, and was elected consul, the highest office in the imperial administration, in AD 379. The town of Trier, on the banks of the Moselle, where he conceived his most famous ode, was likewise an archetypal example of the cultural impact the combination of Rome and Christianity had had on the once-barbarous lands of western Europe. It possessed palaces, baths, chapels, and a basilica, and had served as an imperial residence during the reigns of Constantinus II, Valerian I, and Theodosius.
This civilized idyll was not destined to last. Within ten years of the death of the poet, the tranquil scenes he had described had become a war zone. On New Year’s Eve AD 406, the Vandals, a Germanic tribe, rolled across the frozen Rhine and devastated Roman Gaul. Trier was sacked; the villas Ausonius had praised were reduced to smoking ruins and the vineyards that surrounded them, populated, in the poet’s fancy, with satyrs and nymphs, were burned to their roots. According to an observer of the period, “All Gaul was filled with the smoke of a single funeral pyre.” Its population was slaughtered or enslaved, and the grandson of Ausonius was reduced to working in chains on the ancestral estates. By AD 450, the entire Roman Empire in the west had been shattered into fragments by the cumulative impact of wave after wave of barbarian invasions.
The trouble had begun in AD 376, when two bands of Goths had appeared at the edge of Roman territory on the banks of the river Danube. They wanted sanctuary from the Huns, an even more barbaric species of barbarian, who had invaded their own country. In return for a place to settle within the Roman Empire, they pledged to support it with their arms. The offer was accepted, and perhaps two hundred thousand people crossed the Danube. They were disarmed, fed with refuse and dog meat, robbed of their children, and shunted around like cattle. Unsurprisingly, they revolted. They commenced by plundering the Balkans, and although they did not have the science to lay siege to cities, they destroyed the agriculture of the area and decimated its population. It required several Roman armies and ten years of campaigning to control them. Shortly afterward the Huns themselves invaded Roman territory via the Caucasus. In 401, the Goths revolted once more and marched into Italy. Thereafter, the barbarian incursions came thick and fast. The Ostrogoths attacked in the east, the Vandals in the west, and the Visigoths through the center. In 410 Rome itself was sacked.
Worse was to come. The barbarians started fighting one another, and a hundred conflicts, some trivial, others major engagements, occupied the next generation, until they were distracted from their squabbles by the reappearance in force, in AD 446, of the Huns. The Huns were Eurasian nomads who were expert horsemen, superb archers, and intelligent tacticians, as capable of laying siege to cities in the best Roman style as of massacring their populations. They were objects of especial terror to Christians, who suspected them of being the harbingers of the Apocalypse. Their leader, Attila, was identified as “the Scourge of God,” sent to chastise unbelievers and to test the faithful.
The short-term influence of the Huns on the production and consumption of alcohol in Europe was significant. They destroyed vineyards, butchered their workers, and drank the cellars dry. They possessed a number of their own rituals for drinking, centered around the consumption of kumis—fermented mare’s milk. Kumis is a rare example of alcohol obtained from animal, as opposed to vegetable, sources. It was weak—around 2 percent ABV—and was neglected by the Huns in favor of wine when the latter was available. Despite, however, being the conquerors of substantial tracts of cultivated land, the Huns remained true to their nomadic roots. They neither liked nor understood metropolitan life, so did not linger in the cities that they sacked, some of which survived their visit with little more damage, albeit depopulated of their inhabitants, than scorch marks and bloodstains. Attila died in AD 453, his empire collapsed within ten years, and the Huns vanished—as if they had indeed been evil spirits.
The barbarian invasions split the western Roman Empire into a collection of warring states. The trade links that had supplied, for instance, Britain with Falernian wine were broken. The use of currency collapsed. The homogeneity that Rome had imposed across the continent dissolved, and the nations of modern Europe together with their different languages and customs were born amid ashes and slaughter. The invaders established new systems of manners and government, which placed a different worth on drink from the classical and Christian ideals that had prevailed throughout Europe. The Germanic tribes who had become the new rulers of the western empire possessed heroic ideologies, which promoted vigor and activity above organization and piety. Their heroes were monsters—of superhuman strength and appetite—binge drinkers as well as serial killers. Their impact on drinking habits was most pronounced in the peripheral parts of the empire, particularly in Britain. Whereas in Italy and Gaul vestiges of Roman taste and Roman administration lingered on under the new rulers, they all but vanished in Rome’s most western province.
Rome had lost control over Britain around AD 412, when the emperorHonororius issued an edict advising its inhabitants that they must fend for themselves. They made a last desperate appeal to the metropolis in AD 446—the province was being torn apart: “The barbarians drive us into the sea, and the sea drives us back to the barbarians. Between these, two deadly alternatives confront us—drowning, or slaughter.” But the appeal went unanswered, and thereafter Britain slipped back over the horizon into the Dark Ages. The principal tribes to profit from the collapse of Roman authority in Britain were the native Picts and Celts, and the immigrant Angles and Saxons who arrived from what are now Denmark and Germany. The Anglo-Saxon invasion was piecemeal and began around the middle of the fifth century when Vortigen, a Kentish warlord, invited Horst and Hengist, the leaders of bands of Saxon mercenaries, to take land in the Thames Estuary and protect him against the Picts who were running riot through the island. Negotiations were carried out at a banquet, and a later record of the event notes the introduction of a new drinking custom to England. The mercenaries were the hosts, and after they had feasted Vortigen, a “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, wassail!’” Vortigen was struck by her beauty and asked his interpreter how he should answer. “She called you Lord King,” said the interpreter, and “offered to drink your health. Your answer to her must be ‘Drinc heil! ’” Vortigen accordingly answered “Drinc heil” and bade her drink, after which he took the cup from her hand, kissed her, and drank himself. The girl was Hengist’s daughter and so captivated Vortigen that he asked for her hand in marriage, and gave over Kent as the bride price.
The Saxons and the other warrior bands that followed Horst and Hengist into Britain were keener to plunder than teach its inhabitants the proper way to wassail. The country was broken up into fiefdoms, and society reverted to tribal values. In the absence of the uniform law and order that the Romans had imposed, trade collapsed, the ports were empty, the roads and sewers fell into disrepair, and without a critical mass of artisans, merchants, their servants, and their slaves to populate them, the
towns were abandoned. The new arrivals brought their own social unit, the clan, and own style of settlement, the village. The population of these communities numbered in their hundreds, in contrast to the tens of thousands who had lived in the Roman cities.
A corresponding shift in drinking habits occurred. Whereas the Romanized Briton’s ideal tipple might have be a krater of fifteen-year-old Falernian wine mixed with water, consumed at a leisurely pace and accompanied by a discussion of the latest literature out of Rome, Anglo-Saxons drank for the glory of intoxication—for a joyride to the stars—and did not care overmuch what vehicle they used for transportation. They distinguished four generic kinds of alcoholic drink: medu (mead), ealu (ale), win (wine), and beor, whose identity is a matter of debate. Mead had the most cachet. Rather as the Hellenic hero Prometheus had stolen fire from the sun god, so the chief Anglo-Saxon deity had undertaken a quest for the good of mankind whose object was the Mead of Wisdom. In poetry, heroes yearned for and returned to mead halls, where they might make mead boasts and take mead oaths that held a particular sanctity. Ale, however, was the common drink. It was a quintessentially Germanic beverage, common to all the Teutonic tribes who now ruled over continental Europe. But whereas many of these, in particular in Gaul and Spain, had taken to wine and were beginning to blend Roman drinking habits with their own, in Britain ale ruled supreme. Wine and its associated rituals were all but forgotten. To judge by archaeological records, in the form of amphorae shards, the supply dried up in the century following the fall of Rome.
Grave goods show that the Anglo-Saxons employed a variety of drinking vessels—cups, mugs, glasses, and cattle horns. These last were decorated with bands of silver or gold and had the quality that they could not be put down unless they were empty, and so were passed from hand to hand or drained in a single draft. Smaller vessels have also been recovered from the graves of warriors and princes—Anglo-Saxon shot-cups—whose diminutive size implies they were used to hold a more potent brew than mead, ale, or wine. This might have been the mysterious beor, which was stronger and sweeter than ale and rarer than mead and, while not wine, ranked at least in strength with wine, and whose consumption led to a state known in Old English as beordruncen, i.e., very drunk. Two culprits have been identified as beor : a type of super-strength cider, which, in theory, can be fermented to almost 18 percent ABV; and a concentrated liquor freeze-distilled out of ale, mead, or cider, which can be as strong as 50 percent ABV, and which requires little more effort to make than leaving a barrel of whichever brew out of doors over winter.
Whatever the potion and the measure, alcohol was generally consumed in a mead hall. Every village contained one or more of these edifices that were the houses of the elite, who used them to perpetuate their wealth, fame, and power through the liberal distribution of food, drink, and gifts. Halls were the epicenters of Anglo-Saxon culture. Gladiators, the theater, chariot races, and other similar spectacle entertainments had vanished with the Romans. Leisure time—and there was plenty of it, at least half of every year— was spent in hunting, in playing games, in practicing how to fight, and in drinking. The mead hall was a communal gathering place— both kitchen and cultural center—where people were fed, where they declared their allegiances, and where they celebrated their collective identity. Halls varied greatly in size—the smallest were perhaps ten by fifteen feet, the largest a hundred or more yards in length. All were symbolic of the relative power of their owner. A sense of the status they conferred, and the desire to build them, is preserved in Beowulf, the first epic poem to be written in Old English. The poem begins with the raising of a hall by King Hrothgar, who, after success as a raider, and in winning treasure and followers, wished to celebrate his triumphs:
Anglo-Saxon drinking horn
So his mind turned
to hall building: He handed down orders
for men to work on a great mead hall
meant to be the wonder of the world forever;
it would be his throne room and there he would dispense
his God-given goods to young and old.
Although halls were built for formal purposes, they were nonetheless lively places whose ceremonies revolved around drinking. Hall-goers were serenaded by bards, who were inspired to sing by their particular god, Kvasir, whose name is a derivation of “strong ale.” Kvasir, according to legend, was slain by two malicious dwarfs who mixed his blood with alcohol to make “the mead of inspiration.” Anyone who drank of this magic potion could thereafter compose poetry and speak wise words. The warriors in the hall who listened to the odes of heroism responded by making mead- or ale-pledges, oaths of a sacred nature, which usually nominated acts of rapine or slaughter as their aim and which they were expected to fulfill on pain of shame. According to a saying of the period: “In war is proved what was pledged over ale.” Women also had a clearly defined role in hall etiquette. They acted as cupbearers and were referred to by the bards as “peace weavers,” in the sense that by passing a drink from warrior to warrior, they maintained the friendship between them. The cup, or horn, was handed to the drinker in strict order of precedence—first to the hall lord, often with the injunction to be joyful at drinking, then to the duguo—the elder retainers—next the geoguo—young retainers—and finally to guests.
Morale in the mead hall, among the warriors and the women who served and who drank with them, was the barometer of happiness for the clan. In Beowulf, disorder in the hall is presented as a kind of sacrilege. A monster by the name of Grendel appears in the poem. He kills and eats Hrothgar’s retainers, who, despite repeated oaths, are unable to defend themselves:
Time and again when the goblets passed
and seasoned fighters got flushed with beer
they would pledge themselves to protect Heorot
and wait for Grendel with their whetted swords
But when dawn broke and day crept in
over each empty, blood spattered bench,
the floor of the mead hall where they had feasted
would be sick with slaughter.
The scribe of Beowulf was a Christian and decorated the pagan tale of monsters, blood feuds, and stolen treasure with Catholic sentiments. Christianity was the brightest light in the Dark Ages. Its egalitarian creed, and the fervor of its missionaries, won over the beer-drinking barbarians who now ruled in place of Rome, and forged links between their disparate and antagonistic kingdoms. However, its clergy were forced to adapt their doctrines to accommodate the tastes and habits of their new flocks, and European Christianity acquired its own peculiar flavor. It was considered impossible to make barbarians live by the recommendations of Clement of Alexandria and give up heavy drinking, which was so central to etiquette in the case of princes, and the principal form of leisure for everyone else, so this aspect of their culture had to be tolerated at the risk of losing souls.
While the ecclesiastical writers of the age were diligent in their condemnation of drunkenness, almost all of them condoned drinking. Most belonged to various monastic orders, which multiplied at an explosive rate in the middle of the first millennium. Western Christian monasticism was established by St. Benedict of Nursia (c. AD 480-543), a wellborn Italian, who studied in Rome then fled to seek enlightenment as a laborer in the countryside. The lessons he drew from isolation and hard work inspired him to compose a rule for those disposed to imitate him. Despite promoting the virtues of poverty, chastity, and obedience, his rule was wonderfully popular, and Benedictine monasteries sprang up all over western Europe. Critical historians have asserted that their rapid increase was no surprise: The politics of the age were complex, the governments oppressive, famines were frequent, and so the opportunity to withdraw from the perils of civilian life and to spend one’s days in tranquility, engaged in prayer and physical or mental labor according to one’s temperament, was well-nigh irresistible.
Benedict, despite his emphasis on self-denial, did not expect abstinence from his followers: “Although we read that wine is not at a
ll proper for monks, yet because monks in our times cannot be persuaded of this, let us agree to this, at least, that we do not drink to satiety, but sparingly; because ‘wine maketh even wise men fall off.’” His rule allowed each monk a ration of one hemina5 of wine per day; though an abbot might issue more “if the circumstances of the place, or the work, or the summer’s heat, should require” it. This generous ration could be withdrawn as a punishment: Anyone “tardy in coming to the work of God or to the table” was condemned to eat alone, “his portion of wine being taken from him, until he hath made satisfaction and hath amended.”
The conversion of the British Isles to Christianity by the Benedictines and their fellow religious orders commenced in Ireland, which never had been conquered by the Romans and so had retained its indigenous values untainted. Its pagan inhabitants lived in tribes, and their drinks were ale or mead. They seem to have been master brewers: A Dark Ages poem describing the life and deeds of Cano, an Irish prince of the era, lists more than a dozen different sorts of ale and names the regions in which they were consumed:
Ale is drunk around Loch Cuain
It is drunk out of deep horns
In Magh Inis by the Ultonians
Where laughter rises to loud exultation. . . .
The Saxon ale of bitterness
Is drunk with pleasure about Inber in Rig,
About the land of the Cruithni, about Gergin
Red ales, like wine, are freely drunk
The Irish were evangelized by St. Patrick in the fifth century, around the same time that the Kentish warlord Vortigen was being taught to wassail. The saint defeated the magic of hostile Druids with miracles, converted kings, and founded monasteries the length and breadth of Ireland. While his views on alcohol have not been preserved, those of his contemporary divines show a marked bias in favor of it—indeed, a desire to associate drinking with faith. Several of them worked miracles using ale as a prop, in particular St. Brigit (c. AD 450-520), who, like Christ at the wedding feast of Cana, turned water into alcohol on several occasions, once managing to change the dirty bathwater of a leper colony into good red ale. St. Brigit could, moreover, multiply ale. Faced with a shortage of grain, and the proximity of Easter, she prayed over her brew, which produced enough ale to last through Holy Week and for some days thereafter.