Drink

by Iain Gately

  So much upheaval shattered the foundations of feudalism. Instead of being plentiful and submissive, labor was scarce and flighty. In England, the serfs found they could pick and choose between employers and walk away from the obligations that had tied their ancestors to the service of a lord, or an abbey. Their wages leapt: even the meanest worker earned four and a half pence per day, which was enough to buy himself three loaves, a big joint of meat, and several gallons of ale. Labor, moreover, migrated to towns, and the consequent concentration of thirst made brewing feasible on a commercial scale. Brewsters were displaced by large breweries, usually run by men, and the common alehouses became their customers.

  Hand in hand with the new concept of a free market for labor came the notion of leisure. Public drinking houses flourished as a consequence. A fresh ethos evolved around them: They were run by the people, for the people. They were places where men and women from different occupations and backgrounds might meet to drink and to enjoy each other’s company, and where they might talk with candor about their rulers. Indeed, the common people enjoyed a freedom of speech and action in their drinking places that was denied to them elsewhere, and these institutions became the nucleus of a popular culture.

  In England, the public places where people could buy alcohol came in three forms: (a) alehouses, (b) taverns, which sold wine as well as ale, and (c) inns, which, strictly speaking, were hostels for pilgrims. Whether alehouse, tavern, or inn, postplague urban pubs were built to a new architectural plan. Instead of a single drinking space, equipped with benches, reminiscent of the Anglo-Saxon hall, they became warrens, with galleries of rooms, and drinkers were distributed through these according to their wealth and status. Poor drunkards were kept downstairs or in the cellars, merchants and other respectable folk occupied the middle tiers, and whores plied their trade in the rafters. The clientele of drinking houses were mostly illiterate and so their signs were simple, visual, memorable. They used animals (e.g., the Bear) celestial bodies (the Sun), or heraldic devices from coats of arms including exotic or fantasy creatures such as lions, unicorns, dragons, and griffins to announce their presence.

  The popularity of public drinking houses can be deduced not merely from their increasing numbers but also from the flood of criticism they attracted from the church, which considered them to be competition. English Christians were going to pubs instead of mass, and passed the most important festivals in the calendar in their cups instead of on their knees. Such godlessness knew no bounds. According, for example, to Master Rypon, prior of Finchdale, not even Lent was sacred: “When by law or custom of the Church men should fast, very few people abstain from excessive drinking: On the contrary, they go to the taverns, and some imbibe and get more drunk than they do out of Lent, thinking and saying—‘Fishes must swim! ’” Those who did attend divine service went to the pub afterward, where they could be found “drinking and singing, with many idle words, . . . and evil expressions . . . making the holy day a sinful day.” Pubs also diverted people from the drinking parties that the church itself organized, which were an important source of its revenue. In country parishes throughout England, groups of parishioners, such as the young bachelors, arranged annual church-ales, usually to coincide with Christian holidays, whose profits went toward church maintenance funds and to pay for new vestments for their priests.

  In order to justify their antipathy toward pubs, the clergy reexamined holy scripture and found drunkenness to be a form of gluttony, one of the seven deadly sins. Once they had quantified the damage it caused to the immortal soul, they composed cautionary sermons, with vivid imagery, to scare their congregations away from their rivals. People who ventured into a “Develes temple” could expect to miss out on paradise. Temptation lurked in every pottle. The brimming mug of ale in this world would be replaced with a goblet of fiery brimstone in hell. As well as eternal torment after death, drinkers could expect to be disfigured in this life by their sin. According to their critics in the pulpit, they acquired an unhealthy complexion “paler than that of the infirm, so that amongst the living their flesh is as the flesh of the dead.” These zombies were also cursed with corpse breath and a woeful sense of balance: “Oft as they go homeward towards their beds they drench themselves in ditches by the way.” Once home, the drunkard/glutton could be expected to set himself on fire, see double or even treble, fall asleep among the hounds, and on occasions, murder his wife and children.

  Moreover, gluttony introduced its victims to its fellow deadly sins sloth, lechery, and pride. Drinkers spent all day in bed, were careless of how they appeared, and grew fat through inactivity. Those who could rouse themselves to any degree were all lust and boast, but mostly the latter, for pride was construed to be the “devill’s wine,” the house red, of all his chapels. Drink made men brag—Satan entered them via their cups and whispered inside their heads: “Thou arte lord of great power. Thou arte stronger than another. Thou art comlier, fairer, wiser in working, more subtle in understanding, more abundant in riches than others be. . . . Why art thou so familiar with poor men? . . . ( Lo, sirs! Lo, sirs! This is the drink the which the devil maketh many on drunken!)”

  Great sins led to small. Swearing abounded in taverns, and false oaths were offensive to both the secular and sacred courts: Under common law, oaths were binding declarations; according to the second commandment, it was a sin to take the name of God in vain. The sacrilegious ejaculations that characterized the speech of drunkards were lambasted from the pulpit. A representative effort, from Brother Whitford of Sion, tells the story of a blasphemous squire named Mayster Baryngton, who retired to a tavern after a blank Sunday morning’s hunting and, once he had quenched his thirst with ale, set to cursing his luck: “By God’s blood, this day is unhappy !” No sooner had he spoken than his nose began to bleed. The sight of his own blood provoked the squire into a frenzy of further swearing, and at each fresh curse, he began to bleed somewhere else—from his ears, at his wrists, from under his fingernails, “in marvelous great quantity.” Undeterred, Mayster Baryngton kept up his blasphemy, whereupon his tongue turned “black as pitch” and “he expired and was dead.”

  The negative sentiments of sermons were echoed in poetry. William Langland, whose Piers Plowman paints not merry but miserable England with a put-upon peasantry, takes pains to show the damage drunkenness could wreak among the illiterate masses—how they might ruin themselves even in the absence of feudal overlords. He sets one of his scenes of degradation in an alehouse, peopled with both real and allegorical characters. Its principal figure is Glutton, representing the deadly sin of the same name, who is intercepted on his way to church by Betty the brewster. Betty tempts Glutton into her den, where he finds a complete crosssection of postfeudal commoners already drinking: a shoe seller, a gamekeeper and his wife, Tim the tinker and his apprentices:

  Hick the horse dealer and Hugh the needle seller

  Clarice of Cock Lane and the clerk of the church

  Davy the ditcher and a dozen other;

  Sir Piers the priest and Pernel of Flanders

  A fiddler, a rat catcher, the street sweeper of Chepe,

  A roper, a riding man, and Rose the dish seller,

  Godfrey of Garlickithe and Griffith the Welshman . . .

  The atmosphere is all bustle and cheer. Everyone welcomes Glutton, and ale is called for. Those with insufficient funds pawn their clothes or the tools of their trade in order to contribute to the round. And on this sinister note matters deteriorate. Glutton drinks deep and betrays his bestial nature:

  They sat so till evensong singing now and then,

  Til Glutton had gulped down a gallon and a gill.

  His guts ’gan to rumble like two greedy sows;

  He pissed a potful in a paternoster-while10

  And blew with the bugle at his backbone’s end,

  That all hearing that horn held their noses after

  And wished it were stopped up with a wisp of furze.

  Not to be outdone by the pu
lpit, Langland also succeeded in associating a fourth member of the seven deadly sins with drinking houses in his poem. Betty the brewster is married to Avarice, who ruins the poor by extending them credit to buy ale.

  Despite such vociferous and disapproving opponents, alehouses were loved by the people. A preacher records, with disgust, that the men who drank deep at them were accounted “good fellowes” by their peers. Another, with equal repugnance, observed that the individuals who frequented them sang songs, played games, told each other jokes, fell in love, and consummated love on the premises, and were, in general, sinfully happy.

  A sympathetic view of the English pub appears in the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer (d. 1400), whose Canterbury Tales commence in the Tabard Inn at Southwark, where a group of pilgrims have gathered on their way to the tomb of St. Thomas à Beckett. The Tabard is a welcoming place, blessed with a genial landlord, who declares in the prologue of the poem that he hopes “never to drink anything but wine or ale.” He advises his pilgrims to tell each other stories to pass the time along the way to Canterbury, and they oblige. The Canterbury Tales was something of an innovation in English literature. Instead of peopling his work with allegorical or mythical figures, or stereotypes, Chaucer sought to present individuals, and used their drinking habits as an aid to characterization—readers could form a better mental image of his heroes and heroines if they knew what they drank and what they thought of alcohol. The enigmatic Summoner, for instance, who loved “strong wine, red as blood,” would “speak and cry as he were mad” in Latin, after imbibing enough of his beloved potion. The Miller, in contrast, is drunk throughout his tale, which itself is an example of the vulgar lechery that preachers railed against from their pulpits as being among the side effects of drinking. The Wife of Bath bares her soul when she speaks of the sweet wine she adores and the effect it has on her:

  For after wine, of Venus must I think:

  For just as surely as cold produces hail,

  A liquorish mouth must have a liquorish tail.

  In women wine’s no bar of impotence,

  This know all lechers by experience.

  While some of Chaucer’s characters comment on the dangers of drinking—the Parson, for instance, calls drunkenness “the horrible sepulcher of man’s reasoning” and recommends abstinence—The Canterbury Tales as a whole presents alcohol in a sympathetic light. This positive approach reflects Chaucer’s own feelings about the substance— his father was a wine merchant, and we know he drank regularly, for in 1374 King Edward III granted the poet a pitcher (eight pints) of wine per day for life, which was later supplemented with another royal grant of a ton of wine per year. It also reflects the spirit of the age. Preachers may have fulminated against pubs and drunkenness, but they did not dare attack drinking per se, which, as the pilgrims of The Canterbury Tales illustrate, was an essential part of life in late medieval England.

  8 A NEW WORLD OF DRINKING

  At the same time that clerical hostility to drunkenness was growing in England, the medical reputation of the fluid that caused it was going from strength to strength in continental Europe. Alcohol was the medieval panacea, recommended by such luminaries as Arnald of Villanova (d. 1315) as a cure for almost any ailment. A physician and alchemist by profession, Arnald set down the good news about drink in his Liber de Vinis. The Book of Wine was an enthusiastic champion of its subject and recommended plenty of it, both as a prophylactic and a medicine, because “it truly is most friendly to human nature.” If taken in the right measure wine was suited to “every age, every time, and every region.” In addition to blessing everyone with perfect health, from peasant infants to princes in their dotage, wine could help women to conceive and give birth, and best of all it was intoxicating. Arnald believed that periodic drunkenness was not just fun but also good for people, though not more often than twice a month. In the words of a man respected in his time for his learning: “There is undoubtedly something to be said for inebriation, inasmuch as the results which usually follow do certainly purge the body of noxious humors.”

  Arnald experimented with the Islamic science of distillation in the course of his alchemical work, and his pupil Raymund Lull, Franciscan monk, alchemist, and missionary, was the first European to write about spirits. He reckoned them to be a “Marvelous medicament,” better even than wine, because, in his opinion, they were an entirely different fluid. Distillation did not so much separate as transform, and the substance it produced was “an emanation of the divinity, an element newly revealed to man, but hid from antiquity, because the human race was then too young to need this beverage [which is] destined to revive the energies of modern decrepitude.” The element in question was the fabled quintessence—the fifth essence—the substance from which all heavenly bodies were believed to have been made, a sample of which Lull thought he had captured in his retort. His enthusiasm was shared by other early European distillers. Thaddeus of Florence (1223-1303) wrote a landmark tract on the matter whose title, “De Virtute aquae vitae, quae etiam dicitur aqua ardens” (“On the virtues of the water of life, which is also called firewater”), gave the new and elevating beverage the names by which it became known throughout Europe.

  The first part of the continent in which distillation flourished was Germany, then comprised of dozens of petty kingdoms. In the fifteenth century, apothecaries in a number of these states started to sell spirits to the public by the shot, as a health tonic. They retailed them as brandy, which derives from the German Gebrant wein, or “burned wine,” an allusion to the distillation process. As demand for their product grew, and the mythical element became an everyday beverage, it acquired a reputation for being dangerous if consumed in excess. A Nuremburg doctor, writing in 1493, advised would-be brandy drinkers that they had to treat the new fluid with caution: “In view of the fact that everyone at present has got into the habit of drinking aqua vitae it is necessary to remember the quantity that one can permit oneself to drink, and learn to drink according to one’s capacities; if one wishes to behave like a gentleman.” Clearly, this diplomatic warning was not enough, for in 1496 restrictions were placed on the retail and consumption of spirits in Nuremberg. They could not be sold on Sundays or feast days, and spirits bought on weekdays might be drunk only at home. Similar limitations were introduced in Munich a few years later.

  Despite such warnings and restrictions, the popularity of spirits continued to grow. Their case was championed in print by Hieronymous Braunschweig, an Alsatian army doctor and author of the illustrated Big Book of Distillation (1512). The Big Book was aimed at the home distiller and lavished praises on “the mistress of all medicines.” It claimed curative powers for aqua vitae to rival those attributed by Arnald of Villanova to wine: “It eases diseases coming of cold. It comfortsthe heart. It heals all old and new sores on the head. It causes a good color in a person . . . it eases the pain in the teeth and causes sweet breath . . . it heals the short-winded. It causes good digestion and appetite . . . and takes away belching. It eases the yellow jaundice, the dropsy, the gout, the pain in the breasts when they be swollen, and heals all diseases in the bladder. . . . It heals the bites of a mad dog.” Last, but not least: “It gives also courage in a young person and causes him to have a good memory.”

  Most fifteenth-century German spirits were distilled from wine, of which the region now produced a considerable surplus. The Cistercian monasteries along the Rhine, and a number of aristocratic vintners, had discovered the Riesling grape was the perfect match for the terrain and climate and had planted it in abundance. The original Cistercian settlement in the region at Eberbach by now had over three hundred hectares of vineyards and was the largest single producer of wine in late medieval Europe. In celebration of this status, its monks constructed a giant wine barrel, or tun, in 1500, which had a capacity of about seventy thousand liters. The tun was described as the eighth wonder of the world by the poet Vincentius Obsopaeus, who salivated in his verses over the ocean of fine wine that it contained.
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br />   German, or Rhenish wine as it was known at the time, was sold all over Europe. It was typically light in color and weak in strength, and commanded a slight premium in price to the wines of Bordeaux in England. It was, however, far from being the most expensive wine in circulation, which distinction was reserved for vintages from the southern and eastern Mediterranean. The late medieval period witnessed a tremendous expansion in commerce, which was pioneered by the rising Italian city-states of Venice and Genoa. The Venetian trading empire extended from Christian Constantinople and various Saracen nations in the east, to Southampton and Antwerp in the west. It specialized in high-value goods—silks and spices from the Orient and powerful wines from the Levant, whose grapes had been allowed to dry a little in the sun after their harvest, thus concentrating their sugars and increasing their alcoholic potential. The principal Venetian brand was known in England as Malmsey, after the Byzantine town of Monemvasia in the Peloponnese. The Genoese focused on Chian wines, from the eponymous Greek Island, which they had captured from the Saracens in 1261. They also sourced wine from Catalonia, Valencia, and Málaga in Spain as these were successively reconquered for Christianity.

  The Italian city-states explored as well as traded. Not only did they turn north into the Atlantic when they left the Mediterranean, toward Portugal, France, and the British Isles, they also ventured south into what, for fourteenth-century Europeans, were unknown waters. By 1339, the Genoese had reached the Canary Islands, which were populated by a people called the Guanches, of uncertain origin and stone age technology, who resisted initial attempts to settle but who were subdued by imported Normans from 1402 onward. The surviving Guanches were sold into slavery and their lands were planted with vines. The Madeira Archipelago was first visited in the same year that the Canaries were put on the map. It was “rediscovered” in 1419 by a Portuguese expedition sent by Prince Henry the Navigator and settled in 1425. Unlike the Canaries, Madeira was uninhabited and agriculture rather than slave taking was the priority of its immigrants. Within a decade it was exporting sugar and producing wine. The Azores were next to appear on nautical charts. They had first been spotted in 1427, visited in the 1430s, and had been settled by the 1450s. They were planted with vines from Crete, and soon produced a strong sweet wine similar to that which had made the Mediterranean island famous in classical times.