Drink (10 page)

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 all 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
hemina
⁵
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 This generous ration could be withdrawn as a punishment: Anyone “tardy in coming to the work of God or to the table” was condemned to eat alone, “his portion of wine being taken from him, until he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:

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.

Alcohol also appears in the rules produced by Irishmen, in the style of St. Benedict, for use in their native monasteries. St. Gildas (AD 504- 570) was responsible for the earliest example of these, in which he acknowledged that monks must be allowed to drink, and that even if they did so to excess then this was no great sin: “If anyone because of drunkenness is unable to sing the psalms, being stupefied and without speech,” they were to be “deprived of dinner,” which was a modest penalty in an age when fasting was thought to be a laudatory activity. This policy of toleration was extended to the lay population. St. Gildas is on record as stating that his mission included drunkards. As he pointed out in a letter to a fellow cleric, “Our Lord Jesus Christ did not avoid the feasts of publicans, so that he might save all sinners and harlots.”

Irish Christians were responsible for the reconversion of much of Europe, and their native tolerance of drinking contributed to their successes abroad. Their missionaries left for France and Germany armed with inspirational tales of not one but three Irish saints who had had the power to convert water into ale, for Mochuda and Cronanus had developed the same miraculous skill as Brigit. Their examples were followed on the continent by saints Arnuld and Goericus, to the amazement of their audiences, and numerous pagan souls were saved for Christ by the spontaneous creation of alcohol. Irish missionaries were prepared to work miracles against, as well as with, their favorite beverage. St. Columban (521-579) won many converts by casting Satan out of an ale cask that a band of heathen Austrians were about to offer to their native deity: “They had placed in their midst a large [cask] . . . filled with ale. When the man of God approached and asked what they intended to do with it, they said that they intended to make an offering to their god, Wotan. . . . Hearing of this abominable deed, at a distance he breathed upon the vessel, and through a miracle the vessel was shattered into pieces . . . and the [force of the blast expelled] the ale. . . . It was clear that the devil had been hidden in this vessel, and he would have captured the souls of the participants through the heathen offering. The barbarians, seeing this, were stunned, and said that the great man had the breath of God, since he was thus safely able to shatter the vessel into pieces.” Interestingly, the supernatural ability to explode casks predates St. Columban in Irish myth. Athairne the Fierce, a legendary hero, was said to have developed an urgent thirst for ale while still in his mother’s womb and, after taking control of her faculties, prompted her to ask a brewer to draw some from his barrel. She was refused, whereupon the unborn hero caused the barrel to explode and enjoyed secondhand the spilled brew his mother licked off her fingers.

The pious endeavors of Irish and other missionaries led to the creation of a Christian empire of souls, whose European dominions closely matched those of imperial Rome, and which shared the same capital. Christian channels of communication were the conduits through which news of Britain, the abandoned province, reached Rome, more than a century and a half after silence had fallen. It seems that Rome had forgotten as much about its former possession as the inhabitants of Britain had of their past ruler. The persistence of Ultima Thule was revealed by the appearance of some of its youth in the papal slave market, where they were spotted by Pope Gregory I. Struck by their beauty, he inquired as to their place of origin and, when told they were Angles, from England, resolved to convert such appealing pagans. In AD 597 he sent a Benedictine monk, St. Augustine of Canterbury, on this important mission. It was successful, after numerous martyrdoms, and within a century most of England had become Christian. Bishoprics and monasteries were founded and endowed with land, bishops and abbots grew in temporal as well as spiritual power, and their refectory tables were laden with as much food and alcohol as any pre-Christian mead hall. Not only did the plenty of the halls infiltrate the monasteries, but also their drinking culture. The Anglo-Saxon abbot Alcuin, writing circa AD 800 to a Mercian bishop, admonished him for overindulging, as if he were a hall lord: “It is surely better that Christ’s bishop is more praised for his performance in church than for the pomp of his banquets. . . . The continual pursuit of drunkenness . . . [is] insanity: In the words of the prophet, ‘Shame on you, you mighty wine drinkers and bold men in mixing your drinks.’ Whoever takes pleasure in such things will, as Solomon says, ‘never be wise.’”

Monasteries were islands of literacy in an analphabetic country. Their monks made exquisite copies of the gospels and the other sacred texts of the Christian canon. They wrote, by and large, in Latin and preserved some of the most famous of the imperial authors for the sake of their instructive writing styles. Exposure to Ovid and Virgil made them familiar with the Roman pantheon, and they incorporated classical metaphors and imagery within their own works. Bacchus was resurrected as a synonym for wine; they referred to vineyards as Nysa after the mountain where he had spent his adolescence. The clerics also revived the dormant classical hierarchy of drinks with wine at the top. Their prejudice is evident in the
Colloquy of Aelfric,
written by an English bishop in the late 900s and intended to serve as a phrase book for Anglo-Saxon novices learning Latin. It takes the form of a Q & A between teacher and pupil and illustrates the drinking habits of the monastery:

Note that the novice, probably a teenager, welcomed ale when he could get it, suggesting that Clement’s advice on adolescent drinking carried as little weight in England as his strictures against bingeing. The irrepressible thirst of the Anglo-Saxons was confirmed elsewhere in Aelfric’s work. His sermon
De Populo Israhel
was written as a model to show his fellow clerics how to explain to the bibulous English why an omnipotent deity had supplied Moses with water in the wilderness instead of something alcoholic. God, according to Aelfric, had he been so minded, could just as easily have caused a flow of wine “or, what is more, of ale” to spring forth from the rock, but that he chose not to do so was simply proof of the inscrutability of his ways.

In addition to reviving Bacchus, and formulating appropriate policies toward drinking for Anglo-Saxon Christians, the religious orders were instrumental in collecting and preserving English medical lore in documents known as
leechdoms.
These used alcoholic beverages in almost every cure; indeed, the only condition for which they were not recommended as medicine was pregnancy. According to one such tract, “pregnant women should not drink to excess nor drink
beor
at all.”

Just as civilization was enjoying a second spring in England, a fresh batch of barbarians appeared from the north. The Vikings arrived by sea, and since most of the fighting in the country over the past two centuries had been land-based, the English were entirely unprepared for them. The most unready were the monasteries, many of which were situated on little islands just off the coast, so as to be at a safe distance from the conflicts that rolled up and down the land and the temptations it contained in times of peace. Lindisfarne, an islet off the coast of Northumbria, which had been selected by St. Aiden in AD 635 as the ideal site for a religious colony and had flourished to the extent that it had a church the size of a cathedral, more than a hundred monks, an alumni roll that included several saints, a brewery, and a treasure of gold and silver, was the first to be attacked. The Vikings hit Lindisfarne in AD 793, and in the words of Simeon of Durham, they “laid everything waste with grievous plundering, trampled the holy places with polluted feet, dug up the altars, and seized all the treasures of the holy Church. They killed some of the brothers; some they took away with them in fetters; many they drove out, naked and loaded with insults; and some they drowned in the sea.”

The Vikings were a rude reminder to the Christian Anglo-Saxons of just how civilized they had become since their conversion. Ethnically, Vikings were very similar to the warrior bands who had settled Britain after the end of Roman rule—they had matching tribal gods, an identical veneration for mead halls, and an equal obsession with battle and excess. They launched their
snaken
—snake boats, long ships—not only against the coasts of Britain but also those of Germany, France, Portugal, and Spain. Wherever they visited they left the same reputation as a race of psychopaths who respected neither property nor person. Their swords, spears, battle-axes, and war hammers were responsible for the creation of a host of new martyrs. They put down roots in some of the places they attacked. In England they took Northumbria and Mercia, and fought legendary wars against King Alfred of Wessex; in France, the Norsemen founded the kingdom of Normandy; and they were probably the first humans ever to reach and settle Iceland. In between raiding and colonization, the Vikings traded their plunder for luxuries via river through the Baltic states and Russia to the Black Sea, where they established contact with Constantinople, the last outpost of the old Roman Empire. Their trade goods in the main consisted of furs, slaves, amber, and walrus ivory, which they exchanged for gold, silver, and wine.

Alcohol was central to Viking culture. Their gods drank heavily; their paradise consisted of a battlefield, where dead heroes might fight all day every day for eternity, and a celestial hall, Valhalla, where the deceased repaired each dusk to enjoy a perpetual menu of roast pork and mead served by awesome blonde Valkyries. The Vikings had the same categories of alcoholic drink as the Anglo-Saxons—mead, ale, wine, and
beor
. Like the Anglo-Saxons, they venerated mead but drank mostly ale. Modern attempts to reproduce a Viking brew have resulted in a strong (9 percent ABV), dark, and malty beverage, sweet in taste— which would have seemed even sweeter in an age when sugar was rare. In polite Viking society ale was strained before being served—ale strainers have been found amid the grave goods of well-bred ladies, who performed the role of cupbearers in the Viking halls.

The Norse sagas, which contain their creation myths, their genealogies, and record the deeds of their greatest warriors, provide a sense of the pervasiveness of drink in Viking society. A striking number of their heroes and kings died from alcohol-related accidents—King Fjolne, for instance, fell into a vat of mead below his hall and was drowned; the prince Swegde and his train of warriors were lured by a dwarf into the pit of hell after a drinking binge; kings Alf and Yngve, brothers, murdered each other in Yngve’s mead hall when drunk, and so on. Rather as the Romans had made a tactic of intoxicating barbarians before attacking them, Vikings often settled their feuds by killing each other in mead halls, or burning them to the ground when their occupants were drunk. An example of both metasolutions appears in the Yngling saga, in the story of King Ingjald, who marked the beginning of his reign with an heirship feast: “It was the custom at that time that he who gave an heirship feast . . . should sit upon the footstool in front of the high seat, until the full bowl, which was called the Brage-beaker, was brought in. Then he should stand up, take the Brage-beaker, make solemn vows to be afterward fulfilled, and thereupon empty the beaker. Then he should ascend the high seat which his father had occupied; and thus he came to the full heritage after his father. Now it was done so on this occasion. When the full Brage-beaker came in, King Ingjald stood up . . . and made a solemn vow to enlarge his dominions by one half, toward all the four corners of the world, or die.” King Ingjald realized his pledge by intoxicating his guests, burning down his own hall with them all inside, then confiscating their kingdoms.