Drink (14 page)

Feudal patterns of drinking, and the principle of servitude, were disturbed by a human catastrophe in the middle of the fourteenth century. Between 1347 and 1385, at least one in three of every noble, cleric, student, and commoner in Europe was killed by a plague pandemic.While historians are undecided whether the pestilence in question was bubonic plague, pneumonic plague, or a combination of the pair—the
Black Death
spread quickly, struck suddenly, and was fatal to nine-tenths of the people it infected. There was no known cure—not even prayer and a blameless life could stay the disease. All sorts of preventatives and remedies were tried—people bathed themselves in vinegar and holy water, adorned themselves with herbs, amulets, and crosses, altered their habits, took refuge in the country, all to no avail. Alcohol was many people’s first and last resort. As the epidemic spread westward, ale was used as a prophylactic and was believed to have won some small if notable battles against it. When the Black Death appeared in Oudenburg in Belgium, Arnold, the local abbot, forced Christians to drink his brews instead of water. Survival rates were high among his congregation, and after death he was canonized. He is now the patron saint of brewers.

The Black Death took fifty years to die away, blossoming into minor epidemics in the interim and killing a third of the remainder of the population of Europe in the process. It was not the only problem facing the continent: The climate was changing—the Little Ice Age (c. 1350-1850) had begun; the church was being torn apart in a power struggle between pope and antipope; the Hundred Years’ War between England and France was in full swing, as were conflicts in Italy, Germany, the Low Countries, and on various Mediterranean islands.

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:

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:

Not to be outdone by the pulpit, 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:

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.”