Drink (17 page)

In addition to recording the differences and similarities between Japanese and European attitudes toward alcohol, Rodrigues also drew attention to the passion in the Far East for a nonalcoholic beverage, which had no counterpart of similar significance in his own culture. He traveled extensively in China as well as Japan and, everywhere he went, found people drinking
cha,
or tea. The idea that a dry, i.e., alcohol-free, drink might confer similar benefits to, say, wine upon its consumers was almost unimaginable in Europe. True, there were such prodigies as healing springs; true, too, that infants drank milk and thrived on it. But the suggestion that boiling leaves in water was a worthwhile use of firewood seemed ridiculous. In consequence, the “various properties, natural powers, and benefits of Cha” and the extravagant praise lavished on it by two hard-drinking civilizations, both of which, incidentally, scorned drinking hot water solo, were examined by Rodrigues in depth and one by one. His conclusions were positive. Tea, as the Asiatics insisted, did indeed have useful properties. It was an aid to celibacy, to the digestion, and to sleepy people. It had a calming influence—“As a cordial it eases the heart and relieves melancholy”—and attractive organoleptic qualities: “The scent of excellent cha is most pleasing, and when a lot of it is drunk . . . it leaves in the throat a very mellow taste.” Best of all, it was an outstanding urine trigger and thus “very good against the pain caused by the [kidney] stone and strangury.”

Rodrigues noted the particular importance of this unusual beverage to the old. The Japanese had a custom of renouncing their worldly goods to their children upon reaching a certain age and station and retiring to the countryside, where they lived in fantastically expensive mock-hermitages, in which they entertained each other, with great ritual, to tea. The ceremony was minimalist and required the patience of age to appreciate its art. There were neither tea boasts nor tea bards; indeed, the contemplation of a single flower or twig was considered the height of entertainment. Might high tea perform a similar role in Europe? Rodrigues held back from making predictions: While tea was appropriate to a Zen mind-set, even its most fervent Japanese advocates still believed alcohol to be the appropriate beverage for the hot-blooded people who had not yet given up on the world.

9 WATKIN’S ALE

In 1578, the cozy duopoly of Portugal and Spain over international trade beyond Europe was violated by an Englishman with a red beard and an unpleasant temper. Francis Drake, following the route pioneered more than fifty years before by Magellan and not attempted since, sailed into the Pacific, where he raided every Spanish settlement between Valparaiso and Acapulco. He burned down their houses, freed their slaves, sank their ships, and carried off their treasure. His greatest prize was the
Caca Fuego,
a Manila galleon laden with spices, silk, and bullion; his incidental captures yielded substantial quantities of Spanish- and South American-grown wine, including 1,770 skins of the Chilean vintage of 1577. Drake coasted up America as far as present-day San Francisco, where he claimed the land for his queen, received the submission of the native chiefs, and named the region Nova Albion. He, and the complement of his ship, the
Golden Hind,
were probably the first men ever to drink wine in northern California. After repairing his vessel, Drake reached off over the Pacific to Asia, where he gate-crashed the spice trade, before heading home for England and a knighthood.

The appearance of an English ship in those parts of the world that the pope had confirmed as belonging to Catholic Spain and Portugal was as unexpected as it was unwelcome. In retrospect, it was inevitable. During the same decades that they had been exploiting their respective spheres of influence, a schism among European Christians had thrown the home continent into disarray. Within a period of about thirty years between 1520 and 1550, northern Germany, Switzerland, Scandinavia, England, and parts of the Low Countries had rejected the authority in matters spiritual of the pope, and the customs of his church, in favor of new, radical versions of Christianity. As this upheaval—the
Reformation
—progressed, pitting Protestant reformers against Rome, a battle royal took place for the moral high ground. The consumption of alcohol entered the debate, at first in metaphor, as each side accused the other of behaving like drunks. The Catholics, claimed the Protestants, were inebriated with power, whereas Protestants, to Catholic minds, had the corrupted thought processes of terminal alcoholics. Such accusations caused both sects to scrutinize the place of drink in their version of a Christian society.

Martin Luther, if not the architect then at least the catalyst of the Reformation, had strong views about the matter. In his opinion, it was certainly wrong that Catholic monks should touch alcohol, for it turned them into inebriated onanists. He spoke from experience—he had started in religion as a black-robed monk. Everyone else, however, could drink with an easy conscience, just as their Savior had. Moreover, there were reasons to celebrate: “We ought to give thanks to God for providing us with food and drink and then besides, liberating us from the papacy. . . . If you are tired and downhearted, take a drink.”

Luther, in deed as well as word, was by and large proalcohol. He was provided with a barrel of Einbecker beer by the Duke of Brunswick to keep his spirits up during his first tussle with the Catholic Church, and his attitude to drink in general is summed up in one of his better-known sayings:

He did however, consider drunkenness to be un-Christian and it was sufficiently prevalent in the reformed German states, probably as a consequence of the spread of distilled spirits, to move him to speak against it. He depicted it as an epidemic, which had erupted among the commoners, and latterly had contaminated society at every level, so that “now those who are the greatest and best are beginning to fall, indeed, even the princes. Now the ten-year-old milksops . . . are beginning, and ruining themselves in their flower. . . . We preach, but who stops it? Those who should stop it do it themselves. . . . Therefore Germany is a land of hogs. . . . If you were going to paint it, you would have to paint a pig.”

Other Protestant reformers, notably Ludwig Haetzer (d. 1529), took a harder line toward alcohol than Luther. The aim, after all, was not merely to correct the abuses of the church but also to make society pure. Like the fire-and-brimstone preachers of the medieval English pulpit, Haetzer believed that drinking inevitably led to sin, and in 1525 he published a treatise,
On Evangelical Drinking,
which proposed total abstinence, not only from drunkenness but also from alcohol among Evangelical Christians. His views were echoed by Sebastien Franck in another treatise,
Concerning the Horrible Vice of Drunkenness,
which was printed in 1528, and which, after describing the disgusting effects the Horrible Vice had on humans, concluded that drinkers were “heathens and not Christian, who do not show forth the fruits of faith.” His solution was to ban drink in Christian societies. These were, however, minority views; indeed, Haetzer was executed by other reformers for his radicalism. Protestants in the main considered drinking to be a secular rather than a sacred matter. They watered down the doctrine of transubstantiation, according to which the bread and wine of the Eucharist became the actual flesh and blood of Christ, to
consubstantiation,
whereby they remained food and drink, albeit infused with the spirit of divinity. This change effectively reduced the religious importance of wine. The best it could be, to Luther and his followers, was a vehicle for the Godhead.

The Catholics, in contrast, while happy to condemn their opponents as alcoholic heretics, said little against drink per se. Wine, in the hands of a Catholic priest, could still be the blood of Christ, and so many monasteries were in the wine or brewing trades that to lose the wealth these generated would be financial suicide. Moreover, there were numerous saints associated with the production, distribution, and consumption of alcohol. Could it be that these companions of God labored in vain? In consequence, whereas the Protestants had questioned drinking and would continue to do so as part of a general reassessment of what constituted a Christian way of life, Catholicism more or less ignored the issue. There was a scholarly debate in various Italian states about the nature of wine, whose participants, while unanimous in the opinion that wine was a healthy beverage, in particular the red variety, since of all foodstuffs it most resembled blood and therefore would convert easiest to this vital fluid, uttered a few mild criticisms against it. The critics, however, were very much in the minority. The reputation of alcohol, wine especially, was on the rise in Catholic countries during the Reformation. This, in part, was a consequence of the Renaissance, the intellectual and artistic movement that had begun in the Italian city-states the previous century and which had since spread through Europe.

Michelangelo’s
Bacchus

The Renaissance revived Roman and Greek ideals and themes in the visual arts, and also represented Christian scenes in classical styles. Bacchus, whose emblems had for so long been employed as Christian symbols of resurrection, was himself resurrected and once again became a proper subject for artists. The rehabilitation of the god of wine was completed by the hand of Michelangelo, who was commissioned by Cardinal Raffaele Riario to produce a statue of the pagan demon for his palace. The resulting image, life-size in marble, is a masterful combination of myth and realism. Bacchus is cut from the rock in an unsteady pose. Although well muscled, he lacks the signature hard body of his creator’s other works, rather is faintly androgynous, reflecting the effeminacy sometimes attributed to him in myth. The face, moreover, is unsettling: According to the English poet Percy Shelley, the statue “looks drunken, brutal, and narrow minded and has an expression of dissoluteness the most revolting.” In the event it was rejected by the cardinal and sold instead to a banker. Its creator was partial to wine, especially that of his native Tuscany, every mouthful of which, he claimed, “Kisses, bites, licks, thrusts, and sings.”

Among other classical ideals, the Renaissance also revived the Platonic principle of moderation in drinking. This standard was proclaimed in works such as
The Book of the Courtier
(1528) by Balthazar Castiglione, a kind of Renaissance etiquette manual for the man about court. According to Castiglione, drunkenness was the enemy of continence and temperance, the two watchwords that should govern the behavior of the aspiring courtier. Interestingly, the princes or cardinals whose courts Castiglione’s readers hoped to frequent still aimed at the medieval ideals of flamboyance and excess. The cardinals, in particular, were as continent as Viking raiders, and their bastard sons, whom they disguised as their nephews,
¹²
often excelled their fathers in dissipation. As for princes, while some expected their menials to be sober and alert, they considered themselves above such conduct, for they, after all, were no mere courtiers.

The old-fashioned virtues of conspicuous consumption and distribution were displayed to perfection at the court of King Henry VIII of England who, according to a French spy, was “constantly intoxicated.” The staff and guests at his favorite palace in Hampton Court got through 4.8 million pints of ale and beer each year, and more than a hundred tons of wines from all over Europe, and this was but a fraction of the alcohol consumed at his other palaces and frequent, splendid pageants. Henry further distinguished himself from the Renaissance ideal by renouncing the Catholic Church, which he had once championed, and adopting Lutheran values, in order that he might divorce his first wife for a prettier, more fertile woman. He rejected the authority of Rome, authorized his second, of six, marriages, and, in 1534, established himself (with the consent of a dutiful Parliament) as the supreme head of the new Church of England. Once the religion of his kingdom was in safe hands, he moved against the servants of his Papist rival. Its monasteries in England were inspected and found to be populated with drunken sinners. Their assets were seized and distributed among his favorites, and their monks and nuns were pensioned off or told to find work.

As the dissolution of the monasteries progressed, it acquired a destructive nature. The images of saints and martyrs that had crowded English churches were smashed, pilgrims’ shrines were demolished, theological libraries were burned, and colorful Catholic festivals were banned. The church-ales, hitherto an important part of rural life, were prohibited in 1547, on the principle that they, too, were a species of idolatry. Marriage was demoted from a sacrament to a civil matter, so that the wassailing that had accompanied
bride-ale
(bridal) celebrations lost its sanctity. The consequent reduction of drinking occasions and places—for church halls had been the social centers of some rural communities—was compensated for by an increase in the number and importance of pubs. Confiscated church property was converted into secular drinking space. In London, for instance, the Chapel of St. Martin-le-Grand was refurbished as a wine tavern, the site of the Carmelite priory of Whitefriars was given over to alehouses, and land belonging to the Dominican order—the Blackfriars—became home to a pub named after the pre-Reformation owners, which still exists and still serves ale.