Drink (18 page)

Between the death of King Henry VIII in 1547 and the ascension to the throne of Queen Elizabeth I in 1558, England was in turmoil. It had had a Protestant child monarch and a vituperative Catholic queen in the interim, whose respective advisors persecuted the opponents of their factions of Christianity with equal fanaticism. During this period, English pubs acquired the reputation of being places where the idle and discontented, whether Catholic or Anglican, depending upon which sect was out of power, might gather to foment discord. The reputation lingered for the first two decades of Elizabeth’s reign, during which she consolidated power, and
their
numbers continued to grow. The official distrust of public houses derived from their egalitarianism, born in the age of Chaucer, which had since become part of English culture—anyone might meet at one and say what they felt about any subject with absolute freedom. The increase in the number of pubs, and the impossibility of controlling the hearts and tongues of the people who went to them, infuriated the ruling class. England suffered an economic depression in the middle of the sixteenth century, and this was blamed on drinking places, as was unemployment, vagrancy, and the appearance of syphilis. The damage they caused to the economy was explained to Parliament by William Cecil, secretary of state: “The multiplying of taverns is evident cause of the disorder of the vulgar people who by haunting thereto waste their small substance which they weekly get by their hard labor and commit all evils that accompany drunkenness.” Their role in the dissemination of syphilis was the speculation of William Clowes, surgeon of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, who claimed to have treated over a thousand syphilitics and who believed that infection was transmitted not just by sex but also via “unwary . . . drinking” in “lewd alehouses,” whose moral atmosphere alone might contaminate the innocent.

Neither Cecil or Clowes had any effect on the trade of public houses, whose numbers continued to grow. According to the first official census, carried out in 1577, England (less three counties) contained 14,202 alehouses, 1,631 inns, and 329 taverns. This equated to a pub per every 187 persons,
¹³
and excluded both the plethora of informal outlets such as tippling houses and the multitude of hucksters who sold ale by the mouthful or the pottle in the streets.

Many of the new drinking places stocked a different kind of beverage from ale—
beer
. Beer, in Elizabethan times, was ale brewed to a slightly more complicated process, and with the infusion of hops, as had been recommended by Abbess Hildegard von Bingen in the Middle Ages. Although these may seem small differences, they had important consequences. Hops had a threefold effect on ale—they imparted bitterness to its flavor, they increased the foaminess of its head, and most importantly, they possessed powerful antimicrobial properties. Whereas ale generally had a shelf life of a week or two, beer lasted for months. Beer was first recorded in England in 1361, when a trader from Amsterdam named James Dodynessone paid a toll on some firkins he had landed at Great Yarmouth. For the first century or so after its appearance in the country it was considered a drink for foreigners. However, its longevity recommended it as a provision for troops on campaign and ships on long voyages, and soldiers, sailors, and Londoners developed a taste for the alien brew. By 1493, the “berebrewers” of London were sufficiently numerous to found their own mystery, or guild, and by the time of the Reformation it was as common in metropolitan pubs as ale.

Despite the slight differences between the two, beer was viewed with a great deal of suspicion, especially by traditionalists, who labeled it a noxious foreign concoction. Andrew Boorde,
¹⁴
author of the immensely popular
Dyetary of Health
(1542), a diet-cum-home-doctor book, advised his readers to stick to good old ale, since “ale for an English man is a natural drink.” Conversely, they should avoid beer at all costs, for “it is a natural drink for a Dutch man,” and Dutchmen had radically different metabolisms from people born in the island kingdom. Boorde lamented the spread of beer, which “of late days is much used in England to the detriment of many Englisshe people; specially it killeth them the which be troubled with the colic and the stone and the strangulation.” He warned any of his countrymen still tempted to try it that beer “doth make a man fat, and doth inflate the bely, as it doth appear by the Dutch-men’s faces and belyes.”

Beer gained ground against ale, despite such strident health warnings. It was, after all, in its common form, a better-made and more interesting brew. Ale brewers fought back by pushing up the alcoholic strength of their product, and beer brewers responded in kind. Elizabethan “maltbugs” could choose between such heady concoctions as “Huffecap, Mad Dog, Father Whoresonne, Angel’s Food, Dragons Milk, . . . &c.,” and made a spectacle of themselves when they tracked down a quality barrel, whether of beer or ale: “It is incredible to see how [they] lug at this liquor, even as pigs should lie in a row, lugging at their dame’s teats, till they lie still againe, and be not able to wag.”

While beer may have had the advantage in terms of shelf life, ale enjoyed a better image. In contrast to metropolitan beer, it was perceived of as a breath of country air, as the mainstay of stout and patriotic yeomen and their rosy-cheeked spouses and offspring. Moreover, like the pulque of the Aztecs, ale had symbolic or sentimental associations with fertility. The popular Elizabethan ballad “Watkin’s Ale,” for instance, tells the story of a girl who doesn’t want to die a maid and so persuades a lusty youth to proof her against this eventuality. They court for a short while, and then:

Not only was ale blessed by traditional ties to procreation, it also had the endorsement of England’s greatest dramatist, William Shakespeare.His partiality toward it may be deduced from the respective drinking habits of his characters. His heroes quaff, or praise, ale, and criticize beer, which is the beverage of choice of his villains and weaklings. The playwright’s preference may be interpreted as protonationalism. By the time that Shakespeare had started writing, Elizabethan England had developed a clear identity, and with it an archetypal Englishman. In addition to favoring ale over beer, this new paragon had definite tastes in other categories of drink, which are also apparent in Shakespeare’s plays.

The
fashionable drink, the darling of gallants, sea captains, and playwrights alike, was a sweet, strong golden wine called
sherris
,
sherris-sack,
or just plain
sack. Sherris
was an Anglicization of Jérez, the name of the town in Andalusía in Spain where this nectar was produced.
Sack
derived from the Spanish
sacar
—to take out, or export. Its popularity resulted in part from a promotional drive by its producers, the dukes of Medina Sidonia, who had encouraged trade in their wines with England by removing export duties and through offering special privileges to its merchants. The drive had coincided with war between France and England, which had put claret off-limits, and by 1570 the English, together with their fellow Protestants in the Netherlands, were taking out forty thousand butts of sack, or two-thirds of the annual vintage, every year. Their fondness for the fluid was not diminished by the outbreak of hostilities between England and Spain in 1585; indeed, sack seems to have become more attractive, on the understanding that any on sale in England had been captured from the Spaniards. This association was strengthened when Sir Francis Drake led a preemptive raid against the Spanish fleet as it lay in harbor in Cádiz. The sack, in the sense of investiture and despoliation of the town, yielded two thousand nine hundred butts of the eponymous wine as part of the booty. Englishmen queued up to drink “authentic Cádiz” when Drake brought it home. What could be more patriotic than to tipple on a beverage bought with English cannon and English blood?

Sack had its champion in the Shakespearean character of Sir John Falstaff, who has sack in front of him, or calls for more, almost whenever he is onstage. Perhaps his best known speech is in praise of this elixir, and its sentiments may be taken to reflect Elizabethan feelings about alcohol in general:

“A good sherris-sack hath a twofold operation in it. It ascends me into the brain, dries me there all the foolish and dull and cruddy vapors which environ it; makes it apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes; which, delivered o’er to the voice, the tongue, which is the birth, becomes excellent wit. The second property of your excellent sherris is the warming of the blood; which, before cold and settled, left the liver white and pale, which is the badge of pusillanimity and cowardice, but the sherris warms it and makes it course from the inwards to the parts extreme. It illumineth the face, which as a beacon gives warning to all the rest of this little kingdom, man, to arm,” for “valour comes of sherris,” and therefore: “If I had a thousand sons, the first human principle I would teach them should be, to forswear thin potations, and to addict themselves to sack.”

Falstaff was Shakespeare’s most popular comic creation—the embodiment of Elizabethan drinking, with all its perceived vices and virtues. He was so well-liked that he reappeared as star of his own show—
The Merry Wives of Windsor
. This play, graced with one of Shakespeare’s few original plots, showcases drunkenness, and its pitfalls, and its champion. A rumor written down a century afterward claimed that it was composed in obedience to the wishes of Queen Elizabeth, implying that England high and low loved Sir John Falstaff. It is interesting that a character so defined by tippling could be so popular. Sir John has echoes of Silenus, the fat old drunken demigod who sometimes traveled with Bacchus, suggesting that both the Romans and the Elizabethans had a similar ideal drinker in their heads—a figure both comic and endearing.

Sir John had a variety of drinking companions, female as well as male, and the former presented lively exhibitions of feminine drunkenness, the stage symptoms of which included blushes and malapropisms. Doll Tearsheet, for instance, a prostitute invited by Falstaff to drinks in an upstairs room at the Boar’s Head Tavern, his home from home (in
King Henry IV, Part II
), arrives for her assignation with an impressive color in her cheeks, the result of drinking “too much canaries . . . a marvelous searching wine.”

Women of all conditions appear to have enjoyed a reasonable freedom to consume alcohol in Elizabethan times. While outright inebriation (except in stage whores played by boys) was frowned upon, it was considered normal for them to drink. The queen herself breakfasted on ale, took wine at her banquets, and permitted spirits to be kept in her palaces. In rural areas, brewsters still made ale by the trough, and in wealthy households, women experimented with distillation. Just as the farmer’s wife brewed, so her equivalent in the gentry manufactured “strong waters.” Lady Margaret Hoby, for instance, wife of Sir Thomas Posthumous Hoby, recorded in her diary (1559-1605) how she “went about my stilling; stilled aqua vitas.” The fair amateurs occasionally needed guidance as to when to use the fluids they produced. In his
Delightes for Ladies
(1602) Sir Hugh Platt advised his readers that they should not try to clean their teeth with aqua vitae, lest these fall out and they be forced “to borrow a rank” in order to be able to eat their roast beef.

Whether their tipple was beer, ale, sherris-sack, or rosewater, the inhabitants of Elizabethan England drank deep and with gusto. Their passion for alcohol is reflected in the philosophical passages of Shakespeare about its effects on individuals and their performance when under its influence.
Macbeth
contains the perfect summary of its physiological consequences—nose picking, lechery, and urine;
The Merchant of Venice
depicts how it deludes drinkers; and
Twelfth Night
showcases its comic aspects. Like Aristophanes in classical Athens, Shakespeare influenced opinions toward alcohol and its effects for centuries to come, and the insights, or prejudices, toward the fluid apparent in his plays were those taken to Virginia, in North America, when the English decided to settle there.

10 PILGRIMS

The decision to establish English colonies in the Americas was prompted by the wealth that Spain was extracting from her New World domains. Might not England also find gold, pearls, and silver mines in the vast territory that the Spanish had yet to occupy? The Elizabethan prophet of colonization was Sir Walter Raleigh, who had a vision of a brave and prosperous new England on the far Atlantic coast, owned by the gentry and worked by industrious yeomen. Raleigh was not the first Englishman to have dreamed of, or to have promoted, colonies in the Americas. In 1497, a group of Bristol merchants had hired the Genoese captain John Cabot to investigate their prospects. He had reported that the fishing was good off a part of the North American coast that was christened Newfoundland, and his employers established summer camps along its shores. Cabot, however, vanished on his second voyage west, and for the next eighty years, the idea of colonization was put on ice. It was resuscitated in 1583, when Sir Humphrey Gilbert raised funds in London for an ambitious settlement in the New World, which was intended to revive feudalism on a scale that not even the Spaniards had attempted. Gilbert took a fleet to Newfoundland, which he claimed for England, but made no efforts to establish a permanent settlement and was lost at sea on his return voyage.

Indeed, England’s New World ventures had been a series of failures—depressing precedents, which argued against their repetition, until Sir Walter Raleigh brought some glamour to the show. Not only was he beautifully dressed and experienced in planting (he had been involved in the colonization of Ireland by the sword), but he was also blessed with a talent for organization. In 1584, he obtained letters patent from Queen Elizabeth for the foundation of an American colony and, the same year, sent a reconnaissance expedition under captains Amidas and Barlow. His scouts were back in England within a few months, having explored a patch of what is now North Carolina, which they declared to be akin to the biblical promised land, and distinguished in a similar fashion by an abundance of vines: Their first landing place had been “so full of grapes that the very surge of the Sea sometimes over-flowed them.” They had made contact with the native tribes, who were friendly; and Barlow had taken note of their drinking habits: “Their drinke is commonly water, but while the grape lasteth, they drinke wine, and for want of casks to keep it, all the year after they drink water, but it is sodden with ginger in it, and black sinamon, and sometimes sassaphras, and divers other wholesome and medicinable herbes and trees.” Barlow’s “wine” was grape juice, for unlike the inhabitants of central and southern America, the natives of the northern part of the continent did not drink alcohol.