Introduction

Summary

‘Bifil that in that seson on a day,

In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay …’

Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales (c.1380–1400)

‘They goe ten times to an Ale-house, before they goe once to a Church.’

Thomas Young, Englands Bane: or, The Description of

Drunkennesse (1617)

‘Tourists coming to England will have a number of cultural signposts telling them what makes England ‘England’: high on the list will be ‘the pub’ as a must-see …’

Steven Earnshaw, The Pub in Literature (2000)

From the starting point for Chaucer’s pilgrims – and thus arguably for English literature – through Thomas Young’s complaint that it was ‘too much frequented by yong and old of all conditions’, to its prominent place on twenty-first century lists of ‘what makes England “England”’, the pub has played a defining role in English social and cultural life. It has done so over many centuries, and eulogies to its significance as an integral strand in the fabric of English society often accord a sense of timelessness to that role. But the place of the pub in English life is not timeless: it has a history. Indeed, the term ‘pub’ only came into common usage in the nineteenth century, as a shortened version of ‘public house’, which itself was not used until the end of the seventeenth century. Before this time England’s drinking establishments were described as three distinct institutions: inns, taverns and alehouses. This book charts the history of the most common of these, the alehouse, during that formative period in its history – between the middle of the sixteenth and end of the seventeenth centuries – when it first came to achieve its centrality in the social and cultural lives of English men and women. There was nothing inevitable about this historical development. It involved a considerable struggle, but one from which the alehouse emerged as a key institution in early modern England. In large part this was because it facilitated one of the most important processes of social bonding in this society: participation in a form of recreation that contemporaries called ‘good fellowship’.

The significance of the early modern period in the history of the alehouse is best brought out by sketching out developments in the period that preceded it. Whilst no dedicated studies of the alehouse exist for the medieval period, what evidence we do have indicates that the institution was not particularly prominent.