3 - ‘Good Companions and Fellow Boozers’: The Idiom of Good Fellowship

Summary

‘To be called a good companion and fellow-boozer is to me pure honour and glory.’

François Rabelais, Preface to Gargantua and Pantagruel

The French Renaissance writer François Rabelais claimed that recreational drinking was – for its participants at least – a positive sociocultural activity, one that conferred upon its partakers ‘pure honour and glory’ derived from the admiration of one’s ‘fellow-boozers’. In his Gargantua and Pantagruel, a chapter entitled ‘The Drunkards’ Conversation’ deployed a celebratory lexicon of alcohol consumption – ‘Let’s have a song, let’s have a drink, let’s sing a catch!’; ‘fill this up till it spills over’; ‘let’s knock it all back’ – in a tone that revels in liberal drinking and jovial companionship, and highlights that for Rabelais drink was ‘the symbol for the uninhibited interchange of affection between man and man’. Part Two of this book argues that a similar celebratory idiom, one that emphasised merriment, liberality, and affectionate social bonds – referred to by contemporaries as ‘good fellowship’ – lay at the heart of the appeal the alehouse held for early modern English men and women.

Of course, not all alehouse patronage took on the form of good fellowship, and it is important to keep in mind the distinction – so central to the regulatory framework for alehouses – between two broad categories of alehouse visits: those generally acceptable ones in which a moderate amount of alcohol consumption served a ‘functional’ purpose, and those officially prohibited occasions where patrons were more centrally concerned with consuming larger quantities of drink for recreation. As Chapter 1 showed, visits to the alehouse to obtain essential victuals by those without their own brewing facilities, or by those on the road looking for refreshment, were regarded as wholly legitimate. Sharing a pot of ale as a means to seal a business deal or resolve a neighbourly conflict were also relatively uncontroversial, and drink might often function as a ‘mundane marker of accord and good will’ and serve to ‘oil the wheels of social intercourse’. Provided such visits lasted no longer than an hour and did not descend into drunkenness, they were unlikely to arouse opprobrium from any quarter. That said, many of the occasions on which alcohol was consumed in the alehouse clearly went beyond these routine, functional visits.