11 - Drinking and Entertainment

Summary

Drinking

Audrey Horning recently observed that wine served as a medium of economic exchange in plantation Ireland. In the 1604 leasing arrangements agreed between Thomas Phillips, later one of the chief architects of the Londonderry plantation, and the earl of Tyrone, the timber rights in Killetra County, Londonderry were to be paid for by a rent of one tun of claret and one half-tun of wine. Although the exact role of wine is uncertain, it also seems to have served complex ritual and political functions in Anglo-Irish relations and in the process of negotiation.

In a letter from John Garland to Sir John Perrot in 1589, Garland wrote:

After the delivery of your Honour’s ‘scoule,’ [scull], to O’Neill, he took it in his hand and kissed it at least half-a-score times, and then presently he sent for two hogsheads of wine and christened your scull, and after he had drunk his fill, and he put on his shirt of mail and his jack, and called for a bowl of wine, and drank it to your Honour’s health, withal he put on his scull and drew out his sword with a great oath, and said that Sir John Perrot was the truest man of his word that ever he knew.

The significance of O’Neill’s drinking ritual is difficult to determine. There are echoes here, for example, of the ancient practice of Celtic and Scythian head hunting. Scythians, a tribe from which the Irish were believed to be descended, made use of the actual skulls of their enemies so as to drink of their strength and power. There are also religious and liturgical undertones, manifest in the christening of the skull. Whatever the exact significance of the ritual – or, of course, the manner in which Garland chose to report it – it is clear that both the wine and the drinking vessel, in this case Perrot’s military helmet, were central to O’Neill’s political statement. His actions indeed suggest an overlap between rituals of political and social drinking and the complex procedures of hat etiquette discussed earlier. Certainly, this raises intriguing questions about the extent to which Irish and English drinking practices overlapped, differed and were modified to serve as a point of cultural mediation and commensality between natives and newcomers.