London: The Biography полностью

And, with the food, arrives the drink. The inhabitants of the London region, some four thousand years ago, imbibed a variety of beer or mead. Londoners have been drinking it ever since. Close to the Old Kent Road a Roman brooch of jasper was recently uncovered. Engraved upon it was the head of Silenus, the drunken satyr who was tutor to Bacchus; no better divinity of London could have been discovered. Thomas Brown noted of London, in 1730, that “to see the Number of Taverns, Alehouses etc. he would imagine Bacchus the only God that is worshipp’d there.”

In the thirteenth century London was already notorious for “the immoderate drinking of the foolish.” The wines of the Rhineland and of Gascony, of Burgundy and Maderia, the white wine of Spain and the red wine of Portugal, flooded in, but the less affluent drank ale and beer; the hop seems to have been cultivated by the beginning of the fourteenth century, but most ale was spiced with pepper and known as “stingo.” This again suggests the partiality of Londoners for highly flavoured comestibles, perhaps as a fitting adjunct to their energetic and competitive lives in the city. In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c. 1387-1400) the Cook is well aware of the requirements for what the poet elsewhere calls “a draught of moist and corny ale,” while his Miller, an ale-drinker, “far-dronken was all pale.” In the same period Glutton, in William Langland’s Piers the Plowman (c. 1362), “yglubbed a galon and a gille” of ale. Certainly there were many establishments for that purpose. By the early fourteenth century there were in London “354 taverns and 1,334 breweries,” more familiarly known later as boozing kens or tippling offices. Early in the fifteenth century it was recorded that there were some 269 brewers and in 1427 the London Company of Brewers was incorporated with its own coat of arms. Already it had composed rules for its members, such as that in 1423 which ordered that “retailers of ale should sell the same in their houses, in pots of peutre, sealed; and that whoever carried ale to the buyer should hold the pot in one hand and a cup in another, and that all who had pots unsealed should be fined.” A similar respect for quality was imposed upon the vintners who by city statute in the early fifteenth century were forbidden to “colaire ne medle” with their wine. One William Harold was, in 1419, sentenced to the pillory for an hour on the charge of “contrefetyng of old and feble spaynissh wyn for good amp; trewe Romeney, in the parisshe of seynt Martyns in the vyntry.”

By the sixteenth century, according to John Stow, the problems of drunkenness had become so acute that two hundred London alehouses were suppressed in 1574. There were some twenty-six brewers in London by that time, and their produce was variously known as Huffe Cup, Mad Dog, Angels’ Food, Lift Leg and Stride Wide. The ingredients seem to have varied, with constituents including broom, bay-berries and ivy-berries, together with malt and oats, although only the concoction brewed from hops was given the name of true beer. The Elizabethan chronicler William Harrison noted the drunkards in the streets and remarked that “our malt bugs lie in a row lugging at their dames teats, till they lie still againe, and not be able to wag.” Certain alehouses of the period were so identified with London itself, both in ballad and in drama, that they became representative of the city. The Boar’s Head in Eastcheap was the vivid setting of Falstaff and Pistol, Doll Tearsheet and Mistress Quickly, and so impressed itself upon the folk memory of Londoners that it was generally agreed that Shakespeare himself must have drunk on the premises. In the eighteenth century members of a literary club assembled there in order to assume Shakespearean roles, and such was the power of its associations that it attracted pilgrims to its site long after its destruction in 1831. There is, however, one specific remembrance. Robert Preston “late Drawer at the Boar’s head Tavern” departed this life at the age of twenty-seven on 16 March 1730; he “drew good Wine, took care to fill his Pots” and his headstone lay against the wall of St. Magnus the Martyr.