“The Myter in Cheape,” the Mitre of Cheapside, was a haunt of locals where according to Ben Jonson if “any stranger comes in amongst ‘em, they all stand up and stare at him, as he were some unknown beast brought out of Africk.” The drawer here, George, attained immortality when named in 1599 by Jonson in Every Man Out of His Humour-“Where’s George? call me George hither quickly”-and in 1607 by Dekker and Webster in Westward Ho!-“O, you are George the drawer at the Mitre.” It is evidence of the way in which a particular Londoner can become fixed as a type or character in the eyes of his contemporaries. The peculiar and persistent connection of alehouses with drama was also maintained by the memory of the Mermaid.
What things have we seen
Done at the Mermaid; heard words that have been
So nimble and so full of subtle flame
wrote Beaumont to Jonson. Keats, echoing the sentiment two hundred years later, knew no
Happy field or mossy cavern
Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern
The poet, himself a Londoner who as a child lived on the premises of the Swan and Hoop in Moorgate, had migrated in imagination to the junction of Friday Street and Bread Street where the Mitre was consumed in the Great Fire.
A tavern “is the onlely Rende-vous of boone company,” according to the Guls Horne-Booke of 1609 where it is important to know the bar staff or drawers and “to learn their names such as Jack, and Will, and Tom” to procure prompt service as well as credit. Then you may say to the waiter, “Boy, fetch me money from the barre.” The bill was known as “the reckoning” or “the shot.” Games of dice were played and travelling fiddlers went from establishment to establishment. We are allowed to peer closely into the rooms of an early seventeenth-century tavern, by using an inventory from the aptly named Mouthe in Bishopsgate Street. Here are listed the boarded partitions separating one room from another in that tavern, each chamber bearing a different name: the Percullis, the Pomgrannatt, the Three Tuns, the Vyne, and the King’s Head. So we have five different “barres” on the same premises, furnished with tables, benches and stools. In the Percullis, there was “one longe table of waynscote, with a fforme” as well as “one oyster table,” “one olde wyne-stoole” and “a payre of playinge tables”; in the King’s Head there was also an oyster table, as well as “a child’s stoole.” In one of the guests’ chambers, on the floor above, were listed down pillows, flaxen sheets and a tapestried coverlet as well as chests and cupboards.
A poem of 1606 mentions “the Bores head, hard by London stone … the swan at Dowgat … The Myter in Cheape … the Castel in Fishstreet” and others “to make Noses red,” but it was not only drink and lodging which seventeenth-century tavern-keepers supplied. An advertisement from a landlord, moving from the Swan at Holborn Bridge to the Oxford Arms in Warwick Lane, mentioned that “He hath also a hearse, and all things convenient to carry a Corps to any part of England.” “There are endless inns,” Thomas Platter wrote in the early 1600s, “beer and wine shops for every imaginable growth, alicant, canary, muscatels, clarets, Spanish, Rhenish.” Endless, also, are the verses written upon the topic of London alehouses. Ned Ward’s Vade Mecum for Malt Worms and John Taylor’s Pilgrimage are only two examples of poems that list public houses and their locations as a kind of topography of the city, in which the nature and shape of London are known only in terms of intoxicated reverie:
Hence to Cloak-lane, near Dowgate hill we steer
And at Three Tuns cast Anchor for good Beer …
Thereafter haste made waste, and sun was set
Ere to the Shoreditch Flagon I could get.
At ten I took my leave, and by the moon
Reached the Bell Inn, and fell into a swoon.
The words of the two poets are conflated here, in order to suggest the precision of their references to the city as a place where one must get drunk in order to survive.
The excise tax imposed upon beer in 1643 testifies to the increasing popularity of that drink. Pepys noticed during the Great Fire that the women “would scold for drink and be drunk as devels”; there may of course have been some excuse for their behaviour during that inferno but a calm observer, Henry Peacham, writing The Art of Living in London in 1642, commands “above all things beware of beastly drunkenness … some are found sometimes so drunk, who, being fallen upon the ground or, which is worse, in the kennel, are not able to stir or move again. Drinking begets challenges and quarrels, and occasioneth the death of many, as is known by almost daily experience … Drunken men are apt to lose their hats, cloaks, or rapiers, nor to know what they have spent.” Pepys also recorded a lady, dining at the house of a mutual friend, who in one draught knocked back a pint and a half of white wine.
