The English: A Social History, 1066–1945 (Text Only) Read online

  Certainly, by Chaucer’s time, the friar was more often a ‘very festive fellow’, ‘glib with gallant phrase and well-turned speech’. The friar in The Canterbury Tales is a limiter, one granted an area in which to beg so as to limit his activities. A disreputable, grasping, ingratiating fellow, he is ready to grant absolution after hearing confessions – for which he claims to have a special licence from the Pope – provided he is decently rewarded.

  He kept his tippet stuffed with pins for curls,

  And pocket-knives to give to pretty girls.

  And certainly his voice was gay and sturdy,

  At sing-songs he was champion of the hour.

  His neck was whiter than a lily-flower

  But strong enough to butt a bruiser down.

  He knew the taverns well in every town

  And every innkeeper and barmaid too

  Better than lepers, beggars and that crew,

  For in so eminent a man as he

  It was not fitting with the dignity

  Of his position, dealing with a scum

  Of wretched lepers; nothing good can come

  Of commerce with such slum-and-gutter dwellers,

  But only with the rich and victual-sellers.

  5 Drinking and Playing

  As well as in the church, villagers met in the alehouse, a drinking place far less expensive than the large inns in the towns and on the main highways where the more prosperous wayfarers stayed and rather less so than the taverns which sold wine and which became more socially distinguishable from alehouses as the Middle Ages progressed. In the earlier years of the fourteenth century French wine cost only about 3d a gallon but by the late fifteenth century, after the Hundred Years’ War with France and the loss of Gascony, it rose to as much as 8d and by the end of the sixteenth century it could not be bought for much less than 2s 8d.1 The taverns where wine was sold – usually advertised by branches and leaves hung over the door – were mostly in towns and kept by vintners. In 1309 in London, where the population was between 30,000 and 40,000, there were apparently as many as 354 taverners and the Vintners’ Company was gaining virtual monopoly of the retail trade. There seems to have been proportionately as many in every large town; but as one pilgrim grumpily complained, ‘Taverns are for the rich and for lovers of good wine.’2 The poor had to be content with the alehouse.

  Ale, however, was not cheap. The Assize of Ale of 1266 fixed the maximum price of ½d a gallon in the towns and about ¼d elsewhere. But a royal ordinance of 1283 raised the maximum to 1½d a gallon for strong ale and 1d for the weaker, so that for four pints even of the weaker brew a labourer, as Peter Clark has estimated, would have to part with about a third of his daily earnings. Nor was the ale supplied by the average village brewster as good as that to be enjoyed in baronial households where an expert ale-wife would be employed. The brew dispensed by most ale-sellers was much thicker, flatter and sourer than the best Kentish ale so highly praised by Gerald of Wales in the twelfth century. Fermentation was frequently incomplete and, although long-peppers were added to the mixture to help preserve it, the liquor soon went off. One fourteenth-century drinker complained that it was ‘muddy, foggy, fulsome, puddle, stinking’.3 Manor servants and day labourers were, therefore, grateful that they received food and drink as part of their wages, since the ale placed on the board in the hall and in the outbuildings where workers were fed after fulfilling their obligations in the masters’ fields was much more palatable than that the independent ale-seller could be relied upon to supply.

  Most ale-sellers and brewers were women. At Wallingford in the early thirteenth century there were nearly sixty brewers and only four of them were men. And most male brewers had other occupations. At Norwich among those listed as brewers were a smith, a parchment dealer, a carter and a gate-keeper. In the earlier Middle Ages few of those who brewed and sold ale kept open house for drinking on their premises. Their customers came with jugs and buckets to take the brew away. It was also hawked about the streets, and, at fairs and festivals, sold from stalls in the market-place. But by the end of the fourteenth century the number of alehouses in towns and large villages seems to have been growing fast, and those who kept them were increasingly relying for their supplies on local brewers who were operating on quite a large scale. In 1454 a petition from Norfolk protested that a gang of marauders was rampaging about the country ‘with bows and arrows shooting and playing in men’s closes among men’s cattle, going from alehouse to alehouse and menacing such as they hated’.4

  By then the alehouse had become a much more common sight all over the country; and the quality of the ale had much improved, particularly that brewed at Burton-on-Trent and in London. This was partly owing to the introduction of hops instead of spices and partly to the more extensive equipment available to the professional brewer. As early as 1335 the inventory of a brewhouse in St Martin’s, Ludgate, listed, among several other vessels, tubs and utensils, a lead cistern, a tap-trough, a mash-vat, a fining vat and an ale vat. At the same time ale was becoming more easily within the reach of the ordinary working man. Whereas the thirteenth-century labourer had been hard put to it to afford even a pint or two, two centuries later rising wages would have allowed a building craftsman in southern England to buy four gallons of good ale with his daily wage had he wanted to. Certainly the alehouse had by then become a convivial meeting-place where the customers, mostly from the lower orders of society, could drink from earthenware or pewter pots, talk and sing, gamble, sometimes eat and occasionally, as the customers of Julian Fox of Thornbury had been able to do in the 1370s, enjoy the services of a prostitute.5 Breton, the ale-seller in Piers Plowman, keeps a house in which

  Ther was lauhyng and lakeryng and ‘let go the coppe!’

  Bargeynes and bevereges: by-gunne to aryse,

  And seten so til evesong rang.

  Among the customers were a shoemaker, a warner and his wife, Tim the tinker and two of his apprentices, Hick the hackneyman, Hugh the needle-seller, Daw the ditcher, the clerk of the parish, a rat-catcher, a priest, a ropemaker, a hayward, a hermit, a hangman, porters and cut-purses, bald-headed tooth-drawers, a dozen harlots and ‘a whole heap of upholsterers’. One of the bibulous company is Glutton whom Breton has waylaid as he was walking to church:

  But Breton the brewster bad him good morrow,

  And asked him with that whither he was going:

  ‘To holy church’, said he, ‘to hear the service,

  And so I will be shriven and sin no longer.’

  ‘I have good ale, gossip: Glutton, will you try it?’

  ‘What have you?’ he asked – ‘any hot spices?’

  ‘I have pepper and peonies’, she said, ‘and a pound of garlic

  And a farthing worth of fennel seed for fasting seasons.’

  Then Gluttony goes in with a great crowd after …

  He eventually gulps down ‘a gallon and a gil’ after which

  He could neither step nor stand till a staff held him,

  And then began to go like a gleeman’s bitch,

  Sometimes aside and sometimes backwards,

  Like one who lays lures to lime wild-fowl.

  And he drew to the door all dimmed before him,

  He stumbled on the threshold and was thrown forwards.6

  Heavy drinking was not, of course, confined to alehouses and taverns. At most family celebrations, baptisms, marriages and funerals, large quantities of ale were consumed. In about 1223 Bishop Richard Poore of Salisbury found it necessary to order that marriages must be ‘celebrated reverently and with honour, not with laughter or sport or at public potations or feasts’. But the frequency with which similar decrees had to be issued over the years indicates the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of making marriage celebrations more decorous and of eradicating the ‘bride ales’, the customary parties which were held after the church ceremony and at which the guests drank quarts of ale specially brewed for the occasion, the profits going to the bride.

&n
bsp; While Bishop Poore was vainly protesting against irreverent marriages, other bishops were denouncing the loose manner in which funeral ceremonies were conducted, particularly wakes and their attendant singing, games and drunken merriment, not to mention the fornication and theft for which, so a church council of 1342 maintained, they provided opportunities. Yet frolicsome wakes continued unabated; and a death in the family at the manor remained the occasion for such festivities as those held after the funeral of the fourth Lord Berkeley in 1368 when the reeve was instructed to fatten up 100 geese and ‘divers other Reeves the like, in geese, duckes, and other poultry’.7

  As well as ‘bride ales’, there were all manner of other ‘ales’ which provided excuses for heavy drinking, in addition to church ales. There were ‘scot ales’ and ‘play ales’, ‘lamb ales’ and ‘Whitsun ales’ and the ‘scythale’ which was held on the completion of a season of mowing. The cost of some of these ‘ales’ was borne by the lord of the manor as a reward for satisfactory service, but others were held for his profit and tenants were expected to attend and to bring a fixed amount of beer money with them.8

  On most manors at Christmas time the tenants were invited to a feast and asked to bring their dishes and mugs as well as logs for the yule fire in the hall. At this time of year, according to William FitzStephen, Thomas Becket’s clericus, friend and biographer, writing in the second half of the twelfth century, ‘every man’s house, as also their parish churches, were decked with holme [holly], Ivie, Bayes, and whatsoever the season afforded to be greene’. As well as Christmas, May Day and Midsummer Day were particularly joyful holidays. In London on May Day, as FitzStephen related, ‘every man, except impediment, would walke into the sweete meadows and greene woods, there to rejoyce their spirites with the beauty and savour of sweete flowers, and with the harmony of birds’. Elsewhere, in every town and village, there would be May Day celebrations, dances and ceremonies so old that none knew when they had first been performed. Young men and girls would go out into the woodlands to the sound of music to gather the May blossom with which, bound in wreaths, they would decorate the windows and doors of their cottages; and they would carry back to their villages ‘their Maie pole, whiche they would bring home with great veneration, as thus’:

  They have twentie or thirtie yoke of oxen, every oxe having a sweet nosegaie of flowers tyed on the tippe of his hornes, and these oxen draw home this Maiepole … which is covered all over with flowers and hearbes, bounde rounde about with strings, from the top to the bottome, and sometyme painted with variable colours, with two or three hundred men, women and children following it, with great devotion. And thus beyng reared up, with handkerchiefs and flagges streamyng on the toppe, they strawe the grounde aboute, binde greene boughes aboute it, sette up Sommer haules, Bowers, and Arbours hard by it. And then fall they to banquet and feast, to leape and daunce aboute it, as the Heathen people did at the dedication of their Idolles, whereof this is a perfect patterne, or rather the thyng itself.9

  In other villages the maypole stood in a convenient part of the village ‘in the whole circle of the year, as if it were consecrated to the goddess of Flowers’. On occasions, a maypole would be set up in the courtyard or grounds of a manor house, and here also pageants and displays of archery were performed, the actors and contestants often dressed as Robin Hood and his merry men. One such pageant was held at a baronial mansion in the fifteenth century:

  A large square was staked out in the grounds and fenced with ropes. Six young men first entered the square, clothed in jerkins of leather, with axes upon their shoulders like woodmen, and their heads bound with large garlands of ivy-leaves, intertwined with sprigs of hawthorn. Then followed six young maidens of the village, dressed in blue kirtles, with garlands of primroses on their heads, leading a fine sleek cow decorated with ribbons of various colours, interspersed with flowers; and the horns of the animal were tipped with gold. These were succeeded by six foresters, equipped in green tunics, with hoods and hosen of the same colour; each of them carried a bugle-horn attached to a baldrick of silk, which he sounded as he passed the barrier. After them came the baron’s chief falconer, who personified Robin Hood. He was attired in a bright grass-green tunic, fringed with gold … A page as Little John walked at his right hand; and Cecil Cellerman, the butler, as Will Stukely, at his left. These, with ten others of the jolly outlaw’s attendants who followed, were habited in green garments, bearing their bows bent in their hands, and their arrows in their girdles. Then came two maidens, in orange-coloured kirtles with white courtpies, strewing flowers, followed immediately by the Maid Marian, elegantly habited. She was supported by two bride-maidens, in sky-coloured rochets girt with crimson girdles, wearing garlands upon their heads of blue and white violets. After them came four other females in green courtpies, and garlands of violets and cowslips. Then Sampson the smith, as Friar Tuck, carrying a huge quarter-staff on his shoulder; and Morris the mole-taker, who represented Much the miller’s son, having a long pole with an inflated bladder attached to one end. And after them the Maypole, drawn by eight fine oxen, decorated with scarfs, ribbons, and flowers of divers colours; and the tips of their horns were embellished with gold. The rear was closed by the hobby-horse and the dragon. When the May-pole was drawn into the square, the foresters sounded their horns, and the populace expressed their pleasure by shouting incessantly until it reached the place assigned for its elevation: and during the time the ground was preparing for its reception, the barriers of the bottom of the inclosure were opened for the villagers to approach, and adorn it with ribbons, garlands, and flowers as their inclination prompted them … And when it was elevated the woodmen and the milk-maidens danced around it according to the rustic fashion.

  The baron’s chief minstrel accompanied the dance on his bagpipes, his assistants playing pipe and tabor. Then the jester frisked up and down the square on his hobby-horse, followed by the ranger ‘who personated a dragon, hissing, yelling, and shaking his wings with wonderful ingenuity’; while the mole-taker pranced about, throwing meal into the faces of the spectators or rapping them over the head with the bladder at the end of his pole, and Friar Tuck ‘walked with much gravity around the square, and occasionally let forth his heavy staff upon the toes of such of the crowd as he thought were approaching more forward than they ought to do … Then the archers set up a target and made trial of their skill in regular succession.’ The pageant was finished with the archery; and the procession began to move away to make room for the villagers who afterwards assembled in the square and ‘amused themselves by dancing round the maypole in promiscuous companies’.10

  Archery, which was a principal feature of this pageant, was practised everywhere, although it was a constant complaint by those in authority that young men were neither so assiduous nor so skilful as their ancestors had been and that, in the words of John Stow, young men had long since abandoned this healthy and useful exercise to ‘creepe into bowling-alleys and ordinarie dicing-houses where they hazard their money at unlawful games’.

  During the Hundred Years’ War with France numerous proclamations had been issued to encourage the practice of archery. ‘Cause public proclamation to be made,’ ran one Act of 1369, ‘that everyone of the said City of London strong in body, at leisure times and on holidays, use in their recreation bows and arrows.’ To foster the exercise – deemed essential for the provision of well-trained bowmen for the army – handball and football were forbidden under pain of imprisonment; and further ordinances, prohibiting all other sports on Sundays and Feast Days, decreed that if an archer killed a man while practising, the misadventure should not be considered a crime. Spaces were set aside beyond the city walls where earthen butts were set up. In the country, men were urged to practise in churchyards and on village greens, using arrows about three feet long with sharp tips of steel – capable of penetrating through an oak door four inches thick – smooth wooden shafts, and flights of duck or peacock feathers or, more rarely, of parchment. The bows were abo
ut five feet long and the best of them were made of yew, though, to prevent too many yews being cut down for the purpose, bowyers were instructed from time to time to make four bows of witch-hazel, ash or elm to every one they made of yew. The best bowstrings, according to Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus, the Schole of Shooting, were made of good hemp, flax or silk. The bowstring was drawn back to the ear unlike the string of the shortbow which was drawn back only to the chest, and a skilled long-bowman could shoot accurately at distances up to 300 yards. It was the archers of South Wales who had first shown Edward I the range and power of the long-bow and this had thereafter become the principal weapon of English infantry; and, by becoming so, had revolutionized both the organization and tactics of the English army. Edward I’s army on the Continent in 1297 had contained 7810 infantry, three-quarters of them Welsh, and only 895 cavalry. Edward III’s army contained a higher proportion of cavalry, but not of knights, for the additional mounted men were horse-archers who could pursue the retreating enemy at great speed after his cavalry attack had been stopped and broken by the line of armoured knights and foot-archers.11