Not Home: Alehouses, Ballads, and the Vagrant Husband in Early Modern England

The recorded stopping-places of one English vagrant arrested by authorities during a western trek in 1612 takes the following night-by-numbers form:

First night, the Saracen's Head in Farringdon;
Second night, the Star in Abingdon;
Third night, an unnamed alehouse in Wallingford;
Fourth night, the Hand in Reading;
Fifth night, the Shoemaker's Last in Newbury;
Sixth night, the Black Boys in Andover;
Seventh night, the Chequers in Winchester;
Eighth night, an unnamed alehouse in Amesbury;
Ninth night, a barn five miles from Amesbury;
Tenth night, the White Horse in Fisherton Anger. ¹

Each siting in this sequential list is a one-night layover and, with only one exception, each is an alehouse. Alehouses sprang up all over England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in direct response to an upsurge in vagrancy and its look-a-like, mobile labor, which was often persecuted by authorities as indistinguishable from vagrancy. ² Following the migratory paths of such itinerants, alehouses were most numerous in towns, and, of course, especially in London. The Londoner Richard Rawlidge protested in 1628 that fifty or sixty years earlier "alehouses were scant . . . [but] now every street [is] replenished" with them. Thomas Dekker, in his English Villanies (1632), concurred. Referring to the red lattice or chequer pattern that was often painted on the walls of small, unlicensed houses in London (instead of ale-stakes or signs that extended out from the house, like those cited above), Dekker complained: "A whole streete is in some place but a continued Ale-house: not a shoppe to be seene betweene a Red lattice." ³ Later statistical evidence provided by Peter Clark supports these claims. Within the city proper, in 1657 there was about one licensed tippler to every sixteen houses, with some of the poorer wards running a ratio closer to one to six or one to seven. Within the suburbs, alehouses were even more numerous, and their rapid proliferation, in Clark's words, "virtually out of control." ⁴

Alehouses thus kept pace with the growth and expansive movements of impoverished itinerants in early modern England. But as a temporary stopping point for vagrancy—that is, as a habitable siteof vagrancy—the alehouse opened its doors to poor local dwellers as well as to those just "passing through." And in doing so, it further opened up the metonymic power of vagrancy initiated already in its embrace of mobile and unstable labor. What was the great attraction of the alehouse for these diverse groups? Certainly it met their basic needs for cheap drink, food, accommodation, and news of possible work. But it also offered much more. In essential ways, I argue, the alehouse offered the unemployed and poor (including even employed local residents) an alternative community and an alternative home. That is, though in many ways like a traditional community and home, the alehouse, as we shall see, was also crucially unlikethem. As such, it constituted a paradoxical or ambiguous space, which, by virtue of its indeterminacy, could be variously and "freely" inhabited. However, if thus siting vagrancy metonymically extended the vagrant experience, it also restricted access to it. Broadside street ballads—the aesthetic form which not only decorated alehouse walls but also, as we shall see, fully inhabited the space of vagrancy—are especially vocal on this subject. Alehouse ballads, in particular, celebrate the gendered co-opting of the alehouse by lowly housed men. In these ballads the alehouse becomes a liberating space situated in opposition to the constraints of the domestic home. But before we can fully appreciate the ballads pasted on its walls, we must first enter the alehouse "home." ⁵

The Alehouse: Home Away From Home

In a very rudimentary way, alehouses provided the vagrant and poor—and especially youths, as Paul Griffiths would add&#8212...