Alehouses and Good Fellowship in Early Modern England by Mark Hailwood (review)

Roughly a century before the Gin Craze, England experienced a similar moral panic, this time somewhat less intense but geographically more extensive and provoked instead by the rapid proliferation of alehouses. From the late sixteenth century through the middle of the seventeenth century, a mounting fury of denunciation was matched by policing and regulations that betrayed profound antipathy to popular culture and to its expression in rituals of alcoholic sociability. Although historians have studied the subject before, most importantly in Peter Clark’s magisterial “The English Alehouse,” their research has tended to be institutional, from the outside in if not from the top down. Thus Mark Hailwood breaks new ground with his impressive monograph. After a first half that revisits some of the more traditional themes and approaches, a second half takes us inside the alehouse and focuses on the customers and their behavior. Combining wide-ranging research with sophisticated analysis, he offers a welcome study that will shape not only our understanding of alehouse culture but more broadly of pre-modern communities.

As the most modest and least formal of England’s hierarchy of public drinking places, alehouses were often little more than a public room or two in a private house. Cheap, pervasive, and open to all but particularly attractive to the poor, they offered something to drink and a place to drink it. They had been regulated since the Middle Ages, but Hailwood argues that the early seventeenth century brought not only a new intensity to this regulation but also a new target. Although authorities accepted the need for alehouses as a place to purchase beer, legislation made it clear that the sociable use of this space, what he calls “recreational drinking,” was considered illegitimate and fundamentally dangerous. To understand this attitude, Hailwood dives into the court records and finds a pattern of local elites petitioning to limit the way the poor could use alehouses. Local elites in communion with the authorities went beyond condemning drunkenness and unsavory customers; now they identified the time and money spent by the poor on recreational drinking as a destabilizing assault on the local community and economy.

Court records, however, also lead Hailwood to reconsider some of the dichotomies that have traditionally been applied to alehouse culture. Whether seen as the antithesis to the Church, or to respectable politics, or simply to a hegemonic elite culture, the alehouse found in court records had a more complex relationship with regulators and elites. Hailwood emphasizes the diversity of roles and attitudes found on both sides of the argument. Despite frequent hostility expressed by churchmen and lay authorities, some used and defended alehouses. Despite some radicalism expressed by patrons, Hailwood emphasizes the alehouse instead as an “ersatz public sphere” [73] hosting a range of opinions and a site for the negotiations of local politics and power. Alehouses were a venue for the whole of rural society to express a range of values.

For it is the attitudes and behavior of the patrons that really interest Hailwood. To understand what they were doing and why, he turns to a rich if potentially awkward source. The thousands of broadside ballads, or printed songs, that circulated during the period included many celebrating recreational drinking. Hailwood argues that these were the creation of composers who might look much like the customers and owners of alehouses and were enjoyed even by the many customers who were illiterate. The argument that they were “performative” rather than “prescriptive” [170] is plausible but hardly definitive. Nevertheless, the themes evoked by this literature are richly suggestive of attitudes that probably transcended any one social milieu. They celebrated sociability, liberality, and heavy drinking, where each was understood to contribute to the other. And Hailwood strengthens the case by finding similar tropes in very different sources.

He returns at the end to the court cases and the behavior they reveal in ale-houses. Patrons sought “fellowship,” which Hailwood defines as a combination of companionship and friendship. They...