A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth-Century England (review)

Most of the chapters in this intriguing volume began as papers delivered at a conference, held in 2001 at the University of Reading, on Drink and Conviviality in Early Modern England. Collectively, they address the "moral ambiguity of alcohol" as a cause of both "celebration and regret" (xiv), indeed, the "pleasing sinne" of the title; the "recurring connection between alcohol and sociability"; and "the potential connection between drink and politics" (xv), as well as less abstract matters such as "what was drunk; how much was consumed; and where drinking took place" (xvi). These investigations mix social history and literary criticism; their objects range from texts and behavior in the late sixteenth century to the late seventeenth and occasionally beyond.

Early chapters delineate the social hierarchy of drink in the period, so that, according to Cedric Brown, the wine snob Robert Herrick "tends to deny the best civility, and certainly the true muse, to beer," whereas the little-known, and distinctly inferior, contemporary poet Leonard Wheatcroft, very much a man of the people, "develops a poetic practice that has ale at its heart" (15). When male drinking societies started to form in the early 1600s, meeting in private rooms of public taverns, the choice potable of their intellectually pretentious members was invariably wine: "As in antiquity," Stella Achilleos writes, "wine is considered the drink of poets, related to literary composition and classical moderation" (30). Drinking wine could by itself mark an individual as possessed of a superior sensibility. This particular snootiness existed in England, of course, not on the Continent, about whose practices and refinements Pleasing Sinne does not speculate. It is interesting that the derogatory word "wino," which suggests a depth of dissolution out of reach of beer drinkers, seems not to have existed in early modern English. It is absent from the original edition of the OED, and Eric Partridge dates it to not much earlier than 1925.

Still, matters were not this simple, for however refined the drinking of wine may have appeared to some, it was still the aping of a foreign practice, and the consumption of beer, or at least of ale, was as English as English could be and therefore a patriotic action, a civic good. In "National Stereotyping in Early Modern Culture," which I found particularly informative, Charlotte McBride shows that in the Middle Ages ale had been the English drink, and even as late as 1542 one Andrew Boorde could write, "Ale for an englysshe man is a naturall drynke" and "Bere . . . is a naturall drynke for a dutche man" (183), the difference between the two drinks being the presence of flavoring hops in beer. Things changed, however, so that "[b]y the second half of the sixteenth century, a taste for beer was widely established in England and the need to import hops, its vital ingredient, began to be seen as an economic drain on the country" (184). So as odd as it might sound to us, beer, because of its expense and "foreignness," came to be seen as the elite drink. (The choices in this period are virtually always among ale, beer, and wine. Spirits, as Anya Taylor has shown in Bacchus in Romantic England: Writers and Drink, 1780–1830 [1999], did not become widely attractive and troublesome in England until the eighteenth century.) The economic and social consequences of the ascendancy of beer over ale were vast; for centuries the production of ale, which "required little specialised equipment or capital outlay," had been "women's work," the industry of rural housewives throughout the land, whereas "[t]he brewing of beer lent itself to commercial enterprise, as it requires considerable capital expenditure on equipment" (182). The effect was to marginalize the importance of women's work and pave the way for the establishment of the giant eighteenth-century breweries like Whitbread and Younger.

Pleasing Sinne does not ignore the complicated...