BOME

Toby Sullivan Bibliography pubs/history.com
Pub Culture
The history of pub culture in London is one that mirrors the more traditional
political, social, and economic history of the city. At the same time though,
the pub and historical variants thereof, have been an escape from the day to day
drudgery of life in London. For though the structures and names have changed
over time, there has always been a fundamental need to get roaring drunk with
one’s mates. From the sloshed ancient Romans to the pissed Victorian laborers
and all the drunks along the way, Londoners have fine tuned a unique cultural
movement around alcohol and the places that dispense it. A people need somewhere
to turn to celebrate the good and forget the bad, some are desperate enough to
turn to family or church, but others manage to get on with there lives after a
pint or ten at the local. There were the heady days of ale and the dark days of
the well lit gin palaces. In the noble pursuit of alcoholism, the London
citizenry managed to stave off assaults by the party pooping puritans, the
boring bourgeois, and the deadening duties. A mere history cannot express the
profound importance of pub culture. No, nothing less than a pre-history will do.
There cannot be anything more disappointing than being forced to leave a land
of sun, enlightenment, and peace, for a land of rain, gray, rain, and mortal
danger. If you were unlucky enough to be a Roman soldier garrisoned in
Londunium, then that was your reality. One can hardly blame these poor Italian
imperialists, for wanting to transplant a bit of Roman merriment to there dismal
posting. This took the form of the tabernae. In the spirit of Spanish tapas, the
tabernae provided wine and a bit of food for nibbling. These tabernae would
later be reincarnated as taverns for the Elizabethan gentleman drinker. Neon
shamrock technology was still a far way off, so the tabernae attracted drinkers
with a subtle bit of grape vine.
The real British drink was ale and the real British drinking establishment was
the creatively named “alehouse”. Long before there was a united kingdom, there
was a disunited one of villages and loose alliances. Locals that got the hang of
brewing sold to their neighbors and central locations for drinking sprung up
around these houses. Ale was passed around in communal containers. It was in
these ale houses that neighbors bonded through mutual swilling of spit and ale.
To ensure fare servings of the mixture, there were pegs in the containers that
marked where each drinker could drink down to. The naughty few that drank more
than there fair share, “took the next person down a peg or two”. This gave rise
to other quaint expressions such as “I’ll beat you bloody senseless” . The
glorious history of government sticking its stuck up nose where it doesn’t
belong, began during this time period in the 7th century, when Kent’s King
Ethelbert capped how many people were allowed to sell ale. Some historians
(mainly myself), believe that if his mother had named him John, then he wouldn’t
have such a big chip on his shoulder.
By the time the middle ages rolled around ale was the preferred and safest form
of refreshment. Water was best left for the oxen after all that was where most
of their dung ended up. Most people at one time or another, have after a
particularly long and potent session at the pub, just wanted to curl up and go
to sleep right there. For these people there was the invention of the inn. In
the spirit of the crusades and the papal city of Rome, the fad of religious
pilgrimage hit the British Isles like a ton of bricks, a ton of thirsty bricks.
From York down to London up and over a bit to Canterbury, there were bloody
great cathedrals and roads going to them. Before now all the traveling people
had to do was contained on there feudal estate unless it was to raid another
feudal estate. Now England was a more centralized state travel was safer and
physically more possible with better roads. These traveling pilgrims made good
use of the inns. As did the emerging merchants. The Tabard inn, in Southwark,
London won literary fame as it was mentioned in the Canterbury Tales in 1388 by
Chaucer.
Queen Elizabeth I ruled from the mid 16th century to the start of the 17th
century. This was the time period when England played catchup with its own
renaissance. London was now the capital of a country that was using its maritime
dominance to expand in influence and territory. There was a well established
middle class of second rate aristocrats, professionals, and merchants. These
people would form the core of the social movement called by historians (mainly
myself again), pretentious leisure drinkers. These people dined on relatively
decent food and drank wine. The looked down on the lower class, spitting, ale
guzzlers, they were the new, gentile, spitting, wine guzzlers.
All good fun has to come to an end and as usual the church had something to do
with it. No not the Catholic Church whose monasteries were among the first true
inns. In fact it was not so much a church that spoiled things as it was an
Oliver “Puritan” Cromwell. The Civil War which started in 1642 was funded
largely through taxation of alehouses in whichever place each side happened to
hold. The war ended in 1949 with beheading of King Charles I. Oliver Cromwell
cracked down on unlicensed ale houses and fun in general. What the nation lost
in amusement it gained in actual regulations for the houses of booze that
remained. These regulations remained intact when Charles II came to power
following Cromwell’s death. What didn’t remain quite so intact was the city of
London and nearly all the pubs contained within. The Great Fire of London in
1666 leveled most of the city.
Charles carelessly died in 1685 leaving as an heir James II. This was all well
and good if you were a papist, but the influential Protestant parliament found
the arrangement unacceptable. In the gloriously bloodless revolution of velvet,
the Dutch king, William of Orange was invited over to rough up the Catholics and
be king. You only have to know my uncle Ludo to realize the Dutch fondness for
gin. Well in the spirit (no pun intended) of the theory that alcohol cures all
problems, even those caused by alcohol, William drastically lowered tariffs
flooding London with cheap gin. He did so to undermine the people smuggling the
highly popular French brandy and wine into the country. It was a bit of
anti-catholic trade barriers that started the whole thing. In the end it was a
bit like the US government inventing crack to undermine the cocaine cartels. Gin
devastated the working class. Instead of having a casual social drink at an ale
house, the gin shops created an unsupportive atmosphere of dramatic binge
drinking. London clergy and bourgeois took moral objection to all the drinking.
While the capitalists were concerned about their bottom line, who wants drunken
factory workers? These three influential groups successfully pushed through laws
that limited the amount of gin that could be distilled and sold. This worked
until the 1820’s when liberalization of trade led to rock bottom gin prices.
Cunning sin merchants utilized gas lights, plate glass windows, and mirrors to
“create gin palaces”. Would these gaudy upstarts spell the end for our hero the
pub?

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