In Arnold’s Chronicle, published by Pynson about 1521, the following receipt for making beer is given: “Ten quarters of malt, two quarters of wheat, two quarters of oats and eleven poundes of hoppys, to make eleven barrels of single beer.” Hops only came into use about the reign of Henry VII; previously ivy berries, heath or spice had been used as a flavouring for ale. Leonard Maskall, of Plumpton, a writer on gardening in the reign of Henry VIII, has the credit of acclimatising the hop-plant. He is also said to have first introduced carp in the moat at Plumpton Place. Hence the rhyme of which many versions are given:
“Hops, heresy, carp and beer,
Came into England all in one year.”
However, hops are mentioned as an adulterant in ale in a statute of Henry VI; and about the same time mention of beer occurs in the accounts of Syon Nunnery, which were kept in English.
Every inn, large or small, once possessed its own brewhouse, and although wholesale breweries were established about the time of the Flemish immigration, at the end of the fourteenth century, home-brewed ale was commonly on draught fifty or sixty years ago. The White Horse at Pleshy, that village that boasts of knowing neither a teetotaller nor a drunkard, relied entirely on its home-brewed liquors up to within the last ten years, and the apparatus wherein they were prepared remains for the student of old methods to examine.
Home-brewed ale is still more commonly to be met with in some districts than many suppose. Even in the neighbourhood of the greatest brewery town in the world, Burton-on-Trent, there are small inns which rely upon their own brewing for the best of their ale. There is a very old brewhouse at Derby, at the Nottingham Castle Inn, into which any passer-by may step from the street and see, twice a week, a huge cauldron containing about a hundred and twenty gallons, bubbling and foaming in the corner. This brewhouse dates from the sixteenth century, and is one of the oldest buildings in the town; the Dolphin, whose licence dates from 1530, being another and perhaps older inn in the same neighbourhood.
White Horse, Pleshy
A legion of brewers are named in Domesday Book, mostly women, and manorial assizes show a preponderance of the fairer sex. The price of bread and ale was fixed by statute in Henry III’s reign, and it was the business of the Ale-tester to see that the measures were of standard capacity and stamped with some recognized official mark. Alehouses abounded everywhere, known by a long pole surmounted by a tuft of foliage. An Act of 1375 regulates the length of the ale-stake at not more than seven feet over the public way. The poles had a tendency to become over long to the deterioration of the timber structures from which they depended, as well as danger to travellers passing on horseback. At Guildford, and some other cloth centres, the alehouses were required to exhibit a woolpack for a sign.
These alehouses were of all sorts and sizes. There was the humble hedgeside cottage, looking like a mere sentry-box, illustrated in the fourteenth century MS.[9], where a hermit is being entertained by an alewife with a very large beer jug; or the little alehouse on the Watling Street, somewhere near Rainham, where Chaucer’s Pardoner dismounted to
“Drynke and byten on a cake”