CHAPTER V.
JACK CADE—“There shall be in England seven halfpenny loaves sold for a penny, the three hooped pot shall have seven hoops, and I will make it felony to drink small beer.”—Hen. VI., Part II. Act iv. Scene 2.
ANCIENT AND CURIOUS LAWS RELATING TO THE MANUFACTURE AND SALE OF ALE AND BEER.
INGS, Parliaments and Local Authorities have, from very early times up to the present, more or less interfered with the production and sale of alcoholic liquors. As a rule, the laws and regulations made by them had the benevolent object of preserving the public health and pocket, but to modern notions they appear for the most part arbitrary and vexatious enactments which unduly oppressed an important industry.
Before dealing with the many early references to laws concerning the brewing and sale of ale, it will be interesting to notice a few of the curious regulations to be found in the Canons of ancient religious orders enjoining sobriety on the members of their communities. Almost, if not quite, the earliest of the kind is attributed to St. Gildas the Wise, who lived towards the close of the sixth century, and is to the effect that, if any monk through drinking too freely gets thick of speech, so that he cannot join in the psalmody, he is to be deprived of his supper.
The Canons of St. David’s contain further rules on the same matter. Priests about to minister in the temple of God, and drinking wine or strong drink through negligence, and not ignorance, must do penance three days. If they have been warned, and despise, then forty days. Those who get drunk from ignorance must do penance fifteen days; if through negligence, forty days; if through contempt, three {97} quarantains. He who forces another to get drunk out of hospitality, must do penance as though he had got drunk himself. But he who out of hatred or wickedness, in order to disgrace or mock at others, forces them to get drunk, if he has not already sufficiently done penance, must do penance as a murderer of souls.
That these restrictions were not confined to clerics may be seen from the decree of Theodore, seventh Archbishop of Canterbury (A.D. 668–693), that if a Christian layman drink to excess, he must do a fifteen-days’ penance.
King Edgar seems to have gone nearer to the programme of the United Kingdom Alliance. Strutt says of him that under the guidance of Dunstan he put down many alehouses, suffering only one to exist in a village. He also ordered that pegs should be fastened in the drinking horns at intervals, that whosoever drank beyond these marks at one draught should be liable to punishment. We find, however, that this last-mentioned device defeated its own end, and became a provocative of drinking, so that in 1102, Anselm decreed, “Let no priest go to drinking bouts, nor drink to pegs (ad pinnas).” The custom was called pin-drinking or pin-nicking, and is the origin of the phrase, “He is in a merry pin,” and, doubtless, also of the expression, “Taking him down a peg.”