Drunkenness was the besetting sin of the period when I came to college. I need scarcely add that many other vices followed in its train.
Again, speaking of a college friend:—
I do not remember ever to have seen him guilty of drunkenness, at that time almost universal.
Again (pp. 147-148):—
For many years during Rev. Charles Simeon’s ministry (I speak from my own personal knowledge) Trinity Church and the streets leading to it were the scenes of the most disgraceful tumults. On one occasion an undergraduate, who had been apprehended by Simeon, was compelled to read a public apology in the church. Mr. Simeon made a prefatory address: ‘We have long borne during public worship with the most indecent conduct from those whose situation in life should have made them sensible of the heinousness of such offences; we have seen persons coming into this place in a state of intoxication; we have seen them walking about the aisles, notwithstanding there are persons appointed to show them into seats; we have seen them coming in and going out without the slightest reverence or decorum; we have seen them insulting modest persons, both in and after divine service; in short, the devotions of the congregation have been disturbed by almost every species of ill conduct.’
About 1788, Gunning was for some time a tutor in Herefordshire; there he observed that immense quantities of cider were drunk:—
In years when apples were abundant, the labourers in husbandry were allowed to drink as much cider as they thought proper. It was no unusual thing for a man to put his lips to a wooden bottle containing four quarts, and not remove them until he had emptied it. I have myself witnessed this exploit; but I never ventured to mention a circumstance apparently so incredible, until I read Marshall’s History of Herefordshire, in which he relates the same fact.
George Pryme (b. 1781, obiit 1868) in his Autobiographic Recollections, 1870, fully confirms Gunning’s picture of Cambridge:—