CHAPTER VI.
PLANTAGENET PERIOD.—HENRY II. TO THE DEATH OF RICHARD I.
The period on which we now enter, called, in compliance with usage, the Plantagenet, might for our present purpose more strictly be named The Light Wine Period. And it is instructive; and might have served for instruction to certain of our legislators in the present reign, who first tried beer (houses) to put down spirit drinking, and then tried wine to put down spirits and beer. The facts of English history were disregarded, and these remedial expedients were adopted, in the light of which the irony of the Spartans pales, who to put down drunkenness made their slaves drunk, and then exhibited them as hideous examples.
We have seen that the traffic of wines with Bordeaux was brought about through the marriage of Henry II. with Eleanor of Aquitaine. That ‘great Provence dower,’ as Dante calls it, was the secret of the new trade with Guienne and Gascony, provinces which had both been erected into the dukedom of Aquitaine in the preceding century. The Normans were the great carriers. In the centre of the vessels that brought home the produce of the new English possessions in France were large fixed tanks (Pipæ gardæ), and right well did the sailors understand the process known as ‘sucking the monkey,’ or, in plain English, furtively drawing off the wine from its receptacle in course of transit. And they must have had plenty of choice, for amongst the wines imported were Muscadell, Malmsey, Rhenish, Dele, Stum, Wormwood, Gascony, Alicant, Canary, Sack, Sherry, and Rumney.
At the very time that the English were enjoying the wines of France, our French neighbours were reciprocally appreciative. William FitzStephen, in his Life of Thomas à Becket, states that when he went as chancellor into France to negotiate a royal marriage, two of the waggons which accompanied him were laden with beer in iron-bound casks for presents to the French, ‘who admire that kind of drink, for it is wholesome, clear, of the colour of wine, and of a better taste.’
To this period many writers refer the origin of
Distillation.
And, as in many other cases, when the inventors are unknown, the Arabians are at once accredited with the discovery. The argument probably runs thus—Alcohol, alchymy, alchymist, alembic, have all something in common; moreover, they all begin with al, and al is the Arabic article, therefore alcohol was invented by the Arabians. So high an authority as Gibbon (Decline and Fall) is of opinion that ‘they first invented and named the alembic for the purpose of distillation.’ Indeed, it is the commonly received opinion that their visionary hope of finding an elixir of immortal health led them to the discovery of alcohol, and entailed upon mankind a beverage which has proved to some a blessing, but to millions a curse.
But the derivation of the words is the history of their origin. Alembic is the Greek ἄμβιξ, a beaker, with the Arabic prefix al, which is intensive. Alcohol is the Hebrew Kaal (Chaldaic cohal), with the same prefix, and signifies something highly subtilised, pure spirit.[57] The Arabians owed much to other countries; they were rather restorers and improvers than inventors. They formed the link which unites ancient and modern literature; but their superstitious reverence for antiquity checked originality of ideas and freedom of thought. In respect of the discovery in question, it is certain that the invention preceded the days of the Saracens. Pliny very nearly described the process. Thus, he details the mode of obtaining an artificial quicksilver by distillation; and in another book (xv.), he speaks of the vapour arising from boiling pitch being collected on fleeces of wool spread over pots, and afterwards extracted from them by expression. Galen, the famous medical writer of the second century, speaks of distillation per descensum; while Zosimus, a writer of the fifth century, has given figures of a distilling apparatus which Borrichius has copied in his Hermetis et Ægyptiorum Chemicorum Sapientia.