Alehouses and Good Fellowship in Early Modern England, Volume 21Representing a history of drinking "from below", this book explores the role of the alehouse in seventeenth-century English society. This book provides a history of the alehouse between the years 1550 and 1700, the period during which it first assumed its long celebrated role as the key site for public recreation in the villages and market towns of England. In the face of considerable animosity from Church and State, the patrons of alehouses, who were drawn from a wide cross section of village society, fought for and won a central place in their communities for an institution that they cherished as a vital facilitator of what they termed "good fellowship". For them, sharing a drink in the alehouse was fundamental to the formation of social bonds, to the expression of their identity, and to the definitionof communities, allegiances and friendships. Bringing together social and cultural history approaches, this book draws on a wide range of source material - from legal records and diary evidence to printed drinking songs - to investigate battles over alehouse licensing and the regulation of drinking; the political views and allegiances that ordinary men and women expressed from the alebench; the meanings and values that drinking rituals and practices held for contemporaries; and the social networks and collective identities expressed through the choice of drinking companions. Focusing on an institution and a social practice at the heart of everyday life in early modern England, this book allows us to see some of the ways in which ordinary men and women responded to historical processes such as religious change and state formation, and just as importantly reveals how they shaped their own communities and collective identities. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in the social, cultural and political worlds of the ordinary men and women of seventeenth-century England. MARK HAILWOOD is Lecturer in History, 1400-1700, at the University of Bristol |
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Adam Eyre alcohol alebench alehouse company alehouse patrons alehouse regulation alehouse sociability alehouse-going alehousekeepers Alternative Society amongst appeal argued authority Basingstoke beer behaviour bonds Boro Broadside Ballad Calne chapter Cheshire church Clark constable contemporaries Croscombe diary drink literature drinkers drinking companions drinking culture drinking in alehouses drinking rituals Drunkards drunkenness E.P. Thompson Early Modern England early modern English elite English Alehouse English Society Essex evidence fellow fellowship ballads female Gender heavy drinking Hindle historians idiom inhabitants John John Noyes Kümin labourers London Lufkin magistrates male McShane merry mixed-gender Modern England Cambridge Myddle neighbours officers Order and Reformation Oxford parish parishioners Pepys petitioners petitions poor Popular Culture Q.S. Recs Q/SR quarter sessions records recreational drinking regulatory Roger Lowe role seventeenth century Seventeenth-Century England sexual Shepard sociable drinking Social History Somerset spend suggested suppressed tavern Thomas tion Tlusty town village whilst Wiltshire Withington wives women WSHC