University Place

Caroline Boswell

And there were different strengths of drink at this time. You had small beer, which would be a weaker beer, often brewed by pouring additional hot water on top of the original mash from the first brew. You had middle beer, which would be, you know, the first batch of relatively strong beer. And then you had strong beer. And this was really what we would call high-gravity beer. And of course, people at the time drank all three kinds depending on the time of day it was. You probably drank small beer in the morning, and then maybe middle and strong beer over the course of your day. And a lot of it depended on your occupation. For a long time, historians assumed that poor people and especially day laborers, perhaps farmhands, drank only small beer, but in fact, they often drank strong beer because, part of the reason drink was an everyday necessity was that it's, as we know, high in calories, right. And so, actually, landowners would fight for the best farmhands by offering the strongest beer because that would actually be part of your pay. And this would be, you know, legendary or it would be passed down by rumor that such-and-such a farm, if you labored there, had the strongest beer on offer. And now, people have asked me, well, how exactly was it that people were able to be productive if they were drinking particularly strong beer? And that is a question that historians have not quite answered yet.

audience laughing

Caroline Boswell

Let's talk a little bit, something about the name. Public house, they weren't owned by the state, despite the fact they're called public houses. They were public houses because they were open to the public. Right, and so, therefore, they had to provide very specific services to be licensed. And that's where the name "pub" comes from. It's a short version of "public house." They very specifically had three different types of drinking establishments. They had inns, they had taverns, and they had ale houses. Inns were large establishments. Innkeepers were relatively wealthy. Sometimes they even participated in local politics. And they catered to a wealthier clientele. You're not gonna find your dukes or kings here. The toffs don't go to where the ordinary people hang out. But still, you're gonna be talking about relatively wealthy people. And they're gonna be attending inns largely because they need sustenance, right, and they need a place to stay. So inns, in order to be licensed, obviously had to offer accommodations to people. They had to have stables, which again, suggests they're wealthy clientele if you can afford a horse. And, of course, you had to have food. But additionally, what people wanted was access to private rooms. Not just to sleep, but to socialize because they didn't necessarily want to mix with the general population that might be attending the inn at any given time. And so, they very much cater to a specific, more elite class and as such they offer more beverages than, say, an ale house. They're gonna offer wine in addition to beer, ale, and potentially cider and perry, depending on what part of England you're in. Taverns, again, catered to relatively well-to-do, as they would call them, people in the early modern period. They specifically sold wine, though you could, of course, purchase beer there as well, but you went to the tavern to purchase wine. And wine was more expensive in England than beer because it was not produced there. And so, it was again, wealthier merchants who would be able to afford this. So they're largely going there to purchase their wine. And in fact, sometimes you would go just to simply purchase it and take it home, right, because most people did not make their own wine. In fact, the vast majority of people did not. Taverns, much like inns, also had to offer a degree of accommodations, though that wasn't their primary purpose like an inn. The lowest and most prolific of all of these kind of drinking establishments was the ale house. Ale houses were far less permanent structures than taverns or inns. Oftentimes, they were simply someone's house that had opened up as an ale house in part to supplement income. But they were definitely much smaller, less affluent places. Their primary purpose, of course, was to offer beer. Originally they offered ale, but ale had more or less been replaced, since ale is unhopped beer in England. This is the Medieval image and you can see what's going on here, is this woman, who is an ale wife, right, she runs an ale house, is welcoming her new customer, who is clearly a monk, he's quite thirsty, very happy to see that she has ale available for him. And how does he know this? Well, at this time, if you were going to sell ale and you didn't do it regularly, the way in which you signaled the fact that you had a fresh brew ready was that you put the ale stake at the top of your house. Which in this case is this broom, so it's an ale stake,

hanging out to signal to passersby

"Hey, we're open for business today. "Come on in, we've got a fresh brew." And this, obviously, is the precursor to the pub sign, right, which becomes a more permanent fixture in the future. But this was how ale houses tended to operate in the Medieval era. Eventually, they'll become more permanent structures, but the illegal ones, kind of in and out, as you might imagine, depending on when they were unearthed by the local authorities.