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Pub Crawl (British History)
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Mick Harper
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Let's think about gin for a moment. First of all, it was incredibly strong (cf Professor Aston's remarks about beer being stronger in olden days). The reason it was strong is that the object was to get drunk cheapest, quickest. Which is OK for recreational drinking in Hogarthian London. But when work's on the line different principles apply -- hence the introduction of grog, watered rum, on board Navy ships. And I'm pretty sure small beer for everybody in medieval times during the working day.

But you can't get full strength rum nowadays even though it's only recreational. Why not? Because of the rise of the Nanny State of course. Though it's interesting that the great surge in British growth happened when a) getting legless on cheap alcohol was possible in the eighteenth century and b) getting mindless on cheap opiates was possible in the nineteenth century. There is something to be said for allowing people to get off their heads easily when they're not working because it allows them to work happily enough on the other six days. It's like the rise of the cocaine culture in the City of London coinciding with the great boom there of the late twentieth century. Just a thought
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TelMiles


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So you're a subscriber to the theory that drugs fire "civilisation" then eh Mick? The theory that coffee is responsible for it is along the same lines I suppose.
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Mick Harper
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It's more of a working hypothesis than a belief. Though my true interest is in the role of syphilis in various intellectual breakthroughs.
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DPCrisp


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[aside]

To clarify an earlier misunderstanding:

the village is really a cluster of farms/fields/parks/woods with public, private, manor and God houses, together with farm buildings, kilns, etc. scattered variously about. There may be a few miles between churches or pubs, but there are no gaps between villages: they fill up the spaces between towns, cities and roads.

I see no evidence (either ancient or modern) for this supposition about houses filling the spaces. The overwhelming urge, before cars and unless you're a nob, is to aggregate together.

I agree. The houses never filled the spaces, but the villages do. It's like this: we each take up a physical space and a personal space; or before the kick-off each team occupies the whole of its half of the pitch, even though the players are concentrated into a couple of square feet each.

The village is an area, but it has a nucleus and a few other bits and bobs besides. But, frinstance by concentrating on the church or the pub, we tend to perpetuate the notion that there are gaps between villages.

Towns and cities are pretty much the nuclei without the surrounding area, I suppose.

[/aside]
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DPCrisp


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[musing]

Re. drugs and civilisation: The Return of the Tribe was v.interesting. Last year, some guy went to Papua New Guinea: this year, the chief and a delegation came to England. As we should always expect, but is always nice to see, they're just the same as us. They spoke English and were already familiar with various trappings of modern material culture, but there were a few surprises, e.g. they thought St. Paul's Cathedral could not have been made by men; and they were rather taken with falconry and fletching on arrows (not to mention that they had never climbed a hillside to look down on the forest and never seen snow or trees without leaves).

They're as bright as anyone else, but these are not the Cro-Magnon Men who went to the Moon. Why not?

One of the key conditions in which technological innovation did lead to the Moon is the city -- in Jane Jacobs' sense, of course: networks of people exchanging goods and ideas, spurring and implementing new ones and generally creating wealth. Hominids had fire and simple stone tools for millions of years: I guess they can't have had any cities. Cro-Magnon had a suddenly more refined and more diverse set of tools, which were the basis of further developments; but they were also the results of innovation. Cities {Not "the city": they are always plural.} and this breakthrough toolkit were created together: cities are required for all innovation. {Flaked flints and fire... and honeycomb and woven nests and... and... need to be understood another way...?}

Why don't PNG and the other materially primitive cultures not have cities? Did they just miss out on being hooked up to the network? Or did they become isolated from the cities? I think it's the latter: that theirs is a "purified", stripped down existence. Compare viruses that are less complicated than cells but could not exist without them: they are not more primitive, they are more streamlined, as it were. Complex cells will never descend from viruses; and astronauts will never emerge from the jungle or the out back. I think "primitive" ways of life are specialised ways of life; attended by conservatism.

The PNG tribes have been exposed to modern technology, but by and large choose not to get into that game. This self-regulation is, I suppose, the latest expression of conservatism, traditionalism, ritualism.

Pro-drug campaigners like to point out that ritual use of drugs doesn't become antisocial or criminal. But that's because it's ritualised. What do unbridled drug/alcohol use and unbridled city-innovation have to do with each other?

[/musing]
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DPCrisp


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there were 3 different types, one each for kids, women and men.

The way I heard it, the mash was re-used and gave different strengths: Daddy Beer, Mummy Beer and Baby Beer. No, wait... small beer is the only one I can remember, on which Wikipedia says:

"Small beer (also, small ale) is a beer/ale that contains very little alcohol. Sometimes unfiltered and porridge-like, it was a favoured drink in Medieval Europe and colonial North America where George Washington had a recipe involving bran and molasses. It was sometimes had with breakfast, as attested in Benjamin Franklin's autobiography."

It's also a foodstuff? Doesn't all hinge on the boiled water then. And when you consider that the English countryside is drenched in fresh water... and that the urban population was in the minority until, what, 1885?... and that neither wine nor cider involve boiling the juice... one has to wonder why beer is supposed to have saved all our lives.

(All soil is shit, so one wonders whether even 'intensive' livestock farming could really pollute the water supplies enough to worry about. On the other hand, maybe under certain circumstances, e.g. after a drought when the animals have been corralled and the rain sheets off the dry ground, washing a lot of dung into the streams, a Don't Drink the Water rule came in that no one felt like reversing. The scholars suppose it to have been quite unconscious though.)

"Before public sanitation, cholera and other water-transmitted diseases were a significant cause of death. Because alcohol is toxic to most water-borne pathogens, and because the process of brewing any beer from malt involves boiling the water, which also kills them, drinking small beer instead of water was one way to escape infection. Small beer was also produced in households for consumption by children and servants."

Why do they fixate on the boiling of the water if the alcohol does as much good?

"Small beer/small ale can also refer to a beer made of the "second runnings" from a very strong beer (e.g., scotch ale) mash."

So small beer can be made small in the first place, or from further passes.

"These beers can be as strong as a mild ale, depending on the strength of the original mash. This was done as an economy measure in household brewing in England up to the 18th century and is still done by some homebrewer...

Thomas Thetcher's tombstone at Winchester Cathedral features a poem that blames his death on drinking small beer while hot... The pub tradition of Swearing on the Horns includes a pledge not to drink small beer when strong beer is available."
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TelMiles


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I've been looking into the Time Team assumption that most people drank ale in the middle ages. And what I've found is that there needs to be some clarification here: the time team in question said that ale was ALL the people drank but my research says otherwsie. Whilst people DID obviously drink ale, they only did when it was available. Water and to a lesser extent milk was the drink of choice.
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Mick Harper
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Just in case it becomes important, ale and beer are distinguished technically by the latter having hops and the former not. Of course this might be a lexigraphical old wives' tale but if I may put in a personal note here. For health reasons I have not drunk alcohol for thirty years so when I recently gave up smoking I decided to take up alcohol instead. I find it all fairly disgusting except good quality lager which is not merely good to taste but rather addictive -- the taste, I mean, not the effect which in truth doesn't seem to affect me.

Is it the hops or the ale which is imparting this taste?

Coupla points on the hop question which alerted my AE bogosity synapses:
1. Hops were initially included as a 'preservative'
2. Hops were not introduced into English ale until 1500, seven hundred years after they were routine in Europe.
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Oakey Dokey



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The Oak represents royalty against the Roundheads hence the numerous pubs named 'The Royal Oak'.

The term 'gall' is very old, it's even used to describe chaffing or rubbing and sores associated with the action, and certain English kings have used the term. The Romans also referred to the additives they put in their 'vinegar' wine (their daily allowance) as Gall. The origin of the description is again Oaks, or rather Oak saps, the rubbing of the bark is known as Gall.
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Mick Harper
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The Oak represents royalty against the Roundheads hence the numerous pubs named 'The Royal Oak'.

The term 'gall' is very old, it's even used to describe chaffing or rubbing and sores associated with the action, and certain English kings have used the term.


This seems to be a link with scrofula, the King's Evil, and which was popularly supposed to be cured by the monarch actually going round touching the patients. What is doubly interesting though is that this is linked with the Merovingians but I can't for the life of me remember why.

But the Oak/Civil War connection is a bit more complicated. The two big pub names are The King's Head and The Royal Oak and they are normally associated with the Civil War via 1) the beheading of Charles I and 2) Charles II hiding up an Oak Tree when making his escape after losing the Battle of Worcester.

However, the King's Head is also, eg Bran and Lud, firmly enshrined in Celtic/Druidic/British lore. Charles I wore his hair in (I think, consciously) Merovingian style and was of course a Stuart, i.e. a proto-Merovingian.

Charles II's Oakean adventures might have been purely propagandistic but of course Charles I's beheading is presumably non-mythical. But perhaps this goes to show that both sides in the Civil War may have been more conscious of ancient lore than we normally give them credit for.

But what really links the whole thing, in my provisional opinion, is the health angle. The one thing that concentrates everyone's mind (even the rich-and-powerful's minds) is concerns about personal mortality. So if you have a sect that posseses the cure for even one deadly disease...well, you don't have to be Rasputin to see the potential.
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DPCrisp


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The History of Luton and its Hamlets being a history of the old parish and manor of Luton in Bedfordshire by William Austin F.S.A. F.R.HIST.S., 1928, gives, in Appendix G, "a record of place names, with certain particulars, that are found within the parish [which] may prove of some value to students of local topography".

But before that, Appendix F is "a tabulation of ancient Inns, so many of them intimately bound up with the life of the town in the middle ages [which] should prove of some value to local historians".

I.e. pubs is more important.

---

My point here, though, is that if pub signs were supposed to be visual flags for the illiterate, then why aren't they dominated by simple coloured shapes, say? Not the Red Lion -- is that a lion? -- but the Red Square and so on.

But then, each pub is in a different place and looks different. If the signs are for the locals, why have anything more than a generic symbol for a pub? (Cf. the barber's pole.) "Which one is the Newt & Cucumber?" "That's the one at the foot of the hill." Why isn't "the pub at the foot of the hill" good enough for everyone?

'Course, if they're not just for locals, then more elaborate names make more sense. But then another mystery is why subtle names always come out the same, like a crown plus something else being consistently and differently The Rose and Crown or The Royal Oak. And I still don't buy the story that Civil War allegiances were emblazoned for the enemy to see.

---

Anyway, this sampling of real names is:

Well, firstly, quite long: fifty-four "ancient inns", ignoring "modern" ones, in Luton and half a dozen hamlets in the century or two before urban population exceeded the rural. That seems rather a lot! which also speaks to the importance of the pub in village life.

There are indeed several simple names that could just be well-known objects recognisable by the illiterate, but only about a quarter of them:

Anchor
Bell
Black Swan
Bull
Cock
Fox
Goat
Harrow
Horns
Leather Bottle
Star
Sun
Wheatsheaf
Windmill
Woolpack


Almost half are simple-ish, but start to beg the question of why there should be a single, consistent name arising from a sign. There are other things you need to know, such as why this is a white horse rather than just a horse; or that plough, footplough and wheelplough are all different; or that the number figures in the name. (All of which says the simplest ones are not quite so simple.) Some things are a bit out of the ordinary but still get recognised/rendered consistently, such as Chequers and dolphins.

Chequers
Crown
Dolphin
Five Bells
Foot Plough
Halfmoon
Hartshorn
Highlander
Horse and Jockey
King's Arms
Plough
Ram's Head
Red Cow
Red Lion
Saracens Head
Sergeant
Shoulder of Mutton
Talbot and Dog
Three Horse Shoes
Two Brewers
Waggon and Horses
Wheelplough
White Hart
White Horse


A few (a fifth) are clearly symbolic or you'd have to know quite a lot to tell just what the picture is of. Surely these are relying on the writing rather than the pictures to announce their names:

Barley Mow
Cross Keys
Duke's Head
Rose and Crown
Royal Oak
George
George the Second
Old Bell
Old Sergeant
Old Tavern
Traveller's Rest


I'm at a loss with the last few. I don't know what they are or I don't know how anyone is expected to recognise a picture of one:

Belgium Arms
Fleur de Luce
Tinpot
Vinecocks


---

Talbot and Dog is an interesting one: they say no one knows where "dog" comes from or why it took over from "hound". A talbot is a particular tracking dog, so a dog was presumably another specific, perhaps complementary type.

---

There's still some mystery about ancient public houses because, although there seems to be quite a lot of literacy implied here, these are all on record from 1643 or later, pretty widespread literacy is surely the reason they are on record in the first place.

My chief conclusion is that even the simplest names imply a level of sophistication above the locals being able to tell which tavern they just rolled out of: needing and having consistent names is all part of normal life where people travel about and swap recommendations or horror stories about the pubs they've been in. And I can't see a horizon beyond which life is not this normal; contrary to historians who fit pub signs and illiteracy into a different sort of life in the middle ages.
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Mick Harper
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Consider the post. How did mail get around to country folk without an address? Surely it was sent to the local pub (it is difficult imagining the parish church would take on such a temporal task). In which case the pub would need a name.

Also, consider that there are two kinds of pub -- the 'local' and the 'inn' for travellers. Now of course the inn would need a name but inns always have a local following too so, as it were, everybody has at least two 'locals' to choose from. Hence the real local would need a name too.

On the question of longevity, it must surely be clear that pubs precede villages. Walking a long way to church (or whatever pre-Christ) is no big deal because a) it may only be once a week b) it's a communal walk and c) you're in tip-top shape both ways. None of this is necessarily true for the pub. Hence you live near the pub.
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Hatty
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Talbot and Dog is an interesting one: they say no one knows where "dog" comes from or why it took over from "hound". A talbot is a particular tracking dog, so a dog was presumably another specific, perhaps complementary type.

Talbot is "ancestral to the bloodhound"; it's an unusual name for a breed, perhaps it was named after the Talbot (Norman) family similarly to King Charles spaniels? Talbot is translated somewhere or other as 'mastiff' so could be t'other way round of course.

My chief conclusion is that even the simplest names imply a level of sophistication above the locals being able to tell which tavern they just rolled out of: needing and having consistent names is all part of normal life where people travel about and swap recommendations or horror stories about the pubs they've been in.

In some respects pubs are the cornerstone of local history; one of our locals, 'The Crispin', the patron of shoemakers, is named after a shoemaker who previously occupied the premises though the actual pub sign as per usual shows a medieval crusader knight (N.B. it's not St. Crispin). And they commemorate local events, like the Queen's Oak, the only pub with that name in the country, named after Queen Vic who planted an oak opposite (cf. 'The Adlington Arms' recently renamed after one of our Olympic gold medallists, something for future historians to mull over).
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Hatty
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How did mail get around to country folk without an address? Surely it was sent to the local pub (it is difficult imagining the parish church would take on such a temporal task).

In a small community everyone knows everyone, wouldn't be hard to track down the addressee surely, though a good excuse to repair to the local tavern.

fifty-four "ancient inns", ignoring "modern" ones, in Luton and half a dozen hamlets in the century or two before urban population exceeded the rural. That seems rather a lot! which also speaks to the importance of the pub in village life.

Certainly even smallish market towns boast a plethora of watering-holes; we have, or rather had, seventeen within a short radius of the market-place, most now gone alas. Not to mention the long-established PHs aligning the London to Bath road, much as the motorways have service stations at strategic intervals.

No need to walk far to a pub in a market town indeed but presumably the market town came first, pub(s) second.

And I still don't buy the story that Civil War allegiances were emblazoned for the enemy to see.

The Crowns, Oaks and Royal this'n'thats would come after the fighting surely, to proclaim one's support post Restoration?
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Mick Harper
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In a small community everyone knows everyone, wouldn't be hard to track down the addressee surely, though a good excuse to repair to the local tavern.

You are entirely forgetting that a postal service cannot "track down" people. Indeed, the more I think about this, the more I am persuaded that ancien postal services might be the key to a great many things.

The Crowns, Oaks and Royal this'n'thats would come after the fighting surely, to proclaim one's support post Restoration?

Can anyone think of a pub-name that commemorates the other side?
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