CHAPTER IX.

TUDOR PERIOD.

The legislative enactments of the reign of Henry VII. demand minute attention. With a certain modification, it is true that the direct legislative sanction of the liquor traffic dates from this reign. The revival of the trade of England was a great object with this monarch. The greater part of the foreign trade of England had hitherto been carried on by foreigners in foreign vessels of burden. Henry was sensible that this prevented the increase of English ships and sailors; so, to remedy this in part, he got a law passed in his first Parliament, that no Gascony or Guienne wines should be imported into any part of his dominions, except in English, Irish, or Welsh ships, navigated by English, Irish, or Welsh sailors, which obliged them to build ships and go to sea, or to lack their favourite liquor. This law was enforced and enlarged by an Act made in his third Parliament (1487), when it was enacted that no wines of Gascony or Guienne, or woads of Tholouse, should be imported into England, except in ships belonging to the king or some of his subjects; and that all such wines and woads imported in foreign bottoms should be forfeited.

By 7 Henry VII., c. 7, it was enacted (in order to counteract the duty of four ducats a tun lately imposed by the Venetians) that ‘every merchant stranger (except Englishmen born) bringing malmseys into this realm, should pay 18_s._ custom for each butt, over and above the custom aforetime used to be paid.’ The price of the butt was fixed at 4_l._

Of far more importance was the Act of 1496, passed ‘against vacabonds and beggars.’ This empowers two justices of the peace ‘to rejecte and put away comen ale-selling in townes and places where they shall think convenyent, and to take suertie of the keepers of ale-houses of their gode behavyng, by the discrecion of the seid justices, and in the same to be avysed and aggreed at the time of their sessions.’

Leland gives in his _Collectanea_ a wine list which indicates the comparative prices of wines at this time:--

De Vino rubeo, VI dolia, prec. dol. 4_l_ 24 li De Vino claret, IV dol. prec. dol. 7¾ 14 li 13 8 De Vino alb. elect. unum dol 3 li 6 8 De Vino alb. pro coquina i. dol 3 li De Malvesey, i but 4 li De Ossey, i pipe 3 li De Vino de Reane, ii almes 26s 8

We get a good notion of the daily routine of court living in this reign from the ordinances of the royal household. There is nothing whatever in them indicative of excess, but they are interesting as matters of history, and records of etiquette. ‘When the king cometh from evensong into his great chamber on the even of the day of estate, the chamberlain must warn the usher before evensong that the king will take spice and wine in his great chamber.... Then shall the gentleman usher bring thither the esquire, and especially the king’s server (officer who set, removed, tasted, &c.) to bring the king’s spice plate.... And when the usher cometh to the cellar door, charge a squire for the body with the king’s own cup.’ This is simply a specimen of pages of like directions.

Entries in the Household Book of Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, furnish details of a nobleman’s style of living at the beginning of the sixteenth century. On the Feast of the Nativity 290 persons dined and supped at Thornbury Castle, on which occasion were consumed eleven pottles and three quarts of Gascony wine, and 171 flagons of ale. This was not excessive for the times, the vices of which are admirably pictured in William Dunbar’s remarkable poem, _The Dance_. He describes a procession of the seven deadly sins in the lower regions. Gluttony brings up the rear:--

Then the foul monster Gluttony, Of wame [belly] insatiable and gredy, To dance he did him dress: Him followed mony foul dronkart, With can and collop, cup and quart, In surfett and excess. Fully many a wasteful wally-drag [outcast], With wames [bellies] unwieldable did forth wag, In creische [fat] that did incress: Drink, aye, they cried, with mony a gape, The fiends gave them hait leid to lap [hot lead to lap] Their levery [reward] was no less.

The Household Book of the Earl of Northumberland is another capital illustration of the table life of the higher nobles. In reading the estimates, it must be taken into account that the household consisted of 166 persons. The allowance of grain per month gave 250 quarters of malt at 4_s._, two hogsheads to the quarter. This allowance may be thought to speak more for the temperance of the retainers than for the liberality of the lord. The wine was dispensed more liberally. An annual consumption showed ten tuns and two hogsheads of Gascony. A breakfast bill of fare appears thus: ‘Breakfastis for my lorde and my ladye. Furst a loof of brede in trenchers, two manchets, one quart of bere, a quart of wine, half a chyne of muton, ells a chyne of beif boyled.’

A searching visiting of monasteries, indeed of all ecclesiastics within the dominion, was entrusted by Henry VII. to his vicar-general and vice-gerent, Thomas Cromwell. The scrutiny was intended mainly for the monasteries. The eighty-six articles of instruction compass a large field of minute inquiry. The commissioners were doubtless much indebted to monastic factions and animosities for some of the information which they gained. The scrutiny revealed terrible irregularities in some cases, prominent among which were the vices of gluttony and drunkenness. The result of this official investigation was the dissolution of the smaller monasteries. And thus good was effected; for, however much we discount the charges alleged, for the reasons above suggested, the lives of the inmates had become a far and wide scandal. Innocent VIII. sent a bull to Archbishop Morton in 1490, in which he informs him that he had heard with great grief from persons worthy of credit, that the monks of all the different orders in England had grievously degenerated, that giving themselves up to a reprobate sense they led dissolute lives. But the archbishop was fully aware of the evil, for in 1487 he had convened a synod of the prelates and clergy of his province, for the reformation of the manners of the clergy. In this convocation many of the London clergy were accused of spending their whole time in taverns. But there is no disguising the fact that profuseness of living was countenanced in the highest places of the Church; which, if it does not excuse, at any rate explains the excesses of the ‘inferior clergy.’ As late as 1504, when William Warham was enthroned as Archbishop of Canterbury, a feast was given for which was procured--fifty-four quarters of wheat, six pipes of red wine, four of claret, one of choice white, one of white for the kitchen, one butt of Malmsey, one pipe of wine of Osey, two tierces of Rhenish wine, four tuns of London ale, six of Kentish ale, and twenty of English beer.

It is curious how many of our tavern signs originated from incidents in the history of our sovereigns. The ‘Red Dragon’ was in compliment to Henry VII., who adopted this device for his standard at Bosworth Field. It was in old times the ensign of the famous Cadwaller, the last of the British kings, from whom the Tudors descended. The field of Bosworth furnished matter for another sign. The hawthorn-bush crowned was adopted by Henry VII. in allusion to the crown of his predecessor which was found hidden in a hawthorn-bush after the battle. But the seventh Henry escaped the honour (?) conferred upon his successor and perpetuated, of being immortalised by his portrait as Bluff Harry on scores of tavern signboards. It is stated in the _History of Signboards_ that at Hever, in Kent, one of these rude portraits of Henry VIII. may be seen. Near this village the Bolleyn, or Bullen, family held possessions, and old people in the district still show where Henry used to meet Anne Bolleyn. Anyhow, years after the sad death of Anne, the village ale-house had for its sign, ‘Bullen Butchered.’ When the place changed hands, the name of the house was altered to the ‘Bull and Butcher,’ which sign existed till recently, but was altered at the request of the clergyman of the parish, who suggested the ‘King’s Head,’ and the village painter was commissioned to make the alteration. The bluff features of the monarch were drawn; and in his hands was placed an axe, and so the sign remains at present.

In the collection of ordinances for the Royal Household we have an account of the ceremony of _wasselling_, as was practised at Court on Twelfth Night in the reign of Henry VII. The ancient custom of pledging each other out of the same cup had given place to the use of different cups. Moreover, ‘when the steward came in at the doore with the wassel, he was to crye three tymes, “_Wassel_, _wassel_, _wassel_,” and then the chappell (chaplain) was to answere with a songe.’ The custom of ‘toasting’ was in full force. Shakespeare’s _King Henry VIII._ contains several such allusions. Thus in act i., scene 4, the king exclaims--

Let’s be merry. Good my lord cardinal, I have a half a dozen healths To drink to these fair ladies.

Malmsey (pronounced by Shakespeare to be ‘fulsom’) competed with sack to be the favourite drink of the period; it was the only sweet wine specified in the ordinances of the household of Henry VIII. Malmsey was a strangely generic term for sweet wines from almost every vine-growing district. Candia, Chios, Lesbos, Tenedos, Tyre, Italy, Greece, Spain, all yielding the _Malmsey_, which we found to have proved so fatal to

Maudlin Clarence in his Malmsey butt.

Some believe it to have been first made at Napoli de Malvasia, in the Morea. Certainly the principal part of that which was so extensively imported in the middle ages came from the Archipelago. When subject to Venetian rule Candia and Cyprus supplied Europe with their finest wines, the former island alone being said to have exported 200,000 casks of Malmsey annually.

Sack is another generic term for sweet wine,[87] and is not of necessity, as Nares describes it, ‘the same wine which is now named sherry;’ a statement which the rest of his own remarks contradict. Thus we find not only sherry-sack, but canary-sack, Malaga-sack, rumney-sack, palm-sack, &c.[88] The derivation of the word is much disputed; the town _Xique_, and the Spanish _saco_, a bag, have been suggested; but _sack_, also written _seck_, is undoubtedly the French _sec_, the Latin _siccus_, dry. It continued a popular wine for another two centuries, as we find from Tom D’Urfey’s ballad on the ‘Virtues of sack’ (1719). Redding states that the term ‘sack’ was applied to sweet and dry wines of canary, Xeres, or Malaga. Vines are said to have been first planted in the Canary Islands in the reign of Charles V., imported thither from the Rhine. Canary was much drunk formerly; the bibbers of it were dubbed ‘canary-birds,’ and the wine ‘canary-sacke.’[89] An old writer growls, ‘sacke is their chosen nectar; they love it better than their own souls; they will never leave off sacke, until they have sackt out all their silver; nay, nor then neither, for they will pawn their crouds for more sacke.’

The following receipt for beer, taken from Arnold’s Chronicle, published in 1521, reminds that by this time hops were in use, ‘ten quarters of malt, 2 of wheat, 2 of oats, with 11lbs. of hops for making 11 barrels of single beer.’ This is the first I can find with hops as an ingredient. The old distich, of which there are two versions,

Hops, reformation, bays, and beer, Came into England all in one year,

and

Hops and turkeys, carp and beer, Came into England all in a year,[90]

would fix the introduction of hops to the time of Henry VIII. But there is a difficulty here, inasmuch as the use of this plant in brewing was known long before, and Henry VIII., who interfered in everything from religion to beer-barrels, forbade his subjects to put hops in their ale.

Spirits were beginning to acquire a reputation in England. Numbers of Irish settled in Pembrokeshire in this reign, and employed themselves in the distillation of their national beverage, usquebaugh, which had a large sale in this country.

But, to pass from the drinks to the drinkers, the habits of Henry VIII. are well known. He was constantly intoxicated, and kept the lowest company. His right hand, Wolsey, was actually put in the stocks by Sir Amias Powlett, when he was Rector of Lymington, for drunkenness at a neighbouring fair. Why should not such punishments be revived as either the stocks or the ‘drunkard’s cloak’? In this latter, drunkards were paraded through the town, wearing a tub instead of a cloak, a hole being made for the head to pass through, and two small ones in the sides, through which the hands were drawn.

Experience is a good master. No one could look after the monks better than Wolsey. It appears that a system of _misericords_ had found place in monasteries. These misericords were exoneration from duties granted by the Abbots to the monks. This privilege in course of time they abused. The Augustinian canons absented themselves from the choir and cloister, sometimes for whole weeks; whereupon Wolsey ordered that these canons should recreate themselves not singly, but in a number together, supervised by the superior, and accompanied; that they should repair not to the towns, villages, and taverns, but to sunny places near their houses; that they should not go to houses of laymen to eat and drink without leave, but carry their provisions with them.

One of the most magnificent pageants on record welcomed Anne Boleyn to the city of London in 1533. At Gracechurch Corner was erected ‘the Mount Parnassus, with the fountain of Helicon.’ It was formed of white marble. Four streams rose an ell high and met in a cup above the fountain which ran copiously till night with Rhenish wine. At the great Conduit in Cheap, a fountain ran continuously, at one end white wine, at the other claret, all the afternoon. Anne had been maid of honour at court. The household books of the kings describe the allowance and rules of the table of the ladies of the household. A marvellous picture of the times! A chine of beef, a manchet, and a chet loaf was a breakfast for the three. To these was added a _gallon of ale_.

* * * * *

Gascon wine was now in favour for court consumption. The Losely MSS. supply the items of Sir Thomas Carden’s purchases for Anne of Cleves’ cellar.[91] Among these were 3 hogsheads of Gascoigne wine at 3_l._ each; 10 gallons of Malmsey at 20_d._ a gallon; 11 gallons of Muscadel at 2_s._ 2_d._ a gallon; and 10 gallons of sack at 16_d._ a gallon. A pipe of Gascon wine was also the bribe which Lady Lisle sent to the Countess of Rutland, to secure her good offices in obtaining the post of maid of honour for her daughter, Miss Basset.

We are able to form a rough estimate of the quantity of liquor kept in stock at this time, from a return which was made by order, on the occasion of the visit of the Emperor Charles V. to the king. The city authorities appear to have been afraid of being drunk dry by the swarming Flemings in the emperor’s train. To avoid such a calamity, a return was made of all the wine to be found at the eleven wine merchants and the twenty-eight principal taverns then in London; the sum total of which was 809 pipes.[92]

The corruptions of court life were fearlessly exposed by a contemporary, John Skelton, in his _Bowge of Court_. Bowge (_bouche_, mouth) denoted the courtier’s right of eating at the king’s expense. The Bowge of Court was an allegorical ship with court vices on board. Ecclesiastics in high places were mercilessly satirised in his _Colin Clout_, _e.g._ (_a_) their hurry from the house of God to get drink--

But when they have once caught _Dominus vobiscum_ by the head, Then run they in every stead (place), God wot, with drunken nolls (heads), Yet take they cure of souls.

(_b_) Their unconcern at the tragedy of the Saviour’s passion--

Christ by cruelty Was nailed upon a tree; He paid a bitter pension For manne’s redemption, He drank eysell and gall To redeem us withal. But sweet hippocras ye drink, With ‘Let the cat wink!’

(_c_) Their logomachies under the excitement of drink--

They make interpretation Of an awkward fashion, And of the prescience Of Divine essence, And what hypostasis Of Christe’s manhood is. Such logic men will chop, And in their fury hop When the good ale-sop Doth dance in their foretop.

If Sir T. Elyot (1534) was correct in speaking of temperance as a new word, the virtue was old enough, even though the practice was rare. In the most corrupt times virtue has ever had its witnesses, even as the epoch of the dissolute Henry had its Sir David Lindsay, and its Earl of Surrey. The latter, amongst _the means to attain a happy life_, could name

The mean diet, no delicate fare; True wisdom joined with simpleness; The night discharged of all care; Where wine the wit may not oppress.

The legislation of this reign did little more than affect details. The repeal of a certain law is worthy of note. From a remarkable clause in a statute of Henry III. it might be supposed that England was much fallen from the flourishing condition of preceding times. It had been enacted in the time of Edward II. that no magistrate, in town or borough, who by his office ought to keep assize, should during the continuance of his magistracy sell, either in wholesale or retail, any wine or victuals. This law seemed equitable in order to prevent fraud in fixing the assize. It was in this reign repealed. The following piece of legislation affected the price of wines: By 23 Henry VIII.,