The general drinks of the Anglo-Saxons were ale and mead: wine was a
luxury for the great. In the Saxon Dialogues preserved in the Cotton
Library in the British Museum, a boy, who is questioned upon his habits
and the uses of things, says, in answer to the inquiry what he
drank--“Ale if I have it, or water if I have it not.” He adds, that wine
is the drink “of the elders and the wise.” Ale was sold to the people,
as at this day, in houses of entertainment; “for a priest was forbidden
by a law to eat or drink at _ceapealethelum_, literally, places where
ale was sold.” After the Norman Conquest, wine became more commonly
used; and the vine was extensively cultivated in England. The people,
however, held to the beverage of their forefathers with great
pertinacity; and neither the juice of the grape nor of the apple were
ever general favourites. Of a favourite wassail or drinking-song of the
fifteenth century, the burden was--
“Bring us home good ale.”
“The old ale knights of England,” as Camden calls the sturdy yeomen of
this period, knew not, however, the ale to which hops in the next
century gave both flavour and preservation. Hops appear to have been
used in the breweries of the Netherlands in the beginning of the
fourteenth century. In England they were not used in the composition of
beer till nearly two centuries afterwards. It has been affirmed that the
planting of hops was forbidden in the reign of Henry VI.; and it is
certain that Henry VIII. forbade brewers to put hops and sulphur into
ale. In the fifth year of Edward VI., the royal and national taste
appears to have changed; for privileges were then granted to
hop-grounds. Tusser, in his ‘Five Hundred Points of good Husbandry,’
printed in 1557, thus sings the praises of this plant:--
“The hop for his profit I thus do exalt,
It strengtheneth drink and it flavoureth malt;
And being well-brewed long kept it will last,
And drawing abide, if ye draw not too fast.”
In the reign of James I. the plant was not sufficiently cultivated in
England for the consumption; as there is a statue of 1608 against the
importation of spoiled hops. In 1830 there were 46,727 acres occupied in
the cultivation of hops in Great Britain.
Of barley, there are now above thirty million bushels annually converted
into malt in Great Britain; and more than eight million barrels of beer,
of which four-fifths are strong beer, are brewed yearly. This is a
consumption, by the great body of the people, of a favourite beverage,
which indicates a distribution of the national wealth, satisfactory by
comparison, with the general poverty of less advanced periods of
civilization in our own country, and with that of less industrious
nations in our own day.--_Vegetable Substances used for Food._
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