An Ode To The Alehouse or The Decline of the Pub
The pub is in decline in the UK.
I remember many a weekend spent in pubs as a child. Saturday afternoons, Panda bottle pop and salt & vinegar crisps. The Blue Man was my favourite. The landlady, I think her name was Sylvia, used to give us kids free credits for the jukebox and let us play darts and pool in the back while our dads sat in the bar, growing louder and jollier with every pint.
Yes, the pub in modern Britain is in a sorry state indeed. While the chain pub and trendy bars thrive in city and town centres, the backstreet pub, in particular the free house, is on the critically endangered list, metaphorically speaking of course.
Why should we lament the downfall of the public house? Why indeed…
We can trace the modern pub back to the Romans. We all know about the roads they built, my town sits on the fosseway (a major Roman road built during the 1st and 2nd centuries AD linking the southwest of England to the northeast), but perhaps they are less well known for their pubs. And building roads must have been thirsty work because they’d build their taverns or ‘tabernaes’ at regular intervals along the roads. While drinking establishments of many kinds have existed across cultures and times, the expanse of the Roman Empire meant that the blueprint for the modern pub was one that spanned vast areas of the world.
In mediaeval England, pubs, perhaps better known as inns or alehouses, became places that served the community, and everyone in it too, even the very poorest. As a cottage industry, women were at the forefront of the alehouse, least of all because brewing traditionally fell to the housewife as part of her domestic duties. Not only that, alehouses were also the homes of the proprietor, and so it was quite normal and perhaps obvious the wife would work alongside her husband serving customers and cooking.
Here then we can begin to see the pub not only as a place where people consumed alcohol and got drunk, but also as a place that served the community. Many pubs and alehouses served food and provided lodging as well. More than that though, the pub gave those outside of the political elite and the ruling classes a place where they could exchange ideas and debate politics with their neighbours, and not only in an abstract way, but through the lens of their own lives and the issues affecting them.
The alehouse was popular too. From the period between 1550 and 1650, there were so many, there was believed to be around 1 pub for every 90 people in England alone! And the rise continued. They popped up everywhere, indeed every village had one, every working class area. They were not the preserve of the rich or the elite like parliament and the bars and saloons surrounding that area where even today political talk of the day occurs. You can bet this terrified the authorities!
While drunken brawls and prostitution would have occurred at many establishments, the real danger, the real moral corruption was, as Charles I reputedly put it, “idle and discontented speeches in their alehouses”. The state, in the form of the church and the king, sought to reign in such dissonance in a number of ways. The tippling Acts of 1603 sought to reduce the number of new alehouses and many religious festivities were removed from the calendar in an aim to reduce drunkenness. At the same time, alehouses owned and operated by the church also began to operate in competition with free houses. Not only did they serve beer while also providing a watchful eye on what was being said, but they also served the community by organising charity events that would benefit them.
People coming together and organising has always scared those in power, it’s why authoritative states ban or heavily control protest and unionising. We can see it today, all you have to do is look at those currently in the race to be the new PM and in the legacy of the outgoing.
There’s an air of discontent among people almost everywhere in today’s modern world. Every day there’s news of more energy hikes, a rise in the cost of living, and yet the bosses of rail and energy companies take home millions in profit. But people are getting angry. The strikes of which there seems to be a new one revealed each week have the support of the public, at least for the most part. People like union leader Mick Lynch have shamed countless journalists and politicians, speaking plainly and clearly about the issues that affect so many working class people in Britain.
Where will we gather now that the pub as a place for political discourse with friends and neighbours is on its last legs?
References and further reading
Pubs and politics in Stuart England.
Peter Clark, The English Alehouse: A Social History 1200-1800 (London: Longman Higher Education, 1983).
EMMA KATHRYN
Emma Kathryn, practises traditional British witchcraft, Vodou and Obeah, a mixture representing her heritage. She lives in the sticks with her family where she reads tarot, practises witchcraft and drink copious amounts of coffee.
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