Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 31, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 August 1884 — An English Habit. [ARTICLE]

An English Habit.

As a matter of fact, there is nothing easier than to prove that hard drinking has been an essentially English habit since the dawn of our history. Shakspeare, who left off writing 270 years ago, paints a whole gallery of typical drunkards, and, by the mouth of lago, claims the Englishman as far and away the most consummate toper in Europe. In 1506 it is on record that Joice Rowe, Abbess of Rumsey, one of the wealthiest convents in the kingdom, and tenanted mostly by noble dames, was accused before Bishop Fox of carousing habitually far into the night with her nuns—a pretty strong proof that hard drinking was then a national vice. Toward the end of the fourteenth century Chaucer represents all his lowclass characters as jolly topers. The miller can hardly sit on his horse and the cook tumbles off into the mire in consequence of their potations. • The wife of the miller of Benay does not go to bed without “her jolly whistle well wet.” In 1315 the noble dame Clementina Guilford, Abbess of Rumsey, and the worthy predecessor of Joice Rowe, drinks herself to death. Some generations earlier the author of the romance of “Merlin” describes the mother of his hero—a highly respectable young woman—as accompanying her neighbors to the ale-house, swilling there till long past midnight, taking a lusty share in a brawl, and then falling, literally as well as figuratively, into the claws of the demon, the whole thing taking place as quite a matter of course. In the reign of Stephen comes Walter Map, the jovial Archdeacon of Oxford, with his widely popular drinking songs. A century .earlier the whole Saxon army spent the night before the battle of Hastings in pushing about the bowl. And so we go back century by century; poets, annalists, statutes, and the canons of provincial councils all telling us that deep drinking was the rule all over Great Britain up to the time when our ancestors could form no other ideas of heaven than as a place where fierce bouts of fighting and bouts as fierce of drinking were the only occupations and enjoyments.— St. Janies’ Gazette.