![The old German lines under the engraving of the Beer-brewer may
be thus rendered into English: From barley I boil good beer, rich and
sweet and bitter fashion. In a wide and big copper I then cast the
hops. Then [after boiling the wort] I leave it to cool, and therewith I
straightway fill the well-hooped and well-pitched [fermenting] vat;
then it [the wort] ferments, and [the beer] is ready.
There is no doubt that the brewers’ trade was originally held in
little esteem, and was considered as mean and sordid (de vile
juggement). The ignominious punishments and restrictions (some of
which have been already mentioned) to which the old London
brewers were subjected, prove that their status only slowly
improved. In the time of Henry VIII., however, their position had so
far advanced in repute that in the grant of arms then made to them,
they are specified as “the Worshipful Occupation of the Brewars of
the City.”
The Records of the City of London are particularly full of details
concerning the brewers and the brewing trade, and it will probably
give the best idea of the conditions under which the business was
carried on in former days to mention a few of the principal
regulations gathered from that valuable body of information, and to
supplement them by extracts from the records of the Brewers’
Company. Truth to say, the brewers and the City authorities were
never the best of friends, and long accounts are to be found from
time to time of disputes between them as to the legal price and
quality of the liquor with which the lieges were to be supplied—
struggles in which the action of the authorities seems, according to
our modern notions, to have been arbitrary in the extreme. An
instance of this tyranny over a trade is given in the Liber Aldus, from
which it appears that not only was a brewer compelled to brew ale
of a specified price and quality, but he was not even allowed to leave
off brewing in case he found it did not pay him to continue. The
regulation runs thus: “If any shall refuse to brew, or shall brew a
less quantity than he or she used to brew, in consequence of this
ordinance, he or she shall be held to be a withdrawer of victual from](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25970319-250519150321-8a4937f3/85/The-Building-As-Screen-A-History-Theory-And-Practice-Of-Massive-Media-Dave-Colangelo-27-320.jpg)
The Building As Screen A History Theory And Practice Of Massive Media Dave Colangelo
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- 5. The Building as Screen
- 6. MediaMatters is an international book series published by Amsterdam University Press on current debates about media technology and its extended practices (cultural, social, political, spatial, aesthetic, artistic). The series focuses on critical analysis and theory, exploring the entanglements of materiality and performativity in ‘old’ and ‘new’ media and seeks contribu- tions that engage with today’s (digital) media culture. For more information about the series see: www.aup.nl
- 7. The Building as Screen A History, Theory, and Practice of Massive Media Dave Colangelo Amsterdam University Press
- 8. Cover illustration: The Empire State Building with Philips Color Kinetics System. Photo: Anthony Quintano, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. Layout: Sander Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6298 949 8 e-isbn 978 90 4854 205 5 doi 10.5117/9789462989498 nur 670 © D. Colangelo / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2020 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.
- 9. For Monica and Nico
- 11. Table of Contents Acknowledgements 9 1. Introducing Massive Media 11 From the Top 11 Why Massive Media? 17 A Brief History of the Public Sphere, Monumentality, and Media 19 The Most Advanced Site of Struggle: The Public Sphere 19 Looking Up Together: Monumentality 22 A Modern Monument for the Modern Masses 25 Space and Media 27 Accelerated Rituals 32 Reverie Amidst the Real 35 Entering Supermodernism 38 How this Book Works 40 2. Large-scale Projection and the (New) New Monumentality 49 Moving Images 49 A Short History of the Moving Image in Public Space 53 Architecture, Expanded Cinema, and the New Monumentality 58 The Image Mill 61 Superimposition and Massive Media: Super Imposing 64 Spatial Montage: Extra Diegetic 67 Dispositif and Apparatus: Staging the City 69 McLarena: Recentring the Audience 72 Participation: Don’t Just Sit There and Watch 75 Place Branding and Theatricality 76 A (New) New Monumentality? 77 Experiments in Public Projection 82 30 moons many hands 83 The Line 88 A Perceptual Laboratory 94 3. Low-Resolution Media Façades in a Data Society 99 This Building is on Fire 99 A Short History of the Empire State Building 103 Colours and Meanings 106 Public Data Visualisations 110
- 12. 8 The Building as Screen The Empire State Building 113 Experiments in Public Data Visualisation 120 E-TOWER 121 In The Air, Tonight 124 Temporary Intensities and Collective Conversations 127 4. Curating Massive Media 133 Changing Spaces 133 A Short History of Public Screen Practice 136 Massive Media and Public Art 139 What People Have in (The) Common 140 Connecting Cities 144 Streaming Museum 157 Curating RyeLights 164 Connecting Sites and Streams 166 5. When Buildings Become Screens 173 Dancing with Buildings 173 Tactics and Strategies 174 More Massive, More Media 177 About the Author 181 List of Exhibitions, Films, Songs, Videos, and Installations 183 Index of Names 185 Index of Subjects 187
- 13. Acknowledgements If I had to identify a starting point for this book it would be the moment the organisers of Nuit Blanche in Toronto accepted my proposal to transform the led façade of the CN Tower into a collective beacon for the city’s ‘energy’. My nascent interest in the communicative capacity of the combination of media and architecture may have quickly faded had they not placed their faith in me. It was around that same time that I met Patricio Dávila. Over the past decade, with our various collaborators at what has now become Public Visualization Studio, we have created a number of projects that have engaged buildings, public spaces, and screens, testing and refining theories and techniques along the way. Nothing has been more productive to my thinking on this subject than the work we have done together and the conversations we have had. Early on in the process of conceiving of, researching, and writing this book I connected with Janine Marchessault. She is the kind of academic I continue to aspire to be: actively engaged in fostering and contributing to a community of critical thinkers and doers, locally and globally, through her writing, creating, curating, and teaching. I am grateful to her for the doors and windows she has opened for me into these ecstatic worlds. The support of Paul Moore has been invaluable in this process as well. He has imparted a spirit of intellectual and interdisciplinary rigour that has shaped the way I approach my work and has been exemplary in his generosity towards his colleagues and students. I am grateful to my instructors, colleagues, and students in the various programs and departments I have been a part of as a student and as a faculty member over the course of my life in the arts and academia including the Arts and Science Program at McMaster University, the MA in Cultural Studies and Interactive Media at Goldsmiths College, the joint PhD Program in Communication and Culture at Ryerson and York Universities, the Digital FuturesMA/Mdes/MFAProgramandtheFacultyofLiberalArtsandSciences at OCAD University, the School of Film at Portland State University, and the School of Design at George Brown College. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to engage in critical conversations about media, design, cinema, architecture, history, and culture. I am also grateful to the community of scholars and practitioners involved in the work of the Media Architecture Institute. Thank you for establishing an ever-evolving space for the investigation of our ever-evolving combina- tions of media and architecture. It has been a pleasure to be a part of this
- 14. 10 The Building as Screen group and to help create events, projects, and publications that provide focus and direction for these vital conversations. Colleagues and friends that deserve special mention for their advice, inspiration, and contributions to all of the thoughts, words, and deeds that went into this book are Tanya Toft Ag, Martin Tomitsch, M. Hank Haeusler, Gernot Tscherteu, Chang Zhigang, Martijn de Waal, Shanti Chang, Ava Fatah gen. Schieck, Susa Pop, Nina Colosi, Immony Men, Jay Irizawa, Maggie Chan, Jessica Tjeng, Preethi Jagadeesh, Robert Tu, David Schnitman, Alexis Mavrogiannis, Patricia Pasten, Alen Sadeh, Berkeley Poole, Tim Macleod, Claire LaRocca, Emma Allister, Jessica Tjeng, and the rest of our many collaborators at Public Visualization Studio, Jennifer Fisher and Jim Drobnick at the Journal of Curatorial Studies, Zach Melzer, Annie Dell’Aria, Michael Longford, Sennah Yee, Bruce Piercey, Michael Forbes and the RyeLights team at Ryerson University, Monique Tschofen, Keith Bresnahan, Sarah Diamond, Tom Barker, Will Straw, Matthew Fuller, Janet Harbord, Ilana Altman, Layne Hinton and Rui Pimenta at ArtSpin in Toronto, Sarah Turner and William Rihel at Open Signal and racc in Portland, Mark Berrettini, Amy Borden, Jungmin Kwon, Tomas Cotik, So-Min Kang, Cathy Crowe, Arun R.L. Verma, Ana Rita Morais, Luigi Ferrara, and Maryse Elliott and the editorial team at Amsterdam University Press. Last but certainly not least, I am deeply indebted to Scott McQuire whose scholarship is the foundation upon which this book is built. Finally, to my family: my grandparents, who were selfless in their sacri- fices; my parents, Luigi and Antonietta Colangelo, whose care is apparent each and every day; my brothers Steven and Adam Colangelo and my lifelong friends Massimo Di Ciano, Michael Moretti, and Jamie Webster, who have been there with me in my battles with big, flashy buildings, and other things too; and, to my wife Monica Nunes and our son Nico, to whom I dedicate this book. Home is wherever you are and it is where I always want to be. Thank you for your kindness, support, patience, and love. I could not have done this without all of you and would not have wanted to anyway.
- 15. 1. Introducing Massive Media Abstract This chapter introduces the concept of massive media, a term used to describe the emergence of large-scale public projections, urban screens, and led façades such as the illuminated tip of the Empire State Building. These technologies and the social and technical processes of image circula- tion and engagement that surround them essentially transform buildings intoscreens.Thischapteralsointroducestheoreticalconceptssurrounding space, media, cinema, monumentality, and architecture in order to provide a framework for the analysis of the emergence of the building as screen. These concepts are key axes upon which the ongoing transformations of the public sphere revolve. Subsequent chapters are introduced in which massive media is probed, in case studies and creation-as-research projects, for its ability to enable new critical and creative practices of expanded cinema, public data visualisation, and installation art and curation that blend the logics of urban space, monumentality, and the public sphere with the aesthetics and affordances of digital information and the moving image. Keywords: urban screens, led façades, architecture, public sphere, monumentality From the Top Toronto’s CN Tower was built in 1976 as a telecommunications tower. The iconic building rises 553 metres above the city as an omnipresent reference point for anyone within a 20km radius. It dominates photos taken of the city and reflects the status and character of the city as relatively young and steeped in the architectural modernism of the era in which so much of it was built, simultaneously gesturing towards technologies and techniques as well as the past, present, and future visions of the city. Colangelo,D.,TheBuildingasScreen:AHistory,Theory,andPracticeofMassiveMedia.Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789462989498_ch01
- 16. 12 The Building as Screen Figure 1-1: The CN Tower, Toronto. Photo: Taxiarchos228, used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Desaturated from original.
- 17. Introducing Massive Media 13 While the tower has always been prominently lit, it was not until 2007 that the building was fitted with programmable light-emitting diodes (leds). Its seemingly endless elevator shafts, cylindrical observation deck, and sharp antenna became illuminated and animated by a range of changing colours. Certain holidays, events, and causes were celebrated on the building by way of programming the patterns and colours of the lights. Deep runs into the playoffs by local sports teams were represented in team colours, the rare championship celebrated in gold tones, the deaths of fallen Canadian soldiers commemorated in patriotic reds and whites, and breast cancer awareness turned the tower bright pink once a year. The CN Tower website provided a calendar of lighting events to help the public decode this information, but one might also hear about it on the radio, see it on television, read about it in a newspaper, or come across a social media post depending on who decided to use lights as part of their publicity campaign. Eventually, the CN Tower began distributing images of the changing illuminations of the tower on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram so that people could witness and participate in discussing, liking, and otherwise identifying with the associated images and messages on their own self-fashioned channels of communication. The expressive lighting of the CN Tower and its related media and cultural practices, along with many other architectural landmarks around the world including the Eiffel Tower (which has its own Twitter account in which it speaks in the first-person) and Shanghai’s Oriental Pearl Tower, to name but a few, represents a significant shift in the role of buildings with a monumental presence in urban space. As these buildings have become more screen-like, with their animations and colour changes, and as they have become more entwined with other media and screens through their representations on social media, their role as monumental and iconic architectural expressions, as a dense transfer points for civic and individual identity formation, have merged with the role of screens in our culture creating an entirely new cultural entity in the process. In the case of the CN Tower, the stoic tower became open to the ephemerality of the digital trace and became more available, attractive, and open to various causes, concerns, media channels, and conversations. It reflected its place, time, and audience in a new way, responding in a more sensitive, diverse, and timely way to the city allowing people to interact with and through its image. It became an object that could seemingly listen and speak for the city and its inhabitants. It became a building to have a conversation with. Similarly, the Empire State Building also adorned its tip with a program- mable low-resolution led façade, promoting it through social media channels
- 18. 14 The Building as Screen and presenting light shows coordinated with internet radio stations, ef- fectively updating the son et lumière tradition for the digital age. The Empire State Building and the people that live in its vicinity routinely upload videos of these shows to YouTube, extending the viewing area and public inscribed by the tower. In another example, during the 2008 presidential election, the Empire State Building became a massive real-time display for election results, pitting incremental blue and red columns of light against one another on its spire until finally being bathed in blue to signify Barack Obama’s victory, all of which was broadcast on cnn. More recently, digital projection was added to the election spectacle, the increased resolution allowing for the display of real-time vote counts and images of the candidates on the façade (see Figure 1-2). This massive public visualisation of data and digital imagery tapped into the status of the building as an icon and as a monument that is augmented with programmable lights to create a spectacular embodiment of data that becomes the focal point of a worldwide news event. While buildings have been the substrate for delivering news about elections via magic lanterns since the early twentieth century (see Figure 1-3) (Huhtamo 2013), this current incarnation as a digital, networked screen means that buildings can now perform historical realities in real-time, inserting themselves into public discourse in the process both as and on architectural surfaces. Figure 1-2: Empire State Building, Election Night 2016. Photo: © Jonathan Reyes, courtesy of Jonathan Reyes.
- 19. Introducing Massive Media 15 In addition to the ongoing screen-reliant transformation of iconic and monumental buildings in cities, critical and creative uses of what is often referred to as media architecture (Media Architecture Institute 2015) — buildings with dynamic, expressive, often-digital, elements — have also changed the nature of what we look up to and interact with in public space. Artists such as Krzysztof Wodiczko and Jenny Holzer have spearheaded and developed much of this work, using the power of the monumental building or the pulpit of the public, commercial screen to insert messages of anti-consumerism and criticisms of government policies, exposing the complexities of capital, geopolitics, and identity in powerful, highly visible ways that only massive images in monumental public spaces can provide. Famously, Holzer’s expansive Truisms project found a temporary home on Times Square’s Spectacolour electronic billboard, displaying messages such as ‘PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT’ and ‘MONEY CREATES TASTE’ in Figure 1-3: Charles Graham,‘Election Night in New York City’, The World’s Sunday Magazine, November 8, 1896. Photo: courtesy of the Library of Congress, newspaper microfilm 1363.
- 20. 16 The Building as Screen what might be the spiritual centre of American capitalism and consumerism. Newer works by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, such as his VectorialElevation series and BodyMovies, extend the possibilities of light and architecture to include the direct participation of people at various sites, as well as incorporating telepresent participation to expand the possibilities for identification and meaning at and between these sites through buildings that have in effect become screens. Along with buildings that have leds directly embedded into their façades, merging physical mass with ephemeral animation, high-resolution large- scale digital projection mappings are now common in cities around the world. Synchronised displays across cities, such as Hong Kong’s A Symphony of Lights, which incorporates over 40 buildings in the skyline, have become popular for touristic as well as political purposes. Light festivals such as Vivid Sydney and the Fêtes des Lumières in Lyon transform entire sectors of cities into digital cinemas and outdoor galleries for public art and spectacle. Coordinated monumental lighting displays have also been incorporated into city-wide protests and demonstrations. In the weeks following the terrorist attacks on the offices of satirical newspaper, Charlie Hebdo, the words ‘PARIS EST CHARLIE’ (see Figure 1-4) were projected across the Arc De Triomphe and the trademark light show of the Eiffel Tower was dimmed to pay respect to those who had died in the attacks (Keromnes 2015). Both Figure 1-4: Paris Est Charlie is projected onto the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Photo: © Patrick Mayon, courtesy of Patrick Mayon.
- 21. Introducing Massive Media 17 intensified a sense of solidarity through light, architecture, and public space with those gathering and demonstrating in the city. While artistic and political uses of large-scale projections, screens, and media façades multiply in cities, it should come as no surprise that advertise- ments take up the most space and time on buildings that have become screens. In this sense, it is more often the case that cities and buildings are not becoming screens so much as they are becoming ad-based media channels. Buildings such as the Empire State Building regularly rent their luminous tip to corporations (such as Facebook and Microsoft) or even Broadway shows to display their colours and use the resulting ‘content’ for promotional purposes. For example, a recent promotion for Verizon saw the building display the results of an online poll that asked fans who they thought would win the 2014 Super Bowl in the week leading up to the event, eventually displaying the results of the daily tally in the colours of the more popular team on the building. Likewise, projection-mapping projects and urban screens around the world regularly promote anything from cars, to clothes, to mobile phones on prominent civic buildings. Overall, the expansion of critical, creative, and commercial uses of expres- sive architectural surfaces is a growing cultural force that is changing our relationship to iconic, monumental structures. As buildings become more like screens through the application of interactive, networked, large-scale outdoor projection, architectural façades, and urban screens, we must explore their creative and critical potential, opening up spaces through curation and programming for new expressions of place and identity in the face of advertising and city branding initiatives. Why Massive Media? The building as screen and its related practices of conversation, contesta- tion, and commerce in public culture have two key characteristics. Firstly, they are big — they are, in fact, massive. As a result of their scale they are highly visible and thus loaded with cultural and economic value and significance. They take space, that is, they take up a significant amount of prime real estate and demand to be considered as public and communal, thus referencing a history and future of mass culture as well. Secondly, they are communicative and technical — they are media. They use their scale, visibility, ephemerality, centrality, and communicative capacities, from data visualisations enabled by programmable led façades, interaction through sensors and mobile ubiquitous media, moving images, sound, and networked
- 22. 18 The Building as Screen communication, to broadcast their messages and engage on- and offline publics. In this way, they are mass media. They make space and produce it through interactions both proximal and distal: they mediate. All together, they are massive media. They are buildings that reflect a larger shift in our society towards the foregrounding of interactivity and experience. They are structures that can talk and listen, buildings that we can click on, swipe, share, capture, and converse with and about. Massive media are buildings that tell us something about the place they are in, about ourselves and others as we engage with them, and that connect us to other people and times, both near and far. This book addresses this emerging phenomenon. And it does so because there is a lot at stake in these seemingly playful, benign situations. Archi- tecture and media shape our understandings of who we are, individually and collectively, and change how we read and interpret the world around us. Questions of identity (of the self and other) are bound up in our cultural expressions, particularly ones that appear to be public and representative, as works that appropriate the scale and visibility of a building tend to be. These spaces are also particularly fraught with competing commercial interests, be they those of advertisers who seek to capture larger markets in increasingly spectacular ways, by technology and telecom companies whose aim is to convince us that more technology in cities is an inherently good thing in itself ignoring the power imbalances and biasses this creates, or cities that are angling to compete for global talent and tourism. Many projects in this field present themselves as playful, participatory, or revolutionary but amount to little more than city branding or passive entertainment, and are often elitist and exclusionary. The critical and creative potential of these spaces remain despite these tendencies. The relative novelty of the form presents us with unique opportunities to shape emerging practices and to carve out new spaces for new media art and expanded cinema that can strengthen our ability to connect with our past, present, and future, locally and translocally, at a time when these connections are under threat by politics of division, economics of disparity, and technologies of distraction and segregation. The exploration of creative, historical, and critical understandings of massive media is necessary considering the proliferation of screen-based and screen-reliant buildings and environments and their potential impact on the development of public culture and architecture. How do these new assemblages of media, architecture, and space fit within a history of iconic architecture and monumentality? How do they reflect and challenge our notions of public culture and how we have expressed collectivity and pro- gress? How does massive media change and challenge our notions of space,
- 23. Introducing Massive Media 19 monumentality, and the public sphere through the application of various primarily screen-based media? And finally, and perhaps most crucially: How can the combination of media in the form of moving images, data, networks, and animations make large-scale public displays and urban media environ- ments more inclusive and sensitive to their social and historical contexts? In exploring these questions, this book will outline useful, practical and theoretical tactics that should be of interest to students, practitioners, and researchers of architecture, new media art, interaction and user experi- ence design, cinema, and the humanities, providing a test for theoretical claims made about the transformative properties of digital technology in cities and for monuments, and a reliable guide and predictor of future outcomes, directions, and critical practice in this field. It aims to establish critical perspectives, theories, and methods for the practice of public visual culture through massive media amidst technological, social, epistemological, ontological, and economic change. A Brief History of the Public Sphere, Monumentality, and Media The Most Advanced Site of Struggle: The Public Sphere Looking at and conversing about the same thing at the same time. It is a simple idea but it is a critical element of intersubjective cultural discourse. When millions of us watch the same television show, listen to the same song, or read the same book, we become part of a discursive community that, through various channels of feedback, both immediately and at various mediated distances, shapes how we collectively think and feel about these things. These scenarios outline the conditions of what we might call a public sphere: a place where autonomous individuals can come together to form a group that can mediate and manage feedback related to their collective thoughts and desires. The public sphere can be seen to have undergone a trajectory of trans- formation and fragmentation alongside technological advancement. Jürgen Habermas defines a healthy public sphere as the places and protocols (both technical and social) by which private people come together to form a public that is as accessible, autonomous, non-hierarchical, and participatory as pos- sible. Habermas’ understanding of the contribution that various media and spaces have on this coming together is crucial to the resulting qualities of the discourse generated by a public sphere. He notes that the public sphere, due to its size, is a dispersed commonality of strangers, which ‘requires specific
- 24. 20 The Building as Screen means for transmitting information and influencing those who receive it’ (1974, 49). For the bourgeois public sphere, emerging in the early eighteenth century from a previous courtly conception of ‘representative publicness’ (Habermas 1989, 5), this meant a combination of media and public space that included the growth of the press, literary societies, the salon, and the coffee house. Habermas argues that the health of the bourgeois public sphere flagged in the twentieth century due to a re-feudalisation and fragmentation via mass media that concentrated power in large multi-national corporations and isolated individuals in private dwellings where the media platforms of television and radio had taken hold. More recent theories of the public sphere tend to focus on the role of media in the public sphere. Following from Habermas, German filmmaker and theorist Alexander Kluge and his colleague Oskar Negt take on the challenges posed by mass media to the health of the public sphere such as fragmentation, isolation, and distraction. Negt and Kluge were particularly interested in electronic media and satellite links that created the conditions for the existence of global news outlets such as cnn in the 1980s. Somewhat more pessimistic about the global proliferation of electronic media than McLuhan, Negt and Kluge saw ‘the media of industrial commercial public- ity, in their most negative implications, as an inescapable horizon, and as the most advanced site of struggle over the organisation of everyday experience which contextualises all other sites’ (Hansen 1993, 211). Thus, the public sphere became for them a struggle for the contextualisation of sites of debate and memory through media. As a result, their approach shifted the conditions for the health of the public sphere to those of ‘open- ness, inclusiveness, multiplicity, heterogeneity, unpredictability, conflict, contradiction, and difference’ (ibid., 189) that can be enacted in and through the use and appropriation of media which changes the who, what, and how of participatory politics. As Miriam Hansen notes in an essay that revisits Negt and Kluge’s work: The new types of publicity that have been proliferating over the past decade or two, especially with the electronic media, not only urge us to rethink, once again, the function, scope, and mode of intellectual activity; they also force us to redefine the spatial, territorial, and geopolitical parameters of the public sphere (ibid., 183). The proliferation of media in public space via monumental projections and displays, as well as networked, location, and context aware technologies, as evidenced by buildings like the Empire State Building, can be seen to
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- 26. possess. The engraver of Der Bierbreuwer was Jost Ammon, and the engraving is considered one of the best examples {133} of the art at this very early period. A plate taken from the same work, representing a cooperage, will be found on page 334.
- 27. The old German lines under the engraving of the Beer-brewer may be thus rendered into English: From barley I boil good beer, rich and sweet and bitter fashion. In a wide and big copper I then cast the hops. Then [after boiling the wort] I leave it to cool, and therewith I straightway fill the well-hooped and well-pitched [fermenting] vat; then it [the wort] ferments, and [the beer] is ready. There is no doubt that the brewers’ trade was originally held in little esteem, and was considered as mean and sordid (de vile juggement). The ignominious punishments and restrictions (some of which have been already mentioned) to which the old London brewers were subjected, prove that their status only slowly improved. In the time of Henry VIII., however, their position had so far advanced in repute that in the grant of arms then made to them, they are specified as “the Worshipful Occupation of the Brewars of the City.” The Records of the City of London are particularly full of details concerning the brewers and the brewing trade, and it will probably give the best idea of the conditions under which the business was carried on in former days to mention a few of the principal regulations gathered from that valuable body of information, and to supplement them by extracts from the records of the Brewers’ Company. Truth to say, the brewers and the City authorities were never the best of friends, and long accounts are to be found from time to time of disputes between them as to the legal price and quality of the liquor with which the lieges were to be supplied— struggles in which the action of the authorities seems, according to our modern notions, to have been arbitrary in the extreme. An instance of this tyranny over a trade is given in the Liber Aldus, from which it appears that not only was a brewer compelled to brew ale of a specified price and quality, but he was not even allowed to leave off brewing in case he found it did not pay him to continue. The regulation runs thus: “If any shall refuse to brew, or shall brew a less quantity than he or she used to brew, in consequence of this ordinance, he or she shall be held to be a withdrawer of victual from
- 28. this city and shall be punished by imprisonment, and shall forswear his trade as a brewer within the liberties of the City for ever.” The same idea, formerly so prevalent, that persons ought to be compelled by the strong hand to pursue their avocations, and the arbitrary manner in which the authorities acted in obtaining a supply of victuals, may be illustrated from the Annals of Dunstaple (1294), in which it is {134} recorded that the King’s long stay at St. Albans and Langley “enormously injured the market of Dunstaple and all the country round. . . The servants of the King seized all victual coming to the market, even cheese and eggs; they went into the houses of the citizens and carried away even what was not for sale, and scarce left a tally with any one. They took bread and ale from the ale-wives, and if they had none they made them make bread and ale.” In 1297 the Sheriffs of Notts and Derby are ordered by Edward I. (Rymer R. 1. 883) to proclaim in every town that the bakers and brewers should bake and brew a sufficient store of bread and ale for certain Welshmen, who were marching to chastise the Scots, “because the King is unwilling that, by reason of such victuals failing, the men of those parts should suffer damage at the hands of the sd Welshmen.” The persons employed in the malt liquor trade, whether as manufacturers or retailers, are specified in an ordinance of the reign of Henry IV. to be Brewers, Brewsters, Hostillers (i.e., Innkeepers), Kewes (i.e., Cooks), Pyebakers, and Hucksters. The hucksters were undoubtedly at one time accustomed to sell their ale in the streets of London. In 1320 they were prohibited by the Lord Mayor and Aldermen from selling ale on London Bridge. In the sixth year of Richard II. Juliana atte Vane, huckster, was charged with selling her ale in “hukkesterie;” she is asked from whom she bought the ale, and replies that she bought the said ale, viz., one barrel of 30 gallons, from Benedicta (brewster), who lived at “Crepulgate.” It was accordingly adjudged that Juliana had broken the City regulations, and the ale was forfeited. The brewers were forbidden at this time to sell to hucksters under pain of forfeiture and imprisonment at the will of the Mayor, the intention apparently being that only a brewer should be a vendor of ale.
- 29. By the reign of Henry IV. the brewers, although they had as yet no royal charter, had joined themselves together for purposes of mutual protection and social intercourse. They are mentioned in an ordinance of the seventh year of that reign as the Mystery (i.e., trade or craft) of Free Brewers within the City, and a constitution is ordained for them by the City Fathers. The freemen of the Mystery are yearly to elect eight persons, four of the part of the City east of Walbrook, viz., two masters and two wardens, and four like persons of the part west of Walbrook. These eight are to make regulations for those using the mystery of brewing, as to the hiring of servants, the sale of ale, and such like matters, as they should be charged by the Mayor and Aldermen; they are also to see “that the good men of the mystery may {135} have a proper place to go to to transact their own business,” and are called together upon the proper occasions “by summons of their beadle in such a manner as other mysteries are;” they are to supervise those who make and supply ale, and to see that “good, able and seyn (sound) ale” is brewed according to the legal price, and to report offenders to the Chamberlain of the City. Considerable difficulty was at this time experienced in compelling the sellers of ale to keep to the lawful measures of barrel, kilderkin, and lesser vessels. On a complaint being made to the Common Council in the ninth year of Henry IV., that whereas “each barrel ought to contain thirty gallons of just measure, but each is deficient by two gallons or more . . . if the dregs are reckoned as clear ale, and that the brewers will make no rebate in the price on that account to the great deceit and damage of the Lords, Gentles and Citizens,” therefore the deputies of the Chamberlain are ordered to mark every barrel as containing 27 gallons, and the half barrel as containing 14 gallons by reason of the aforesaid dregs. Five years later further evil doings are recorded. The Brewers and brewsters, “to the displeasure of God and contrary to the profit of the City, sell their ale three quarts for a gallon, one quart and a half for a potell (i.e., a two-quart measure); and one hanap (i.e. a two-handled tankard), for a half quart of which six or seven hanaps scarcely
- 30. make a gallon,” and they are therefore ordered for the future to sell only by sealed measure and not by hanap, tankard, or any such vessel. In the reign of Henry V. the famous Lord Mayor, Richard Whitington, and the Brewers seem to have been perpetually at daggers drawn. The records of the Brewers’ Company contain a quaint account of an information laid against them for selling dear ale; the complainant in the case being Sir Richard, whose mayoralty had then expired. The substance of it, translated from the original Norman French, is as follows:― “On Thursday, July 30th, 1422, Robert Chichele, the Mayor, sent for the masters and twelve of the most worthy of our company to appear at the Guildhall; to whom John Fray, the recorder, objected a breach of government, for which £20 should be forfeited, for selling dear ale. After much dispute about the price and quality of malt, wherein Whityngton, the late mayor, declared that the brewers had ridden into the country and forestalled the malt, to raise its price, they were convicted in the penalty of £20; which objecting to, the masters were ordered to be kept in prison in the Chamberlain’s company, until they {136} should pay it, or find security for payment thereof.” Whereupon, the Mayor and Court of Aldermen, having “gone homeward to their meat,” the masters, who remained in durance vile, “asked the Chamberlain and clerk what they should do; who bade them go home, and promised that no harm should come to them; for all this proceeding had been done but to please Richard Whityngton, for he was the cause of all the aforesaid judgment.” The record proceeds to state that “the offence taken by Richard Whityngton against them was for their having fat swans at their feast on the morrow of St. Martin.” Whether this unctuous dish had offended the famous Mayor’s mind by way of his digestion, does not appear.
- 31. Whityngton. The same Robert Chichele is recorded to have issued the fol low ing curious reg u la tion in 1423:—“That re tail ers of ale should sell the same in their houses in pots of “peutre,” sealed and open; and that whoever carried ale to the buyer should hold the pot in one hand and a cup in the other; and that all who had cups unsealed should be fined.” Many other complaints of the “oppressive” acts of Whitington towards the Company are also recorded. {137} The Company, as appears from these records, had the power of fining its members for breach of discipline. In 1421 one William Payne, at the sign of the Swan, by St. Anthony’s Hospital, Threadneedle Street, was fined 3s. 4d., to be expended in a swan for the masters’ breakfast, for having refused to supply a barrel of ale to the King when he was in France. Simon Potkin, of the Key, Aldgate, was fined for selling short measure, whereupon he alleged that he had given money to the masters of the Brewers’ Company,
- 32. that he might sell ale at his will. This excuse embroiled him with the Company, who were not to be appeased until he had paid 3s. 4d. for a swan to be eaten by the masters, but of which, it is added, “he was allowed his own share.” In 1420 Thomas Greene, master, and the wardens of the Company agreed that they should meet at “Brewershalle” every Monday for the transaction of their business. It would appear that the first Hall had then been recently erected, for, as we have seen, the Brewers had in the preceding reign no fixed place to which “the good men of the mystery” might resort. Many curious accounts are to be found of election feasts. The presence of females was allowed. The brothers of the Company paid 12d., and the sisters 8d., and a brother and his wife 20d. A menu of one of these feasts, given in the ninth year of Henry V., is subjoined. It shows the nature of these entertainments at that period.
- 33. LA ORDINANCE DE NOSTRE FESTE EN CESTE AN. La premier Cours The First Course Brawne one le mustarde Brawn with mustard Caboch à le potage Cabbage soup Swan standard Swan standard Capons rostez Roast capons Graundez Costades. Great costard apples. La seconde Cours The Second Course Venyson en broth one Venison in broth Blanche mortrewes44 Mortreux soup {138} Cony standard Rabbit standard Pertriches on cokkez rostez Partridges with roasted cocks Leche Lombard45 Leche Lombard Dowsettes one pettiz parneux. Sweetmeats and pastry. La troisme Cours The Third Course Poires en serope Pears in syrup Graundezbriddes one Great birds and Petitz ensemblez Little ones together Fretours Fritters Payne puff one Bread puff Un cold bakemete. A cold baked meat. 44 Mortreux was a kind of white soup. Chaucer says of the Cook that:―
- 34. “He coude roste, and sethe, and broille, and frie, Maken mortreux, and wel bake a pye.” 45 An old receipt for leche lombard describes it as made of pork pounded with eggs; sugar, salt, raisins, currants, dates, pepper, and cloves were added; the mixture was put in a bladder and boiled; raisins, wine and more spices were added, and the whole was served in a wine gravy. It will be gathered from a study of this bill of fare that, though the Brewers frequently alluded to themselves in petitions as “the poor men of the Mystery of Brewers,” “your poor neighbours the Berebruers,” and such like, they nevertheless fared rather sumptuously than otherwise. Here is their drink bill for a similar entertainment:― BOTERYE. item for xxii galons of red wine xiiijs. viijd. item for iij kilderkyns of good ale at ijs. iiijd. viis. item for ij kilderkyn of iij halfpeny Ale at xxij iijs. viijd. item for j kilderkyn of peny ale xijd. In 1422 Parliament ordered that all the weirs or “kydells” in the Thames from Staines to Gravesend should be destroyed, and the Lord Mayor and Aldermen ordained that two men from each of the City Companies should assist in the work. Thomas Grene and Robert Swannefeld were accordingly chosen on behalf of the Brewers to go to Kingston. The expenses were defrayed by a general contribution by the members of the Company. “These be the names,” says the old {139} writer, “of Brewers of London, the wheche dede paien diverse somes of monye for to helpe to destruye the weres yn Tempse for the comynalte of the Cite of London shulde have the more plente of fissh.” The names of some two hundred and fifty subscribers are subjoined to the record. In 1424 the Brewers had a Lord Mayor to their mind in John Michelle, who was “a good man, and meek and soft to speak with.” When he was sworn-in, the Brewers gave him an ox, that cost 21s. 2d., and a boar valued at 30s. 1d.; “so that he did no harm to the
- 35. Brewers, and advised them to make good ale, that he might not have any complaint against them.” Returning to the ordinances of the City, we find that about this time (7 Hen. V.) there were some three hundred brewers in the City and liberties. In that year another precaution was taken to ensure a proper measure of cask. The coopers were ordered by Whitington to mark with an iron brand all casks made by them. Each cooper was to have his own brand, and the marks were to be entered of record. This regulation was carried into effect, and the mark chosen by each cooper appears on the City Records with his name annexed, as thus:― In the sixteenth year of the reign of Henry VI. the first charter was granted to the Brewers’ Company. It empowered the freemen of the Mystery of Brewers of the City of London thenceforward to be a corporate body, with a common seal and powers of taking and holding land. The Company was yearly to elect four of their number as wardens, who were to have power to regulate the members of the Mystery and their brewing operations, and also to govern and rule all men employed in, and all processes connected with, the brewing of any kind of liquor from malt within the City and suburbs for ever. This last provision was probably intended to extend the power of the Company to the Fellowship of the Beer-brewers, then beginning to come into existence. Some years afterwards a coat-of- arms was granted to the Company by William Hawkeslowe, Clarencieux King of Arms of the South Marches of Ingelond. It is thus described in the grant: {140} “They beren asure thre barly sheues gold, bound of the same, a cheveron, gowles, in the cheveron thre barels, Sylvir, garnyshed with sable.”
- 36. The Ancient Arms. The Arms of the Brewers’ Company. The Brewers had taken for their patron saints St. Mary and St. Thomas the Martyr, and bore the arms of Thomas à Becket impaled with their own, until Henry VIII., dis cov er ing that St. Thomas was no saint after all, des e crat ed his tomb, scat tered his dust to the four winds of heaven, and com ‐ pelled the Brewers to adopt another es cut cheon. The new coat, dis card ing the ob noxious saint’s insignia, was a good deal like the old one, and is borne by the Company to this day. It is described in the grant as follows: “Geules on a Cheueron engrailed silver three kil der kyns sable hoped golde between syx barly sheues in saultre of the same, upon the Helme on a torse siluer and asur a demy Morien in her proper couler, vestid asur, fretid siluer, the here golde, holding in either hande thre barley eres of the same manteled sable, dobled siluer.” With regard to the old Hall of the Brewers’ Company, it oc cu pied the site of the pre ‐ sent Hall, and is des cribed by Stowe as a “faire house;” it was des troyed in the Great Fire. Of the pre sent ed i fice, which sprang Phœnix-like from the ashes of the yet smok ing City—it bears date 1666—suf fice it to say that it is a fine build ing, char ac ter is ‐ tic of the arch i tec tural style of the period, and that for lovers of old oak car vings its in terior is worthy a visit.
- 37. This notice of the Brewers’ Company, its foundation, its feasts, and {141} its troubles has taken us rather in advance of our tale, and we must hark back to the middle of the fifteenth century. To judge from an entry in the City Records of the sixteenth year of Edward IV. the Brewers were sometimes openly resisted by force of arms. The actual occasion on which this was done is not specified, but it is recorded that Richard Geddeney was committed to prison for having said that the Brewers had made new ordinances, and that it would be well to oppose them, as had formerly been done, with swords and daggers, when they were assembled in their Hall. Six years afterwards a petition was presented to the Lord Mayor and Aldermen by the Brewers, which is so good a specimen of the usual style of their supplications that some portions of it are given. It begins by “petieously compleynyng that where in tyme passed thei have honestly lyved by the meanes of bruyng, and utteryng of their chaffer as well within the fraunchises of the saide Citee as withoute. And hath ben able to bere charges of the same citee after their havours and powers as other freemen of the saide citee. Where now it is so that for lak of Reules and other directions in the saide Crafte they ben disordered and none obedience nor goode Rule and Guydyng is hadd within the saide Crafte to the distruction thereof.” It is therefore prayed—“That eny persone occupying the Craft or feat of bruying within the franchise or the saide citee make or do to be made good and hable ale and holesome for mannys body. . . and that no manner ale after it be clensed and set on yeyst be put to sale or borne oute to eny custumers hous till that it have fully spourged (worked).” That no brewer shall occupy a house or a “seler” apart from his own dwelling-house for the sale of his ale. That no brewer shall “entice or labour to taak awey eny custumer from a brother brewer,” or “serve or do to be served any typler (i.e., retailer of ale) or huxster as to hym anewe be comen custumer of any manner ale for to be retailed till he have verrey knowlage that the saide typler or huxster be clerely oute of dett and daunger for ale to any other person” . . . . . That every person keeping a house and being a brother of Bruers do pay to the Wardens of the
- 38. Company a sum of 4s. yearly. “That no manner persone of the said crafte . . . presume to goo to the feeste of the Maior or the Sherriff unless he be invited . . that members of the crafte shall appear in livery when so commanded that is to sey gowne and hode . . . That the livery of the crafte be changed and renewed every third year agenst the day of the Election of the newe Wardeyns of the crafte . . .” That once a quarter the ordinances of the Company shall be read to the assembled brewers in {142} their common hall. That no brewer is to buy malt except in the market. That malt brought to market must not be “capped in the sakke, nor raw-dried malte, dank or wete malte or made of mowe brent barly, belyed malt, Edgrove malte, acre-spired malte, wyvell eten malte or meddled46, in the deceite of the goode people of the saide citee, upon payn of forfaiture of the same.” No one is to buy his own malt or corn in the market, “to high the price of corn in the Market,” under pain of the pillory. No one is to sell malt “at the Market of Gracechurch or Greyfreres before 9 of the clock till market bell therfor ordeigned be rongen,” and at one o’clock all the unsold malt is to be cleared away. 46 “Capped in the sakke”=probably with some good malt put on the top and defective malt beneath. Mowe brent barley=barley that has heated in the stack. Belyed=swollen. Acre-spired=with the shoot of the plant projecting from the husk. Wyvell-eten=weevil-eaten. Meddled=mixed. All these rules and ordinances the Lord Mayor and Aldermen were graciously pleased to sanction and confirm. The records contain many entries showing the difficulties the authorities had to contend with in keeping the brewers to the legal price and qualities of ale, a subject already touched on in Chapter V. The prices being fixed by law, and no allowance being made for the natural fluctuations of the market, it is not to be supposed that the brewers would give their customers any better ale than they were absolutely compelled by law to give. As old Taylor quaintly says:―
- 39. I find the Brewer honest in his Beere, He sels it for small Beere, and he should cheate, Instead of small to cosen folks with Greate, But one shall seldome find them with that fault, Except it should invisibly raine Mault. Disputes arising between the officers of the Brewers’ Company and any members of the guild, were sometimes referred for settlement to the Lord Mayor and Aldermen. In 1520 there was “variance and debate in the Court of Aldermen between the Master and Wardens of the ale-brewers and Thomas Adyson, ale-brewer, concerning the making of a growte” by the latter. The parties having submitted their case to the Court, it was adjudged that Adyson should go to the Brewers’ Hall, {143} and there, before the Master and Wardens, “with due reverence as to them apperteynyng, standing before them his hed uncovered, shall say these words: ‘Maysters, I pray you to be good masters to me, and fromhensforth I promytte you that I shall be good and obedient to you . . and obey the laws and customs of the house.’” Foreign brewers (i.e., brewers not members of the Company) were only allowed to sell ale within the City on paying 40s. annually to the use of the City, and in default of payment the Chamberlain “shall distreyne their carts from tyme to tyme.” There was also a duty called ale-silver, which had been paid from time immemorial to the Lord Mayor by the sellers of ale within the City. Complaints of short measure were still common, and as it is shown that the barrels were delivered to customers without being properly filled, so that “thynhabitants of the City paye for more ale and bere than they doo receive, which is agenst alle good reason and conscience,” therefore the brewers were ordered to take round “filling ale” to fill up their customers’ casks. In the eighteenth year of Henry VIII. a striking instance of the insubordination of the Brewers is recorded. The four Wardens of the Company were ordered to produce their books of fines, “the whiche to doo they utterly denyed.” Therefore the four Wardens and their
- 40. Clerk, Lawrence Anworth, “were comytted to the prisn of Newgate ther to remayne.” This seems to have awakened the Wardens to a sense of their duties, for on the same day they brought in “ij. boks inclosed in a whytte bagge.” A committee was appointed to inspect the same, “forasmuche as it is thought that mayne unreasonable fynes and other ordynannces be conteyned in theym.” It has been already mentioned (p. 68) that from the time of Henry VI. beer had begun slowly to displace the old English ale. The Beer- brewers had gathered themselves together into a “fellowship” for the protection of their interests, and were quite distinct from the Ale- brewers, who composed the Brewers’ Company. Whatever may have been the case earlier, in the reign of Henry VIII. the Beer-brewers numbered in their fellowship a certain proportion of Dutchmen. In the twenty-first year of that reign it was ordained that “no maner Berebruer, Ducheman or other, selling any bere shall, etc.” “Also that no maner of berebruer Englise or straunger, shall have and kepe in his house above the nomber of two Coblers to amende their vessells.” Constant reference is made to the Beer-brewers as being a fellowship separate from the Ale-brewers until the reign of Edward VI., by which {144} time they had united, apparently without obtaining the sanction of any authority to the change. In the fifth year of that reign a resolution was passed by the Court of Common Council that, “forasmoche as the beare-bruers in the last commen counseyll here holden most dysobedyentlye, stubborenelye, and arrogantlye behaved theymselfes toward this honourable Courte,” the whole craft of the Beer-brewers are for ever disqualified from being elected to serve upon the Common Council; if, however, the Beer-brewers make humble submission, they may be restored to their old status, “if your lordship and the wysdomes of this Citee shall then thynke it mete.” And forasmuch as “most evydently yt hathe apperyd that this notable stobernes of the beare-bruers hath rysen by the counseyll and provocatioun of the ale-bruers, which have unyted to theym all the beare-bruers,” it is ordered that for the future the two crafts shall not unite, nor shall the Ale-brewers compel any one to come into their Company. This state of things continued till the third year
- 41. of Queen Mary’s reign, when a petition was presented by the Brewers to the Common Council, which recited that the two crafts had formerly been united, “as mete and verye convenyente it was and yet is,” and prayed that the restriction might be removed. The petition ended thus: “and they with all their hartes accordinge to theire dueties shall daylye praye unto almightye god longe to prosper and preserve your honours and worshippes in moche helthe and felycytie.” This affecting appeal, which would have moved a heart of stone, had the desired effect, and from that day to the present the Beer-brewers and Ale-brewers have been united, “as mete and very convenyente it is” that they should be. Different governance, however, was applied to the former, and for long after this period four Surveyors of the Beer-brewers, being “substantyall sadd men,” were elected every year to supervise the trade. An instance of the tyranny with which the trades were regulated in the old days has been already given; a very similar one may be taken from an order of the Star Chamber in the twenty-fourth year of Henry VIII., which commands that “in case the Maire and Aldermen of the same Citie shall hereafter knowe and perceyve or understonde that any of the saide Brewers of their frowarde and perverse myndes shall at any tyme hereafter sodenly forbere and absteyne from bruynge, whereby the King’s subjects shulde bee destitute or onprovided of Drynke,” the brewhouses of such “wilfull and obstynate” brewers shall be taken possession of by the City, who are to allow others to brew there, and provide them materials “in case their lak greynes to brew with.” {145} Regrators and forestallers (i.e., persons who bought large stocks of provisions with the object of causing a rise in price) were in old times severely treated by the authorities, who generally checked their iniquitous dealings by ordering them to sell their stores at a reasonable price. The forestaller, indeed, might think himself lucky if he escaped so easily. In the fourth year of Edward VI. four persons who had accumulated great quantities of hops in a time of scarcity were ordered to sell their whole stock at once at a reasonable price.
- 42. All through the reign of Queen Elizabeth the unfortunate brewers were vexed with frequent and, in some cases, contradictory regulations: This beer was to be allowed; that beer was prohibited; prices were still fixed by law, and qualities must correspond to the City regulations. Even though a man be ruined, he could not leave off brewing, for fear of being held a “rebel.” A curious ordinance, made in the fourteenth year of Elizabeth’s reign, shows the extreme newness of the ale and beer consumed by the good men of the City of London in those days. The ordinance is expressed to be for the reformation of “dyvers greate and foule abuses disorderlye bigonne by the Brewers,” and, reciting that the Brewers have begun to deliver their beer and ale but two or three hours after the same be cleansed and tunned, it provides that no beer or ale is to be delivered to customers till it has stood in the brewer’s house six hours in summer and eight in winter. There seems to have been a smoke question in London even as early as this period, for in the twenty-first year of Elizabeth we find that John Platt was committed to prison, “for that he contrarye to my Lorde Maior’s comaundement to refraine from burninge of seacoles during her Majestie’s abode at Westminster, he did continually burn seacole notwithstanding.” A petition from the Brewers to Her Majesty’s Council about the same period recites that the Brewers understand that Her Majesty “findeth hersealfe greately greved and anoyed with the taste and smoke of the seacooles used in their furnaces.” They therefore promise to substitute wood in the brewhouses nearest to Westminster Palace. What would have been Her Majesty’s “grief” if she could have experienced a modern November in London? In Peter Pindar’s poem on the visit of King George III. to Whitbread’s Brewery, allusion is made to the once popular belief that brewers’ horses are usually fed on grains. The origin of this idea may possibly be found in the regulations enforced in London as to the price of and the dealings in brewers’ grains. In a proclamation of Elizabeth’s {146} time it is recited that “forasmuche as brewers’ graines be victuall for horses and cattell as hey and horsebread and
- 43. other provinder be,” therefore a price is to be set upon grains by the Lord Mayor, and the buying of grains to sell again is forbidden. The difficulties of enforcing the rules as to price and quality of ale and beer are shown in the frequent complaints of the brewers, and in the numerous trials that were made from time to time by the City authorities to ascertain how much drink ought to be brewed from a fixed quantity of malt. In the thirty-fifth year of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, a large Committee was appointed to make trial, at the charges of the City, of twenty quarters of malt, to be brewed into two sorts of beer, viz., strong beer at 6s. 8d. the barrel, and “doble” beer at 3s. 4d. the barrel. As a result of the trial, the brewers promised to draw only five barrels and a half of double beer from a quarter of malt until the price of malt had fallen to 18s. the quarter; a strong proof this of the growing taste for strong ale and beer. Shortly before this time the strongest ale allowed by law had been this same “doble.” Now the “doble” had taken the place of the single, and the strong ale of twice the strength of the “doble” had stepped into its place. A very summary way had the City authorities in the sixteenth century, of treating any drink or victual which did not come up to the required standard of excellence. In 1597 we find it ordered that two and fifty pipes of corrupt beer, “being nether fitt for man’s body, nor to be converted into sawce (i.e. vinegar) . . . shall have the heades of all the same pipes beaten owte and the beer poured out into the channells, part in Cheapside, part in Cornhill and part in Bishopsgate.” After the reign of Elizabeth the entries concerning the Brewers and their delinquencies become fewer and farther between. The prices of ale and beer were still fixed by law, but more common-sense views on the subject of trade and trade regulation were slowly beginning to prevail, and we soon lose all traces of the tyrannous and vexatious regulations of which so many instances occur in earlier times. One more such instance may be mentioned of an arbitrary attempt to force trade out of its natural channels, and to lower prices and compel sobriety at one and the same time. In 1614 the
- 44. Lord Mayor, “finding the gaols pestered with prisoners, and their bane to take root and beginning at ale-houses, and much mischief to be there plotted, with great waste of corn in brewing heady strong beer, many consuming all their time and means sucking that sweet poison,” had an exact survey taken of all victualling houses and ale- houses, which were above a thousand. As above 300 {147} barrels of beer were in some houses, the whole quantity of beer in victualling houses amounting to above 40,000 barrels, he had thought it high time to abridge their number and limit them by bonds as to the quantity of beer they should use, and as to what orders they should observe, whereby the price of corn and malt had greatly fallen. The Brewers, however, seem to have been too many for his Lordship, for though he limited the number of barrels to twenty per house, and the quality of the two sorts of beer to 4s. and 8s. a barrel, so that the price of malt and wheat was in a fortnight reduced by 5s. or 6s. per quarter, yet the Brewers brewed as before, alleging that the beer was to be used for export, and, “combining with such as kept tippling houses,” conveyed the same to the ale-houses by night, so that in a few weeks’ time the price of malt had risen to much the same figure as before. In 1626 the Brewers’ Company was in evil case, as may be judged from a petition presented by them in that year to the City Fathers, in which they allege that they are in a decayed state and not able to govern their trade, that their Company consists of but six beer- brewers and a small number of ale-brewers, and that other brewers are free of other Companies. The petition goes on to pray that no other person than a freeman of the Company be allowed to set up a brewhouse in the City. The petition was referred to a Committee, and nothing more was heard of it. A similar petition, presented to the Common Council in the year 1752, was considered and the prayer granted. While, however, the Brewers’ Company had been allowed to fall into decay, the City regulations of the trade had become less and less irksome, and the brewers themselves increased in wealth and prosperity. Many allusions may be found in the writers of the middle
- 45. of the seventeenth century, which prove that the status of the brewers had greatly improved. The old Water Poet thus describes how the brewers “are growne rich”:― Thus Water boyles, parboyles, and mundifies, Cleares, cleanses, clarifies, and purifies. But as it purges us from filth and stincke: We must remember that it makes us drinke, Metheglin, Bragget, Beere, and headstrong Ale, (That can put colour in a visage pale) By which meanes many Brewers are growne rich, And in estates may soare a lofty pitch. Men of Goode Ranke and place, and much command, Who have (by sodden Water) purchast land: {148} Yet sure I thinke their gaine had not been such Had not good fellowes usde to drinke too much: But wisely they made Haye whilst Sunne did shine, For now our Land is overflowne with Wine: With such a Deluge, or an Inundation As hath besotted and halfe drown’d our Nation. Some there are scarce worth 40 pence a yeere Will hardly make a meale with Ale or Beere: And will discourse, that wine doth make good blood, Concocts his meat, and make digestion good, And after to drink Beere, nor will, nor can He lay a churl upon a Gentleman.
- 46. A somewhat similar moral may be drawn from the humorous little poem, written a century and a half later by a namesake of the Water Poet:― THE BREWER’S COACHMAN. Honest William, an easy and good natur’d fellow, Would a little too oft get a little too mellow; Body coachman was he to an eminent brewer, No better e’er sat on a coach-box to be sure. His coach was kept clean, and no mothers or nurses, Took more care of their babes, than he took of his horses; He had these, aye, and fifty good qualities more, But the business of tippling could ne’er be got o’er. So his master effectually mended the matter, By hiring a man who drank nothing but water, “Now William,” says he, “you see the plain case, Had you drank as he does you’d have kept a good place.” “Drink water!” cried William; “had all men done so, You’d never have wanted a coachman, I trow. They are soakers, like me, whom you load with reproaches, That enable you brewers to ride in your coaches.” A short space only may be devoted to a record of a few of the more remarkable brewers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Jan Steen, of Delph, seems to have been a brewer famed rather for his eccentricities than for his beer. He flourished in the days of Charles II., and Arnold Hinbraken, his biographer, says that a whole book might {149} be filled with droll episodes of his life. “He was so attached to boon companions, that his Brewery came to grief. He bought wine with his money instead of malt. His wife, seeing this, said one day to him, ‘Jan, our living is vanishing, our customers call in vain, there is no beer in the cellar, nor have we malt for a Brew, what will become of us? You should bring life into the brewery.’ ‘I’ll keep it alive,’ said Jan, and walked away. He went
- 47. to market and bought several live ducks, having first told his men to fill the largest kettle with water and heat it. He then threw a little malt in it, and threw in the Ducks, which, not accustomed to hot water, flew madly through the Brewery making a horrid noise, so that his wife came running in to see what the matter was, when Jan, turning to her, said, ‘My love, is it not lively now in our Brewery?’ However, he gave up brewing, and turned Painter.” William Hicks, who died in the year 1740, was one of the most remarkable Brewers of the last century. He was brewer to the Royal household, and left behind him a well-earned reputation for honesty and loyalty. A striking proof of his loyalty may be seen to this day in the statue of George I., which he set up on the summit of Bloomsbury steeple, and of which a facetious person wrote:― The King of Great Britain was reckon’d before The head of the Church by all good Christian people, But his brewer has added still one title more To the rest, and has made him the head of the steeple. Another celebrated brewer of last century was Humphrey Parsons, twice Lord Mayor of London. This gentleman, when upon a hunting party with Louis XV., happened to be exceedingly well mounted, and, contrary to the etiquette observed in the French Court, outstripped the rest of the company, and was first in at the death. On the King asking the name of the stranger, he was indignantly informed that he “was un chevalier de malte.” The King entered into conversation with Mr. Parsons, and asked the price of his horse. The Chevalier, bowing in the most courtly style, replied that the horse was beyond any price other than his Majesty’s acceptance. The horse was delivered, and from thenceforward the chevalier Parsons had the exclusive privilege of supplying the French Court and people with his far-famed “black champagne.” It has been the sad reflection of many an one, on wandering in a churchyard and reading the epitaphs of the departed, that certainly the most virtuous and highly-gifted of mankind have already passed {150} away—that is, if the epitaphs are absolutely to be relied on. Mr.
- 48. Tipper, the Newhaven brewer, who died in 1785, and lies buried in Newhaven Churchyard, is an instance in point. Surely none but himself could have been Mr. Tipper’s parallel. His epitaph runs thus:― Reader! with kind regards this grave survey, Nor heedless pass where Tipper’s ashes lay. Honest he was, ingenuous, blunt and kind, And dared do, what few dare do—speak his mind. Philosophy and History well he knew, Was versed in Physick and in Surgery too. The best old Stingo he both brewed and sold, Nor did one knavish trick to get his gold. He played thro’ life a varied comic part, And knew immortal Hudibras by heart. Reader, in real truth, such was the man, Be better, wiser, laugh more if you can. The last resting place of Mr. Pepper, sometime brewer of Stamford, in Lincolnshire, bears these lines:― Though hot my name, yet mild my nature, I bore good will to every creature; I brew’d good ale and sold it too, And unto each I gave his due.
- 49. The following lines were composed on a brewer who, becoming too big a man for his trade, retired from business—and died:― Ne’er quarrel with your craft, Nor with your shop dis’gree. He turned his nose up at his Tub And the bucket kicked he. And so the old Brewers are dead and gone, with their virtues and their faults, their troubles and their successes, and the modern Brewers reign in their stead.
- 51. CHAPTER VII. “The Almaynes with their smale Rhenish wine are contented; but we must have March beere, double beere, dagger ale, and bracket . . .” Gascoygne’s Delicate Dyet for Daintie-Mouthed Droonkards. Alum si fit stalum non est malum Beerum si fit clerum est sincerum. Old Rhyme. VARIOUS KINDS OF ALES AND BEERS.—SOME FOREIGN BEERS. — RECEIPTS. — SONGS. — ANECDOTES. N attempt to describe, or even to specify, all the ales and beers that have gained a local or more wide-spread fame, would be a lengthy task. Nearly every county in England, and nearly every town of any size, has been at one time or another noted for its malt liquors. The renown of some localities has been evanescent, having depended probably upon the special art of some “barmy” brewer or skilful ale-wife, whilst of others it may be said that years only increase their fame and spread their reputation. From a perusal of those queer old collections of quackery, magic, herb-lore and star-lore, the Saxon Leechdoms, it may be gathered that our Saxon ancestors brewed a goodly assortment of malt liquors. They made beer, and strong beer; ale, and strong ale; clear ale, lithe (clear) beer; and twybrowen, or double-brewed ale, the mighty ancestor of the “doble-doble” beer of Elizabethan times. Besides all these, there was foreign ale for those whose tastes were too fastidious to be satisfied with their native productions. {152} On the authority of the Alvismál, it may be said that no distinction was originally drawn between ale and beer, except, perhaps, that the latter was considered to be a somewhat more honourable
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