Austrey
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Seventeenth Century AustreyTavern
Gossip
Comparative
studies suggest that illiterate day-labourers and husbandmen had easy access to
news in the village alehouse, which served as a general meeting place and
information exchange. Margaret
Spufford has found evidence to suggest that ballads and chapbooks were freely
handed round, read aloud and discussed by alehouse patrons.
Taverns and gossip were synonymous; as one contemporary writer observes,
‘every man hath his penny to spend at a
pinte in the one, and every man his eare open to receive the sound of the
other’ The alehouse was also a popular meeting place for itinerant
travellers, chapmen and general carriers - the carriers of information - who met
with the farming population and exchanged news picked up in their travels.
Strong drink and profane company might easily loosen a man's tongue to
sedition. However,
the alehouses were not the ‘nests of
Satan’ and hotbeds of conspiracy and impiety that the puritans imagined
them to be. In an illuminating
article, Peter Clark suggests that alehouses nurtured rather more conservative
and parochial attitudes. Although there were occasionally seditious outbursts,
they never became ‘the command centres of popular revolution’. Their failure to fulfil this role has been ascribed to three
factors: the absence of political awareness among their various patrons, the
gradual tightening of control over alehouses by the authorities using statutory
licensing provisions, and the ambiguous position of the alehouse-keeper who had
to keep on the right side of the authorities. The
Austrey villagers were certainly no more isolated from the centre of events than
Rous’s parishioners or the inhabitants of East Anglian market towns.
Like their East Anglian counterparts, they probably frequented taverns
and alehouses in the village and in the local market towns, where they might
obtain first hand news from the capital from wayfarers and carriers.
A 1598 Leicestershire archdeaconry court case describes a noisy gathering
of local farmers including inhabitants from Swepston and Appleby at an alehouse
in Atherstone during the annual fair. Some Austrey inhabitants may have attended
radical sermons and discussed them among themselves, like the Cambridgeshire
villagers at Wisbech mentioned earlier. However,
the villagers' receptiveness to ideas which challenged the status quo, both here
and in Cambridgeshire, was governed to a large extent by familiarity with the
written as opposed to the spoken word. The alehouse was the focus for the
ignorant and irreligious, rather than a place of serious thought or debate.
Serious opposition, based upon informed opinion, was more likely to take
place among those who had already been admitted to the ruling elite: men and
women who had access to ideas in print.
Sources
and Notes
CSPD
1634-5, 245, 356. Dedicatory
epistle to a contemporary chapbook, ‘Theeves Falling Out &c.’ cited by
M. Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories (London, 1981), 65. A
certain John Lewes of King’s Cliff in Northamptonshire, a petty chapman,
allegedly ‘said the king was no better than a beggar (as be heard preachers
say out of the Bible)’ was ‘supposed to be very schismatically affected: and
to have been deeply soured in the puritan leaven ... crack-brained and somewhat
crazed by some factious leaders’: CSPD 1636, 321-2 See
particularly, P. Clark, ‘The Alehouse and the Alternative Society’ in
Puritans and Revolutionaries: essays in seventeenth-century history presented to
Christopher Hill, eds. D.
Pennington, K. Thomas (Oxford, 1978), 67-70, 68-70. L.R.O.
Archdeaconry Court Proceedings, Winter v Petcber, 1D 41/4/673; 1D 41/4/721;
‘An Appleby Adulterer before the Archdeacon’, Leicestershire
Historian, 2 No. 11 (1980), 4-10. |
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