Threats to The Social Order
Until the end of the Middle Ages, the alcoholic beverages consumed in Europe were produced solely by fermentation. By far the most important were beer and wine, although mead, cider, and other fruit-based wines were also consumed in the regions where they were produced. Alcoholic beverages made by distillation appeared in Europe by the twelfth century, but even as late as 1500 they were produced in very limited quantities and almost exclusively for medical purposes. Yet by the end of the 1500s, distilled spirits had entered the mainstreams of European and American drinking cultures and the bloodstreams of their populations. The first form of spirits to be produced was brandy, which is distilled from wine, but before long, other beverages (notably whiskey, gin, and vodka) were distilled from cereals. In the seventeenth century, the distillation of rum from molasses, a by-product of sugar production, began. The appearance of these new alcoholic beverages, which were much higher in alcohol by volume than beer and wine and lacked their cultural traditions, had short- and long-term implications for patterns of alcohol consumption and regulation. They make the period from 1500 to 1750 a critical one in the history of alcohol.
Distilling alcohol involves heating an alcohol-bearing liquid, usually made from grapes or cereals but also from fruits and vegetables, such as potatoes. Because alcohol boils at a lower temperature than water, it vaporizes before the water in the liquid, and the vapor is collected and then cooled, so that it condenses and produces concentrated alcohol in liquid form. Modern spirits go through one or two, and sometimes three, distillations; each distillation produces a liquid that is higher in alcohol by volume than the one before. The origins of the process are unclear, but an image in the works of the Egyptian/Greek alchemist Zozimos of Panopolis in the early fourth century is easily recognizable as distilling equipment.1 This does not mean that distilled alcoholic beverages were produced at that time. Distilling can be used to separate any substances having different points of volatility. It is likely that the earliest distillation was used to purify substances like mercury, water, and various oils—and to pursue the alchemists’ ultimate goal of turning base metal into gold—rather than to produce a more intensely alcoholic beverage. Moreover, although classical texts contain many references to the production and consumption of fermented beverages, there are none to beverages made by distillation. Arab scientists who later advanced the work of the Greek alchemists might well have distilled alcohol, and much of the language associated with the process has Arabic roots: there is the word “alcohol,” for a start, and also “alembic,” the apparatus used for heating the liquid and cooling the vapor. But an argument has also been made that distilling began in the border areas of modern Pakistan and India.2
When Europeans learned and applied the science of distilling alcohol is not clear. It has been suggested that the first batch of spirits was produced in 1100, at the prestigious medical school at Salerno, in southern Italy,3 but if that is so, it took a remarkably long time for alcohol distilling to catch on more widely. Although there are references to distilling throughout the rest of the twelfth century, some with the object of purifying water, none records distilling alcohol. Perhaps the few instances of alcoholic distillation were carried out only as a curiosity, or the product tasted so bad that distillers did not drink enough of it to appreciate its effects and its potential.
The first unambiguous references to distilled alcohol as a beverage date from the thirteenth century. In Spain, a Catalan scholar of Muslim science, Ramon Lull, admired the smell and flavor of his distilled spirit and presciently suggested that it might be an excellent stimulant for soldiers before they went into battle.4 His colleague Arnaldus de Villa Nova, from Valencia, promoted distilled alcohol as having rejuvenating effects—this two centuries before his fellow countryman Ponce de Leon looked for rejuvenating waters (the Fountain of Youth) in the New World. One of Arnaldus’s scientific preoccupations was identifying ways to maintain or regain youthfulness. His various recommendations included drinking a concoction of saffron, aloes, and viper juice; being cheerful and moderate; and avoiding sex and strenuous exercise.5 Perhaps it is not surprising that he would think that, in distilled spirits, he had found yet another effective substance. Alcohol, he enthused, “has the power to heal all infirmity and diseases, both of inflammation and debility; it turns an old man into a youth.”6 Later in the thirteenth century, in Italy, a number of scholars recommended distilled alcohol—which was by then becoming known as aqua vitae, or “the water of life”—for its supposed medicinal values, whether it was consumed or applied to wounds.
Yet before distilling alcohol could gain acceptance and respectability, it became a casualty of the reaction against alchemy. In the fourteenth century, alchemy was declared to be contrary to nature and akin to magic, and it was condemned by church and secular authorities alike. Pope John XXII declared aspects of alchemical theory to be heretical in the early 1320s, and in 1326 the inquisitor general of Aragon, in Spain, started a campaign to suppress it. It was forbidden in England, Venice, and elsewhere, and in 1380, Charles V of France made the ownership of distilling apparatus, which was widely associated with alchemy, a capital crime.7
This was not a climate that encouraged the production of distilled alcohol. But some scientists and scholars persisted, and there are occasional but sparse records of spirits production throughout the 1400s, when the pressure against alchemists was gradually relaxed. Michele Savonarola, court physician in Ferrara, published a book on distilling, De Aqua Ardente (On Burning Water, a reference to the fire used to heat the base liquid), in which he stressed the therapeutic effects of spirits and their efficacy in dealing with the plague, which continued to affect many parts of Europe. On the other hand, Leonardo da Vinci designed an improved alembic for distilling alcohol from ale or wine, but only for use as a solvent or as an incendiary for military purposes; he warned against drinking distilled spirits.
By the end of the fifteenth century, distilling alcohol for medical purposes was largely differentiated from alchemy, even though both used the same apparatus. Distilling alcohol had been appropriated by physicians and apothecaries who, in many countries, were given rights to distill, prescribe, and sell spirits. Sometimes the distillate was used in its pure form; at other times it was distilled with flowers, plants, herbs, and spices, each form being prescribed for particular ailments. In 1498, the high treasurer of Scotland recorded a payment of 9 shillings to a “barbar” (barber-surgeon) “that brocht aqua vitae to the King in Dundee by the King’s command.”8 It was also made in religious houses, where monks and nuns sometimes made medicinal “waters.” In one of the earliest references to distilling in Scotland—a 1494 order for “eight bolls of malt to Friar John Cor wherewith to make aqua vitae”—the producer was a member of a religious order.9
The health value attributed to spirits was signaled by their generic name, aqua vitae—ironic, because the process of distilling separated the alcohol from the water in the base liquid. The name was replicated in other languages, such as the French eau-de-vie, Scandinavian aquavit, and Gaelic uisge beatha or usquebaugh, which in the 1700s became “usky,” “uiskie,” and “whiskie.” (The word “brandy,” meaning “burnt wine,” was coined in the seventeenth century, from the Dutch brandewijn.) One of the earliest printed books on aqua vitae, in this case brandy, was published in Germany in 1476 and recommended a half-spoonful every morning to prevent conditions as varied as arthritis and bad breath. Other physicians wrote of the beneficial effects of brandy for physical ailments (it cured headaches, heart disease, gout, and deafness); as an aid to appearance (it improved the bust and stopped hair graying); and as therapy for emotional and other problems (it banished melancholy and forgetfulness).10 The inclusion of conditions commonly associated with aging (such as deafness, forgetfulness, and graying) reflects the claims that drinking brandy prolonged youth and thus life itself.
The essential property that was attributed to brandy and other spirits was heat. Aqua vitae was also known as “burning water” (aqua ardens) and “hot water,” after the process used to heat and vaporize alcohol-bearing liquids, and distillers themselves were often called “water-burners.” No doubt because of the burning sensation of concentrated alcohol in the mouth and throat, distilled spirits were believed to embody the heat of the fire that was required to make them. As heat-giving beverages, spirits played an important medical role because of the dominant medical model of the time, which understood health as a balance of the properties that coexisted within the human body: heat and cold, dryness and moistness. Aqua vitae could be used to counteract excessive cold, and it was thus ideal for old people whose bodies were cooling—but not necessarily for old widows, whose bodies were believed to be so dry that they might combust if brought into contact with such a fiery beverage. Nor was brandy advised for young people: they were considered to be naturally warm and could overheat if they consumed “hot waters.” Overall, though, the health benefits of brandy, the first distilled spirit to enter the medical arsenal, seemed incontestable. Doctors readily prescribed it, and their patients happily took their medicine. Brandy became popular as a general tonic, and some wealthier people adopted the habit of starting the day with the burst of warmth and energy that distilled alcohol provides, a tradition that continues in some parts of Europe to this day.
In 1545, the German physician Walter Ryff provided a comprehensive explanation of the medicinal value of brandy, which, he wrote, was not to be drunk as a beverage but as a “powerful medication.” Ryff first described all the therapeutic properties of wine—especially “thick, red wine,” which increases the blood supply—and then argued that because brandy is the essence of wine, it has even more medicinal properties. “Aqua vitae,” he wrote, “is especially useful in treating a cold, moist head and brain. . . . It drives out the threat of apoplexy, minor and major strokes, paralysis, dropsy, epilepsy, shaking and trembling limbs, and if the limbs have fallen asleep and become numb and without feeling because of cold, it is rubbed externally on the skin or drunk in an appropriately suitable amount.”11
But brandy and other spirits also presented problems because of their high alcohol content. Alcohol levels could not be measured at this time, but even though spirits often contained various additives and were frequently drunk diluted and adulterated, it is quite probable that many had an alcohol content well above the 40 percent that is commonly the maximum allowable strength today. Simply by virtue of being distilled from wine, brandy had far more alcohol by volume than wine. This alone does not mean that spirits were (or are) more likely to produce intoxication, which is a function of the volume of the beverage consumed, not only of its inherent alcohol level. It is possible that when spirits first entered the market, consumers drank them with almost the same gusto as they downed wine and beer, with regrettable consequences, but it is more likely they were consumed in small measures.
If the excessive consumption of fermented beverages such as beer and wine aroused concern and had historically been subjected to regulations and penalties, we can easily understand why the even greater potential of distilled alcohol to cause intoxication, personal risk, and social disruption justified even more rigorous restrictions on its production and consumption. Because alcohol had not been identified as the agent common to spirits, beer, and wine, spirits were initially treated as a distinct class of beverage, and they became the first of many substances to be highly regulated. By the early 1700s, in a reprise of the attempts to suppress alchemy, there were calls for distilled spirits to be banned entirely. The water-burners who provided Europeans with brandy (and later with gin, vodka, and rum) had ignited a debate on alcohol, health, and social order that would simmer at varying levels of intensity for centuries.
The fundamental problem was that it was impossible to restrict consumption of brandy to the medicinal purposes that were first deemed its proper use. Indeed, it was impossible to define the conditions for which brandy might be useful, so as to specify what constituted proper consumption and what was abusive. Like wine, brandy was a medicine that was not only prescribed for specific ailments but also approved for limited consumption as a general tonic that might be consumed daily to maintain a state of physical and emotional well-being. This ambiguity, and the ambivalence about brandy-drinking to which it gave rise, was nicely encapsulated in a 1532 German book on distilling. Brandy, the author wrote, “is good for the sad and the melancholy. . . . It gives back physical strength and makes one hearty and happy.”12 Just as it was hard to distinguish medically defined physical and emotional ailments from the banal worries and troubles of daily life, so it was difficult to determine where therapeutic consumption ended and recreational drinking began.
Although spirits continued to have strong medicinal associations until the twentieth century, they began to slip from the grasp of the medical profession during the early 1500s. The town of Colmar was licensing and taxing alcohol distillers by 1506.13 In many places, the right to distill was extended to guilds that produced food and drink, such as the victuallers and vinegar-makers; in France, these guilds had been granted distilling privileges by the 1530s.14 On the other hand, distilling remained under the supervision of physicians in England until the 1550s, when a commission of the Royal College of Physicians was appointed to inspect distillers. Not until 1601 were the monopolies on distilling in England ended, and Elizabeth I declared that her subjects should “have all the cheap aqua vitae they wanted to warm their chill stomachs.”15
As physicians began to lose control of aqua vitae, so did religious orders when, from the 1530s, reformers dissolved religious houses in most of the regions where Protestantism became dominant. Many former monks and nuns continued their distilling activities when they entered the secular world, and women were very prominent in the world of distilling. Half of the thirty distillers in Munich in 1564 were women; there were reports of prominent women in places as diverse as England, Hungary, and Brunswick making aqua vitae; and much of the spirits production in England was in the hands of working women. At this time, distilling was largely a domestic, small-scale operation, and women distillers were an echo of the brewsters who, by the 1500s, had almost disappeared from ale production. In 1546, Henry VIII, nearing death, appointed a woman to keep two gardens at Hampton Court for “making and stilling all manner of . . . herbs, waters and other necessaries” for his use.16
The distillation of alcohol not only from wine but also from cereal-based fermented liquids (essentially ale) had important implications in northern European regions. There the climate ruled out viticulture, particularly from the sixteenth century, when a phase of more severe winters destroyed many vineyards in marginal regions. Grain-based spirits gave people who could not afford imported wine access to a locally produced beverage with a higher alcohol content than beer. It is arguable that the very warming qualities of spirits produced an especially receptive market in the cooler climates and cold winters of northern Europe, and by 1600, grain-based aqua vitae was being produced in Ireland, Scotland, Germany, Scandinavia, and elsewhere. Perhaps some consumers were too receptive. Distilling in Scotland clearly accounted for a good share of barley production, and in 1579, in anticipation of a poor grain harvest, the Scottish parliament banned distilling, except by earls, lords, barons, and gentlemen. The parliament declared that “a great quantity of malt [is] consumed in the whole part of this realm by making of aqua vita, which is a great cause of the dearth.”17
As the consumption of spirits widened socially and perhaps increased on a per capita basis, there were the predictable warnings about excessive drinking. In the Holy Roman Empire, a police ordinance of 1530 blamed drinking to one’s health (which had already been banned) as a cause of increasing drunkenness: “The abuse and mischief of pledging healths has increased everywhere, becoming more and more entrenched and extensive, leading to blasphemy, murder, manslaughter, adultery and other such misdeeds.”18By 1550, the Dutch physician Laevius Lemnius noted that aqua vitae had become so common as a beverage that people in western Germany and Flanders were drinking more than was good for them.19 In part these warnings reflected the wish of the new Protestant churches to curb the immoral activities of all kinds that they alleged the Church of Rome had tolerated or encouraged. In Switzerland, Jean Calvin introduced rigorous laws that not only punished drunkenness but also curbed the sociability that had centered on drinking in taverns. Such regulations affected all kinds of alcohol, but spirits were regarded as potentially far more dangerous, both to health and to the social order, than fermented alcoholic beverages.
While the health benefits of spirits continued to be promoted, they were often qualified. Doctors in Nuremburg warned in 1572 that “brandy is more seriously damaging than other [drinks], especially to pregnant women and young working people, and causes many damaging illnesses and maladies on a daily basis.”20 Authorities throughout Europe began to try to regulate the production, sale, and consumption of spirits. In the interests of public health, the German city of Nuremburg in 1567 required brandy to be made only from “good, proper wine or wine lees.”21 Augsburg began to tax brandy as early as 1472, and various municipalities began to ban the sale of brandy on Sundays or during church services. Nuremberg did so in 1496 (and several times more in the 1500s, which suggests there were problems of compliance), as did Munich in 1506 and Augsburg in 1529. In Nuremberg, brandy could be sold on other days only from stalls in the marketplace, but in Augsburg it could legally be purchased from grocers or craftsmen in their shops or directly from the homes of distillers.22
In these and other German towns, brandy was surrounded by restrictions designed to prevent it from becoming a beverage that might be consumed daily in sociable circumstances, as wine and beer were. Laws prohibited citizens from sitting and drinking brandy where they bought it. Instead, customers could either stand and drink brandy where it was sold or take it home to consume it in private.23 If they did drink it on the spot, they were forbidden to toast and drink to anyone’s health, and the most that could be consumed on the premises was 1 pfennig’s (a penny’s) worth.24 Because a shot of brandy became a popular way to start the day, some German states limited brandy sales to workday mornings, unlike wine and beer, which could be sold and consumed throughout the day and evening.
The authorities were clearly anxious to limit spirits consumption, and they continually reminded consumers that it was essentially for therapeutic use rather than for recreational drinking. But officials also came under increasing pressure to relax restrictions. Distillers and brandy retailers in cities throughout Germany argued that they faced unfair competition from unregulated producers and sales in the countryside, that brandy was such a beneficial beverage that the authorities should encourage its availability rather than make it more difficult to obtain, and that as prices rose during the inflationary 1500s, 1 pfennig bought a negligible volume of brandy. The Augsburg city council responded by raising the limit to 2 pfennigs in 1580 and to 4 in 1614, and although it also agreed to permit customers to sit while drinking brandy, it perversely refused to allow them to consume food with it. The continuing special status attributed to brandy is highlighted by the 1614 warning that “brandy is not a drink to be taken immoderately, but only for strength or medicinal purposes.”25
Attempts to limit consumption to small therapeutic doses proved futile, however, and production of spirits spread rapidly throughout Europe. The distilling industry, like religion, was one of the first beneficiaries of the invention of the printing press. From Gutenberg’s marvel flowed a veritable stream of books that described the technique of distilling and lauded the value of aqua vitae. By 1525, books on distilling (and on brandy specifically) had been published in a variety of European languages, including French, German, Dutch, Italian, and English. Distilleries were constructed everywhere, and consumption undoubtedly kept pace with increasing production; but there are no useful statistics on either, because spirits were only sporadically subjected to taxation and their producers seem frequently to have evaded it.
By the seventeenth century, spirits were entrenched in European drinking cultures, and they were increasingly normalized, so that by the mid-1600s, policies on the manufacture and sale of spirits were similar to those imposed on beer and wine. Guilds of distillers had been established, and duties were levied on their products. In Augsburg the last prosecution for illicitly producing spirits for sale (in this case it was distilled rye) was brought in 1643, even though the law remained on the books for some decades afterward. The English distilling industry took off, and by 1621, when the London Company of Distillers was founded, some 200 distillers were producing “Aqua Vitae, Aqua Composita and other strong and hott waters.” Other stills made alcohol from substances as varied as wine lees (an early grappa), beer dregs, and rotten fruit.26
One of the most important developments in the history of distilling was the birth of major concentrations in the southwest of France. The first was Armagnac, which began to develop as early as the 1300s, but the second, in the Charente region north of Bordeaux, became far more important in commercial terms. Still the center of French brandy production (and the region that includes Cognac, the district that gave its name to a premium brandy), Charente possessed two vital resources: vineyards that produced large volumes of white wine and forests that provided fuel for the distillery fires. Dutch entrepreneurs began to establish stills in the 1620s, and before long they were turning out unprecedented volumes of brandy. In the mid-1640s, England was importing about 200,000 gallons of brandy from Charente each year; by 1675, imports had risen to a million gallons, and by 1689 that figure had doubled.27
Figures like these suggest that the volume of spirits on European markets must have risen markedly during the seventeenth century. In 1677 the Paris police claimed that “crooks, vagabonds and other evil people” were using brandy to commit the “evil deeds,” thefts, and other crimes that supported their lives of “libertinage and debauchery.” They would “make their way every evening at dusk to whatever quarters they desire at some brandy seller’s as a meeting place from which after having drunk an excess of brandy . . . they depart furious at all hours of the night causing great disorder and obstructing public safety.” The police forbade brandy- and liquor-sellers to admit anyone after 4:00 PM between October 1 and the end of May, when the days were short and darkness fell early.28
But the reservations expressed about brandy paled against the anxiety provoked by grain-based spirits when they began to enter mainstream European drinking cultures in the early 1600s. These spirits included gin, a Dutch beverage distilled from grain and flavored with juniper berries, and whiskey, which was made from barley.29 Gin and whiskey attracted suspicion because even though they were made by the now-familiar process of distillation, they were relative newcomers to the range of commercial beverages, and their merits and dangers were unknown. In 1609, King James VI of Scotland blamed the state of his rebellious subjects on the Southern Isles on whiskey and wine: “One of the chief causes of the great poverty of the Isles, and of the cruelty and inhuman barbarity practiced in their feuds, was their inordinate love of strong wines and aquavite.”30But whiskey was clearly more problematic, as James allowed them to make as much whiskey as they needed for use by their families but banned the importation of any more. (Lords and “wealthy gentlemen” were exempted.)
As different as they were from each other, grain spirits and brandy traveled similar paths in terms of regulation from 1500 to 1700. They were first defined as prescribed medicines. In 1505, for example, the Scottish whiskey trade was placed under the control of the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh.31 Next they were retailed under restrictive conditions, on the understanding that they were beneficial to health but that their consumption for pleasure alone needed to be controlled. Finally, as the spirits entered the world of recreational consumption, the restrictive regulations were repealed or simply fell into disuse, and the authorities realized that greater benefits were to be gained by taxing them. The Dutch imposed taxes on spirits in the early 1600s; they were followed by the English in 1643 and by the Scots a year later. When Scotland and England formed a union in 1707, the common excise rate was 1 penny per gallon of spirits.32
Rum had a different history. Made by distilling fermented molasses and the waste products from sugar-making, it was first produced in British and French colonies in the Caribbean in early seventeenth century, although there are ambiguous references as early as 1552.33 (There are also earlier examples of fermented sugarcane juice in China and India.) Rum quickly became a popular drink among European colonists and indigenous populations in the Caribbean region. It was attributed a wide range of medicinal properties—such as relieving fevers by using “fire to drive out fire”—and was valued for its calories.34 It also found a niche market in European navies and merchant fleets. Rum was added to barrels of water as a preservative, and it was the only alcohol that could be taken onboard ships on the American side of the Atlantic. The Royal (British) Navy began to provide sailors with a daily measure of rum as early as 1655 (the practice continued until 1970), and rum soon became identified as a seaman’s drink. Although rum was imported in small volumes to England (where it was popular among seamen in port towns), it remained marginal because the costs of shipping it across the Atlantic generally made it much more expensive than brandy and locally made grain spirits. It did, however, became an important part of the drinking culture of North Americans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to the point that a number of rum distilleries (using molasses imported from the Caribbean) were founded in the American colonies.
The other main distilled alcoholic beverage was vodka, which was first produced in the broad region now occupied by Russia, Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine. The first producers were probably monks who distilled cereal-based beverages (usually from rye) for medicinal uses (as in the rest of Europe), either to be consumed by patients or applied externally. By the sixteenth century, however, improvements that included adding flavorings (such as honey, spices, and herbs) made vodka a popular beverage. It is a matter of contention whether Poles or Russians first developed vodka; the word, which means “little water,” could be derived from either language. There are references to a distilled spirit (called gorzalka, derived from the Polish word for “to burn”) in Poland in the eleventh century, but it is not clear whether this can be thought of as vodka.35 Whether or not Poland was the birthplace of vodka, a Polish vodka industry was in place by the end of the seventeenth century. By 1620, a number of cities were licensing distillers, and in that year Gdansk alone issued sixty-eight licenses. In 1693, a Cracow distiller published recipes for vodka and also showed that it could be made from potatoes as well as cereals.
In Russia, however, the tsars established a series of monopolies over vodka as early as the 1470s and used it as a source of revenue and as a means of political and social control.36 In the 1500s, Ivan IV created a new privileged class and gave its members exclusive access to vodka in return for their loyalty. Peter the Great continued to dole out vodka to his supporters and used it to manipulate diplomats and guests. In 1695, he created the Drunken Council of Fools and Jesters, which required its members (including himself) “to get drunk every day and never go to bed sober.”37This early participation of the Russian state in vodka production set the tone for centuries, as successive imperial administrations and their successor Soviet regimes relied on revenues from alcohol.
The reception of distilled alcoholic beverages in seventeenth-century Europe led to a debate on their merits, relative not only to one another but also to beer and wine, the fermented drinks of long standing. Commentators also discussed tea, coffee, and chocolate—which were introduced to the diets of better-off Europeans in the 1600s—in these contexts, and it is worth noting that they made no sharp distinction between alcoholic and nonalcoholic beverages. Although caffeine was not identified by name as the active ingredient in the new hot drinks, they were recognized as having stimulating effects that were not dissimilar to alcohol’s. Tea, wine, coffee, and beer do not seem easily interchangeable as beverages now, but some seventeenth-century writers saw nothing incongruous in arguing that tea was preferable to wine because it conveyed all the benefits of wine without the disadvantages of intoxication and a hangover. As for coffee, many writers roundly condemned its consumption as vehemently as they did abuse of alcohol. One French doctor pointed out that coffee and chocolate were “at first us’d only as Medicines while they continued unpleasant, but since they were made delicious with Sugar they are become Poison.” He pointed out that coffee caused insomnia, reduced the appetite, stunted children’s growth, and “renders both Sexes less fruitful.” In the last context he reported that one woman who saw a horse being gelded commented, “They need only give him Coffee to moderate the Passion he had for Mares.”38
The discussion on alcoholic and nonalcoholic drinks encompassed the most widely available beverage of all: water. There was disagreement on the value of water, in itself and in comparison to the other beverages. A French doctor proclaimed water “the wholesomest of all Drinks . . . a curb to the excessive Heat that consumes us” and argued that “those who drink nothing but Water, are ordinarily more healthful and live longer, than those that drink wine. Since Noah, who was the first that drank . . . [wine], the Life of Man is become more short, and Diseases more frequent than before.”39
This minority voice was drowned out by most others, among them that of Richard Short, one of England’s noted seventeenth-century physicians. Short agreed that water was appropriate for people who lived in hot climates (such as “Africa and Libya”), but he insisted that it was dangerous for the inhabitants of cool-climate countries like England, where “many have endangered themselves, many have lost their lives by drinking of water.” Water destroyed their natural heat and caused all kinds of ailments, especially in old men whose bodies were already growing cold and needed to be heated. Dr. Short was alarmed at “the new mode of drinking it” and described drinking water after dinner as “growne much in use now a dayes.”
Short’s comment might have exaggerated the trend, but it raises the possibility that water was being added more frequently to the range of beverages on the seventeenth-century table. While it is almost certainly the case that the poor drank water, much of it undoubtedly of poor quality, Short seems to have been thinking more of the middle and upper classes. He conceded that one might take a little water after having wine with dinner because the effect was simply to dilute the wine, but he described water after beer as “madnesse.”
Short did not suggest that spirits were the best drinks but recommended wine (“absolutely better than water”) and beer (“sweet and healthful and affords good nourishment”). While he gave sound medical reasons why wine and beer were more beneficial and more easily digested, Short buttressed the case against water by appealing to gastronomic tradition: “We are not accustomed to drink water in our country. . . . We ought not to change custom when ’tis ancient. . . . A National custom in diet is rational.” Short left his readers in no doubt as to his opinion of water-drinking: “I see no reason but that we may as well give Narcoticks, that is, stupefying things, as poppy, and opium, as well as water in our country.”40
The debate on water reminds us that alcohol was frequently a safer beverage than the available water. Short did not discuss pollution as such, although he wrote that water from wells was worse than water taken from rivers. But his contemporaries did express concern about drinking water. One seventeenth-century proposal for supplying London with “good and cleare strong water” noted that the prevailing supply was foul and muddy and “not fit for many uses.” It called for the construction of a closed aqueduct to provide the city with “excellent good water, fit for any use, either for dressing of meate, for washing, baking, brewing, or drinking.”41 Maybe it is significant that drinking was placed last in this list of purposes to which clean water would be put.
The same period also threw up proposals for desalinizing (removing the salt from) seawater, a process that would have been invaluable for the navy and merchant marine. Long voyages at sea were becoming more and more common as Europeans explored the rest of the world; established settlements in the Americas, Africa, and Asia; and fished as far from Europe as the cod-rich seas off the coast of Newfoundland. Such voyages raised problems of carrying enough drinking water for crews and ensuring that the water did not foul in the wooden barrels used for holding it. As spirits became more widely available, they were often added to barrels of water to slow spoilage, but desalinization was a more attractive alternative.
One invention that was widely advertised in the seventeenth century promised to produce 90 gallons of fresh water from salt water every twenty-four hours. Its backers argued that this would be not only a boon to sailors but also a great help to communities “that lye near the Sea, and either want [lack] good, or have Brackish Water.” The proposal to desalinize had the support of twenty-three doctors, including Richard Short, whose strictures against water-drinking we have already noted. Presumably, although water was dangerous to the English in England, it could be safely consumed by English seamen when they sailed in the warmer climates off Africa and in the West Indies. The doctors who endorsed the desalinization process pointed out that the “brackish Waters of the Sea-coast, and the putrifying Waters made use of at Sea, might probably have afforded them a great number of Patients, which may hereafter be lessened by the use of the wholesome Water.”42
Proposals such as this, designed to provide safe drinking water, are reminders that it is wrong to think that Europeans drank only alcoholic beverages. Yet if there was concern about the quality of water, there was a lot more anxiety about the availability and consumption of vast volumes of alcohol. Drunkenness was said to be commonplace in England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Beer production appears to have peaked in England in this period, and one commentator predicted that before long the whole kingdom would be “nothing but a Brewery or Distillery, and the Inhabitants all Drunkards.”43
But spirits caused the greatest headaches—not only to many consumers but also to those worried by what they saw as rising consumption. Gin was said to be much stronger than brandy and to be, as such, a much “hotter” beverage that could “overheat” its consumers. If excessive brandy-drinking in the morning led to the abuse of wine and beer in the afternoon, the risk was that much greater when grain spirits were involved. Warnings about the potential dangers of spirits seemed to be justified by a number of moral panics in the early eighteenth century, the most dramatic and best-documented of which was the “gin-craze” that was believed to have taken hold in parts of England between 1700 and 1750. (“Gin” was a generic term for a wide range of distilled spirits, and it was not specifically the juniper-flavored spirit that was at issue here, but all grain-based alcohol.)
It is difficult to separate reality from rhetoric when looking at this phenomenon.44 It was probably not nearly as serious as it was portrayed in the most alarming accounts of contemporaries and some later historians. The 1925 description by the historian Dorothy George that “it would be hardly possible to exaggerate the cumulatively disastrous effects of the orgy of spirit-drinking between 1720 and 1751” seems itself to be an exaggeration.45 And contemporary accounts of widespread ruin and death as a result of gin-drinking are surely examples of moral panic based on a fragile interpretation of verifiable events. Be that as it may, it is clear that the production and consumption of spirits did increase dramatically in some parts of England (especially in London) during the first half of the eighteenth century, and that this must have had implications for the health and well-being of many individuals and for the social order more generally. It is difficult, however, to assess the scale of the phenomenon and its consequences and to understand why they provoked a moral panic.
The popularity of gin in England was kick-started by a shortage of brandy, which by the late seventeenth century was being imported from France in substantial volumes: 2 million gallons a year by the 1680s. These imports were interrupted when William of Orange, a Protestant Dutch prince, became king of England in 1688, causing a rupture in England’s relations with the aggressively Catholic king of France, Louis XIV. Not only were imports of French brandy drastically reduced for a number of years (what did arrive was subjected to punitive duties), but the accession of William popularized gin, a beverage with Dutch origins. At first, gin was imported from the Netherlands, but before long, English distillers were producing it, or adulterated versions of it, in large quantities.
Between 1690 and the 1720s, the English parliament encouraged the production of spirits, not because it was necessarily considered a good thing in its own right, but to reduce demand for wine and brandy from the Catholic French. Gin became, effectively, a patriotic drink, even if it did not displace beer as England’s national beverage. Parliament allowed virtually anyone to distill spirits commercially as long as they paid the required duties of 2 pence a gallon—a low rate that went unchanged when, in 1710, the taxes applied to beer were increased by up to 100 percent. Although restrictions on distilling were occasionally imposed before the 1720s, they reflected concern about grain shortages and were intended to ensure that food supplies were not compromised by alcohol production. As it happened, the period from 1715 to 1755 saw a run of good harvests (there were only three poor years), so that cereal for distilling was plentiful and relatively inexpensive.
The deregulation of distilling led to the establishment of an estimated 1,500 stills in and around London by 1736. Most (perhaps three-quarters of them) were small-scale distillers using equipment worth less than £100, and only perhaps one in six owned equipment valued at more than £1,000.46 The distilling industry thus differed markedly from brewing, which by the early 1700s was becoming dominated by fewer and fewer large-scale companies.
Not only was the production of spirits taxed at a lower rate than brewing, but there were benefits to selling spirits. Retailers of spirits did not have to buy licenses, and because they did not sell food or offer accommodations, they needed more modest premises than alehouse keepers. Another incentive was added in 1720 when anyone who distilled and retailed spirits was exempted from the obligation of billeting troops—a detested burden imposed on innkeepers, stable keepers, and others. Under these favorable commercial conditions, and with a buoyant market, the number of dramshops (as small retailers of spirits were known) flourished. According to contemporary reports, which might or might not be accurate, there were more than 8,500 dramshops in London by 1725, or one dramshop for every eleven houses.47 In poorer districts like Westminster and St. Giles, they were said to account for one in every four houses. This is a staggering density, and it seems possible that the number of dramshops was exaggerated; it is hard to see how a retailer could stay in business selling to customers from ten houses, on average, let alone three houses.
These figures were collected and made known at the time, and accurate or not, they can only have fueled anxiety about what appeared to be an insatiable appetite for spirits. Taxed production of gin rose from half a million gallons in 1688 to 2.5 million gallons in 1720,48 and to that must be added an unknown volume of spirits produced illicitly and therefore not recorded in the excise figures. But the duty on spirits was so low that even when it was applied, spirits remained an attractive addition or alternative to ale and beer in the all-important consumer calculation of cost to alcoholic strength. The flavor of the spirits might have added to their attractiveness. Most were made from corn, but they were generally flavored—sometimes with juniper berries (like the original Dutch gin) and sometimes by such additives as coriander, sulfuric acid, and oil of turpentine—and often sweetened with sugar. The sweetness is thought to have contributed to gin’s appeal to women in particular, although the arrival of sugar in Europe in the 1600s had generally pushed sensory preferences toward sweetness, and men frequently sweetened their wine with sugar.
Conditions favored the English spirits industry in the early 1700s, and its very success was the problem, for by the 1720s, levels of spirits consumption and their perceived effects on health and social order rang alarm bells among the upper and middle classes. The 2.5 million gallons legally produced in 1720 were enough to provide every Londoner each year with 3 gallons of spirits, the equivalent of fifteen standard modern bottles—enough for every man, woman, and child in the metropolis to have an ounce a day.49But as we have noted before, the formula “man, woman, and child” is a misleading abstraction when expressing the per capita consumption of alcohol in Western societies, because children historically drank far less than adults, and women consumed less than men.
Yet “man, woman and child” has a particular resonance in the context of the eighteenth-century English gin-craze because much of the anxiety rested on the belief that gin was being abused not only by men, the traditional consumers to excess, but also—and especially—by women and children. Gin was called “Mother Gin” and “Mother Geneva,” names that linked it to women and children. Mothers who guzzled gin were said to feed it to their older children to stop their complaining about being hungry, and indirectly to their infants as they breast-fed. Front and center in the most famous pictorial representation of the gin-craze, William Hogarth’s etching Gin Lane, is a nursing woman, her breasts exposed. She is sprawled on a flight of steps and so insensibly drunk that she is unaware that her infant has slipped from her arms and is falling headfirst to the street below.
Hogarth, who produced Gin Lane in 1751 as the gin-craze drew to a close, must have been inspired by the many written works of the period that vividly described the effects of gin-drinking on women and their families. One writer noted that if “child-bearing Women are habituated to strong inflaming Liquors, the little Embrios must and will have a share” that would cause them to develop “a Love of Strong Liquors before they can call for them, or even see them.”50 He added that many mothers and nurses fed their children gin and that the demand for milk had fallen. Another writer described the children of the gin-drinking mother in these words: “One is bandy-legg’d, another hump-back’d, another goggle-ey’d, another with a Monkey’s Face, and all of them wearing some visible Mark of their Mother’s Folly.”51
As monstrous as were the children described here, they were at least the survivors of their mothers’ alcoholic habits. Many antispirits writers pointed out that these deadly beverages led to a declining birthrate and rising death rate; Hogarth’s representation of the ravages of gin included a number of images of death. The concern expressed here about mortality rates and children’s health was not confined to England, for all European states had an interest in fostering robust demographic growth for political, economic, and military purposes. The commentator who so vividly described the children suffering from what would later be called fetal alcohol syndrome described them ironically as “a hopeful Progeny to furnish the succeeding Generation with Patriots and Defenders of their Country, and Supporters of the British Glory, which their Forefathers have acquired both by Sea and Land!”52
An array of other arguments was ranged against the consumption of spirits. One was that drinking gin led to a dramatic loss of appetite for nourishing food, although scenarios of an undernourished underclass seem to have been less alarming than the prospect of declining profits for food producers and merchants. Some contemporary accounts told of butchers throwing away meat or feeding it to dogs because no one was buying it. Others reported dairy farmers pouring unsold milk into the sewers. Gin was said to depress the appetite so severely that it reduced the demand for bread, the staple of the eighteenth-century working-class diet. One pamphleteer argued that parliament should step in and raise the price of gin so as to return the poor to “the natural taste of bread, meat and beer.”53 Gin was also socially disruptive in the most banal sense. Not only did it interfere with family stability and the prosperity and health of the population, but it also led to crime and immorality; men and women were said to be driven to theft, prostitution, and murder to support their drinking habits. “Hence follow desperate Attacks, Highway and street robberies, attended sometimes with the most Cruel and unheard of Murthers.”54
Against the arguments for prohibiting or restricting distilling and the sale of spirits were more modest proposals based on the assumption that the scenarios of social collapse were exaggerated. Some writers in this vein, perhaps with interests in the gin industry, insisted that beer-drinkers were just as unruly as gin-drinkers and that, as far as immorality went, dramshops paled against the excesses to be found in alehouses. They argued that the distilling industry contributed to the prosperity of grain-growers and that others benefited in turn, among them implement-makers, carters, and the seamen who manned the coastal vessels that carried the grain to London. The government also had an interest in the alcohol business: it is estimated that by 1730, a quarter of England’s state taxes came from alcohol of all types.
The preoccupation with gin consumption and its social effects continued from the 1720s until the 1750s and resulted in a series of laws that attempted in different ways to deal with the problem. The first act, passed in 1729, attacked the retail end by raising the duty on spirits thirtyfold, from 2 pence to 5 shillings; imposing a licensing fee of £20 a year; and setting a fine of £10 for hawking gin in the streets. But this law, the result of lobbying by London judges and doctors, remained in force only four years before it was repealed because of widespread evasion that the authorities were powerless to stop. The volume of spirits produced legally continued to rise, from 2.5 million gallons in 1720 to 3.8 million in 1730. Once the 1729 law was repealed, the volume shot up, reaching 6.4 million gallons in 1735. Illicit spirits accounted for an unknown quantity on top of these taxed totals.
Soon after the repeal of the 1729 act, another campaign, led by judges and religious organizations, claimed that drunkenness and criminality were increasing and that spirits were to blame. The Grand Jury of the County of Middlesex reported that the poor “are intoxicated and get Drunk and are frequently seen in our Streets in such a condition abhorrent to reasonable creatures . . . [and] are thereby rendered useless to themselves as well as to the Community.”55 Such representations led to the passage of a 1736 law that imposed a licensing fee of £50 a year. At this point the defenders of gin again reacted, and there were threats of riots in the streets of London. As unworkable as the 1929 act, this one was abandoned after three years, and the manufacture, sale, and consumption of spirits were effectively unrestrained. Consumption seems to have peaked in 1743, when 8.2 million gallons were taxed. That was more than a gallon per head for the entire English population, but if we take into account illicit production, variations in consumption by gender and age, and the fact that spirits-drinking was concentrated in London and, to a lesser extent, in a few other ports and industrial centers, adult men must have had access to up to 10 gallons of spirits a year, about a modern bottle per week. Clearly there was enough in circulation for a substantial minority of male adults to drink considerable amounts on a regular basis.
But spirits production declined from the mid-1740s, and when another act was passed in 1751, the so-called craze was already ebbing. The 1751 regulations forbade distillers to sell their own product and imposed a modest licensing fee of £2 on retailers. It is easier to understand why spirits became so attractive in the first place than why they lost their appeal. Perhaps the series of laws, as ineffective as they were, dislocated production and made supplies unreliable. Perhaps drinkers moved back to beer, especially to the new, stronger “porter” style. In the later 1750s, too, the thirty-year series of good cereal harvests came to an end; the 1757, 1759, and 1760 harvests were so poor that distilling was banned entirely in order to protect food supplies. By then, spirits production was already in decline, in any case, and the ban simply intensified an existing trend.
The gin panic brought to the surface some of the relationships of alcohol to power. This was the first attempt in Europe to use the full force of the state to control the consumption of alcohol; sixteenth-century regulations against drinking and sitting, or against toasting and treating, paled against the aims of the English parliament to remove a popular alcoholic drink from the market. Because there were no precedents to this scale of regulation, mistakes were made. The first act, of 1729, which raised the cost of retail licenses, was probably intended to drive many retailers out of business and to force the rest to pass on the cost of the license to their customers, thus depressing demand. Parliament subsequently focused on production rather than retailing. Even so, the government was halfhearted in its application of the laws. Mindful of the tax revenues that a legally operating drinks industry provided, it had no wish to see distilling and gin retailing driven underground.
The battle waged against gin was also a class and gender war. The middle and upper classes portrayed the industry as one largely maintained by and for the indigent, unruly, and dangerous popular classes. Gin shops were described as squalid hangouts for the dregs of society, and dram-sellers were considered shiftless at best, criminal at worst. The links between spirits and morals were carefully drawn in class terms. Better-off citizens were portrayed as able to enjoy their beer, wine, brandy, and cordials (flavored spirits) responsibly, but the lower classes were shown as able neither to afford their coarse liquor without condemning their families to destitution at best or to death at worst, nor to drink it without doing so to excess and driving their families into immorality and crime. The stress on the particular evils of women’s drinking echoed a contemporary reassertion of the belief that women were destined by nature to be mothers and that they bore particular responsibilities toward their families. Excessive drinking by women was not only deplorable but unnatural.
But affordable gin must have been attractive to many of London’s workers as a pleasant experience in a life that offered few. Many of the working poor were recent migrants from the country, used to drinking festivities reined in by informal social mechanisms that were either absent from or less effective in the urban environment. It is believable that the better-off interpreted any widespread public intoxication as evidence of social disorder and collapse. The critical point might well have been the public character of working-class drinking; laws have historically penalized public drunkenness rather than domestic intoxication. The critics of London’s gin-drinking poor were anything but abstemious, but they could drink themselves insensible in private. A contemporary poem drew attention to the double standard:
Now greedy Great Ones, their inferiors Grind
And Vice monopolize of ev’ry kind.
In costly Riot they may waste the Wealth,
The Poor must rest content with Temp’rate Health.56
Although much attention was directed to the dramshops as places of disorder and crime, the bulk of spirits retailers appear to have been drawn from the same social groups as other food and drink retailers, and their premises were no different from those of other small-scale traders.57 But in some respects the gin trade was different from others, and again there was a link to women. It seems likely, first, that women were more highly represented as gin-sellers in England, just as women were prominent as distillers throughout Europe. About a quarter of licensed sellers and perhaps a third of unlicensed traders were women, and a disproportionate three-quarters of gin-sellers jailed in 1738–39 because they could not pay the £10 fine were women. Although it is possible that the authorities targeted women traders, these figures suggest that women were more highly represented in the gin trade than among, say, food-sellers (where they made up 10 to 15 percent), and that they were especially common at the poorer levels, probably among street sellers who offered gin from stalls or barrows.58 This would have reinforced the feminization of the gin panic.
It is possible, too, that women patronized dramshops more frequently than they did alehouses. Women rarely visited alehouses, which were often resolutely masculine in their patronage, but they might well have drunk spirits at a dramshop run by a woman. Gin was often identified as a women’s drink, especially when it was sweetened, and the fact that many dram-sellers were women might have made dramshops new places of female sociability, historically a source of anxiety for men. The recurrent association of gin and women in the antispirits campaigns could have reflected hostility to the presence of women in public places as much as to the social implications of lower-class drinking.
Viewed from the underside of society, the attempts to regulate gin—which meant making it more expensive and difficult to obtain—turned gin-drinking into a form of cultural resistance. The poor seem to have had allies in some magistrates and commissioners of excise who turned a blind eye to many infractions of the laws and, in some cases, even refunded fines that had been paid.59 Distillers mocked the impotence of the laws by producing beverages called “parliament brandy” and “parliament gin.” Disturbances greeted each Gin Act, and when the particularly draconian 1736 act was passed, there were mock funerals in London to mark the death of “Madame Geneva.” Quite possibly, the attempts to suppress gin increased its appeal, and gin became a field of class conflict.
The gin-craze was a short period in the longer history of distilled spirits and of alcohol more generally, but it vividly illustrated issues that often fermented below the surface. The most notable aspect of it was the attempt to deal rigorously with what some of the upper classes saw as a dangerous misuse of alcohol that threatened to undermine the social order. The scope of the Gin Acts in trying to reduce consumption by forcing poor retailers to close down and by raising the price of gin to consumers was unprecedented. The acts failed because of popular resistance and lack of enforcement mechanisms, and also because the government both relied on tax revenue from alcohol and was nervous about the public disorder that might erupt if serious attempts were made to cut off access to cheap gin. The Gin Acts were not an attempt to impose prohibition, but they resembled some twentieth-century efforts to reduce alcohol production and consumption.
It was no accident that the attempts at control in the 1700s centered on distilled spirits. Their entry into mainstream markets from the early 1500s had provoked anxiety and a range of ad hoc regulations. Even though they became normalized in most jurisdictions, in the sense that they became subjected to regulations similar to or the same as those for beer and wine, they continued to be subjects of social anxiety. When the antialcohol movements emerged in the 1800s, their prime targets were distilled spirits. This is a reminder that when we speak of the history of alcohol, we constantly need to bear in mind that the various alcoholic beverages often had distinct histories.