Hard Drinking; Essentially an English Habit.

Te Aroha News, Volume II, Issue 72, 18 October 1884, Page 5

Hard Drinking; Essentially an English Habit.

As a matter of fact, there is nothing easier than to prove that hard drinking has* been an essentially English habit since the dawn of our history. Shakspere, who left off writing 270 years ago, paints a whole gallery of typical drunkards and by the mouth of lago, claims the Englishman as far and away the most consummate toper in Europe. In 1006 it is on record that Joicc Rowe, Abbess of Rumsoy, one of the wealthiest convents in the kingdom, and tenanted mostly by noble dames, was accused before Bishop Fox of carousing habitually tar on into the night with her nuns— a pretty strong proof that hard drinking was then a national vice. Toward the end of the 14th century Chaucer represents all his low class characters as jolly topers. The miller can hardly sit his horse, and the cook tumbles off into the mire, in consequence of their potations. The wife of the miller of Benay does not go to bed without " her jolly whistle wel ywet. In 1315, the noble dame Clementina Guildford, Abbess of Rumsey, and the worthy predecessor ot Joice Rowe, drinks herself to death. Some generations earlier, the author of the romance of Merlin describes the mother of his hero — a highly respectable young woman — as accompanying her neighbours to the ale-house, swilling thero till long past midnight, taking a lusty share in a brawl, and then falling literally as well as figuratively into the claws of the demon, the whoie thing taking place as quite a matter of course. In the reign of Stephen come? Walter Map, the jovial Archdeacon of Oxford, with his widely popular drinking songs. A century earlier the whole Saxon at'iny spent the night before the battle of Hastings in pushing about the bowl. And so we go back century by century ; poets, annalists, statutes, and the canons of provincial councils, all telling xis that deep drinking was the rule all over Great Britain, up to the time when our ancestors could form no other ideas of heaven than as a place where fierce bouts of fiuhting and bouts as fierce of drinking were the only occupations and enjoyments. — From the " St. Jamos's Gazette."