Conviviality and charity in medieval and early modern England - response to Judith M. Bennett, Past and Present, no. 134, February 1992

Past & Present, Feb, 1997 by Maria Moisa

Who attended these parties? Were the drinkers well-off peasants, villagers or small-town dwellers, or did they include all strata of society? Bennett tells us that the very poor were not admitted and the very rich attended only perfunctorily.(15) But to find out about these parties a more detailed examination of the Wakefield court rolls than that provided by the year 1412-13 is required. The evidence is extremely limited: the entries only recorded the place, the names of the offenders, the fines imposed, the type of offence and, exceptionally, whether it had been committed once or several times by each of them (les helpales in this case). Organizers were usually male: peasants and craftsmen, well-off town-dwellers or poorer uplanders; they were rarely servants and seldom female. We may assume that so too were their guests, but not necessarily that the different groups intermingled.

A more accurate way to assess the composition of the groups would be to look at the prices charged, since these would reveal the drinkers' purchasing power. But neither the prices nor the quantities brewed were mentioned in the court rolls, and of the profits, which would be an indicator of prices, it was said only that they were `excessive' or `too much', i.e., above the commercial rate. However, if we look at what alewives charged and at the fines they had to pay, we realize that there is a connection between the price of a gallon and the amount of the amercement, although such a connection varied over time. In the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries before the famine, fines were six or twelve times the price of a gallon, but they later dropped to between four and six times the cost, a fine of 2d. to 6d. for ale costing 1/2 d. or 1d. A fairly complete series of prices and fines for 1348-52 shows that fines went up before the plague and then down again to between 2d. and 6d., 12d. in some cases. They remained at this level for the following hundred years. After the plague, prices doubled and the fine-to-price ratio fell, possibly from 4:1 to 2:1.(16) We expect the help-ale prices to be higher than the commercial ones, so that if the alewives' price was still 1d. in the fifteenth century, attracting a minimum fine of 2d., a 2d. help-ale fine implies that a gallon was selling for 1 1/2 d. or 2d. The higher fines would then be related to higher prices, perhaps a 12d. fine for a price of 6d., 8d. or even 12d. a gallon, while the higher amercements of 20d., 24d., 40d. and 80d. (in 1406-8) would refer to multiple offences, exorbitant prices, large parties and wealthy people.

Taking into account a reasonable consumption per person, which medieval (and present-day Yorkshire) sources estimate at about one gallon, we may hypothesize that if the organizer brewed half a quarter of malt, fines of 2d. to 6d. indicate that the Sowerbyshire parties of the 1430s were modest gatherings of up to thirty people at most, more group affairs than village celebrations. Those who attended were prepared to drink a gallon each for an amount varying between lid. and, say, 4d., thus yielding an illicit profit of 30d. up to 8s. or 9s. The more affluent parties in and around Wakefield and Brighouse in 1406-08 were larger with higher prices, probably no lower than 6d. or is., and with profits of up to several pounds, like those of the seventeenth-century minstrel of Tamworth.(17)