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became another of the myriad responsibilities of the mistress of a large house.
    Yet by and large, while their Germanic cousins were guzzling gin and brandy on a daily basis, the English were taking it in cautious sips when feeling queasy. True, we read of Irish distillers crossing the Irish Sea in the time of Henry VIII and setting up shop in Pembrokeshire, on the coast of Wales, and Flemish ones operating in London a few years later (I should emphasize here that Ireland and Scotland were not England, and both took to spirits-drinking considerably earlier; see Whiskey Punch, Chapter XIV). But neither group seems to have gained all that much commercial traction, and it’s safe to say that spirits-drinking in England didn’t progress much beyond the Self-Medication stage until the 1600s—indeed, in William Harrison’s 1587 Description of England , we find him much exercised at the inebriety of his countrymen (e.g., regarding strong ale, “it is incredible to say how our maltbugs lug at this liquor, even as pigs should lie in a row lugging at their dame’s teats, till they lie still again and be not able to wag”), yet there’s nary a dram of brandy or genever or usquebaugh to be found among the many drinks he lists with which they’re continually fuddling themselves.
    Why did the English, a determinedly bibulous people, wait so long to embrace the efficiencies of recreational spirits-drinking? For one thing, there was really no place to do it. From roughly 1300 to 1600, every time an Englishman nipped out for a drink, he had a choice of venues. Well, not every time—in most of the land, no matter who you were, you would have had to make do with the plain old alehouse—a humble, mom-and-pop sort of place, where you drank ale and beer and nothing but ale and beer, without so much as a packet of crisps (or whatever the contemporary equivalent was) to nibble on while you drank your pint or quart. Since the average Englishman/woman/child was already drinking a gallon or so of ale or beer a day at home and on the job (nobody drank water if they could possibly help it, and tea and coffee didn’t appear on the scene until the mid 1600s), the alehouse offered little in the way of novelty. If you lived in one of the principal towns, though, had money to spend and looked presentable, you could also go to an inn, which had rooms to let, or a tavern, which didn’t. Both sold ale (as a matter of course), but they also offered imported wines and food and a faster, more cosmopolitan clientele. The tavern was regulated with particular strictness—wine was considered more disruptive than ale, and the kind of people who could afford to idle away the hours drinking it and gambling (not traditionally a feature of the alehouse) and whatnot seemed far more likely to cause trouble than the business travelers who frequented the inn or the workingmen who filled the alehouses. Even London, the great metropolis, licensed no more than forty or so taverns, while most towns were lucky to have even one (in 1577, England had over 14,000 licensed alehouses, as opposed to 1,600-odd inns, most clustered in the major market towns, and a paltry 329 taverns).
    This two-tier system was cumbersome, perhaps, but in a country where animals were called one thing by the people who raised them and another by those who could afford to eat them, it was not incomprehensible. It’s no coincidence that “alehouse,” like “pig,” “calf” and “bull,” is a word of Anglo-Saxon origin, while “tavern,” like “pork,” “veal” and “beef,” comes from the Norman French. The two institutions faced each other across a cultural gulf that, over the centuries since the Norman Conquest of 1066, had evolved into a class one. And distilled spirits had no class. While their natural place would be in the more cosmopolitan precincts of the tavern, spirits-drinking elsewhere in Europe was too much of a plebeian activity to recommend it (spirits’ early