Drunk & Disorderly in the County of Cheshire

ENG 331H1S

Drama to 1603

Professor Matthew Sergi

Henry Lawson

ARCHIVAL RESEARCH

Drunk & Disorderly in the County of Cheshire

Key Words: drunk and disorderly, alcohol, rush-bearing, bear-beating, crime

In the play of Noah’s Flood, part of the Chester Cycle (c. 1422-1575), Noah’s wife defies his assertion that they must take to their boat as to avoid drowning and instead remarks;

‘Here is a pottle full of malmsey good and strong;

It will rejoice

Both heart and tongue.

Though Noah think us never so long,

Yet we will drink atite.’ (BAMD 223)

We must consider that the Chester plays are Biblical games – entertainment – rather than the stuff of sermon. Noah’s wife provides some of the playfulness which would come to define the festivities. There is a clear blurring of carnival and performance and she calls upon the audience to join her when she says ‘we will drink atite’. The players encourage drinking, and this celebratory air invoked my study of drinking as a cultural institution in Chester, and what the problems associated with it were.  Drunkenness, and disorderliness, was common at the Inns of Court amongst actors following a performance, but who caused the problems in Chester? Is drinking, as it is today, both a unifying centre for culture and a locus of disorder, crime and violence?

            In the REED Appendix’s Selective List of Musicians and Musical Performers, it is fascinating to learn that each musicians musical instrument of choice is mentioned only as a side note to what is their defining characteristic; their crimes. John Beaumont, a piper, is recorded on the 20 July 1602 for ‘Drunk and Disorderly’ (REED 945) behavior, but his hometown is unknown (the REEDS volume reads ‘unlocated’) (REED 945). The record of William Bradbury, also a piper and ‘unlocated’ is exactly the same – guilty of ‘Drunk and Disorderly’ offenses on 20 July 1602 (REED 945).

The entries are entirely separate, and there is nothing we can use to ascribe a definite correlation, but it seems incredibly coincidental. The list of musicians, remembered for their offences rather than their artistry, illuminates something that underlay my research into Chester’s drunk and disorderly. The records of those who drink and commit crime are particular almost totally to musicians, bear-beaters and vagabonds associated with rush-bearing festivals. Rush-bearing ‘often attracted unsavoury characters, such as pedlars, cutpurses and pickpockets, and became a pretext for heavy drinking in otherwise quiet communities’ (Laroque 157) whilst the problem of inappropriate entertainment regarding wakes and love-ales lead to, in 1588, the justices of the peace in England giving instruction to ensure that every parish church forbade such events.

            Records for drunkenness and disorderliness are curiously absent in the most part before 1603, despite the evidence of Beaumont and Bradbury which proves that alcohol-related problems existed. Most of my research, therefore, is located in the seventeenth century. On 22 April 1616, a letter written by a William Glegg and addressed to a Peter Mainwaring describes Ralph Holland as ‘a Common haunter of ale howses, but also found tipplinge & drinkinge in an ale howse with a pyper to make him mirrie withal, at after xij of the Clocke in the night tyme’ (REED 472). This record, in conjunction with another remembering that Holland was disciplined on 3 June 1612 ‘for keepeinge a disordered howse and prophaninge the Sabboath daie with danceinge pypinge drunkenness and such Lude Exercises’ (REED 664), illuminate that perpetrators were not only particular to categories of people: musicians, bearbeaters, rush-bearers, but that those guilty of one offense can often be found elsewhere in the volumes for similar acts.

The people who crop up are seemingly ostracised from society. Although drinking is encouraged and is surely deep-rooted in Chester’s culture, those who breach the societal expectations of time and place for drunkenness are deemed ‘Roagues and idle Wandringe beggers, which pester the neighboures exceedingly’ (REED 846). Two years later the most common location for inappropriate activity, a rush-bearing, is married with a bear-beater. The High Constable’s Presentments for Eddisbury Hundred remembers John Belward ‘for a drunckard’, ‘for a horible blasphemer’ (REED 960); ‘a wandering rouge’ disciplined ‘for beating his bea[t]res at Bunbury at Saint Iames tyde at the Rusbearing there being never non before, contrary to kinges booke’ (REED 960).

            The records continue in using alcohol, or alcoholism, to ostracize members of the public. The Quartier Sessions Petition for the County of Cheshire on 10 October 1620 documents ‘That one Randull Houfeild (who is a Common drunkard & a dissolute lyver hauinge noe certeyne place of aboade)’ (REED 849). His ‘hauinge noe certeyne place of aboade’ seems to work against him, and efforts to help to homeless are altogether absent in the volumes. The issue of rowdy bear-beaters persists over time and place in the Chester volumes. In Malpas, 1625, on 25 April, the Crown Book reads such; ‘we do present that Roger Yardley of malpas selleth ale without lycence & keepeth a disordered house with bearewardes & bearebaytes where Iohn Calcot was slayne.’ (REED 720) This too illuminates the only other sector of people accused of alcohol-related crime and that is those who ‘selleth ale without lycence’. Of course, unlegislated sales only become apparent with the presence of anarchy on their grounds, so the locus of alcohol problems in Chester remain with bear-beaters and the homeless.

Further into the seventeenth century, however, the problem shifts somewhat from ‘dossolute and Idle persons’ (Hale, January 9 1637, Quartier Sessions Warrants, REED 684), ‘Incorrigible Rouges’ who ‘agreate Terrour to the Neighborhoode’ (REED 684), to the innkeepers themselves. This suggests a tighter lawful system regarding the sale, and consumption, of alcohol heading towards the modern day. On 3 April 1638 the Quartier Sessions Indictments the Cunstables of Neither Knuttesfod ‘Complaine against Thomas Gleaue butcher for keeping of a disordered house and beinge druncke in or about the first daye of marche last past and alsoe for profaneige the name of god by seuerall bludy othes as alsoe for Interteninge of an vnlicensed belward with beares and Causinge him to baite his said bares within his backside’ (REED 693). Clearly, the issue of ‘vnlicensed belward[s] with beares’ continues, alongside the strict laws against blasphemy, but alongside this stems a system, perhaps more fairly, critical of those who house troublesome individuals.

            It is interesting to see the presence of drunkenness and subsequent disorder continue beyond the Chester Cycle’s discontinuation. It was quashed with the rise of Protestantism and the final record of its production is 1575. It provides an example of a cultural event welcoming alcohol consumption, an example which exists in stark contrast to the musicians and bear-beaters who are criticised for their drinking for many years afterwards. Drinking has an association with anarchy, and I argue that it is used to frame members of the public deemed surplus to societal requirements. The suggestion of collective drinking in the play of Noah’s Flood, coupled with the two counts of drunk and disorderly crime in 1602, gives heed to the claim drunkenness and disorderliness did not start to occur in the seventeenth century. It seems unlikely such a culture would spring from nowhere, and the lack of evidence from the sixteenth century only problematizes archival research, and provokes questions of where the records for drinking were lost, why they were lost and who lost them.

Works Cited

The Broadview Anthology of Medieval Drama. Eds. Fitzgerald and Sebastian. Broadview Press: Toronto, 
2013. Print.

Laroque, François, Shakespeare's festive world: Elizabethan seasonal entertainment and the professional stage. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1993. Print.

Records of Early English Drama: Cheshire including Chester. Ed. Elizabeth Baldwin, Lawrence M. Clopper, and David Mills. University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 2007. Print.