The above remarks on drinking customs lead to the consideration of the extravagant drinking and eating of days gone by. Our ancestors, both Saxon and Dane, were tremendous drinkers, and their sole amusement after the labours of the day seems to have been drinking down mighty draughts of ale and mead, and getting themselves under the table as quickly as possible. An ancient anecdote is told of a Saxon bishop, who invited a Dane to his house for the purpose of making him drunk. After dinner “the tables were taken away, and they passed the rest of the day until evening in drinking.” The cupbearer manages matters in such a manner that the Dane’s turn comes round much oftener than that of the others, as, indeed, “the bishop had directed him,” and the desired end is at last attained. Whether Iago was right when he gave to the English the palm in drinking over “your Dane, your German, and your swag-bellied Hollander,” and whether one taught the other his own particular drinking vices, we cannot stop now to inquire. The English were always famed for their love of strong ale, and passing over the intervening centuries and coming down to the Tudor period, many instances could be quoted from contemporary writers showing the proneness of our ancestors to drench deep thought in tankards of the nappy nut-brown ale. Stubbe, in his _Anatomie of Abuses_ (1585), says that the ale-houses in London were crowded from morning to night with inveterate drunkards, whose only care was how to get as much heady ale into their carcases as possible. Ale, strong ale, was all the cry; one who could not or would not quaff of the strongest was counted a milksop, { 284} while he who could drink longest of it without (or rather before), getting tipsy, was the king of the company. It must have been of such an one that Herrick wrote—
Tap, better known than trusted, as we hear, Sold his old mother’s spectacles for beer, And not unlikely, rather too than fail, He’ll sell her eyes and nose for beer and ale.
The love for the strong and the contempt for the small is illustrated in the well-known lines of the old song:—
He who drinks small beer, goes to bed sober, Falls as the leaves do fall, that fall in October; He who drinks strong ale, goes to bed mellow, Lives as he ought to live, and dies a jolly fellow.