The word beer seems gradually to have given place to the word ale, and though the former may have lingered in some parts of the country, and the passage from _King Horn_ already quoted shows that in the thirteenth century it was not quite forgotten—ale became the usual word to express malt liquor. It was English _ale_ that strengthened the arm of English bowmen at Crecy and Poictiers, and on many another well-fought field; and English _ale_ was the “barley-broth” which “decocted” the cold blood of the dwellers in this land of fogs and mist “to such valiant heat” and stubborn endurance in their constant struggles with the valour and chivalry of France.
The old English word “beor,” indeed, had become so weakened and specialised, even as early as the tenth century, that it is to be found in a Vocabulary of that date as an equivalent for idromellum, a word properly signifying an inferior sort of mead, but also denoting the sweet wort, before fermentation had changed it into _ale_. It is curious to observe that when next the word “beer” came into common use in our language, it was by introduction of our neighbours the Flemings, and was specially applied to malt liquor in which the bitter of the hop was an important ingredient. The word left us in sweetness, it returned in bitterness, and so the whirligig of time brings in its revenges. Beer became the name for hopped ale, but that distinction soon began to be less significant, for as early as 1616 we find Gervase Markham, in his _Maison Rustique_, recommends the use of a small quantity of hops in ale-brewing. { 153}
Taylor, in _Drink and Welcome_, dwells upon this distinction between ale and beer in the seventeenth century as follows:—“Now to write of Beere I shall not need to wet my pen much with the naming of it, it being a drinke which Antiquitie was an _Aleien_ or a meere stranger to, and as it hath scarcely any name, so hath it no habitation, for the places or houses where it is sold doth still retain the name of an Alehouse. This comparison needs a _Sir Reverence_ to usher it, but being Beere is but an Upstart and a Foreigner or Alien, in respect of _Ale_, it may serve instead of a better; Nor would it differ from Ale in anything, but onely that an Aspiring _Amaritudinous_ Hop comes crawling lamely in, and makes a Bitter difference betweene them, but if the Hop be so crippled, that he cannot be gotton to make the oddes, the place may poorely bee supply’d with chopp’d Broome (new gathered) whereby Beere hath never attained the sober Title of _Ale_, for it is proper to say _A Stand of Ale_, and a _Hoggeshead of Beere_, which in common sense is but a swinish phrase or appellation.”