In 1948, Felix Frankfurter, writing a majority opinion for the Supreme Court of the United States, drew on his memory of the traditional English “alewife, sprightly and ribald,” to review a Michigan law that proscribed women from selling liquor unless they worked in establishments owned by their husbands or fathers. Noting that the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution “did not tear history up by the roots,” Frankfurter accepted that “bartending by women may … give rise to moral and social problems.” Living hundreds of years and thousands of miles away from the “historic calling” of alewives, Frankfurter drew on his cultural memory of them to conclude that women who serve liquor, especially women who are unsupervised by fathers or husbands, are unruly, disruptive, and troublesome. Armed with such assumptions, one of the greatest jurists of the twentieth century allowed a law to stand that discriminated on the basis of not only sex but also marital status.1

Four hundred years earlier, the city fathers of Chester had not been guided by a written constitution that promised equal protection, nor had they been informed by Enlightenment ideas about reason, justice, and equality. But they shared with Frankfurter a fundamental distrust of women in the drink trade, who, they thought, promoted “wantonness, brawls, frays, and other inconveniences.”² Concerned that these activities would hurt the city’s reputation, in 1540 they ordered that no woman between the ages of 14 and 40 years could keep an alehouse. They presumably hoped, by limiting alehouse-keeping to women thought to be either too young or too old for sexual activity, to clean up the ale trade and expunge its association with prostitution. What the state of Michigan would attempt by relying on the authority of husbands and fathers, the city of Chester attempted by relying on the biological clock. But the guiding assumption in both cases was the same: when women sell liquor, disorder and promiscuity will result.

This chapter explores how this assumption played out in the lives of Englishwomen between 1300 and 1600. Three questions guide this exploration. First, what sorts of ideas about alewives—that is, women who either brewed or sold ale—were part of the common cultural currency of preindustrial England? To answer this question, we will examine representations of alewives found in a variety of cultural media.3 Popular as well as elite, rural as well as urban, serious as well as entertaining, these images portray alewives as disorderly, untrustworthy women. Second, what social and ideological forces encouraged this popular distrust of alewives? In answering this question, we will trace three threads that created a particularly negative image of women who sold intoxicating beverages: antipathy toward victualers of all sorts (males as well as females); fears about the drunkenness, gluttony, and sexual misbehavior associated with alehouses; and misogyny. Although the first two explain why people disliked brewers and alesellers, only the third explains why people focused their dislike on brewsters and tapsters. Third, what do these representations of alewives tell us about ideological inhibitions on women in the ale trade? This question will take us into the complexities of what Gabrielle Spiegel has called the “social logic of the text.” These representations of alewives were more than just cultural artifacts embedded in specific sites of cultural and ideological production; they were also “textual agents at work,” agents that generated social realities as well as springing from them.⁴ As we shall see, the “work” of these texts changed as the brewing industry changed. In the fourteenth century, alewives were represented as dishonest and alluring traders, but by the sixteenth century, when male brewers and beer competed for customers with brewsters and ale, alewives were also represented as old-fashioned women who marketed foul drink. In both these instances and in many others, representations of alewives displaced anxieties about the trade in general onto female traders in particular, and in so doing, they worked to inhibit commercial brewing by women.

Representations of Alewives

The best-known depiction of a brewster is John Skeltons Elynour Rummyng in The Tunning of Elynour Rummyng, a poem probably written in 1517.⁵ This is a well-received poem (then as well as now), written by a poet-priest renowned for the satiric temper of his verse. Literary critics laud the descriptive power, wit, and irony of The Tunning of Elynour Rummyng. Yet its portrait of the alewife Elynour Rummyng, for all its artistic force and wit, is strikingly vicious and nasty.

Twisting the traditional catalog of a woman’s beauty, Skelton describes Elynour Rummyng in careful detail as a grotesquely ugly woman: her face bristles with hair; her lips drool “like a ropy rain”; her crooked and hooked nose constantly drips; her skin is loose, her back bent, her eyes bleary, her hair gray, her joints swollen, her skin greasy. She is, of course, old and fat.⁶ She is also religiously suspect, accepting rosaries as payment for ale, swearing profanely, learning brewing secrets from a Jew, entertaining a customer who “seemed to be a witch,” and dressing up on holy days “after the Saracen’s guise” and “like an Egyptian.” Indeed, the poem is rife with allusions not only to witchcraft but also to inverted religious rites, including a blasphemous mock communion celebrated with ale.7 As Skelton says quite straightforwardly at one point, “the devil and she be sib.”

This is bad indeed, but Elynour Rummyng is more to Skelton than merely an ugly woman of doubtful Christian faith. She is also depicted as a highly unscrupulous tradeswoman. Skelton tells us that she adulterates her ale: she drools in it; she sticks her filthy hands in it; she allows her hens to roost over it, using their droppings for added potency. Skelton also implies that Elynour Rummyng cruelly exploits her customers’ enthusiastic need for her ale: she bargains hard; she accepts as payment inappropriate goods (wedding rings and cradles, as well as rosaries); she encourages indebtedness. And Skelton describes her establishment as roughly run and wholly unappealing: pigs run farting and defecating through the house; fights break out; embarrassed customers—all women, most of them gross women—slink in through the back door.⁸

There are, of course, many ways to read The Tunning of Elynour Rummyng, especially its depiction of the title character. Skelton’s poem is fast-paced and humorous, it draws heavily on literary conventions, and it strongly reflects his satiric temper. His depiction of Elynour Rummyng can be seen as harmless or even affectionate absurdity, as class-based humor created for a courtly audience, or as satire directed against drink and drunkenness.⁹ Yet it is also possible to read the poem, for all its humor and affection and for all its attacks on other subjects such as the popular classes or public drunkenness, as a biting critique of a brewster, a critique that suggests that she and her brew and her alehouse were to be avoided at all costs. This sort of criticism was not new in Skelton’s time, and it did not end with The Tunning of Elynour Rummyng; Skelton’s audience easily laughed and responded to his jibes because it was, in a sense, familiar with the text.

Perhaps the earliest and most common representation of an alewife in English culture shows her condemned to eternal punishment in hell. This characterization is most fully developed in the Chester mystery cycle, a series of plays performed on Corpus Christi (and later, Whitsun) from at least the early fifteenth century.¹⁰ A brewster appears at the end of play 17, The Harrowing of Hell, after Christ has emptied hell of all deserving souls. The brewster alone remains, bewailing her fate:

Sometime I was a taverner,
a gentle gossip and a tapster
of wine and ale a trusty brewer,
which woe hath me wrought.
Of cans I kept no true measure.
My cups I sold at my pleasure,
deceiving many a creature.
Though my ale were nought.

And when I was a brewer long,
with hops I made my ale strong;
ashes and herbs I blend among
and marred so good malt.
Therefore I may my hands wring,
shake my cups, and cans ring.
Sorrowful may I sigh and sing
that ever I so dealt.

Taverners, tapsters of this city
shall be promoted here with me
for breaking statutes of this country,
hurting the common weal,
with all tipper-tappers that are cunning,
mis-spending much malt, brewing so thin,
selling small cups money to win,
against all truth to deal.11

As the play closes, Satan welcomes the brewster, one devil rejoices in her addition to their entourage, and another gleefully promises to marry her. The sins that win the Good Gossip of Chester a special place in hell are all commercial crimes: she uses short measures (dealing in cups and cans, not standard measures), she adulterates her ale (with hops, ashes, and herbs), and she sells poor-quality drink. This scene, in a play performed by the cooks and innkeepers of Chester (men who competed with alewives in the drink trade), was perhaps itself derived from a popular midsummer tradition called “cups and cans.” On midsummer day, the innkeepers and cooks marched in a procession of other traders, preceded by a devil and a woman clanging the illegal cups and cans used by so many brewers and alesellers.¹²

The tale of the Good Gossip has often been interpreted as either a crude addition to the play or a needless comic interlude, but as R. M. Lumiansky has argued, it illustrates well the central point of the play—that Christ will protect the righteous—and might have been an integral part of The Harrowing of Hell from the beginning.¹³ Thus, the Good Gossip served as a general warning to all of Chester’s citizens that they, too, if unrighteous, could suffer eternal damnation. Yet she also delivered very specific warnings to the tradespeople of Chester; although herself a woman, she reminded the gildsmen of Chester that they needed to deal honestly with their fellow citizens. And of course, in both her representation and her speech, she directly warned Chester’s brewers, taverners, and alesellers of their likely fate in hell.

The hellish fate of brewsters and tapsters was a potent and unusually popular representation. Its earliest extant depiction occurs in the Holkham Bible Picture Book, a text produced by a lay artist between 1325 and 1330 for a lay purchaser. There, the Last Judgment shows a male baker, a cleric, and an alewife being carried by devils to a boiling cauldron. The alewife waves a jug over her head, suggesting that she cheated her customers with false measures.¹⁴ Similar images are found on misericords in Ludlow (Shropshire) and Castle Hedingham (Essex) and in a late fifteenth-century boss in Norwich cathedral.¹⁵ Condemned alewives also feature prominently in Dooms (or depictions of the Last Judgment) painted on the walls of late medieval parish churches. Indeed, in singling out social problems for artistic comment, these Dooms depict alewives more often than any other victualers or traders. In paintings surviving in nine separate parish churches, alewives are shown in hell, waving their jugs, exposing their breasts, drawing foul brews, and embracing demons. As Jane Elizabeth Ashby has noted in her study of these Dooms, several of the alewives stand out from other condemned souls because of their especially cheerful and happy countenances; they are delighted, it seems, to find themselves in hell.16

At the same time that representations of damned alewives were circulating in England, William Langland paused twice in Piers Plowman to name and describe the activities of two brewsters.¹⁷ In a lengthy description of the seven deadly sins, Langland depicts the wife of Covetousness as cheating in two trades: cloth-making and brewing. In just a few lines, this woman is described (by her husband) as breaking almost every possible rule for the production and sale of ale—providing poor-quality ale to the poor, hiding her best ale for preferred customers only, charging exorbitant prices, and measuring with nonstandard cups:

I bought her barley malt she brewed it to sell.

Penny ale and pudding ale she poured together

For laborers and for low folk that was kept by itself.

The best ale lay in my bower or in my bedchamber,

And whoso tasted thereof bought it thereafter

A gallon for a groat no less, God knows:

And ’twas measured in cupfulls this craft my wife used.

Rose the Regrater was her right name;

She hath holden huckstering all through her lifetime.¹⁸

Rose the Regrater partly functions in the poem as an illustrative appendage of the sins of her husband, Covetousness. But she also represents, in very vivid and specific terms, a brewster who should never be trusted by her customers. With her weak ale, her unfair prices, and her deceitful cups, she is a sister to the Good Gossip of Chester, a roughly contemporary figure.¹⁹ To be sure, Langland also illustrates Rose the Regrater’s duplicity (and the allied duplicity of her husband) through her work as a weaver (in which she uses loosely spun yarn and false weights). But in both his description of Rose the Regrater and his literal naming of her, he emphasizes her work as a brewster and tapster. For him, there could be no better wife for a greedy man who lied and cheated for profit than a woman in the drink trade.

Once done with Avaricia, Langland turns to Gula, where he immediately describes another alewife, Betoun the Brewster. She runs an alehouse that foreshadows in its rowdiness and grossness the yet nastier establishment of Elynour Rummyng.²⁰ But she also is distinguished by her skills as a temptress, skills that recall the sin of Eve. As Glutton is heading piously to church, Betoun the Brewster entices him into her house and away from religious worship.

Now beginneth Glutton for to go to shift

And carries him to kirk-ward his fault there to show.

But Betoun the brewster bade him good-morrow

And asked of him with that whitherward he would.

“To holy church “ quoth he “for to hear Mass,

And after will be shriven and then sin no more.”

“Gossip, I’ve good ale,” quoth she “Glutton, wilt thou try it?”

“Hast thou aught in thy bag? Any hot spices?”

“I have pepper and peony and a pound too of garlic,

And a farthing’s worth of fennel-seed for fasting days.”

Then goeth Glutton in and great oaths come after.21

The fictional Betoun the Brewster, like the fictional Elynour Rummyng, is a wicked woman, an unchristian encourager of vice, and a profiteer at the expense of others. Indeed, she might even have hosted, as Elynour Rummyng certainly did, a mock mass in which drinking songs were substituted for hymns, a cobbler stood in for the priest, the ale pot circulated as a chalice, and Gluttons own vomit signified penitential restitution.²²

William Langland was concerned about much more than erring alewives, and his Piers Plowman abounds with criticisms of related behaviors: he ridicules drunkenness, he dislikes immoderation in all forms, and he distrusts victualers of all types and both sexes. For Langland, the ale trade brought together all these vices, and for Langland, the ale trade was best personified by two female characters: the cheating Rose the Regrater and the tempting Betoun the Brewster.²³

John Lydgate, poet to the court of Henry Y did not share all the moral concerns of William Langland, but he, too, commented on the wiles of alewives. Lydgate complained about another common type: the sexually alluring woman who tempted her customers to spend money on drink by flirting with them. He criticized one alewife directly:

Gladly you will, to get you acquaintance
Call men to drink, although they therefore pay;
With your kissing though that you do pleasance
It shall be dearer, ere they go their way
Than all their ale, to them I dare will say.
Thus with your ale, and with your cheer so sly,
You them deceive, that in you most affie [trust].

To Lydgate, the flirting alewife was a source of pain and dismay, as well as undue debt. As he particularly emphasized in a sarcastic antiphrasim that he appended to this first poem, the attractive but unattainable alewife epitomized duplicity and inconstancy.²⁴

As established parts of the canon of English literature, The Tunning of Elynour Rumming, The Harrowing of Hell, Piers Plowman, and the poems of John Lydgate are much-studied texts whose nuances and ambiguities have led to many different interpretations and many long-standing controversies. In reading the representations of alewives found in these texts in particularly negative terms, my argument stresses a characterization ignored in much of this literary criticism, sometimes complementing and sometimes confounding past interpretations. My argument also stresses the potentially large audiences for these works. Skelton wrote often for courtly audiences, and it is certainly possible that The Tunning of Elynour Rumming was originally crafted for the amusement of Westminster courtiers, not humble peasants or artisans. Yet it is just as possible that The Tunning of Elynour Rummyng was written for a wider and more popular audience, as suggested not only by its vocabulary, syntax, and meter but also by its particular suitability for oral presentation.25 Whatever Skeltons intended audience might have been, his poem attracted wide popular attention; it was reprinted on several occasions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was included in the libraries of such ordinary people as the mason of Coventry, whose books were cataloged by Robert Laneham in 1575; and it was sufficiently well known to merit allusion in later popular texts, such as Ben Jonsons ATale of a Tub.²⁶ Lydgate, like Skelton, was a poet connected to the royal court, but his two ballads addressed to a teasing alewife were clearly some of his more casual efforts.

William Langland, a married clerk who lived in London for at least part of his adult life, wrote for more humble audiences, and the many extant manuscripts of his Piers Plowman have usually been traced to men who worked as clerks or administrators. But as Caroline Barron has recently noted, “the appeal of Piers Plowman was very wide, perhaps even wider than has yet been suggested.”²⁷ The authors of The Harrowing of Hell in the Chester cycle are, of course, unknown, but like Langland, they wrote in an urban milieu about matters both urban and rural. Their audiences would have included both the townspeople of Chester who supported the cycle and people from nearby villages who came to the town for the festivities.

Moreover, the representations of alewives found in these canonical texts vibrated with particular social force because they were not alone. When parishioners gazed up at the walls of their churches to see alewives cavorting happily with devils, their understanding of such images was partly shaped by a wide range of other popular representations of alewives as sinful, tempting, disgusting, and untrustworthy women. In ballads, tracts, popular prints, pamphlets, and other media, ordinary people expressed a fearful dislike of alewives that was as fully intense as the representations of Skelton, Langland, and Lydgate.

Among the many ballads and tracts that survive in printed form from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are several that describe alewives in very unflattering terms. Jyl of Brentford’s testament tells about an alewife who bequeathed farts to all and sundry (including the poor clerk who wrote out her will).²⁸ The Good-fellows Counsel complains about a fat alewife who connives to get her customers to eat and drink more than they either need or can afford.²⁹ The Kind Beleeving Hostess describes a alewife who deceives her husband, cheats her customers, encourages debt, and keeps whores as servants (in the end, the ballad promises that she’ll get her due, for the singer has run up a large debt that he has no plans to pay).³⁰ And The Industrious Smith tells the story of a simple smith who is undone by his aleselling wife. Hoping to improve their lot in life, he suggests that his wife take up aleselling. When she does, the poor smith “was never so troubled before,” for the alehouse brought disorder, drunkenness, debt, and cuckoldry. To his every complaint, his wife responds reassuringly with the refrain of the ballad: “Sweetheart, do not rail, these things must be, if we sell ale.” In the end, the smith loses not only the alehouse by which he had hoped to thrive but also his smithy.³¹

She raised the spirits of her spicket, to such height, that maids grew proud, and many proved with child after it, and being asked who got the child, they answered they knew not, only they thought Mother Bunchs ale and another thing had done the deed, but whosoever was the father, Mother Bunch s ale had all the blame.

Written with strong humor and some affection, the portrait of Mother Bunch draws on characterizations we’ve already encountered—physical grossness, sexual danger, and uncleanliness:

She was an excellent companion, and sociable, she was very pleasant and witty, and would tell a tale, let a fart, drink her draught, scratch her arse, pay her groat, as well as any Chemist of ale whatsoever. From this noble Mother Bunch proceeded all our great greasy Tapsters, and fat swelling Alewives, whose faces are blown as big as the froth of their Bottle-ale, and their complexion imitating the outside of a Cook’s greasy dripping pan….32

The very name of another seventeenth-century alewife, Mother Louse, implies a similar lack of sanitation. Yet Mother Louse is mostly ridiculed for her great age and old-fashioned clothing. Pictured in front of her rough-and-tumble establishment (Louse Hall), she replies to her critics:

You laugh now goodman twoshoes, but at what?
My Grove, my mansion house, or my dun hat?
Is it for that my loving Chin and Snout
Are met because my teeth are fallen out?
Is it at me, or at my ruff you titter?
Your Grandmother, you rogue, nere wore a fitter.³³

One final example: The Tale of Beryn, a near-contemporary spin-off of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, begins with a lengthy prologue relating how the Pardoner was out-conned by a tapster, Kit. Like Lydgate’s teasing alewife, Kit is unfaithful to men, falsely mourning a dead lover and falsely flirting with the Pardoner. Indeed, she is the ultimate trickster. The Pardoner confidently hopes to beguile Kit into bed and then steal her money, but her plots outdo his. Triumphing over all his schemes, Kit takes the Pardoner’s money, shares his feast with others, arranges a sound thrashing for him, and of course offers her sexual favors to another man. In Kit’s hands, the Pardoner suffers a fate that seems to befall all men who trust in “tapsters and other such.”³⁴

As these many examples show, representations of alewives in late medieval and early modern England are found in a wide variety of media, and they come from a wide range of social milieux. Court poets created these images, as did married clerks, gildsmen, artisans, and peasants. Their receptive audiences included courtiers, as well as clerics, townspeople, and peasants, and their representations enjoyed popularity for a very long time. Already fully developed by the early fourteenth century, the representation of an alewife singled out among other sinners for eternal damnation endured well into the seventeenth century. In 1600, a reforming mayor in Chester suppressed the midsummer enactment of “cups and cans” with its alewife and devil, but it was revived in 1617.35 Suspicious of the honesty, neighborliness, and faithfulness of women in the drink trade, people seem to have delighted for centuries in this representation of the special sinfulness and certain damnation of alewives.

Precious few positive celebrations of alewives and their trade offset these many nasty depictions. I cannot pretend to have unearthed all representations of alewives from English cultural media over more than three centuries, and I have found many minor representations that I have not described here.³⁶ But I have located only two substantial representations of good alewives that might offset the many negative representations of their more wicked sisters. Both are quite late, and both are positive in ambivalent ways. The first, a drinking song performed in The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1613), celebrates Jillian of Berry as an ideal alewife for the drinking man: she welcomes all, she offers good ale and beer, she charges nothing, and she kisses freely. This ideal was, of course, impossible (what alewife could stay in business without charging for her drink?), and its impossibility might have indirectly maligned real alewives, who were less welcoming and less willing to offer drink without charge. In any case, it was an ideal for drinking men only, one that would have had considerably less appeal for either their wives or their neighbors.³⁷

The second comes from Donald Lupton’s early seventeenth-century survey of English places and characters. He offers a fairly straightforward portrait of a brewster who

if her Ale be strong, her reckoning right, her house clean, her fire good, her face fair, and the Town great or rich, she shall seldom or never sit without Chirping Birds to bear her Company, and at the next Churching or Christening, she is sure to be rid of two or three dozen Cakes and Ale by Gossiping Neighbours.

Lupton sympathetically understands the business of a brewster, yet even his positive description includes many now-familiar complaints about alewives: that their ale is substandard; that they connive (in this case, with justice’s clerks) to avoid legal supervision; that they are falsely friendly; that they flirt with their customers.³⁸

Aside from these two ambivalent cases, I have found no celebrations of alewives: they are not praised for the essential product they provide; they are not honored for their good trade and fine ale; they are not held up as epitomes of good wives and good neighbors. Instead, brewsters and tapsters are represented in late medieval and early modern England as nefarious traders, filthy people, and likely candidates for eternal damnation.

Social Analogs

These characterizations of Elynour Rummyng, the Gentle Gossip of the Chester cycle, Rose the Regrater, Mother Bunch, and others of their ilk speak to a widespread and popular distrust of women in the brewing trade. What were the sources of this distrust? And why was it focused particularly on alewives, rather than on all brewers and alesellers? Attacks on alewives drew on three complementary traditions: distrust of the trading practices of all victualers, fears about the sins and disorders caused by excessive drinking, and hatred of women.

In late medieval and early modern England, victualers were tolerated because they did essential work, but they were constantly suspected of abusive practices: adulterating their products, selling poor-quality foods, using false measures to cheat their customers, and charging unfairly high prices. Hence, William Langland not only maligns cheating alewives but also complains about the unruliness and irregularity of all brewers and all victualers. He urges officers

To punish on pillories and punishment stools

Brewers and bakers butchers and cooks,

For these are this world’ s men that work the most harm

To the poor people that must buy piece-meal.39

Other texts echo Langland s concerns about the trading practices of all victualers, male as well as female. Geoffrey Chaucer depicts the Cook in The Canterbury Tales as a slightly unsavory, drunken fellow whose foodstuffs are of dubious cleanliness and quality.⁴⁰ John Gower describes all victualers as lowly types, who cheat even their friends and neighbors at every opportunity.⁴¹ And Barnaby Rich avers that bakers and brewers sin ten times more than usurers, especially in their abuse of poor customers.⁴²

Yet complaints about male victualers were much less virulent than complaints about alewives specifically. First, they seem to have been less common. Aside from brewing and dairying, men participated actively in most victualing trades, and given the predominance of men in such trades as butchering and fishmongering, their representations (negative or positive) are surprisingly few and far between. Second, negative representations of male victualers are milder, more abstract, and less personal than those of alewives. Langland s depiction of Rose the Regrater is much more riveting than his other comments about victualers or brewers; he names Rose, he locates her within a household, and he details her trickery with careful specificity. Chaucer might ridicule the slovenly habits of his Cook, but he also tells us that the Cook is a competent tradesman, skilled at preparing meat, judging ales, making stews, and baking pies. Gower criticizes all victualers, but he reserves special condemnation for female victualers, who, he tells us, deceive and trick their customers much more than do men. As a general rule, representations of male victualers are disparaging only about their business practices; no slighting mention is made of their physical appearances, their establishments, their piety (or lack thereof), their sexuality, or their very salvation. Men actively pursued many victualing trades and suffered much complaint from suspicious customers, but there is no male equivalent of Elynour Rummyng or the Good Gossip of Chester or Mother Bunch.43

Moreover, male brewers not only escaped the nastiest criticisms of their trade but also benefited from unambivalently positive representations. William Harrison had no doubt, it seems, that men brewed trustily and that women sold duplicitously. He speaks glowingly of how male brewers “observe very diligently” the water used in brewing and how a “skillful workman” can alter his proportions to make better beer. Yet he denigrates alewives, describing how they encourage excessive drinking by adding salt or rosin to ale and advising his readers how they might foil such devices.⁴⁴ When popular authors began to celebrate the labors of both merchants and artisans in the late sixteenth century, male brewers were sometimes singled out for special praise.⁴⁵ One playful song was devoted exclusively to The Praise of Brewers. It begins:

There’s many a clinking verse was made
In honor of the Black-smiths trade,

But more of the Brewers may be said
Which no body can deny.

Rife with puns about brewing, the song describes one brewer’s martial triumphs over the Scots and Irish and bemoans his death (and the loss of his strong beer).⁴⁶1 have found nothing in a similarly positive vein for brewsters.

The vulnerability of alewives to particular criticism was also enhanced by the disorder that could attend the sale of ale or other alcoholic products. Ale and beer were essential foodstuffs, consumed as basic liquid refreshment by persons of all ages and all classes, and used in both cooking and healing. Yet ale and beer differed fundamentally from other foodstuffs in their inebriating effects. These effects might have been desired and sought by some customers, but they were vigorously opposed by civic authorities, who wanted orderly houses and quiet lanes, and by church authorities, who equated drunkenness with the sin of gluttony. Sermons depicted alehouses as “deadly rivals” to the church, a rivalry clearly emphasized by Langland in his description of Betoun the Brewster enticing Glutton away from confession and holy mass ⁴⁷ Proverbial teachings maintained that “the tavern is the devil’s schoolhouse,” an idea echoed not only in the many depictions of alewives in hell but also in Skelton’s comment on Elynour Rummyng that “the devil and she be sib.”⁴⁸ And local authorities attempted to control alehouse behavior by prohibiting games, drunkenness, and prostitution, just the sorts of behavior deplored by Langland, Skelton, and the authors of various ballads.⁴⁹ Among all victualers, then, brewers of both sexes suffered special opprobrium because the food they sold was a potentially sinful one.

All victualers were suspected of cheating in their trade, and all brewers and alesellers were censured for causing drunkenness and disorder. But brewsters and tapsters suffered from these suspicions more than male victualers, male brewers, and male alesellers. In part, the particular association of brewing abuses with women might rest in their early presence in the trade; because most brewers in the early fourteenth century were women, cultural representations of brewers were perhaps set in a female form. Also, these negative representations of alewives might reflect the sometimes sexualized circumstances of ale-selling in which women and men played well-known games. Yet neither cultural traditions nor sexual practices suffice to explain why women were so consistently and so continuously singled out for particular reproach. The missing piece is misogyny.50 Because of long-standing traditions about the natural unfaithfulness, wickedness, and unreliability of women, alewives were marked out from other victualers and brewers for special suspicion and attack. In other words, because alewives were women, they—not male brewers and not male tipplers—bore the brunt of popular anxiety about cheating and disorder in their trade.

Like all women, alewives were deemed untrustworthy. If Adam was deceived by Eve, Samson by Delilah, David by Bathsheba, even Robin Hood by the wicked prioress, how could a simple man hope to escape the deceit of a conniving alewife? As one contemporary lyric taught about women:

Their steadfastness endureth but a season;
For they feign friendliness and work treason.⁵¹

John Gower could so confidently assume that female victualers cheated more readily than male victualers because his misogynous culture taught him just that.

Like all women, alewives were seen as temptresses who drew men into sin. Betoun the Brewster, Kit, and the paunch-bellied hostess were, after all, daughters of Eve, tempting customers into excessive consumption and excessive expenditure. Just as Betoun the Brewster enticed Glutton away from mass and into her alehouse, so other alewives were seen as tempting unwitting customers into sin and debt. In The Tale of Beiyn, Kit responds to the Pardoner’s news that he is fasting by setting a pie before him and encouraging him to “Eat and be merry.”⁵² If ale and beer generated sin, women were thought to help the process along.

Like all women, alewives were seen as sexually uncontrolled, driven by “beastly lust” and “foul delight.”⁵³ A tense sexual ambivalence runs through representations of brewsters and tapsters. Some dwell on the disgusting physical appearance of alewives, such as Elynour Rummyng, Mother Bunch, and Mother Louse, with whom few men would willingly lie down.⁵⁴ Others emphasize the duplicitous sexuality of alewives who, like the alewife of Lydgate’s ballad, tease and flirt with customers only to get their business. Still others associate alewifery and whoredom; the alewife Kit in The Tale of Beryn seems ready to sleep with almost any man. And still other representations malign alewives not just for teasing and whoring but also for adultery. The foolish industrious smith is made a cuckold by his wife, who admonishes him not to complain for “These things must be, if we sell Ale.”⁵⁵ In all of these representations, the potent mixture of sexuality and drink is blamed on alewives; it is the woman, neither her male customers nor her husband, who bears responsibility for the teasing, the adultery, and the whoring.

Perhaps most important, like all women, alewives were deemed prone to disobedience. Walter Map wrote, “Disobedience … will never cease to stimulate women”; Chaucer dwelt repeatedly on the disobedient and disruptive power of the Wife of Bath over her husbands; a popular proverb taught simply that “a woman will have her will.”56 This misogynist theme had particular resonance for brewsters and tapsters since their work threatened the ideal of a proper patriarchal order. In flirting with customers, alewives undermined the authority of their husbands; in handling money, goods, and debts, they challenged the economic power of men; in bargaining with male customers, they achieved a seemingly unnatural power over men; in avoiding effective regulation of their trade, they insulted the power of male officers and magistrates; and perhaps most important, in simply pursuing their trade, they often worked independently of men. A “good” alewife flirted and managed and bargained and traded in the interests of her husband and household, maintaining all due deference and subordination. But even a “good” alewife had the potential power, through her trade, to subvert the “natural” patriarchal order.⁵⁷

It is no wonder, then, that representations of alewives dwelt on fearful images of willful and self-governing women. The undoing of the industrious smith is his inability to rule his wife. We are told at the outset, “And though he were very discreet and wise/Yet he would do nothing without her advise.” Humiliated in a variety of ways, the smith is eventually insulted (in perhaps the unkindest cut of all) by a customer who will pay only his wife, saying, “I owe you no money, nor none shall you have/I owe to your wife, and her I will pay.”⁵⁸ We learn similarly of the kind believing hostess that she is entirely unruled by her husband:

To speak, poor man, he dares not;
My Hostess for him cares not;
She’ll drink and quaff
And merrily laugh
And she his anger fears not.⁵⁹

In these and other representations, alewives disobey not only their husbands but also all men. They fail to obey statutory rules and regulations (as did Elynour Rummyng, Rose the Regrater, and the Good Gossip of Chester). They lack respect for God and his church (as exemplified by Betoun the Brewster and all the alewives left in hell). They make complete fools of their male customers, encouraging them to misbehave and lose control (as did Elynour Rummyng, Betoun the Brewster, and Lydgate’s alewife). And they encourage other women to be disobedient to their husbands; the alewife Tipple was a companion to Strife, the wife of the downtrodden and beaten Tom Tyler, and Elynour Rummyng managed to urge even a “housewife of trust” to barter the goods of her family in exchange for ale.⁶⁰ Indeed, the entirely female world of The Tunning of Elynour Rummyng suggests where an alewife’s power can lead: a chaotic world without men in which women, not just alewives but all women, are in control.

European misogyny, then, found an ideal field for expression in popular antipathy toward alewives. Represented in so many cultural artifacts of late medieval and early modern England, anxiety about brewsters and tapsters sprang in part from two sources quite independent of misogyny—dislike of victualers and concerns about the drunkenness, gluttony, and sexual license of alehouses. Yet it was misogyny that directed these two anxieties toward women and added further to people’s dismay. Misogynous ideas about the natural weaknesses and disorders of women suggested that brewsters would cheat more than male brewers, would temptingly lure men into the gluttonous and sexual sins of alehouses, and would flagrantly resist the rule of men. If alehouses were “the devil’s schoolhouse,” then women were the devil’s schoolmistresses—disobeying men, deceiving them, leading them into both gluttony and lechery, and of course profiting at their expense.

Social Meanings

These representations did not, of course, directly harm the business of alewives. It would be absurd to suggest that The Tunning of Elynour Rummyng convinced customers to avoid the brewhouses of women and patronize the brewhouses of men. Few poems are so powerful and few audiences so susceptible to poetic suggestion.61 Moreover, the brewing trade was not so clearly divided between men and women that customers could readily choose to take their custom to one group rather than the other. Yet it would also be absurd to suggest that The Tunning of Elynour Rummyng was art alone, entirely lacking any social force.⁶²

Like any representation, these depictions of alewives as unsavory people and untrustworthy traders resonated in diverse and multiple ways. There were certainly benevolent sides to these images. Poems like The Tunning of Elynour Rummyng offered good entertainment, and while they were read or recited or discussed, customers would drink and laugh and stay to drink again. Such poems also might have defused tension about alewives and their business. In chuckling over Elynour Rummyng and her adulterated ale, foolish clientele, and grotesque alehouse, customers might have assured themselves that their own lot was better. Their hostess was nicer, cleaner, kinder, and more honest than Elynour Rummyng, and they were neither as desperate nor as disgusting as her fictional clientele. These sorts of reactions to the poems, ballads, plays, or other media that maligned alewives might have actually eased an alewife’s trade, helping her to keep customers happy, content, and drinking. Yet these benevolent effects played alongside quite malevolent resonances. For while these poems, ballads, and plays provided both amusing entertainment and reassuring contrasts for customers, they also articulated concerns that could seriously undermine the businesses of brewsters and tapsters.

The attitudes betrayed in these representations might have inhibited the trade of alewives in many ways: they socially marginalized the alehouses run by alewives; they implied that alewives were particularly likely to cheat and deceive their customers; they suggested that the drink sold by alewives was particularly filthy and adulterated; and they dangerously associated alewives with disorder, heresy, and witchcraft. In everyday life, these sorts of accusations carried real force. In 1413, the brewster Christine Colmere of Canterbury lost all her trade when Simon Daniel told her neighbors that she was leprous; although the charge was false, her customers left her for fear of contaminated ale.⁶³ In 1641, an unnamed widow who brewed for the garrison at Ludlow castle lost her trade because, despite her fine reputation, a male competitor spread false rumors about her person and her business.64 As both Colmere and this unnamed widow learned, a brewster’s trade could be damaged by words alone. What they lost through specific slander, other alewives—who worked in a world abounding with images that ridiculed them and maligned their trade—might have lost through more general opprobrium.

Yet as the brewing trade changed, so, too, did representations of alewives. Our earliest sources betray a strong anxiety about cheating by alewives, and this anxiety found further expression well into the seventeenth century. By that time, however, new concerns were also developing in representations of alewives, for after about 1500, anxieties about cheating were often supplemented by worries about foul products and disorderly alehouses. It is difficult, given the paucity of sources and the idiosyncrasies of their survival to the present day, either to assess or to explain the importance of this seemingly “new” emphasis on the filthiness of alewives and their products. For example, a stronger emphasis on physical caricatures of alewives after 1500 might reflect discursive conventions (especially the effect of The Tunning of Elynour Rummyng on later depictions of alewives), sexual anxieties (especially about singlewomen or widows still in the trade), social conventions (especially about witches, scolds, and other undesirable women), or a combination of these and other factors. Moreover, changes in representations of alewives are subtle, not definitive; the mid-seventeenth-century Mother Louse draws on newer emphases on the filthiness of alewives, but she also echoes (in her plans to deceive the excisemen and her promises of “bigger pots and stronger ale” in the future) past complaints about cheating alewives.

Nevertheless, no matter how subtle these representational changes and no matter how obscure their origins, their social meanings were partly rooted in the changing circumstances of the drink trade. In the early fourteenth century, when the ale trade was modest and home-based, nasty depictions of alewives might have served mostly as safety valves, releasing social tensions over female predominance in such a crucial trade. Representations of alewives as conniving cheaters feature strongly in this earlier period, when ale, unchallenged by beer, was most often sold for consumption away from a brewster s shop or home. In the early sixteenth century, when brewing was more profitable and more attractive to men, nasty images of alewives might have more directly discouraged women from working in the trade. New representations of the foul ale and disorderly establishments of alewives belong to this period—when beer challenged ale for the palates of English drinkers, when proliferating alehouses created severe regulatory problems, and when small-scale producers of ale worked alongside professional brewers of ale and beer.

Early representations of alewives pick up on many themes, such as their tempting of innocent customers (Betoun the Brewster) or their sexual teasing (Kit in The Tale of Beryn). But, as seen in depictions of Rose the Regrater, the Good Gossip of Chester, and other unnamed condemned alewives who brandish their illegal pots, cheating by alewives was especially emphasized in the earliest representations. These depictions of alewives as duplicitous tradeswomen were particularly dangerous because they were very true to life: they maligned alewives for the very offenses that were most common and most worrisome to customers. Brewers often cheated with impunity: they diluted their ale, altered their measures, and demanded higher prices, and on most such occasions, neither customers nor officers were any the wiser. Indeed, given contemporary imprécisions of coinage, measures, and quality control, some level of fraud by brewers was probably unavoidable. All communities tried to regulate their brewers and force them to conform to specified standards of price, quality, and measure, but full conformity by brewers was, in fact, quite rare.65 Not surprisingly, most communities seemed to have been resigned to a certain level of nonconformity, making brewers pay standard fines or licensing fees and tolerating a little bit of fiddling by them behind the scenes.

So all alewives were not innocent tradeswomen, falsely accused of cheating when they were only trying to make reasonable profits in roughly honest ways. Some alewives did cheat, and some cheated egregiously. In 1364, for example, Alice the wife of Robert de Caustone of London sold ale in a cleverly disguised false measure. Adding 1½ inches of pitch to an unsealed quart and laying rosemary on top to conceal her subterfuge, she created a “quart” measure that was so fraudulent that even six of her quarts did not make a true gallon.⁶⁶ Yet, although some alewives cheated excessively, not all alewives were guilty of such offenses, and more important, these offenses were not peculiar to women.

It is, of course, impossible to pinpoint the incidence of cheating in any trade (either then or now). Yet there is no reason to assume that women in the drink trade cheated more than men. Our best measure of the phenomenon of cheating by brewers and tipplers comes from reports that the aletasters of Oxford filed in 1324. In June of that year, when they moved through the wards of the city, the aletasters noted at each house whether ale had been sold at the proclaimed price and whether it had been of sufficiently good quality. They checked, in other words, for two common tricks of the trade: charging excessive prices and selling weak or mixed ale. The aletasters seem to have collected their information by interviewing each brewer or aleseller on his or her premises, tasting the ale (if available), and collecting information from neighbors. Their presentments name either not-married brewsters or men (who in most cases probably represented either their wives or a married couple active in brewing). In other words, these presentments can tell us whether singlewomen and widows were more likely than married couples, bachelors, or married women to be adjudged guilty of charging excessive prices or selling weak ale. They suggest that, in fact, not-married women cheated with roughly the same regularity as did other brewers and tipplers (see table 7.1).

These figures can be only suggestive, for it is impossible to know whether singlewomen and widows in the drink trade were treated differently from other brewers and alesellers in Oxford. Perhaps their rate of cheating is accurately reported, but it might be overreported by aletasters especially suspicious of women or, indeed, underreported by aletasters especially willing to overlook or forgive womens petty offenses. As always, there is an immeasurable interpretative shortfall between transgression and legal response. Nevertheless, these figures do lead to two safe conclusions: cheating was common among all brewers and alesellers, and it does not seem to have been particularly prominent among women “ungoverned” by male householders.

Table 7.1 Offenses of Brewers and Tipplers in Oxford, 1324

Offenses:	Not-married women NumberPercent		Men/couples NumberPercent		Total NumberPercent
None	19	47	63	43	82	44
One	18	45	68	46	86	46
Two or more	3	7	16	11	19	10
Total	40	100	147	100	187	100

Source: Oxford Assizes for 1324.
Note: One case with incomplete information has been excluded from these calculations.

Yet, despite what was very likely a rough parity of cheating between women and men in the ale trade, most representations of the trade depict cheating brewers as women, implying that the trade would be well regulated and justly pursued if confined to men. Anxiety about cheating was displaced onto just one segment of the trade: women (and perhaps especially not-married women, who, if they lived without male masters or householders, seemed to be particularly unregulated and uncontrolled). In other words, descriptions of the false trading practices of a brewster such as Rose the Regrater both expressed and aroused the anxieties of ordinary people about their reliance for an essential foodstuff on a trade that could only be minimally regulated. Customers worried that brewers and tipplers would cheat them, and Rose the Regrater and others like her did just that. Stories about Rose the Regrater and other dishonest alewives might have inhibited a real alewife’s ability to manipulate her trade in customary ways; since her customers anticipated being cheated, she was perhaps able to cheat them less effectively. These stories might also have discouraged customers from frequenting the premises of real alewives; since they expected an alewife to be especially dishonest, customers might have taken their trade, if given the choice, to a male brewer or tippler or, at least, to a married alewife well-governed by her husband.

By the sixteenth century, representations of alewives not only impugn their honesty but also malign their foul ales and their disorderly alehouses. Alewives had always been depicted as adulterating their ale, but by the sixteenth century, they were also accused of preparing their ale in foul and unclean ways. Both Rose the Regrater and the Good Gossip of Chester had mingled strong and weak ales together. Later alewives foul their brews in ways that are more disgusting than illegal. Eleanor Rummyng’s ale contains her drool; filth from her “mangy hands”; dung from her roosting hens; and snot from her nose, which, Skelton tells us, was “Never stopping/But ever dropping.” Lest readers miss the point that the aptly named Mother Louse runs an unclean establishment, her picture and poem are accompanied by an escutcheon showing three quite realistic lice, with an ale pot at the crest and the motto “three liese passant.” The notion that alewives brewed their ale without any concern for cleanliness or health reached parodic proportions in the early seventeenth-century depiction of Mother Bunch. Her famous ale, known all over England, comes directly from her “most precious and rich nose.”

Representations of disorderly alehouses date back to the fourteenth century, but they also grew more vivid and more common over time. Glutton sates his desire for food and drink at Betoun’s alehouse; many later characters obtain at alehouses not only food and drink but also sexual play and, perhaps, sexual satisfaction. Lydgate’s alewife teases him to distraction; the tapster Kit in The Tale of Beryn flirts shamelessly with the Pardoner; and the wife of the industrious smith flaunts her lovers before her befuddled husband. Other representations depict alewives as procuresses or harborers of prostitutes. When the industrious smith finds his maidservant in bed with a customer, his wife reassures him, as always, that “these things must be if we sell ale.” The kind, believing hostess keeps two whores, Bess and Dolly, to service her customers, and she offers to procure other women as well.

These representational shifts accompany, of course, very real changes in the circumstances of the ale trade in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. First, in 1350, ale had no real competitors, but by 1500, beer was vying with ale for English drinkers. Suggestions that alewives were old-fashioned and unclean might have spoken directly to this new dichotomy. Beer, brewed in cities such as London and Southampton, was a product of upright gildsmen and large brewhouses, and it was drunk by sophisticated, urban drinkers. Ale, brewed in the houses of countrywomen and drunk by simple folk, was comparatively unregulated, uncontrolled, and old-fashioned.67 Second, in 1350, most ale was sold for consumption elsewhere, but by 1500, alehouses were a ubiquitous feature of the English landscape. Much loved by English alewives and English drinkers, alehouses generated considerable social problems: drinking late at night or on Sundays; corruption of servants and apprentices; games, gambling, and other amusements; prostitution; and of course, disorderly drunkenness.

When Skelton, then, located Elynour Rummyng in a rural alehouse, he was doing more than representing a common type. He was also playing with contrasts between ale and beer, town and country, petty producers and gildsmen, and of course women and men. If Elynour Rummyng had sold beer purchased from a supplier in London, the poem might have retained its critique of drunkenness but lost much of its class-based and gender-based humor. In brewing ale herself and selling it in her alehouse, Elynour Rummyng represents what so many other alewives came to represent in the media of the time: old-fashioned, poor countrywomen; bad, unregulated ale; disorderly and troublesome alehouses.

Of course, these representations held much truth. By the sixteenth century, the women most likely to hold alehouse licenses on their own account were poor widows. Their ale, brewed in private homes in small amounts, was much harder to regulate than beer. Increasingly, both they and their customers were rural yokels, not artisans or merchants or gentry. And their alehouses, often poor and rough, seem to have fostered a variety of traditional activities that troubled and worried their social “betters.” But as with cheating, so with foul ale and dis orderly houses: these problems were not generated by alewives but were ubiquitous in the drink trade, associated as much with the trade of men as with the trade of women.68

Consider, for example, the supposedly upright brewers of London in the sixteenth century By that time, brewers of beer and ale in the city were a small, prosperous, and well-regulated group. With a gild representing their interests to both city and Crown, they had a strong professional identity; and since their gild admitted only the occasional widow to membership, they protected their trade from much female influence. Yet their trade was as plagued as that of rural alewives with adulterated or badly brewed products and with disorderly houses and drunken clients. From the reports of the city, we learn that these wealthy and prestigious gildsmen regularly cheated in their measures, sold unwholesome ale or beer, charged unfair prices, brewed strong beer that encouraged drunkenness, tolerated disorderly houses, kept unclean premises, and wantonly disobeyed city orders.⁶⁹ The trade was so badly managed that in the 1590s a professional informer, Hugh Alley, found that he could largely support himself by initiating suits against erring brewers.⁷⁰

Yet, although professional London brewers, just like rural alewives, sold adulterated drink and fostered drunken disorder, anxieties about these aspects of the drink trade focused largely on alewives. In other words, representations of alewives brewing foul ale and managing foul houses displaced general concerns about the trade onto this particular group of traders. They suggested that if women did not brew or sell drink, good products would be bought from responsible proprietors who ran sober establishments. The Brewers’ Company of London seems to have understood this dynamic quite well. Its incorporation charter of 1639 spoke harshly of women who “are not fit” to sell ale or beer and promoted in their stead “men that are members of this company and have been trained and brought up in the trade, mystery and art of brewing.”⁷¹

Sexual misconduct in alehouses was, of course, another matter. If alehouses had been free of women, much of the sexual disorder associated with the drink trade would have disappeared. Without women serving heterosexual men, there would have been no teasing tapsters, no adulterous alewives, no whores working out of alehouses. These associations of female aleselling with unruly female sexuality reflect a basic tension in the trade of alewives. To attract customers into their houses and sell drink to them, alewives needed to be pleasant and amusing. As Choice of Inventions put it:

A man that hath a sign at his door,
and keeps good Ale to sell,

A comely wife to please his guests,
may thrive exceeding well….

Yet an alewife who was too comely or too friendly ran into trouble. She offended male customers who misconstrued commercial friendliness as genuine flirting (as Lydgate had done); she risked adultery (or the appearance of adultery) ; she suffered the ire of local authorities seeking to root out disorderly houses. The preceding verse ends:

But he that hath a Whore to his wife,
were better be without her.72

Of course, the heterosexual dynamic of alehouses involved men as well as women; both played the game, both profited from it, both sinned, but only women were usually blamed. This dynamic also often involved women who were employees, not proprietors. The alluring woman of an alehouse was sometimes its owner and sometimes the owner’s wife, but she was often a daughter or a maidservant or a prostitute allowed to work out of the premises. Thus, Lupton notes that a prosperous hostess had to be sure that she or her daughter or her maid would kiss her customers “handsomely.”⁷³ Thus, the very first task of the industrious smith when he decides to open an alehouse is to hire a maidservant to attract customers:

They sent for a wench, her name it was Besse
And her they hired to welcome their guests.⁷⁴

And thus, in court records, keepers of alehouses were regularly admonished to be “honest” and tolerate no whores. In 1380, for example, Robert Lovington and his wife, Amy, welcomed whores into their alehouse in Bridgwater and thereby lost their license to tipple.⁷⁵ In other words, sexual misconduct in alehouses did not rely on the sex of the proprietor. Yet, although brewers and ale-house-keepers of both sexes used young women to attract customers to their trade, the sexualized nature of aleselling was associated with brewsters and tapsters only. As Margaret Fiske of Norfolk said in 1578, “there cannot be any alewife thrive without she be a whore or have a whore in her house.”⁷⁶

When English people, then, considered the trade in ale or beer in their communities, they saw many problems. In the fourteenth century, they saw brewsters who, working and selling out of their homes, often cheated their customers in subtle and nefarious ways. By the sixteenth century, they still fretted about cheating, but they also worried more than before about unhealthy brewing, disorderly alehouses, and sexual license. These were real concerns and real problems. But their representation in English cultural media took problems common to all brewers and suggested that they were specific only to female brewers. The cultural repertoire of late medieval and early modern England suggested that all the problems associated with brewing—cheating, foul products, disorderly houses, and a host of other uncontrollable disruptions—were caused not by the trade itself but by the presence of women in the trade. Very real anxieties about the trade were displaced in a very unrealistic fashion onto just female brewers and female alesellers.

Misogyny and Brewsters

In the midsummer procession at Chester, this displacement took literal form, with the goodly innkeepers and cooks of the city preceded in their march by a cheating alewife and her devil. What did bystanders make of this scene? We know that they must have focused much of their attention on the alewifes cheating for they called this part of the procession “cups and cans” after the emblems of duplicity that she carried. For some, she might have signified the unregulated trade of tapsters, as contrasted with the better trade of innkeepers and cooks. But for others, she might have chastised the innkeepers and cooks as well as the tapsters, for she did, after all, precede their company. In other words, the cheating alewife of “cups and cans” could represent not only the corrupt trade of women but also the corrupt trade of all brewers and even all victualers. Needless to say, these representations were not mutually exclusive.

Of course, the cheating alewife of “cups and cans” was only part of the cultural package of the time, and by focusing on her and her analogs in this chapter, I do not mean to suggest that there was an unremitting attack on the work of women in brewing and aleselling. As we have seen, many representations of alewives were fond as well as critical, funny as well as judgmental. Some of those who watched “cups and cans” might have pondered neither cheating alewives nor cheating victualers but might instead have merely enjoyed the jangling vessels, the outrageous devil, and the pageantry of the procession. Others might have seen the alewife as an emblem of their own good alewife, who, if she cheated a bit and flirted a bit, was still a good neighbor and a good friend. They might have laughed with her instead of taunting her.

We cannot stand with the good folk of Chester and judge how they reacted to their “cups and cans,” and to an important extent, this search for a true “reaction” is illusory in any case. If we had stood in Chester’s streets in 1540 watching the crowd react to the alewife and her devil, we would have seen many reactions: laughter, anger, disgust, boredom, perhaps even fear. Some might have called out encouragement to the alewife; others might have pelted her with rotten food and pebbles. By 1617, to all these reactions was probably added another: embarrassment among some citizens that such an old-fashioned custom had been revived in their city The cheating alewife of “cups and cans” does not represent straightforward misogyny in either its origins or its effects. Instead, she illustrates the powerful ways in which misogyny mingled with other traditions and other discourses.

In the year 1540, the mayor of Chester, Henry Gee, oversaw a series of measures designed to eliminate female disorder. First, in the order mentioned at the outset of this chapter, aleselling was proscribed for women between 14 and 40 years of age. As explained in the new ordinance:

Whereas all the taverns and alehouses of this city have and be used to be kept by young women otherwise than is used in any other places of this realm, whereof all strangers resorting hither greatly marvel and think it an inconvenient use whereby not only great slander and dishonest report of this city hath and doth run abroad in avoiding whereof and also to eschew as well such great occasions and provocations of wantonness, brawls, frays and other inconveniences as thereby doth and may ensue daily among youth and light disposed persons as also damage unto their masters and owners of the taverns and alehouses…77

Alewives, in other words, threatened the trade of the city, damaged its reputation, fomented disorders, corrupted the young and weak, harmed masters, and even hurt the owners of alehouses and taverns. Whether Gee’s order to restrict female tippling was very effective or not, it was certainly not forgotten; it was repeated in later decades and, on at least a few occasions, firmly enforced.78

The second order followed hard on the first, and it sought to restrain traditional celebrations associated with childbirth and churching. Complaining about the great waste of the costly dishes, meats, and drinks brought to women in childbed (gifts that were then reciprocated by the new mother at her churching), this ordinance proscribed such gift giving and limited attendance at churchings to the midwife, mother, and sisters of the new mother.⁷⁹ Coming almost immediately thereafter, the third order regulated women’s headgear. Although somewhat confusing in its phrasing, this ordinance sought to limit excessive wearing of caps, kerchiefs, and hats; to allow only hats of white or black; and to distinguish singlewomen from married women and widows.⁸⁰

These new orders were promulgated in May, the first two on the twelfth, just four days before Whitsun. So, when the good folk of Chester laughed at the condemned alewife in the Whitsuntide plays of that year and watched “cups and cans” in the midsummer procession, they might have laughed and watched in different ways from before. They especially might have appreciated more intensely the disorderly dangers that arose from women, for Henry Gee and his brethren had just determined that the work of women, the festivities of women, and even the very clothing of women were threatening enough to the polity to require firm and careful regulation. In 1540, “cups and cans” confirmed the sober judgment of Chester’s best citizens that women, especially women in the ale trade, must be restrained and controlled.

But before 1540, “cups and cans” had already spoken to these issues, and the legislation of that year merely expressed in a new (and perhaps more powerful) forum some of the premises of this traditional rite. Henry Gee, growing up in Chester and serving as its mayor once before in 1533–34, had probably seen “cups and cans” on many occasions. He almost certainly did not walk home from the midsummer procession of 1539 determined to reform the ale trade in Chester because of what he saw on that day in the procession of innkeepers and cooks. But he just as certainly was not ideologically removed from the premises of “cups and cans.” In his legislation of May 12, 1540, Henry Gee expressed the same ideas as those acted out annually in “cups and cans”: both saw women as disorderly, and both displaced the problems of the drink trade onto women alone. One did not cause the other, but both were imbricated within a complex discourse that drew heavily on misogynous ideas. To be sure, this discourse was informed both by anxieties about all victualers and by worries about drunken disorders, but it was also critically shaped by assumptions about the seemingly natural duplicity, disobedience, and disorderliness of the female sex.

In the other chapters of this book, we have seen how women slowly lost their place in the brewing trade. In chapter 3, we saw how singlewomen and widows were unable to respond effectively to the expansion of commercial brewing after the Black Death. This was in part because both legal rules and social customs made it difficult for women to employ men, to foster trade relationships with men, or even to exercise authority over them. In chapter 4, we traced how women were sometimes excluded from gilds of brewers and sometimes subordinated within them. This was in part because gild prestige relied on the virtual exclusion of women from public participation in the trade. An all-male gild was so important that by the sixteenth century—as illustrated by the Pickering household—some women still brewed, but only their husbands belonged to the gild, only their husbands represented the public face of brewing. In chapter 5, we saw how women were unable to gain access to the new skills and new requirements of beerbrewing when it was brought to England by Dutch traders and settlers. This was in part because these beer brewers brought with them from the continent a tradition of brewing as a highly skilled male profession, an art that was “given to men alone.” In chapter 6, we examined how mayors and constables and justices did their best to discourage female brewing and encourage male brewing. This was in part because they thought, with Henry Gee, that women were special sources of disorder. Is there a relationship between all these obstructions, on the one hand, and misogynous representations of alewives, on the other? Of course. The alewife and her devil in “cups and cans” expressed in one forum what Henry Gee expressed in another. Fortified by their common misogynous ideology, both saw alewives as culpable for the abuses of the trade, and both therefore imagined that a trade run by men would be a trade better run.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THESE THINGS MUST BE IF WE SELL ALE

Akwives in English Culture and Society