NORTHERN DRINKING. Beowulf-Ale-Beer-Mead-English Wine-The Mead HallDrinking Horns - Tosti and Harold - Pigment, etc. - The Clergy, etc., drinking-Northern Wine drinking-King Hunding - Brewing-Strange Drinking Vessels, and their Use Punishment of Drunkards. SA AILING from the north, being lured to the south with visions of plunder and luxury, came the Danish and Norwegian Vikings, and, as England was the nearest to them, she received an early visit. With them they brought their habit of deep drinking, which was scarcely needed, as on that score the then inhabitants of England could pretty well hold their own. Their liquors seem to have been ale, ealu, beer, beor, wine, win, and mead, medo. There was a difference between those that drank ale and those that drank beer, as we find in Beowulf: 1 Line 964, etc. In Dugdale's Monasticon (ed. 1682, p. 126), in a Charter of Offa to the Monastery of Westbury, three sorts of ale are mentioned. Two tuns full of hlutres aloth (Clear ale), a cumb full of lithes aloth (mild ale), and a cumb full of Welisces aloth (Welsh ale), which is again mentioned as cervisia Wallia. But though beer and ale were the drinks of the common folk, yet they were not despised by their leaders. 1 "At times before the nobles Hrothgar's daughter to the earls in order We see the social difference between ale and wine drinkers in one of the Cotton MSS. (Tib. A. 3), where a lad having been asked what he drank replied: "Ale, if I have it; Water, if I have it not." Asked why he does not drink wine, he says: "I am not so rich that I can buy me wine; and wine is not the drink of children or the weak-minded, but of the elders and the wise." Every monas The English at that time grew the Vine for winemaking purposes; indeed, very good wine can now be, and is, made from English grapes. tery had its vineyard, and to this day London has şix Vine Streets and one Vineyard Walk. The winehall seems to have been a different apartment to either the mead, or ale-halls, and of a superior order. one man another and bade him hail, gave him command of the wine-hall." 1 "He strode under the clouds, until he the wine-house, the golden hall of men, The mead-hall seems to have answered the purpose of a common hall, as we see by the following. Speaking of Hrothgar, the poet says:— 2 "It ran through his mind that he a hall-house a great mead-house, men to make, which the sons of men should ever hear of; and there within all distribute to young and old, as to him God had given, Then I heard that widely the work was proclaim'd to many a tribe through this mid-earth that a public place was building." Mead was considered a glorified liquor fit for MEN, and is thus sung of by the bard Taliesin : "That Maelgwn of Mona be inspired with mead and cheer us with it, From the mead-horn's foaming, pure, and shining liquor, Mead distilled, I praise; its eulogy is everywhere The fierce and the mute both enjoy it." Mead was made from honey and water, fermented, and in many languages its name has a striking similarity. In Greek, honey is methu, in Sanskrit, madhu, and the drink made therefrom in Danish, is mrod, in Anglo-Saxon, medu, in Welsh, medd, whence metheglyn —medd, mead, and llyn, liquor. In Beowulf we frequently find mention of the mead-horns, and we find it vividly portrayed in the heading of this chapter, which is taken from the Bayeux Tapestry. These horns were generally those of oxen, although some were made of ivory, and were probably used because fictile ware was so easily broken in those drinking bouts in which they so frequently indulged. Another reason was doubtless that they promoted conviviality, for, like the classical Rhyton, they could not be set down like a bowl, but must either be nursed, or their contents quaffed. Many examples of drinking horns remain to us, and illustrations of two are here given one that of Ulph, belonging to, and now kept at, York Minster, and the other the Pusey horn. These are veritable drinking horns; but there are many other tenure horns in existence, which are hunting horns. |