Alehouses and Good Fellowship in Early Modern England, by Mark Hailwood

In Mark Hailwood’s estimation, the alehouse offers a key to understanding the social, cultural and even political world of ordinary people in early modern England, reflecting and shaping both society and broader historical patterns of change. Endeavouring to demonstrate this, he concisely elucidates the place of alehouses within early modern towns and villages and the communities and practices of sociability that they fostered. By combining the social history of alehouses with the cultural history of drinking, he outlines what was at stake in the conflicts over the alehouse, asking what it was about recreational drinking that caused authorities to fear sedition and participants to rally to its defence. A self-proclaimed ‘history from below’, his book emphasises the richness of drinking culture and its meaning for contemporary participants, arguing for the importance of local agency against regulation, telling a triumphant story of how alehouse-goers won a place for recreational drinking within early modern English society.

Agency (philosophy) · Alien · Criminology · Cultural history · Environmental ethics · Meaning (existential) · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Recreation · Sedition · Social science · Sociology · Anthropology · Culinary Culture and Tourism · History · Law · Psychology