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Conviviality and charity in medieval and early modern England - response to Judith M. Bennett, Past and Present, no. 134, February 1992

Past & Present, Feb, 1997 by Maria Moisa

In `Conviviality and Charity in Medieval and Early Modern England',(1) Judith M. Bennett has examined the practice of the `help-ale' (a drinking party for the organizer's benefit) and concluded that it was a form of charity and poor relief which `celebrated the cohesiveness of the communities'. Such charitable aid was given to the poor but honest, a category which included officers and minstrels, as well as the life-cycle poor, but not `vagrants, beggars and idlers'.(2) The survival of the medieval poor, which according to Christopher Dyer remains a mystery,(3) can, Bennett argues, be partly explained by looking at the poor relief which was supplied by the poor themselves, rather than by upper-class institutions. Indeed, the medieval poor received little help from the upper layers of society. There were so many of them that they had to feed themselves, or, if they needed help, resort to the rest of the peasantry instead of putting their hopes in institutions known for their shortcomings. However, while this is so, I am not persuaded that Bennett's evidence proves that the beneficiaries of help-ales were either poor or honest, or that the exchange of overpriced ale for cash was charity. Neither do the many pieces of advice, instruction or admonition circulating in the Middle Ages: these distinguished between gifts and loans among neighbours, which is what help-ales were about, and `charity', for which benefactors could not expect a return in this life.

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While Bennett has found interesting literary evidence, as well as known secondary sources and published parish accounts for the early modern period, her original research is based on the court rolls of the manor of Wakefield in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and in particular on the 1412-13 roll, which recorded a relatively high number of fines for help-ale brewing. I shall limit my comments to medieval help-ales.(4) We are told that the fifteenth-century rolls show that the poor sought charity by means of help-ales. But if we examine the records, this is not what they say. Far from being for the benefit of the poor, these parties appear to have been organized by distinct groups of various economic levels. They were largely male affairs, which challenges the hypothesis that the help-ales -- among other ales -- were particularly useful to women, who were more likely to be victims of poverty and more in need of charity than men. This interpretation should be discarded until some evidence is found which points in that direction: the Wakefield court rolls do not do so.(5)

Moreover, it is simply not true either that beneficiaries made great profits or that they were usually fined one shilling.(6) This is a generalization made on the basis of one tourn in one place. Help-ale fines fluctuated, just like those for commercial brewing, normally from 2d. to 12d. according to area, season and year, but they tended to be lower at tourns in the uplands and higher at those in the lowlands, such as Wakefield. They were higher at the tourn after the harvest, in October or November, than at the spring tourn, and higher and indeed more frequent in years of plenty than in years of scarcity.(7) By considering only the court roll for 1412-13, which was a good year, Bennett ignores the way that peasant prosperity collectively went up and down through the long-term agrarian cycles, as well as the seasonal variations in availability of both cereals and cash. There is a great difference between the 1412-13 fines and those recorded in a year of scarcity like 1439-40.(8) The 1406/07 roll, where H. Ling Roth discovered the Wakefield help-ales, is known for exceptionally high fines of up to 6s. 8d., as well as for the highest number of such offences (at least eighty-one).(9) In this year, fines were high even in small rural places, both for help-ales and other misdemeanours like drawing blood.(10) In 1439-40, after the bad harvests of the 1430s, the fines for commercial brewing fell to 2d. from the normal level of 2d. to 6d., and fewer offences were reported than in years of plenty. Conversely, there were more breaches of the assize of bread, attracting higher fines than usual. At the Wakefield tourn of April 1440, there were no help-ales; elsewhere, three help-ale brewers were not fined, possibly because their offences were minuscule. On some occasions they were attached rather than amerced, as Bennett has noted, but this does not mean that they were treated leniently, since some were brought to trial.(11)

We can see that help-ales were not characteristic of periods of poverty. Ale offences tended to disappear whenever there was a crisis. In the bad season of a bad year, barley, a bread cereal, could not be used to brew ale. An impoverished peasantry sacrificed ale for food, the simplest survival strategy. The hungry drink water, as all medieval writers knew: `You shall eat barley bread, and of the brook drink', said Piers Plowman to his labourers. The typical poor peasant moaned that `scarce for half the year had we a good sufficiency, scarce nothing save bread and bran and water', and even `lacked barley bread or bean bread'.(12) Legislation sometimes forbade the waste of barley in ale brewing.(13) This picture is not contradicted by the fact that help-ales went on in the Sowerbyshire area in upper Calderdale in 1440, for the uplands have been shown to produce normal barley crops in years of bad weather.(14) It seems safe to infer, therefore, that help-ales flourished in times of plenty, in areas with some cash, mostly among the middle and upper peasantry. In bad times, when survival was at stake, they disappeared.

Conviviality and charity in medieval and early modern England - response to Judith M. Bennett, Past and Present, no. 134, February 1992

Past & Present, Feb, 1997 by Maria Moisa

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