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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
Prices thus estimated, and almost certainly under-estimated, allow us to conjecture what type of people attended the helpales. They were rarely, if at all, poor: who would part with 6d. or 12d. in Wakefield in prosperous times, or with lid. or 2d. in a hill village in Calderdale in a bad year? Such prices excluded not only Bennett's category of deviant `vagrants, beggars and idlers', but a very large minority composed of smallholders, cottagers and labourers, many of whom were decent people who had to beg but who would have been labelled `vagrants' if unemployed. There is no reason why idlers, if successful gamblers, would have been excluded from drinking groups.(18)
Do we know whether the beneficiaries were, if not poor, at least `honest', `worthy' and `not profligate'? Did their being `of good standing' and `even constables' guarantee their morals? Medieval officers enjoyed such a bad reputation that any seen brewing and selling ale would have been suspected of extortion, because they could force people to buy drink in order to keep on the right side of `the Law'.(19) Many of these men may have been honourable -- which is what the medieval word honestus meant -- but nonetheless delinquent.(20) Other honest) of some status, who were victims of misfortune, sought episcopal backing to raise funds, but not, as far as we know, through help-ales or parish ales.(21) The first church ale for the benefit of a parishioner seems to have been in the very late fifteenth century. What we do know about the drinkers is that they could afford mildly or heavily overpriced ale, that they were probably on friendly terms with each other and that they counted on one another's monetary support. A thorough study of the Wakefield data would show the various economic levels within a highly stratified peasantry. Instead of a display of social harmony, we are likely to find a number of drinking circles, geographically and socially distinct, with their own levels of spending, consumption and spare resources to share.
Did the drinkers explain their behaviour as charity or mutual help? To answer this question we should go back to the many medieval sources which show the functioning of help and of the exchange of gifts and loans among friends and neighbours;(22) this was a quite separate field from that of charity, almsgiving and poor relief.
It should not be necessary to `fill out this [the manor rolls'] skeletal picture ... from other sources', where those sources come from other periods and concern other customs--for example, seventeenth-century church-ales--nor should it be necessary to resort to modern secondary works which interpret hospitality and charity in the light of what we know about the behaviour of the nobility and of the merchant class.(23) We should not disregard the wealth of material produced by medieval writers on, first, charity and almsgiving and, secondly and separately, on help and credit among neighbours. If we draw on contemporary sources for the interpretation of the hard `skeleton', it becomes clear that the exchanges taking place at help-ales were not seen as charity and almsgiving, but as the necessary giving and lending to keep the wheels of local society well oiled. A few examples, among the very many available, will make this clear.
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