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

These examples could be multiplied. They persuade us that the English countryside knew forms of exchange within local circles which moved between the gift and the loan, and that both gifts and loans circulated within webs of reciprocity, to be repaid at an uncertain and possibly distant future date. The help of the group was indispensable for having a whip-round or for borrowing money. This is the reason why the medieval poor could not be invited to help-ales. Unable to contribute, they were excluded from membership of the drinking group. They could not afford `the cost of maintaining a place in the gang'.

Anthropologists and sociologists have examined such exchanges in modern drinking circles of widely different societies, including Yorkshire. Their studies have noted the formation of methods of co-operation among drinking partners, the strengthening of personal bonds, the opening of credit relationships, the establishment of multiple reciprocity contacts through collective consumption, as well as the existence of strict rules which apply to the exchange of drinks.(31) The theory applied by anthropologists to these exchanges is based on the now classical one first formulated by M. Mauss, which is in turn almost identical with the medieval theory of the gift derived from Aristotle and the Old Testament, and conveyed to the Middle Ages by the Greek fathers of the church, such as John Chrysostom. It distinguished between gifts to men, which were to be reciprocated and which placed the receiver in debt, and gifts to God, or alsm.(32) These latter would also be reciprocated, but in the other world. These theologians devised an indirect form of reciprocity--donor [right arrow] poor [right arrow] God [right arrow] donor--in order to insert the poor into the web of exchanges from which they would otherwise have been excluded. As Mauss found, classical ideas on reciprocity did not clash with Germanic traditions. English peasants could keep the reciprocity web functioning in the usual manner, while simultaneously absorbing the Christian notions of charity and almsgiving to the poor put to them by the low clergy.(33)

Bennett's interpretation of help-ales as charity parties is based on two thirteenth-century synodal statutes, among the many which forbade scot-ales, `called by a change of name charity'.(34) The word `charity', which evidently did not fool bishops, may have been a Latin translation of the English word `love'. For more than a century after this, no special name other than `ale' or `scot-ale' was used in connection with drinking parties. When the fully-fledged help-ale emerged in the fifteenth century, neither the Latin `charity' nor the Anglo-Saxon `love' were mentioned. Quite wisely, the locals called it `help', leaving the manorial clerk at a loss to find a Latin term for it, let alone a declension (brasiavit unum helpale, brasiaverunt cerevisias vocatas les helpales, and so on). The lower strata of medieval English society might have already developed that distaste for the idea of receiving charity typical of the working class.(35) Roth, who without any evidence also assumed that the `help' meant that the profits of the parties went to the poor, was surprised to find in the court rolls a very different appraisal of the Wakefield gatherings, as they were portrayed as being not only against the statute, but also to the prejudice of the lord's tenants.(36)