Social Usages of the Public Drinking House: Changing Aspects of Class and Leisure

Abstract

Different categories of drinking houses, it is claimed, are historically related to different kinds of users and usages. Industrialism, however, entrenched the ubiquitous pub amidst the song, sin and insobriety of the poor and the new working-class urban proletariat. The public house thus became a focus of social freedoms and sexual licence, as well as a locus of more formal elements of rational recreation. Yet the public house was subject to social controls of a ferocious kind and not simply licensing constraints, and some discussion is developed in examining the class basis of recreation and leisure controls. Attention finally turns to viewing the public house as an intermediate context in a relational sense, in an historical sense and in a time sense, and one deserving further sociological attention. Historically, different types of public drinking houses have generally developed out of distinct categories of social usage. The inn developed from the coaching tradition of providing refreshment and lodgings for travellers. Such houses tended over time to foster recreation and itinerant entertainers and to be a focus of not just wealthy travellers but plyers of wares and trades-but always perhaps within the context of a dominant use by the relatively wealthy. Such drinking houses catered for catholic drinking tastes-spirits, wines and beers. The taverns were originally concerned with selling wine, the availability of wine itself being boosted by the cultivation of vines in the medieval monasteries. Such taverns, by the late eighteenth century, were virtually indistinguishable from inns and met the needs of the casual drinker, catering for a wide range of users. The alehouse was the traditional village drinking house; it had none of the accommodation or the formal entertainment patterns of the inn. It was effectively the local community drinking and meeting place and was

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