Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 2014 Change Is Brewing: The nduI strialization of the London Beer-Brewing Trade, 1400-1750 John R. Krenzke Loyola University Chicago Recommended Citation Krenzke, John R., "Change Is Brewing: The ndusI trialization of the London Beer-Brewing Trade, 1400-1750" (2014). Dissertations. 1276. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/1276 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 2014 John R. Krenzke LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO CHANGE IS BREWING: THE INDUSTRIALIZATION OF THE LONDON BEER-BREWING TRADE, 1400-1750 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY PROGRAM IN HISTORY BY JOHN R. KRENZKE CHICAGO, ILLINOIS AUGUST 2014 Copyright by John R. Krenzke, 2014 All rights reserved ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It is my great pleasure to thank the organizations that have supported this project. The History Department and Graduate School of Loyola University Chicago, along with the Arthur J. Schmitt Foundation, have provided me with a series of fellowships that allowed me to complete this project. I would also like to thank the staffs of the libraries at Loyola University Chicago, Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Arlington Heights Memorial Library for their assistance at various stages of this project. I am also appreciative of the assistance provided by the staffs of London’s Guildhall Library, The National Archives at Kew, and the British Library during my research. I am also exceedingly appreciative of those who have assisted me during the completion of this manuscript. I would like to thank members of the faculty of the History Department at Loyola University Chicago who have given feedback on this project at various points including Dr. Kyle Roberts, Dr. Suzanne Kaufman, Dr. John Donoghue, and especially my advisor, Dr. Robert Bucholz. I would also like to thank the members of the Midwest Conference on British Studies, especially James Sack and Eric Tenbus, and the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies for allowing me to present on different aspects of this project in its formative stages. iii Finally, and most importantly, I would like to thank my family and friends for their support while completing this work. In particular I would like to thank my wife, parents, and sister, whose love and support made this project possible. iv For my Wife and Parents PREFACE I began this work as an attempt to answer how the brewing trade in London developed in the seventeenth century. Judith Bennett’s Ale, Beer and Brewsters has examined the medieval English brewing trade from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries; whereas, Peter Mathias’ masterful treatment of the English brewing trade examined it in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and was followed by T.R. Gourvish and R.G. Wilson’s examination of the English brewing industry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When I started this work I sought to answer why the seventeenth century had been neglected in the historiography on English brewing. What I discovered by examining the London brewing trade in that century was not an industry lying dormant, ready to be awakened by the call for industrialization. Instead what I have found is an industry that was shaped by its medieval forebears and would in turn shape the trade as it became one of Britain’s greatest examples of industrialization in the eighteenth century. I have limited this work to London and its environs. London was hardly representative of England as a whole in the early modern period and I do not claim that brewing trade of London was representative of England’s brewing industry at that time. However, throughout the early modern period London’s brewers proved to be remarkably adept at adapting to change within the industry and were always among the first-movers in the English brewing trade. Their ability to adapt and change was not limited to the vi seventeenth century. Instead London’s brewers were in a state of nearly constant flux as they adapted to the whims of the Crown, the City, the guild, and their patrons. I have limited the scope of this project from 1400 to 1750 precisely because most of the important changes within the early modern trade occurred between those dates. Before 1400 London’s brewing trade was much like other towns within England. After 1400 the introduction of hops and beer-brewing immigrants to London and the City’s desire to ensure that the trade was regulated according to its wishes helped to shape the industry into something different than its nearest competitors in size and population. This project ends in 1750 because the latter half of the eighteenth century saw the transformation of the trade in London into one dominated by industrialized firms quite different than their sixteenth- and seventeenth-century predecessors. The main difference between those firms was one of scale; however, the firms that came to dominate the industrialized trade of the eighteenth century were built upon solid foundations laid by their seventeenth-century forebears. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii PREFACE vi LIST OF TABLES x LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS xi ABSTRACT xii INTRODUCTION: BEER AND BRITANNIA 1 Why do We Study Beer? 2 Overview 6 CHAPTER ONE: COAL, HOPS, AND IMMIGRANTS: THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE LONDON BREWING TRADE, 1400-1650 14 The Ingredients: Water, Malt, Yeast, and Gruit 14 The Production of Ale in Medieval England 21 Ale and the Household Economy 24 The Introduction of Hops 29 The Introduction of Beer into England 32 The Cultivation of Hops in England 35 Beer and Beer Brewing in London 39 The Growth of Coal in the London Brewing Trade 44 Coal Connections: The Growth of the London Coal Trade 47 Coal and the Brewers of London 49 Towards a New Industry 53 CHAPTER TWO: BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE: ADAPTING TO CHANGE IN THE BREWERS’ COMPANY 55 Beer and Ale, Native and Foreign 58 The London Ale Brewers’ Guild: Competition and Conflict in the Fifteenth Century 61 The Coming of Stranger Brewers to London 70 Beer vs. Ale 77 A Position of Strength?: The City of London and the Ale Brewers’ Guild 80 The Machiavellian City 87 Was “Female to Male as Ale was to Beer”? 90 CHAPTER THREE: MAKING WAY: THE NATIVIZATION OF THE LONDON BEER BREWING TRADE, 1500-1600 92 viii Anti-Stranger Feeling and Legislation before 1550 94 The Problem of Strangers 99 What did It Mean to be English? 101 The Attack on Strangers in the Brewers’ Company 106 The City’s Attack on the Stranger Community 109 The Regulation of Strangers in the Brewing Trade 114 The Nativization of the Beer-Brewing Trade 116 Building an Industry 121 The Brewing Industry in 1600 128 CHAPTER FOUR: THE WAGES OF SIN: THE GROWTH AND IMPACTS OF THE EXCISE ON BEER BREWING IN LONDON, 1600-1689 130 An Untapped Source: The Taxation of the Brewing Industry before the Excise 134 The Laboratory of Taxation 138 A Trial Balloon: James Duppa’s 1637 Beer Tax 144 The Brewers’ Company 1600-1640 154 Crisis: Civil War and the Excise, 1642-1647 162 Resistance by the Brewers to the Excise and Commonwealth, 1647-1660 169 Status Quo: The Continuance of the Excise following the Restoration 174 Calamity and Catastrophe: The Fires of the Restoration 177 A Company Divided 180 CHAPTER FIVE: “THE RUINED CONDITION OF THIS REVENUE ON BEER AND ALE” : THE EFFECTS OF THE EXCISE ON THE BREWING INDUSTRY IN LONDON, 1689-1750 189 The Revolution of 1688-89 and the Expansion of the Excise 192 An Imperfect Science: The Art of Gauging for the Excise 205 The Brewers’ Handbook: Deceit, Bribery, and Concealment 211 Stout, Three-Threads, and Double-Beer: The Rise of Strong Beers in London 219 The London Brewers’ Crisis 227 The Rise of the Industrial Brewer 233 The London Brewing Trade, 1700-1750 239 CONCLUSION: THREE HUNDRED YEARS OF CHANGE 244 BIBLIOGRAPHY 254 VITA 278 ix LIST OF TABLES Table 1. Lansdowne MS 1215/108: “Grosse Quantities of Strong Beer and Ale and Small Beer in 15 years Ended 24th June 1698 with the Duty of Excise Ariseing from thence” 195 x LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS BL British Library, London GL Guildhall Library, London NA National Archives, Kew PROB Probate Wills of the Archdiocese of Canterbury xi ABSTRACT London’s early modern brewing trade was a dynamic one that was constantly in flux throughout the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. This dissertation seeks to better understand how issues of gender, ethnicity, and class changed and shaped London’s early modern brewing industry. Women played a vital role in the production and marketing of ale in London’s medieval brewing trade. They were displaced from that position of prominence through the introduction of hops by foreign immigrants, known to strangers to their hosts, and the desire of the City of London to more closely regulate the trade in ale and beer. Those forces combined to marginalize women in the trade as they were replaced by male strangers brewing beer. Those strangers came to control the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century brewing trade. Their product, beer, was superior to English ale in durability and cost less to produce. As London began to transition from an ale-drinking community to a beer- drinking one, the community of beer-brewing strangers came under attack on several fronts.