Before the 16th century, the English language had no common word for a habitually drunk person. There were a couple of rare coinages that got close, but they never caught on, nor did they focus on intoxication, just on over-consumption.[1] Then, in 1520, the word “drunkard” appeared, and, by the end of the century, preachers and penny pamphleteers were foaming at the mouth about drunkards and their depravity. I’ll describe the foam a bit later; my point right now is about the birth of a new identity defined by intoxication, an identity that hadn’t existed before.[2]

Yes, there’s earlier condemnation of drunkenness, lots of it. In the Middle Ages, drunkenness was the better part of gluttony, one of the seven deadly sins. Sermons against gluttony warned that drinking could produce dire effects. It might turn you into an animal–or a series of animals, each lower and more disgusting than the last. It might lure demons or the devil himself to your side. It might cause you to spontaneously combust. Gluttony was depicted as a swollen-bellied man or woman eating and guzzling ale–or vomiting great streams of it. But, no matter how disgusting, gluttony was just one of seven deadly sins to which all human beings were vulnerable. People may have been partial to one sin or another, depending on their habits, resources, and friends, but there was nothing existential about gluttony or any other deadly sin: they were all interchangeable instruments of evil.

More importantly, in the rhetoric of gluttony, there’s little difference between too much food and too much alcohol. The glutton could be a tavern-fly who drinks to insensibility every night, or the glutton could be Eve, trading her perfect life in the Garden of Eden for a few delicious mouthfuls of fruit. In other words, the glutton simply represented dangerous consumption in all its forms, and we were all vulnerable to it. Dangerous consumption mattered, claimed those in power, because glutting the body starved the soul and because food and drink, along with clothing, preserved the class distinctions that preserved the order of the world.[3]

English literature written before 1520 features lots of drunkenness but no drunkards. Chaucer’s Miller is drunk. The Cook who follows him is more drunk, so drunk he falls off his horse, but neither is described as a drunkard. In some of the mystery plays devoted to Noah, his wife gets hammered with her girlfriends before (and during) the flood, but they’re not called drunkards, even though they’re often drunk. Drunkard is simply not a an identity yet.

That changed in the early modern period when drunkards began popping up everywhere, at least in print. What gave rise to this new being? One factor was the Reformation, which stepped up efforts to discourage excessive drinking, not just with new laws, but with targeted preaching. Abandoning the seven deadly sins in favor of the ten commandments, Reformers treated drunkenness in a new way: not as a form of gluttony, but as a separate offense that broke the first and most important commandment, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” This commandment may not seem relevant to intoxication, but the connection was based on a medieval trope: that the tavern was a rival “church” where the sinful went instead of regular church. As the trope grew into a full-blown allegory, with the tavern assigned its own priest, prayers, and liturgy, intoxication became the worship of an “evil god,” making drunkenness a form of idolatry, an offense as widely condemned in Reformation Europe as terrorism is today.[4]

Drunkenness also became an issue with the rise of a popular new institution, the alehouse. Driving business to alehouses were large economic changes, such as enclosure, which forced subsistence farmers off their land and widened the gap between rich and poor. Such upheaval, added to the Reformation’s dismantling of charitable religious institutions, created a worrisome new social group, “the unruly poor,” some of whose unruliness was alcohol-fueled.

Much higher up the social ladder were debauched winners in the new economy squandering their (or their fathers’) fortunes on drink. The spread of printing created a market for penny pamphlets condemning their excesses, a market Puritan writers were happy to supply.[5] Regardless of people’s actual drinking behavior, which recent research has shown to be complex and varied, writing about alcohol became polarized, very pro or very con.[6] Out of this landscape staggered the drunkard, on whose lurching shoulders could be stacked almost everything that was wrong with the world.

The drunkard is different in essence from the glutton, even though the two have some similar features.[7] A Calvinist diatribe titled The Drunkard’s Character indicates just how different in its opening words, which call the drunkard “a newe creature,” a separate, self-created species that is neither human nor animal but demonic.[8] In hundreds of pages explaining how this disgusting new creature differs from disgusting old creatures, author Richard Younge expands on themes familiar from medieval sermons, including horrifying descriptions of the physical changes wrought by drinking.[9] But now the familiar details are not terrible dangers into which we all might fall if we overindulge but attributes of an unspeakably vile “other.” Says Younge of the drunkard:

[T]here is not the most lothsome and despicable creature that crawles upon the earth, which he shall not once envy, and wish to have been, rather than what he is.

The Drunkard’s Character goes on in this vein for 692 apoplectic pages, invoking scripture, ancient history, and natural science to identify drunkards as abominations in themselves and sources of every imaginable evil. Throughout these pages, Younge’s fundamental message is that drunkards are the polar opposite of people who drink alcohol because they are thirsty. Those who drink to slake their thirst are “the seed of the woman” (407) and partake in God’s nature, whereas drunkards are “the seed of the serpent” (407) and partake in the devil’s nature. To Younge, the contest between the pious Puritan pampheteer and the devilish drunkards jeering at him from the tavern is the front line of the battle between good and evil. Irredeemably damned, these elite forces of Satan use clever strategies, such as proposing toasts to people’s health, to drag as many souls as possible down to hell with them.

They’re able to do so because drunkenness, to Younge, is an “infection,” easily spread through drinking toasts and other forms of peer pressure. The language of infection is everywhere in The Drunkard’s Character, underscoring the idea that the drunkard has–and is–a contagious, incurable disease, one that weakens the whole body politic. In addition to metaphorical disease, Younge even claims that drunkards cause literal outbreaks of plague simply by being so terrible that God has to smite an entire population! But the drunkards’ own disease has no cure, save divine intervention. Younge’s goal is simply to prevent further contagion.

Younge never stops making the case that the drunkard is “other,” or the opposite of “us.” He makes this case with contrasts such as “seed of the woman” and “seed of the serpent,” and he does it with diction, distancing drunkards from himself and the reader by speaking of them in the third person and by offering prayers such as “Lord grant wee may know no more of them, then by hearesay” (447). He never seeks to reform drunkards, a futile undertaking:

Now why have I unmasked their faces? Is it in hope to humble them? No, for I have acknowledged, yeah proved, that all the water in the Sea will not wash one of these Black-mores white (688).

Using the nascent language of racial inferiority, [10] Younge insists that the drunkard has undergone a permanent existential change from which he cannot be redeemed, except by God, who’s not interested. Young’s stated goal is to save the reader, who is still one of “us,” from undergoing the same existential change. His work, carried to North America by his fellow Puritans, would help shape the conversation about intoxication on both sides of the Atlantic. His despised drunkard would prove more influential than he could have dreamed, popping up even where he was most denied, in the figure of the alcoholic.

Continue to “The Invention of the Alcoholic.”

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[1] The coinages are the Anglo-Saxon oferdrincere (over-drinker) and the Middle English gulchcup (gulp-cup), but neither refers to intoxication, just to drinking too much and/or too fast. Moreover, they represent verbal anomalies, not words in common use. When words linked with alcohol over-consumption are personified in Middle English, they normally refer to people who sell or serve alcohol, words such as “tippler” (one who sells ale). Some of these words later refer to habitually drunk people, a transformation aligned with the one this essay traces. See the next footnote.

[2] There are other new words besides “drunkard” in the 16th century, including “bibber” (heavy drinker, 1530s), “wine-bibber” (heavy wine drinker, 1530s), tosspot (heavy drinker, 1560s), tippler (transformed from ale-seller to habitual drinker, 1570s).

[3] From the 13th century, sumptuary laws dictated the type and quantity of food you could serve (pegged to the rank of your highest-ranking guest). Condemning the waste and moral pollution of conspicuous consumption, sumptuary laws actually reflected the status anxieties of the hereditary aristocracy at times when commoners were discovering new routes to wealth and power. Laws governing apparel (which ranks could wear which items of clothing) are more familiar to us now, but laws governing food were just as important.

[4] Despite frequent fear-mongering about it, the English never became quite as exercised about idolatry as Reformers would have liked–or as Americans did about terrorism. Yes, there were bursts of popular iconoclasm in the reign of Edward VI and during the English Civil War, but most of the “war on idolatry” was state-sponsored destruction intended to enfeeble the Catholic Church and enrich the crown.

[5] Other tavern vices, such as gambling, swearing and whoring, were condemned as well. Tobacco use was considered intoxicating and so was condemned as a form of drunkenness.

[6] In England, this polarization was political, as the anti-Puritan Cavalier Poets and others supporting the king in the years leading up to the Civil War embraced “heavy drinking as a mark of bravado and courage.” See Mark Hailwood, Alehouses and Good Fellowship in Early Modern England (London: Boydell, 2014) 119.

[7] Compare the allegorical figure Gluttony, which appears in poems such as Piers Plowman or The Faerie Queene. Yes, there are continuities, but allegorical figures personify internal impulses, whereas the drunkard–and his female counterpart the alewife–represent real persons in a social landscape. Drunkards may sometimes look like representations of gluttony, but they make different demands on reality.

[8] Richard Younge (“R. Junius”), The Drunkard’s Character: Or, a true Drunkard with such sinnes as raigne in him, viz. Pride, Enmity, Ignorance, Atheisme, Idlenesse, Adultery, Murther with many the like, lively set forth in their colours (London, 1638) 1.

[9] In “Blurred Forms: An Unsteady History of Drunkenness,” historian Kristen D. Burton analyzes the various ways that temperance literature describes alcohol’s effects on the body. I strongly recommend the article to anyone interested in alcohol and history. Also recommended is Dr. Burton’s web site, which features other writing on that topic.

[10] While the fully developed racism that justified the Atlantic slave trade is still a few years away, recent research has demonstrated that blackness had already become a way of denoting existential inferiority, moral weakness, and evil by the end of the 16th century, when Elizabeth I ordered the deportation of “blackamoores.”