Working Class or Workers’ Classes at the Alehouse?

The ballads in the “Drinking and Good Fellowship” section of Volume 1 of the Pepys ballad collection seem to fall into three general categories. Some, like "Here’s to thee Plain Harry" (1.432-433) and "Round Boys indeed" (1.442-443), focus on positive elements of drinking culture like alehouse camaraderie and male homosocial bonds. Other ballads in the section, like "The Drunkards Dyall" (1.428-429), "Roaring Dick of Dover" (1.434-435), and "Fowre wittie Gossips disposed to be Merry" (1.436-437), go beyond these initial positive elements toward a conclusion that brings in a note of debt, loss or regret. Finally, ballads like "A goodfellowes complaint against strong beere"(1.438-439), "No body Loves mee" (1.430-431), and "The backes complaint, for bellies wrong" (1.446-447), show a superficial side of drinking and good fellowship, through repenting and recovering drinkers’ laments. Despite these major thematic (and moral) differences, all of the ballads in the section also share certain common themes: fellowship and company; debt, coins, or pawning; healths and toasts. Perhaps we expect that a collection of ballads will cover a range of opinions on drinking and the rowdy alehouse life. We certainly expect that “Drinking and Fellowship” will include the tropes of coins, beer, friends and comic mishaps. However, what we might not expect are the complicated ways that these varied ballads present themes of middle or working class identity. This short review of these ballads will focus on the ways in which this rising class is described (or describes itself, depending on who these anonymous authors really are) by these “Drinking and Good Fellowship” ballads.

Are these ballads a site for inventing and developing a working class group identity? Or are there multiple and specific identities within the developing definition of an “alehouse class”? Patricia Fumerton writes that “the alehouse offered the unemployed and poor (including even employed local residents) an alternative community and an alternative home” (Fumerton 494). In her article, “Not Home: Alehouses, Ballads, and the Vagrant Husband in Early Modern England,” Fumerton considers the alehouse as at once a potentially domestic space and a direct opposite to the actual home. Indeed, strains of home-making and family-building are common strains throughout these alehouse ballads. At the same time, though, while the ballads do allow us to see a unified working class gathering space—the idea of keeping “company” repeats throughout these texts—they also go out of their way to assert specific occupational loyalties, and to make employment a central identity category. Thus, the alehouse and its ballads are inherently contradictory sites for class study: they are at once home spaces and workplaces, they at once condone and condemn drinking, and the fellowship they depict is at once blind and guild-based.

"Round boyes indeed" (1.442-443) is an example of this dual pull: a ballad firmly in favor of drinking and revelry with friends, it is at once an ode to all working men (“Our livings we get by our hands,/ as plainly you may understand,/ Whilst many gallants sell their land,/ for money to serve their need”) and a very specific call to shoemakers (“Shoemakers sonnes were princes borne” and “S. Hughs bones up we take in hast,/ both pincers, punching alle and last,/ The gentle Craft was never disgrast,/ they have money to serve their need”). Within their comfortable home at the alehouse, after singing general praise for manual laborers, these shoemakers maintain their own specific group identity. Similarly, in "It is bad Jesting with a Halter" (1.440-441), the drinking protagonists are introduced first generally, as “Three Joviall sparkes together,” and then specifically, according to their careers, later in the stanza as “three lusty souldiers.” Each of these ballads functions on two levels: first, in a manner that appeals to and includes any working class alehouse listener, and then according to specific details of a single trade. The emphasis on specific careers in ballads like these nuance the question of a “domestic” alehouse; they describe instead a place where the domestic and family-based world collides with an employee and commerce-based identity politic that is rooted in craft pride and trade loyalty.

This pull between general class camaraderie and individual worker identity is not clean cut, and it is not necessarily a choice between diametric opposites. The characters in these ballads can and do exist at once as working class everymen and workers’ guild representative. In "How Mault doth deal with every one" (1. 427), the personified “Master Mault” fights with a range of working class heroes, rendering each of them drunker than the last. Mault’s opponents read as a veritable laundry list of popular alehouse working professionals: they include a miller, a smith, a carpenter, a shoemaker, a weaver, a tinker, a tailor, a tinker, a sailor, a chapman, a mason, a bricklayer, and a laborer. The author takes pains to have each man carry a tool of his trade, and distinguishes each approach to Mault according to a specific type of labor. At the same time, though, the working men are unified in their failed attacks on Master Mault, and no individual, regardless of his specific skills, can avoid being felled by drunkenness. Here, we see the individual workers reunited as a single, laboring class-identified unit, brought together by their common weakness for Mault. A final laborer’s voice, that of the narrating balladeer, ends the ballad with a plea for free drinks from the hostess. Guild difference is once again subsumed by group company and fellowship.

A similar return to unified class status (one that is unified without eliding individual skills and jobs) is evident in "A Mad Crue" (1.444-445), where each stanza ends with a fill-in-the-blank style space for many working class professions. Joining the previous list of workers are a malt-man, a fiddler, a horse-courser, a hangman, a beadle, a sergeant, a cook, a bear ward, a broker, a pillory, a brewer, a thief, a cuckold, a beggar, and a drunkard. This author even includes a midwife, a milkmaid and an oyster-wench. Again, though each of these professions is given its own specific spot in a chorus, and was clearly included to please listeners from each professional group, they also are unified in that they each say the same thing, over and over, a unified working class alehouse voice.

This voice of the alehouse ballad is inherently singular and many. “Drinking and Good Fellowship” is a collection of ballads that are at once fiercely group oriented and divisive. The ballads range in moral scope, in the range of voices they represent, and in the types of messages they send. Throughout, they offer a window into the development of an alehouse culture and a new class identity. The details of this contested space and shifting class marker are debatable. But the ballads make clear that working through these details should always involve good beer, good song, and good company.

~ Simone Chess

Works Cited

Fumerton, Patricia. “Not Home: Alehouses, Ballads, and the Vagrant Husband in Early Modern England.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, vol 32, is.3, Fall 2002. Duke U.P.

Pepys, Samuel. The Pepys Ballads: Facsimile Volume. Ed. W.G. Day. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1987.