SCEMS | EMDG | Tyler Rainford

Sheffield Centre for Early Modern Studies

Distilled Spirits and Everyday Life in Early Modern England

<p>In 1751, the novelist Henry Fielding decried the emergence of a ‘new Kind of Drunkenness, unknown to our Ancestors’ in London. The source of this nefarious state of stupefaction was distilled alcohol, primarily in the form of gin. For Fielding and many of his contemporaries, the consumption of distilled spirits in drams symbolised a radical new departure in how early modern English people drank alcohol. Drinking drams, it was argued, was simply a means to get drunk. This is significant, because if dram drinking developed ‘without ritual forms to structure its use’, historian Thomas Brennan is right to argue that it ‘had no social meaning beyond its intoxicating effects’. Although the so-called “Gin Craze” to which Fielding was referring has been debunked as a moral panic, historians have yet to fully articulate the role distilled spirits played in quotidian drinking routines beyond the metropolis. Through a survey of diaries and depositions, this paper will demonstrate that distilled spirits were comfortably accommodated into traditional drinking customs and rituals from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. Rather than exclusively functioning as dangerous catalysts for unbridled intoxication, contemporaries understood the effects of distilled spirits and moderated their consumption accordingly. Ultimately, distilled spirits were consumed in multifaceted and complex ways. What is more, they were only one constituent part of diversified landscape of alcohol consumption, where personal preferences, notions of taste, and individual contexts informed drinking habits more than the intoxicating potential of any one drink.</p>

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SCEMS | EMDG | Tyler Rainford

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SCEMS | EMDG | Tyler Rainford

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