Drinking history

Drinking history | Podcast | History Extra

"We assume that the rules that apply to our drinking have always applied, they must be the eternal rules of life. You know we are in Britain today you would tend to, if you get drunk, get drunk on a Friday night. You wouldn't get drunk on you know a Sunday morning which is actually what medieval England would do. Sunday morning was the proper time to to go to the ale house and get lathered... in Aztec society only old people were allowed to get drunk usually...

Religious drinking. People used to drink in order to have, have a spiritual experience. I mean when I say people used, the Ancient Egyptians did this. They had the festival of drunkenness... once a year, possibly twice a year and I was quite sure on this, the Ancient Egyptians would get massively drunk in the Temple of Hathor. So drunk that they vomited. And then they would drink more until they vomited again. And then drink more and more and more. This was the hardest core drinking I've ever found in history until eventually after a bit of an, a drunken orgy frankly, they would fall asleep in the very early hours of them the morning and then you, whilst you sleep the priests would wheel in essentially a great big statue of the goddess Hathor and at dawn they would wake everybody up by erm shouting and screaming and begging drums and everything and everyone but I don't know if you've ever been woken up while you're still drunk but it's a very weird disorientating feeling and you will wake up and suddenly see this massive statue of the goddess there in the dawn light and that was meant to give you contact with the deity and produce a wonderful religious experience...

Beer is actually more nutritious than bread. By which I mean if you've got a pile of barley and you want to get the most calories out of it then you should make beer and not bread. Beer also contains vitamins - it's got Vitamin B which is very important. There is a theory that beer was actually invented before bread was. But yes it's liquid bread... Prior to the nineteenth century everybody drank all day. And by everybody I mean men, women and children. By all day I mean with breakfast...

The reason we now in the West have pushed drinking into an evening slot is actually... Victorian factory owners who wanted their workforce to be completely sober because when you're operating um you know heavy dangerous machinery you probably shouldn't have a few drinks inside you...

In Viking pantheon Odin was drunk all the time. Odin made a point of never drinking anything other than wine. He didn't even eat any food - he just survived on wine and his name means the frenzied one... the only one that i came across where drinking is the province of the major god, the senior god...

The gin crisis is fascinating partially because it's the first erm drugs panic in a lot of ways... An absolute rule of history is that it's fine for rich people to get drunk but when poor people get drunk erm the powers that be get very very worried... the rich at the time were drinking spirits but they were drinking brandy and drinking an awful lot of brandy but nobody ever suggested banning brandy or taxing brandy but gin was the cause celebre of how, how do we get rid of this?...

You know when Clint Eastwood goes into the saloon, orders a drink, barman gives him one and he just tosses the coin on the counter and he never asks how much was that and the barman says oh that was so many cents and you know gets change or anything, it's always just toss a coin on the counter. That is absolutely historically accurate because the way it worked was you would have a two bit saloon and a four bit saloon in each town usually. Well in fact you'd have many saloons. But if you went into a two bit salon every drink no matter what cost two bits and these were the down market saloons... it was like a sort of pound store as it were... that phrase actually of course still survives in America. You can still say this is in some two bit town, meaning this is the down market version. The four bit town would be the upmarket version...

Part of the tradition which goes back a long way: the notion of the man of authority. Will drink a lot without getting drunk... it's very strange: nobody would say oh yes it's wonderful I can take LSD and never hallucinate or I can take coffee but I never wake up"