Drink (9 page)

The trouble had begun in AD 376, when two bands of Goths had appeared at the edge of Roman territory on the banks of the river Danube. They wanted sanctuary from the Huns, an even more barbaric species of barbarian, who had invaded their own country. In return for a place to settle within the Roman Empire, they pledged to support it with their arms. The offer was accepted, and perhaps two hundred thousand people crossed the Danube. They were disarmed, fed with refuse and dog meat, robbed of their children, and shunted around like cattle. Unsurprisingly, they revolted. They commenced by plundering the Balkans, and although they did not have the science to lay siege to cities, they destroyed the agriculture of the area and decimated its population. It required several Roman armies and ten years of campaigning to control them. Shortly afterward the Huns themselves invaded Roman territory via the Caucasus. In 401, the Goths revolted once more and marched into Italy. Thereafter, the barbarian incursions came thick and fast. The Ostrogoths attacked in the east, the Vandals in the west, and the Visigoths through the center. In 410 Rome itself was sacked.

Worse was to come. The barbarians started fighting one another, and a hundred conflicts, some trivial, others major engagements, occupied the next generation, until they were distracted from their squabbles by the reappearance in force, in AD 446, of the Huns. The Huns were Eurasian nomads who were expert horsemen, superb archers, and intelligent tacticians, as capable of laying siege to cities in the best Roman style as of massacring their populations. They were objects of especial terror to Christians, who suspected them of being the harbingers of the Apocalypse. Their leader, Attila, was identified as “the Scourge of God,” sent to chastise unbelievers and to test the faithful.

The short-term influence of the Huns on the production and consumption of alcohol in Europe was significant. They destroyed vineyards, butchered their workers, and drank the cellars dry. They possessed a number of their own rituals for drinking, centered around the consumption of
kumis
—fermented mare’s milk. Kumis is a rare example of alcohol obtained from animal, as opposed to vegetable, sources. It was weak—around 2 percent ABV—and was neglected by the Huns in favor of wine when the latter was available. Despite, however, being the conquerors of substantial tracts of cultivated land, the Huns remained true to their nomadic roots. They neither liked nor understood metropolitan life, so did not linger in the cities that they sacked, some of which survived their visit with little more damage, albeit depopulated of their inhabitants, than scorch marks and bloodstains. Attila died in AD 453, his empire collapsed within ten years, and the Huns vanished—as if they had indeed been evil spirits.

The barbarian invasions split the western Roman Empire into a collection of warring states. The trade links that had supplied, for instance, Britain with Falernian wine were broken. The use of currency collapsed. The homogeneity that Rome had imposed across the continent dissolved, and the nations of modern Europe together with their different languages and customs were born amid ashes and slaughter. The invaders established new systems of manners and government, which placed a different worth on drink from the classical and Christian ideals that had prevailed throughout Europe. The Germanic tribes who had become the new rulers of the western empire possessed heroic ideologies, which promoted vigor and activity above organization and piety. Their heroes were monsters—of superhuman strength and appetite—binge drinkers as well as serial killers. Their impact on drinking habits was most pronounced in the peripheral parts of the empire, particularly in Britain. Whereas in Italy and Gaul vestiges of Roman taste and Roman administration lingered on under the new rulers, they all but vanished in Rome’s most western province.

Rome had lost control over Britain around AD 412, when the emperorHonororius issued an edict advising its inhabitants that they must fend for themselves. They made a last desperate appeal to the metropolis in AD 446—the province was being torn apart: “The barbarians drive us into the sea, and the sea drives us back to the barbarians. Between these, two deadly alternatives confront us—drowning, or slaughter.” But the appeal went unanswered, and thereafter Britain slipped back over the horizon into the Dark Ages. The principal tribes to profit from the collapse of Roman authority in Britain were the native Picts and Celts, and the immigrant Angles and Saxons who arrived from what are now Denmark and Germany. The Anglo-Saxon invasion was piecemeal and began around the middle of the fifth century when Vortigen, a Kentish warlord, invited Horst and Hengist, the leaders of bands of Saxon mercenaries, to take land in the Thames Estuary and protect him against the Picts who were running riot through the island. Negotiations were carried out at a banquet, and a later record of the event notes the introduction of a new drinking custom to England. The mercenaries were the hosts, and after they had feasted Vortigen, a “young lady came out of her chamber bearing a golden cup full of wine, with which she approached the king and, making a low courtesy, said to him, ‘Lauerd King, wassail!’” Vortigen was struck by her beauty and asked his interpreter how he should answer. “She called you Lord King,” said the interpreter, and “offered to drink your health. Your answer to her must be ‘Drinc heil! ’” Vortigen accordingly answered “Drinc heil” and bade her drink, after which he took the cup from her hand, kissed her, and drank himself. The girl was Hengist’s daughter and so captivated Vortigen that he asked for her hand in marriage, and gave over Kent as the bride price.

The Saxons and the other warrior bands that followed Horst and Hengist into Britain were keener to plunder than teach its inhabitants the proper way to wassail. The country was broken up into fiefdoms, and society reverted to tribal values. In the absence of the uniform law and order that the Romans had imposed, trade collapsed, the ports were empty, the roads and sewers fell into disrepair, and without a critical mass of artisans, merchants, their servants, and their slaves to populate them, the towns were abandoned. The new arrivals brought their own social unit, the clan, and own style of settlement, the village. The population of these communities numbered in their hundreds, in contrast to the tens of thousands who had lived in the Roman cities.

A corresponding shift in drinking habits occurred. Whereas the Romanized Briton’s ideal tipple might have be a krater of fifteen-year-old Falernian wine mixed with water, consumed at a leisurely pace and accompanied by a discussion of the latest literature out of Rome, Anglo-Saxons drank for the glory of intoxication—for a joyride to the stars—and did not care overmuch what vehicle they used for transportation. They distinguished four generic kinds of alcoholic drink:
medu
(mead),
ealu
(ale),
win
(wine), and
beor,
whose identity is a matter of debate. Mead had the most cachet. Rather as the Hellenic hero Prometheus had stolen fire from the sun god, so the chief Anglo-Saxon deity had undertaken a quest for the good of mankind whose object was the Mead of Wisdom. In poetry, heroes yearned for and returned to mead halls, where they might make mead boasts and take mead oaths that held a particular sanctity. Ale, however, was the common drink. It was a quintessentially Germanic beverage, common to all the Teutonic tribes who now ruled over continental Europe. But whereas many of these, in particular in Gaul and Spain, had taken to wine and were beginning to blend Roman drinking habits with their own, in Britain ale ruled supreme. Wine and its associated rituals were all but forgotten. To judge by archaeological records, in the form of amphorae shards, the supply dried up in the century following the fall of Rome.

Grave goods show that the Anglo-Saxons employed a variety of drinking vessels—cups, mugs, glasses, and cattle horns. These last were decorated with bands of silver or gold and had the quality that they could not be put down unless they were empty, and so were passed from hand to hand or drained in a single draft. Smaller vessels have also been recovered from the graves of warriors and princes—Anglo-Saxon shot-cups—whose diminutive size implies they were used to hold a more potent brew than mead, ale, or wine. This might have been the mysterious
beor,
which was stronger and sweeter than ale and rarer than mead and, while not wine, ranked at least in strength with wine, and whose consumption led to a state known in Old English as
beordruncen,
i.e., very drunk. Two culprits have been identified as
beor
: a type of super-strength cider, which, in theory, can be fermented to almost 18 percent ABV; and a concentrated liquor freeze-distilled out of ale, mead, or cider, which can be as strong as 50 percent ABV, and which requires little more effort to make than leaving a barrel of whichever brew out of doors over winter.

Whatever the potion and the measure, alcohol was generally consumed in a mead hall. Every village contained one or more of these edifices that were the houses of the elite, who used them to perpetuate their wealth, fame, and power through the liberal distribution of food, drink, and gifts. Halls were the epicenters of Anglo-Saxon culture. Gladiators, the theater, chariot races, and other similar spectacle entertainments had vanished with the Romans. Leisure time—and there was plenty of it, at least half of every year— was spent in hunting, in playing games, in practicing how to fight, and in drinking. The mead hall was a communal gathering place— both kitchen and cultural center—where people were fed, where they declared their allegiances, and where they celebrated their collective identity. Halls varied greatly in size—the smallest were perhaps ten by fifteen feet, the largest a hundred or more yards in length. All were symbolic of the relative power of their owner. A sense of the status they conferred, and the desire to build them, is preserved in
Beowulf,
the first epic poem to be written in Old English. The poem begins with the raising of a hall by King Hrothgar, who, after success as a raider, and in winning treasure and followers, wished to celebrate his triumphs:

Although halls were built for formal purposes, they were nonetheless lively places whose ceremonies revolved around drinking. Hall-goers were serenaded by bards, who were inspired to sing by their particular god, Kvasir, whose name is a derivation of “strong ale.” Kvasir, according to legend, was slain by two malicious dwarfs who mixed his blood with alcohol to make “the mead of inspiration.” Anyone who drank of this magic potion could thereafter compose poetry and speak wise words. The warriors in the hall who listened to the odes of heroism responded by making mead- or ale-pledges, oaths of a sacred nature, which usually nominated acts of rapine or slaughter as their aim and which they were expected to fulfill on pain of shame. According to a saying of the period: “In war is proved what was pledged over ale.” Women also had a clearly defined role in hall etiquette. They acted as cupbearers and were referred to by the bards as “peace weavers,” in the sense that by passing a drink from warrior to warrior, they maintained the friendship between them. The cup, or horn, was handed to the drinker in strict order of precedence—first to the hall lord, often with the injunction to be joyful at drinking, then to the
duguo
—the elder retainers—next the
geoguo
—young retainers—and finally to guests.

Morale in the mead hall, among the warriors and the women who served and who drank with them, was the barometer of happiness for the clan. In
Beowulf,
disorder in the hall is presented as a kind of sacrilege. A monster by the name of Grendel appears in the poem. He kills and eats Hrothgar’s retainers, who, despite repeated oaths, are unable to defend themselves:

The scribe of
Beowulf
was a Christian and decorated the pagan tale of monsters, blood feuds, and stolen treasure with Catholic sentiments. Christianity was the brightest light in the Dark Ages. Its egalitarian creed, and the fervor of its missionaries, won over the beer-drinking barbarians who now ruled in place of Rome, and forged links between their disparate and antagonistic kingdoms. However, its clergy were forced to adapt their doctrines to accommodate the tastes and habits of their new flocks, and European Christianity acquired its own peculiar flavor. It was considered impossible to make barbarians live by the recommendations of Clement of Alexandria and give up heavy drinking, which was so central to etiquette in the case of princes, and the principal form of leisure for everyone else, so this aspect of their culture had to be tolerated at the risk of losing souls.