A flat tyre on my bike made me take the bus this morning, which meant that I reached the book review section of the 29 September edition of The Economist. A paragraph in a review of A Little History of the English Country Church by Roy Strong caught my eye:
Yet these upheavals were nothing, Sir Roy claims, in comparison to the puritanical purges of the civil war, during the mid-1600s, which devastated not only the fabric of the church but also the social communion of the congregation. Moreover, the loss of income, particularly from banning the making and selling of church ales, meant that the buildings started to crumble. The book's illustrations show churches stripped bare and others in which the gaudy tombs of the elite have replaced images of saints.
This is way beyond my field of knowledge, but at least I can field an appeal to the more historically minded of my fellow beer bloggers: Who know more about the church ales?
Update:
Martyn Cornell tried to comment of the blog, a function I've shut off because of the high voloume of spam. Well he e-mailed me with the following extract from the first draft of his book Beer: the Story of the Pint. (Which is on my bookshelf, I hasten to add!):
The rise of beer over ale in the 16th and 17th centuries was matched by the decline in the tradition known as the “ale”. This was a local celebration designed to raise funds for a particular purpose. The longest-lasting was probably the “church-ale”, organised by the churchwardens, when the profit brought in from the brewing and selling of drink, and the consumption of food to go with it, was used for the maintenance of the local church, and for improvements such as a ring of bells or a new loft. Often the “ale” was held in a building called the church-house. Other ales could be for municipal purposes. Lyme in Dorset held regular “cobb ales” in the early 17th century to pay for keeping up the town’s harbour: the one in 1601 raised £20 14s 10d. But the more Puritan-minded Tudor clergy were appalled by church-ales, with one in 1570 claiming they were occasions for “bul-beatings, beare-beatings, bowlings, dycing, cardyng, dauncynges, drunkenness and whoredom.”
Church-ales had actually been largely suppressed under the Protestant Edward VI in the late 1540s, but had sprung back up under his Catholic sister Queen Mary in the 1550s right across the south and west of England. When Mary died and was replaced by another Protestant monarch, Elizabeth, church-ales continued at first in many places, with sometimes spectacular feasts. The “church ale games” for the parish of St Mary in Bungay, Suffolk, in 1566 had a menu that included lamb, veal, honey, eggs, butter, cream, custards, pastries and eight firkins of beer. But from the 1570s, under pressure from Protestant clergy and local magistrates, church-ale celebrations began to disappear from many counties, including all of East Anglia, Kent and Sussex, and to diminish sharply in number elsewhere. By the end of Elizabeth’s reign they were confined mostly to parishes in the West Country and the Thames Valley.
The holding of church-ales was still worrying Somerset’s magistrates in 1633, and sporadic attempts to revive the feasts were suppressed by magistrates in Devon and Sussex during the Interregnum that followed the execution of Charles I in 1649. However, after Charles II’s Restoration in 1660, only one parish in England, Williton in Somerset, seems to have revived the church-ale. It was restarted in 1662, even though the new tax on brewing, which also applied to the Williton churchwardens’ brews, reduced their profits. Takings were declining sharply in the 1680s, and the last blow was the introduction of the Window Tax in 1696, which forced the churchwardens to lease out the church house where the ales were held.