by Melvyn Bragg
JUDITH HAWLEY: Producing spirits in large quantities was a way of keeping farming going, to keep the wheat producing, so it also then proved very important for keeping landowners on side, and they provided a very powerful lobby to keep the distilling industry going.
It was a virtuous circle of supply and demand. And the demand kept growing, as the drinking of flavoured gins became more fashionable. There had always been high levels of drinking in the seventeenth century, but the difference now was the number of women who were drinking as excessively as men. There was an element of performance to this, and drinking gin became something that was done ostentatiously.
ANGELA MCSHANE: You get this lovely little glass to drink from, you haven’t got this massive great pewter thing, and everybody is keen to show themselves off, including people who we think of as the working poor.
The adoption of gin by women and the poorer people gave the legislators a shock. The perception grew that there was a craze, and that gin was being not so much used as abused by the poorer classes, particularly women, reducing productivity while giving them ideas above their station, enjoying luxuries to which they were not entitled. This unease became a driving force behind the growth in regulation. Stories spread of terrible cases such as a drunken nursemaid mistaking her baby for a log and throwing it on the fire, and a mother murdering her child and selling the clothes to buy gin. Little matter that people were getting drunk from other kinds of alcohol, or taking desperate measures for other reasons – gin was becoming notorious.
According to Judith Hawley, people started to petition parliament and, from 1729 to 1751, there were eight separate legal instruments to try to control gin. These controls faced opposition from landed interests and from the larger distillers, so the regulations affected the smallest producers the most and they, Emma Major told us, became very creative about dodging the legislation. Her favourite evasion was a kind of vending machine, the ‘Puss and Mew’ machine, as a secret way of selling gin. Next to a building, fronting onto the street, there was a model of a cat, larger than life …
EMMA MAJOR: Its tail was a pipe, so you would go up to the cat and say: ‘Puss, I would like some gin.’ And if the seller had some gin, it would say, ‘Mew’ – and you would put your money into the mouth of the cat and some gin would come out of the tail.
Customers could drink straight from the tail, for discretion, or collect the liquid in a glass. Still, pressure on the smaller distillers grew, as did concern that gin was indistinguishable from mob rule and criminality. The 1736 act raised the price of a distilling licence to £50, beyond the reach of all but the big distillers, though not everyone agreed to pay it. This attempt to control gin failed, as informers were beaten up. Even when the evidence of wrongdoing was there, it was hard for the authorities to secure convictions as juries were sympathetic to the culture of making and drinking gin.
JUDITH HAWLEY: There were street riots and one of the cries that came out again and again was, ‘No gin, no king; no gin, no king.’
MELVYN BRAGG: Because the English man or woman reserved the right to be drunk if they wanted to?
JUDITH HAWLEY: Yes, it is a sign that we are not French; we can get completely intoxicated when we want to.
EMMA MAJOR: Absolutely, and the reformers tried to spin that and say: no, this is not liberty, you are not really free if you are addicted to gin, and the true British liberty is abstinence – which, of course, is much duller.
After the accession of William of Orange, it became an act of loyalty to drink Protestant gin.
Besides, the poorer people did not recognise themselves as suffering from gin’s corruption in the way that anxious legislators did. Angela McShane emphasised that gin could be drunk in moderation, and there was a pleasure in the sociability that went with it. Hogarth’s Gin Lane is often taken now as representation of what really happened, all the time, but it was propaganda. It was a bringing-together of all that was said to be bad about gin where, among all the horrors, the most telling is the woman who is taking snuff from a box as gentry did. This contrasted with the companion image, Beer Street, in which tobacco was being consumed in a way appropriate to the poor, by being smoked in a pipe. The message, she said, was that the poor who were drinking gin were out of place, ‘so desirous of their luxuries that they are ignoring the things that they ought to be doing, which is producing children to fill the factories, to work, and to make the army strong’.
This came to a head from 1748, as soldiers were returning from the War of the Austrian Succession without work or money and some were turning to crime. The perception was that there was a crime wave, that it was linked to gin and that it was time to draw a line. The first act to make a difference was in 1751, which required that gin could only be sold from licensed premises. Judith Hawley explained that this almost wiped out the smaller providers, so that now gin came mainly from the traditional premises mentioned at the start, the ale houses, taverns and inns, which were already licensed and could afford to pay. Moreover, some of the factors behind the Gin Craze were starting to change. The harvests had been worsening since the height of the craze, there were wars taking soldiers abroad, beer was a little cheaper and, with the economy struggling, there was less money to spend on gin. At the end of the 1750s, there was so little grain, even barley, that the government banned distilling from grain altogether for four or five years.
So why was there so much anxiety over gin in this period that it was labelled a craze? Judith Hawley and Angela McShane suggested that much was to do with the fear of the new metropolitan life and what went on there. Some of the legislation was aimed at turning back the clock to before urbanisation, as if that were possible. Gin became the focus of this, Emma Major added, as the drunkenness in cities was more visible than in the countryside, because 80 per cent of gin consumption took place in London.
Afterwards, in the studio, everyone returned to the idea that the small distilleries were often run by women, who sold the gin to other women, and it was this feminine side to the production that alarmed the legislators. Melvyn recalled his childhood in Wigton and the pot houses run by ‘an old lady, sitting in her front room with a couple of barrels, with three or four customers, and they were very cosy little places. You could go to places like that and one of the reasons you went, of course, was because there was a fire. The centre of this town was like a slum, it was pulled down, damp places, cold places, and in the pub there was a big fire.’
That prompted one final example of the scare stories told in the Gin Craze, before we had to give up the studio.
EMMA MAJOR: Combustion! We have to have spontaneous combustion.
MELVYN BRAGG: Tell us about spontaneous combustion.
EMMA MAJOR: During the eighteenth century, part of the anti-women drinking gin campaign featured cautionary tales of women who drank so much gin that they spontaneously combusted.
THE PICTS
The Picts, according to Bede writing in the eighth century, were one of four peoples of Britain, along with the Scots, the Anglo-Saxons and the Britons. In the tenth century, those last three still existed but the Picts did not. They left stone monuments carved with astonishing artistry and intricacy and other peoples wrote about them. But where was Pictland, what language did the Picts speak and why did they disappear as a distinct group? As we marked the start of our twentieth season in autumn 2017, we discussed this before an audience of students in the Memorial Chapel at the University of Glasgow, many of them studying the subject and some, as it later transpired by inference, with Pictish ancestors.
With Melvyn to discuss the Picts were: Katherine Forsyth, reader in the department of Celtic and Gaelic at the University of Glasgow; Alex Woolf, senior lecturer in Dark Age studies at the University of St Andrews; and Gordon Noble, reader in archaeology at the University of Aberdeen.
The first mention of people described as Picts, Katherine Forsyth said, was in a poem in AD 297 praising the Roman emperor Constantius Chlorus. To the Romans, these Picts
appeared as the iconic enemies – bloodthirsty savages who ran around without clothing and covered in tattoos, the hostile barbarians living in the north. The word picti, on the face of it, means ‘painted people’ in Latin and that seems the most obvious root for the name. However, there is a chance it was a native Celtic word, not a Latin word, as there was a Pictones tribe in Gaul, which was the origin of Poitiers and Poitou. The Picts were perceived as an important enemy on the fringes.
Bull motif on Pictish incised stone from Burghead, Scotland.
KATHERINE FORSYTH: There’s a wonderful little dice box that was used for playing games, from the empire, from the frontier near Cologne, and it’s been carved with an inscription that says, ‘The Picts are defeated, play in safety’.
At the time of Constantine in the early fourth century, the enemies to the north were described as the ‘Caledonians and other Picts’, suggesting that ‘Picts’ was then used as an umbrella term for a range of tribal groups in the north of Britain. Earlier, Tacitus (AD C. 55–C. 120) had written about Roman military incursions that had come to a head at the Battle of Mons Graupius, six or seven generations before the first use of the word Picts, and there he called the people ‘the Britons of Caledonia’. To him, they were noble heroic savages, untainted by the decadence of civilisation, ‘the last of the free’, as he called them, so something hardened between the time of Tacitus and the perception of the people as Picts in AD 297.
Alex Woolf pointed to the period of Roman occupation, where the Britons within the frontier gradually became Romans; they become provincial citizens and the name ‘Briton’ was still attached to them. There were the civilised, Romanised Britons, and there was the Roman provincial nation, which ultimately became the land of the Welsh, and then there were the others, the painted Britons north of the wall who continued as barbarians.
ALEX WOOLF: Within Britain itself, even within the province of Britain, the levels of Romanisation varied enormously and, we might imagine, although here it has to be speculation, that for people living in the south-east, where there were lots of villas and fully developed towns, perhaps even people in Yorkshire might have been thought of as a bit Pictish … a pejorative term of the uncivilised.
The challenge for those wanting clarity on the emergence of the term ‘Picts’ is that there are no surviving written records from the Picts themselves, though there were later accounts of them from the Romans, the Irish and, in the time of Bede (AD C. 672–735), the English. That makes it harder to know when these people, who others described as Picts, began to use the term for themselves or if they ever did.
ALEX WOOLF: We don’t know whether, even at that late period, the people who we call Picts would have used that word themselves. The likely thing is that they adopt that terminology perhaps in the seventh century when they become Christian and they start engaging with classical material; they may think, ‘Oh, yes, that’s us, we’re the Picts.’
On apparently firmer ground, Melvyn turned to Bede, ‘our father of British history, one of the world’s great historians’, and invited Gordon Noble to relate what Bede made of the Picts. Bede was writing in Northumbria, one of the southern neighbours of the Picts and he, as Melvyn mentioned in his introduction, made a very famous statement that there were four peoples of Britain and five languages, where Latin was the language that united them. From that point, Bede went on to give an account of the origin myth of the Picts, saying that they came from Scythia, between eastern Europe and central Eurasia. These people sailed all the way to Ireland initially but Ireland was full, so the Irish said, ‘Why don’t you head over to the next island, Britain, and settle there?’
GORDON NOBLE: But they don’t have any wives so they ask the Irish for wives and the Irish give them wives and the Irish say that if there was ever a doubt in the succession of the Pictish royal line then you should favour the maternal line. This is where we get the idea that the Picts had matrilineal succession.
MELVYN BRAGG: Do you give credence to any of that?
GORDON NOBLE: No.
Gordon Noble added that all peoples have fantastical origin myths, and the Scots have similar myths about coming from Scythia. While Bede was not strong on the origins of the Picts, he was aware of the balance of power in his own lifetime and the century before. He knew that in the seventh century there was a period when the Anglo-Saxons and Northumbrians had an over-kingship of the Picts and that this over-kingship ended in AD 685 with the Battle of Nechtansmere. As for the region inhabited by the Picts, the abbot Adomnán, who was writing his Life of Columba in the seventh century, said the Picts occupied the area east of Druim Alban, the ridge of Britain, which placed them somewhere east of the highlands of Scotland. Bede wrote of them occupying the area north of the Forth, north of modern-day Edinburgh, and there are suggestions that they occupied an area from Fife up to Caithness, possibly having an over-kingship of the Orkneys at some stage, perhaps even over the Western Isles.
The reference to Bede’s mention of the four peoples being united by Latin, the language of the Church, led the conversation to the Picts and Christianity. Katherine Forsyth remarked on the stained-glass windows of Ninian and Columba in the Memorial Chapel where the discussion was taking place, who, in Bede’s account, were the evangelists of the Picts. That, she said, tied in with the popular narrative of great men and heroic missionaries, but the evidence does not back up their claim to significance. It seems that the Picts were first exposed to Christianity through their contact with the Roman Empire, when there was a lot of interaction between the people to the north of the frontier and the Roman world.
KATHERINE FORSYTH: We have a reference. St Patrick in the fifth century writes a letter to the British king, Coroticus, to complain about his slave raiding in Ireland in company with apostate Picts, implying that they were already Christian Picts who had reneged on their faith.
That reference provides evidence of Christianity in Pictland from the fifth century onwards, which was the century before Columba. There are references to Columba preaching to the tribes of Tay, but not converting them, though he was also supposed to have seen the Loch Ness monster.
Earlier, Gordon Noble mentioned the Battle of Nechtansmere and Melvyn returned to this now, describing it as the great moment in Pictish history and a great moment in British history. This was when Ecgfrith, king of Northumbria, who was on course to unite almost the whole of Great Britain, went far north to meet the Picts and, completely unexpectedly after winning battles for thirty years, was not only defeated but killed, and so were his top henchmen. Nechtansmere changed everything, he said.
ALEX WOOLF: It is one of the defining battles of British history and what Bede says, who was actually about twelve years old when it happened, is that from that time the strength and power of the English ebbed away. And 100 years later, the Welsh author of the Historia Brittonum, the history of the Britons, chose to end his history at that point because he saw that as the end of history, in a rather Francis Fukuyama way.
In the sixth and seventh centuries, he added, it seemed as though the whole of Great Britain were to be controlled by the Northumbrians, it was just a matter of time. But in AD 685, the inevitable was stopped. It seems that Ecgfrith had previously invaded Pictland at the beginning of his reign, and Bridei, who was Ecgfrith’s cousin, may well have been put on the throne of the Picts by Ecgfrith. There were references in the run-up to Nechtansmere that Bridei was spreading his wings, ‘deleting’ the Orkneys in AD 682. Ecgfrith went north, expecting presumably that Bridei would kowtow, but that did not happen. At some place somewhere in the north of Scotland, his army was wiped out.
MELVYN BRAGG: How come they took on this man who had never lost a battle in thirty years, Ecgfrith?
ALEX WOOLF: I suspect he was overconfident, he probably also thought that Bridei was ultimately his friend: he was his cousin, they’d worked together for over a decade. He probably thought, ‘I’ve just got to read him the riot act.’
The years after the battle we
re probably when Bridei, technically the king of the northern Pictish kingdom Fortriu, based around the Moray Firth and Inverness, expanded south into areas that had likely been more tightly controlled by the Northumbrian overlordship, around the River Tay, Perth, Dundee and perhaps Fife. That is when there was probably a firm Pictish overlordship stretching from Fife to Caithness.
Gordon Noble explained that one of the main advances in the understanding of the Picts in the past twenty years had come from archaeology. Professor Martin Carver at the University of York carried out work at Portmahomack on the Tarbat Peninsula in Easter Ross, north of Inverness. Excavations by Professor Martin Carver and his team from 1994 to 2007 uncovered an amazing wealth of evidence. He found a roadway leading up to the church with huge amounts of traces of metalworking for reliquaries and other objects, and great quantities of sculpture, cross slabs, parts of shrines, corbels and finials from a stone church, all of them signs of an incredibly wealthy monastic foundation.
GORDON NOBLE: Some of the most exciting evidence – it doesn’t sound that exciting – are bone pegs they found, and an amazing piece of detective work [showed] that these are actually from wooden frameworks to stretch calf skin to make vellum. So they were actually producing books at Portmahomack.
These discoveries indicated that the Picts did write and they were perhaps producing illuminated manuscripts at Portmahomack. Martin Carver’s excavations uncovered this fantastically wealthy settlement and it seems to have come to an end sometime in the ninth century, when it looks as though it was sacked by the Vikings.
This idea of a literate, skilled people runs counter to that of the hairy savages portrayed elsewhere. Katherine Forsyth noted that the stereotype established in the Roman period was remarkably enduring and is one of the aspects that draws people to the Picts, adding, tongue in cheek: ‘If you just call them sort of arty Christian farmers it doesn’t have the same glamour. But really that’s probably more accurate.’
