A Seventeenth Century Pub, an Ale Wife & Subversion
The 5th June 2025 issue of the London Review of Books carries a review by Deborah Valenze of a new book (2023) by micro historian Steve Hindle The Social Topography of rural community: scenes of labouring life in 17th-Century England
Hindle takes a history from below approach pioneered by E P Thompson and others. His focus is on the Warwickshire village Chilvers Coton, where George Eliot was born. She also wrote about the village in Scenes of Clerical Life. Eliot’s focus was on the church but Hindle has a chapter on the village pub.
Hindle’s research recovers from detailed research the details of lives of ordinary people which were previously thought to be lost to or hidden from history.
The village pub was run by an Ale Wife. While Frances Rason made cheese its not clear if she also brewed but it’s very likely. In the book Hindle describes the key role of the village pub (summarised by Valenze below). He notes not just respectability but also ‘those who skulked subversively in the corners of the village alehouse. Two centuries later in Scenes from a Clerical Life, (1858) George Eliot writing about a pub in the same area noted ‘in some of the alehouse corners the drink was flavoured by a dingy kind of infidelity, something like rinsings of Tom Paine in ditch-water’. Note that radicals are always to be found in corners of the pub, presumably out of sight of the bar…
In the 1680s the pub was frequented by farm workers and metal workers, two distinct groups with different incomes and different work experiences. Because probate records for Frances Rason have survived Hindle has been able to put together a detailed picture of what the inside of the pub was like:
Within this context, Frances Rason’s ale house becomes a wealth of potential clues for the historical sleuth. Thanks to that probate inventory, Hindle knows the disposition of rooms and furniture within the alehouse itself. He can even say with certainty what utensils, flagons, and plates Rason’s customers used. Since ale houses were typically male-dominated spaces, it is noteworthy that Rason and her granddaughter ran the tavern by themselves.
https://history.wustl.edu/news/microhistory-english-village
London Review of Books 5th June 2025
Unlike Eliot, who chooses the church, the centre of Chilvers Coton village life in these records is the alehouse run by Frances Rason, one of 26 widows in the parish. She described herself as a victualler, translated by Hindle as a supplier of fast food for the working people of the village. Some of those meals would have included cheese made in her household: she dedicated a large amount of space and equipment to the dairy. While other alehouses received admonitions against rowdy behaviour, Rason’s never did. As an owner-occupier, she would have been allotted an important pew in church and it seems she had friendly relations with the local miller and maltster. Life didn’t get much better than this for an alewife in a 17th-century village.
Rason must have been a trusted as well as a prominent member of the community: the records show that packets of silk were left in her alehouse by middlemen to be collected by weavers; nailmakers also went there to collect iron bars, the raw material of their trade. Rason rented out rooms, too; activity in this establishment must have been constant. A teenage granddaughter called Mary, listed as a servant, helped out. After Rason’s death, Mary became the owner of the family Bible, along with a large share of her grandmother’s movable goods. We’re left to wonder about her fate, however, because she disappears from local records in 1685, when Rason died. Perhaps she used family networks to find a new home. Working in the alehouse would have made her a good judge of character.
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