Good fellowship – a practice centred on recreational drinking in alehouses – was a widespread, meaningful, and potent form of social bonding in early modern England. Yet it was not an activity in which participation was an uncontested right for all. Those who looked to the alehouse – as opposed to the inn or tavern – as the principal site for the practice of recreational sociability, did so in contravention of the laws of the land. In the years between 1550 and 1630 a national system of alehouse regulation was established on the principle that whilst alehouses were an essential component of community infrastructure, this status was conditional upon them serving their ‘true and principal uses’ – lodging travellers, and providing victuals to the local poor – and refusing to permit any forms of recreational drinking. To fully appreciate the significance of good fellowship, therefore, we need to acknowledge a point of wider importance for the study of the cultural lives of relatively humble men and women in the past to which this book has sought to contribute: the need to ‘integrate popular cultural experiences with the power structures that variously encouraged, permitted, and suppressed them’.

If there was a power struggle over good fellowship in this society it was not a straightforward fight between ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ cultures. The lines of allegiance were rather messier than that, and it was too fiercely contested to represent a process whereby a ruling elite confidently asserted its hegemony through the suppression of the activities of subordinates. The central government certainly felt that this was a two-way fight, and regulatory hostility to alehouse sociability was to a considerable extent stoked by fears that the institution posed as much of a threat to the established structures of authority as vice versa. The authorities imagined alehouse-goers huddled around the alebench, plotting the downfall of church and state. It was a paranoid vision, but not a complete fantasy. The alehouse was a space in which the burning matters of church and state affairs were regularly discussed, but as often as not it was in an atmosphere of dispute and disagreement, rather than of consensus and solidarity that might have fomented a radical plebeian revolution.