John Noyes was a prominent figure in the early-seventeenth-century economic and political spheres of the Wiltshire town of Calne. He was a clothier – a trader in the town’s main commodity, woollen cloth – and served as a Member of Parliament for the borough in 1604, and between 1599 and 1630 was several times Burgess Steward, the chief executive of the town’s corporation. In 1612, he took his turn to act as town constable, a role that made him responsible for the keeping of the peace. Here, like so many of the office-holders in the towns and villages of early-seventeenth-century England, Noyes perceived the main impediment to his task to be the disorder emanating from local alehouses. At the meeting of the Wiltshire quarter sessions in April 1612, the court responsible for issuing and revoking alehouse licenses, Noyes and his fellow constable John Killinge made a plea to their superiors, the county magistrates, for assistance in subduing these noisome institutions:

The challenge of policing the town’s alehouses was made more acute by an uncooperative disposition on the part of their patrons, who

The suggested remedy was to target ale-sellers, and request them to lower the strength of their offerings: