ORIGIN AND ANTIQUITY OF ALE AND BEER
E must go back several thousand years into the past to trace the origin of our modern ale and beer. The ancient Egyptians, as we learn from the Book of the Dead, a treatise at least 5,000 years old, understood the manufacture of an intoxicating liquor from grain. This liquor they called hek, and under the slightly modified form hemki the name has been used in Egypt for beer until comparatively modern times. An ancient Egyptian medical manual, of about the same date as the Book of the Dead, contains frequent mention of the use of Egyptian beer in medicine, and at a period about 1,000 years later, the papyri afford conclusive evidence of the existence even in that early age, of a burning liquor question in Egypt, for it is recorded that intoxication had become so common that many of the beer shops had to be suppressed.
Herodotus, after stating that the Egyptians used “wine made from barley” because there were no vines in the country, mentions a tradition that Osiris, the Egyptian Bacchus, first taught the Egyptians how to brew, to compensate them for the natural deficiencies of their native land. Herodotus, however, was frequently imposed upon by the persons from whom he derived his narrative, and no trace of any such tradition is to be found elsewhere. Wine was undoubtedly made in Egypt two or three thousand years before his time.{26}
It is maintained by some that the Hebrew word sicera, which occurs in the Bible and is in our version translated “strong drink,” was none other than the barley-wine mentioned in Herodotus, and that the Israelites brought from Egypt the knowledge of its use. Certain it is that they understood the manufacture of sicera shortly after the exodus, for we find in Leviticus that the priests are forbidden to drink wine or “strong drink” before they go into the tabernacle, and in the Book of Numbers the Nazarenes are required not only to abstain from wine and “strong drink,” but even from vinegar made from either; and in all the passages where the word occurs it is formally distinguished from wine. It may be mentioned in passing, that this word sicera has been regarded as being the equivalent of the word cider. The passage in Numbers is translated in Tyndale’s version, “They shall drink neither wyn ne sydyr,” and it is this rendering that has earned for Tyndale’s translation the name of the cider Bible.
It seems highly probable that the word sicera signified any intoxicating liquor other than wine, whether made from corn, honey or fruit.
In support of the theory that beer was known amongst the Jews, may be mentioned the Rabbinical tradition that the Jews were free from leprosy during the captivity in Babylon by reason of their drinking “siceram veprium, id est, ex lupulis confectam,” or sicera made with hops, which one would think could be no other than bitter beer.
Speaking of this old Egyptian barley-wine, Aeschylus seems to imply that it was not held in very high esteem, for he says that only the women-kind would drink it.5 Evidently the phrase, “to be learned in all the learning of the Egyptians,” had no reference to a competent knowledge of brewing. Before leaving the land of the Pharaoh, it may be mentioned that in that country the labourers still drink a kind of beer extracted from unmalted barley. A traveller in Egypt some years ago recorded in one of the London daily papers that his crew on the Nile made an intoxicating liquor from the fermentation of bread in water; he says that it was called boozer, but whether by himself or crew is not clear.{27}
A goodly number of instances may be found in various old Greek writers of the mention of barley-wine under the various terms of κρίθινον πεπωκότες οινον,6 ἐκ κριθῶν μεθυ, βρῦτον ἐκ τῶν κριθῶν, but it does not appear that beer was ever a popular beverage in Hellas. Further north, the Thracians, as Archilochus tells, brewed and drank a good deal of beer.
Among the Greek writers, Xenophon gives the most interesting and complete account of beer in the year 401 B.C. In describing the retreat of the Ten Thousand, he tells how, on approaching a certain village in Armenia which had been allotted to him, he selected the most active of his troops, and making a sudden descent upon the place captured all the villagers and their headman. One man alone escaped—the bridegroom of the headman’s daughter, who had been married nine days, and was gone out to hunt hares. The snow was six feet deep at the time. Xenophon goes on to describe the dwellings of this singular people. Their houses were under ground, the entrance like that of a well, but wide below. There were entrances dug out for the cattle, but the men used to get down by a ladder. And in the houses were goats, sheep, oxen, fowls and their young ones, and all the animals were fed inside with fodder. And there was wheat, and barley, and pulse, and barley-wine (οἶνος κρίθινος) in bowls. And the malt, too, itself was in the bowl, and level with the brim. And reeds lay in it, some long, some short, with no joints, and when anyone was thirsty he had to take a reed in his hand and suck. The liquor was very strong, says Xenophon, unless one poured water into it, and the drink was pleasant to one accustomed to it. And whenever anyone in friendliness wished to drink to his comrade, he used to drag him to the bowl, where he must stoop down and drink, gulping it down like an ox. The inhabitants of the Khanns district of Armenia, through which Xenophon’s world-famed march was made, still pursue much the same life as they did more than two thousand years ago. They live in these curious subterranean dwellings with all their live stock about them, but, alas! modern travellers aver that they have lost the art of making barley-wine.
Enough has been said as to the use of beer among Eastern nations to disprove the theory of the old author of the Haven of Health, who asserts, quoting “Master Eliote” as his authority, that ale was never used as a common drink in any other country than in “England, Scotland, Ireland, and Poile.”{28}
Ale or beer was in common use in Germany in the time of Tacitus, and Pliny, who may have tasted beer while serving in the army in Germany, says, “All the nations who inhabit the west of Europe have a liquor with which they intoxicate themselves, made of corn and water (fruge madida). The manner of making this liquor is somewhat different in Gaul, Spain, and other countries, and it is called by various names; but its nature and properties are everywhere the same. The people of Spain in particular brew this liquor so well that it will keep good for a long time. So exquisite is the ingenuity of mankind in gratifying their vicious appetites, that they have thus invented a method of making water itself intoxicate.” Among the many various kinds of drink so made were zythum, cœlia, ceria, Cereris vinum, curmi, and cerevisia. All these names, except zythum, are probably merely local variations of one word, whose British representative may be found in the Welsh cwrw.
Turning to the earliest records of the use of malt liquors in this country, we find that, according to Diodorus Siculus, the Britons made use of a very simple diet which consisted chiefly of milk and venison. Their usual drink was water; but upon festive occasions they drank a kind of fermented liquor, made of barley, honey, or apples, and were very quarrelsome in their cups. Dioscorides wrote in the first century that the Britons, instead of wine, use “curmi,” a liquor made from barley. Pytheas (300 B.C.) said a fermented grain liquor was made in Thule.
The drinks in use in this island at the time of its conquest by the Romans seem to have been metheglin, cider, and ale. Metheglin, or mead, was probably the most ancient and universally used of all intoxicating drinks among European nations. Cider is in all probability the next in order of antiquity of the drinks in use amongst our Celtic predecessors. It was made from wild apples, but its use was probably not so wide-spread as that of either mead or ale.
The two drinks, mead and cider, are appropriate to nations who have made but slight advances on the path of civilisation. Tribes of nomads, or of hunters, would find the wherewithal for their manufacture—the honey in the hollow tree, the crabs growing wild in the woods. The manufacture of ale, however, indicates another step forward; it implies the settlement in particular districts, and the knowledge and practice of agriculture. It is, therefore, not surprising to find that the Celtic inhabitants of the midland and northern parts of this country, at the time of the first Roman attack, knew no drink but mead and cider; while, in the southern districts, where contact with {29}the outer world had brought about a somewhat more advanced civilisation and a more settled mode of life, agriculture was practised, and cerevisia, or ale, was added to the list of beverages.
Given below is a metrical version of the origin of ale. It is put in this place between the account of the use of ale by the Britons and its use by the Saxons, because our anonymous poet does not seem to have quite made up his mind whether he is recording a British or a Saxon myth. The name of the king would seem to point to a British origin, whilst some of the gods on whom he calls are Teutonic.
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