A short history of the British pub

Where it starts: the Roman road

The British pub starts as a roadside business twice over: with the Roman taberna that arrived with the legions in AD 43, and again with the Ale Houses Act of 1551–52, the statute that first required a magistrate’s licence to sell ale and began the paper trail every claim on this site is tested against. The tabernae were wine shops set along the new roads and in the new towns, and they adapted quickly to what local people actually drank. The word survives as “tavern”, and the advertising method survives in folk memory: a bunch of vine leaves hung outside to show that wine was available.

That is the pattern for everything that follows. A pub is a private house that has been opened to the public, positioned where people are already travelling, selling what the neighbourhood wants, under whatever rules the state has most recently invented.

Alehouses and ale-wives

For most of the medieval period there was no pub trade as such. There was brewing, done at home in enormous quantities because ale was safe, nourishing and did not keep, and there were households that happened to brew more than they could drink and sold the surplus. That is an alehouse: an ordinary dwelling where the householder served homemade drink and perhaps found a corner for a traveller to sleep.

Regulation arrived early and half-heartedly. Around 970 King Edgar is said to have tried to limit the number of alehouses per village, and is credited by tradition with introducing the drinking peg as a measure — the origin claimed for the phrase “take someone down a peg or two”. The story is a good deal firmer as a phrase than as a policy.

By the later Middle Ages three distinct trades had separated out, and confusing them is the commonest error in pub history. Alehouses were houses selling ale, run by householders, at the bottom of the social scale. Taverns sold wine to townspeople with money, and existed almost exclusively in towns. Inns were substantially built, purpose-designed premises with numerous bedchambers and stabling, often erected by monasteries on pilgrim routes. We have separated the three properly in inn, tavern or alehouse: what is the difference.

The scale of the alehouse trade is startling. A survey of 1577 counted roughly 17,000 alehouses, 2,000 inns and 400 taverns in England and Wales — about one drinking house for every 200 people.

The parish brewed too

One institution deserves separate mention because it produced buildings that are still pubs. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries many parishes built a church house next to the churchyard, where the parish brewed and sold ale to raise money for the fabric of the church. These were not pubs. They were fundraising halls with a brewhouse, and some of them slid into commercial drinking as the practice of parish ales died out after the Reformation.

Devon has the best survivals. The Church House Inn at Harberton keeps an early oak plank-and-muntin screen behind its bar, and the Church House Inn at Rattery, which claims 1028, is described by CAMRA as a listed sixteenth-century church house. The claim and the fabric are five centuries apart, and the building type is genuinely part of the ancestry of the English pub.

1552: the licence

The single most important date in the history of the British pub is the Ale Houses Act of 1551–52, which required alehouse keepers to be licensed by justices of the peace at quarter sessions and to give sureties for good behaviour and against drunkenness on the premises. It was the Crown’s first attempt at national legislation on drink, and the English licensing system grows directly out of it.

It also created the paperwork. Quarter-sessions licensing records run in county record offices from 1552 until licensing was reorganised in 1888, and from 1753 the victuallers’ recognizances were entered in annual registers that sometimes name the sign over the door. Everything we can say with confidence about an English pub before the nineteenth century comes from that archive, which is why Historic England’s review of the famous claims concludes that England’s oldest surviving inns date from the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries rather than from the Saxon dates on their signs. The strongest single case, the George Inn at Norton St Philip, was built as an inn by the Carthusians of Hinton Priory, and its timbers are tree-ring dated to 1430–32.

Gin, and the reaction to it

The eighteenth century interrupts the story with spirits. Cheap gin, untaxed and unlicensed in its early years, produced a social crisis in London acute enough to force legislation — the Gin Acts of 1736 and 1751 — and consumption fell sharply afterwards. Gin matters here for a reason that outlasts the panic: it established the principle that Parliament would use tax and licence to steer people from one drink to another, and it set up the reasoning behind the great deregulation of 1830.

The coaching age

Meanwhile the inn was having its finest century. Between roughly 1700 and 1840, long-distance coaching turned inns into infrastructure: staging posts placed at intervals of a few miles where teams of horses were changed, passengers fed and mail exchanged. The galleried courtyard, the archway wide enough for a coach, the range of bedrooms over the stables — these are functional features, and where they survive they are the most legible evidence of the trade.

The George Inn in Southwark is the last galleried coaching inn in London, and it only half survives: two of its three wings were demolished in 1889 when the railway wanted the land for warehousing. That is the whole story of the coaching inn in one sentence. The railways destroyed the trade within a generation, and the great inns became hotels, tenements or ruins. Our guide to what a coaching inn was goes into how the system worked.

1830: the beerhouse explosion

The Beerhouse Act 1830 is the moment the modern pub landscape was created. Parliament, still worried about spirits, decided to flood the market with beer: any ratepayer could brew and sell beer, ale and porter from home for a licence fee of two guineas a year, exempt from beer duty and free of the magistrates altogether. They could not sell wine or spirits.

The result was immediate and enormous. By 1841 some 45,500 licences had been issued; the price of beer had roughly halved by 1838; and tens of thousands of new beerhouses and small breweries opened, concentrated in the industrial north. In Manchester and Salford the number of breweries went from 27 in 1827 to 75 by 1873. A great many ordinary street-corner pubs in northern England date their existence, if not their present buildings, to this Act.

The Victorian rebuilding

The second half of the nineteenth century rebuilt what 1830 had created. Brewers with capital bought up licensed premises to guarantee outlets for their beer, producing the tied house system that would dominate British drinking for a century, and they spent money on the buildings: etched and cut glass, mahogany servery fittings, tiled facades, snob screens and elaborate multi-room plans designed to keep social classes apart. Most of Britain’s protected historic pub interiors are Victorian or Edwardian rather than medieval, and several in this collection are exactly that — Hand & Shears near Smithfield keeps its separate doors into small bars around a central servery, refitted in 1896.

This is also the period that invented most of the ancient-pub claims. Antiquity sold beer, so signs were repainted, dates were painted on, and mock-Tudor beams appeared on Georgian frontages. We take that industry apart in what “Ye Olde” actually means.

War, and the afternoon gap

The First World War changed British drinking habits more than any temperance campaign. Under the Defence of the Realm Act 1914 and the Central Control Board for Liquor Traffic, opening hours were cut to roughly midday to 3pm and 6.30pm to 9.30pm, buying rounds — “treating” — was banned, and beer was weakened, all in the name of munitions production. The compulsory afternoon gap in permitted hours survived in England until the Licensing Act 1988: two generations of British drinkers were turned out of the pub at three o’clock because of a wartime measure aimed at absenteeism in 1915.

1989 and after

The last great structural change came from competition law rather than temperance. The Monopolies and Mergers Commission found that the six largest brewers, holding some 75% of the market, constituted a complex monopoly, and recommended capping brewery-owned tied estates at 2,000 pubs. The Supply of Beer (Tied Estate) Order 1989 — the Beer Orders — freed publicans to buy non-beer drinks from anyone and gave tenants of the big six the right to a cask guest beer from outside the tie.

The brewers responded by leaving the pub business rather than the brewing business, selling their estates to a new kind of company that brewed nothing: the pubcos. The orders were revoked on 17 January 2003, by which time the industry had been transformed. The full story, including the Pubs Code of 2016 and the market rent only option, is in what is a free house.

Two later changes are the ones drinkers remember. The Licensing Act 2003, in force from 24 November 2005, replaced a patchwork of Victorian statutes with a single flexible regime — the “24-hour drinking” headlines proved wide of the mark, since only 8,300 premises in the whole country held 24-hour alcohol licences by March 2016. And on 1 July 2007 smoking was banned in enclosed public places in England, which changed the smell, the sound and the economics of every pub in the country within a week.

What survives

The numbers are not comfortable. Britain had around 50,000 pubs in 2008 and about 39,000 by 2018.

What that makes the pubs on this site is not quaint but improbable. A building that has sold drink through 1552, 1830, 1914, 1989 and 2007 has survived five complete reinventions of its own industry, and the ones that have done it in medieval fabric are rarer still. That is the real argument for taking their history seriously — and for checking it. Start with the oldest pubs in England, or with how historians date an old pub.

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