James Lightbody, Every man his own gauger: wherein not only the artist

Chapter

ABSTRACT

James Lighbody’s practical treatise on gauging and brewing offers a practical guide to the technical skills used in many trades associated with the drinks industry at the end of seventeenth century. A gauger is one who gauges: a combination of measurement and calculation used to ascertain the capacity or content of a cask or container. The art of gauging was thus specifically a set of skills that an exciseman had to master. Excise duties were a form of inland taxation levied on specified goods, such as alcoholic liquors, beer and tobacco at the time of their manufacture. The gauger measured the capacity of the vessels in which beer or coffee were brewed or stored. Excise taxes were first imposed by the Long Parliament in 1643, and were retained on the Restoration as the King’s personal revenue, when coffee was amongst the goods added to the excisable list. The tax required the creation of a new cadre of officials, the excisemen, given powers of entry in order to measure production directly. See M. J. Braddock, Parliamentary Taxation in Seventeenth-Century England: local administration and response, Studies in History, 70 (Woodbridge, Boydell & Brewer for the Royal Historical Association, 1994), pp. 170–94. The exciseman, and the excise in general, remained unpopular throughout the seventeenth century, both as a sign of petty authority and modernity. Lightbody’s explanation of the art of gauging is in this sense an attempt to democratise access to the exciseman’s technical skill of gauging. In as much as his guide reveals trade secrets usually known only to adepts, his work constitutes a kind of practical enlightenment. In a wider sense, Lightbody’s work gives evidence of social consequences of the economic 150transformations of the period, such as the curiosity in status inconsistency and social mobility.