ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates attendance patterns at early modern public houses. Historical anthropologists include extensive tavern information in their surveys of popular lifestyles, interdisciplinary projects investigate modern food and alcohol consumption, and there is growing interest in the 'theatre' of public houses among students of crime, communication, sociability and popular culture. Spatial separation of social groups by tables or even rooms, a feature much emphasized for the period after 1800, was a possibility in early modern Europe. Public houses attracted much interest as battlegrounds in epic struggles such as the civilizing process, social polarization and the campaign for greater moral discipline. The chapter examines the issue of clientele from different perspectives, with particular emphasis on the number, social profile and gender of patrons. There is plenty of evidence that public houses attracted the 'better' sort around 1800: most unambiguously in Lippe, where the visitation of 1812 revealed that no level of the village hierarchy was significantly under- or over-represented among patrons.
