ABSTRACT
Drinking houses in early modern Britain were politicized territories according to a wide variety of definitions. The regulatory spaces of Guildhall and Audit House echoed with claims that drinking houses promoted drunkenness, unbalanced household economies and kept servants from their employers at all hours of the night, and that they sustained sexual immorality. Emphasizing the role of material space recovers some less well-known ways in which they contributed to social monitoring by enabling the surveillance of threatening behaviour in three related legal and social contexts. The chapter concludes that, while Southampton's citizens participated extensively in the systems of vigilance contained within drinking houses. The cooption of these sites for the ultimate purposes of civic governors problematizes their sustenance of an emancipatory hidden transcript and contributes to a critique of the usefulness of the concept to early modern power relations that have only recently started to emerge.
