ABSTRACT
Drinking has historically formed part of the desirable life for most people, and improvements in living standards have facilitated increased consumption. Drinking by children and young people was the norm until well into the nineteenth century. For late fourteenth and fifteenth-century England the following pattern of drink consumption may be suggested. First, the whole population, of both sexes and all ages, drank. Second, total consumption rose from already high levels. Third, there began the shift in consumption from ale to hopped beer. Fourth, wine-drinking declined. Peter Clark, the pioneering historian of the English alehouse, argues medieval and early modern Europe witnessed two great revolutions in drinking taste: the first was the shift from ale to beer over the twelfth to sixteenth centuries, the second the rise of spirit-drinking, which had spread by the eighteenth century to most parts of Europe as well as the New World.
