ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses the production and sale of alcoholic drinks. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, it is possible to identify three sectors in the retail of drink, each of which had its origins in the medieval period. These were inns, alehouses and taverns, a categorization employed in the first comprehensive survey of drinking places, undertaken in 1577. The retail drink trade in the mid eighteenth century was diverse and complex, a product of the range of drinks available, society's growing sophistication and the vital social roles played by drinking places. Diversity and complexity continued to characterize retailing, but by the third quarter of the nineteenth century an institution known as the pub may be said to have arrived. This section charts that emergence, looking at the fortunes of inns, taverns and gin shops, the prevalence and decline of illegal retailing and the creation of a new drinking place: the beerhouse.
