Booze weekly use
How was this enormous quantity of booze used? Page 3 of Hasledine's account book details the weekly consumption from the week beginning 13th November 1737 to that of 14th October 1738. During this period Tyrconnel and his household were at his London home for 19 weeks, and so the number of weeks in residence recorded at Belton was 30.
An Account of the weekly Disbursements of the several sorts of Liquors charged to the Butler in the first and second Pages of this book.
Thence I, having my head full of drink from having drunk so much Rhenish wine in the morning, and more in the afternoon at Mrs. Blackburne’s, came home and so to bed, not well, and very ill all night.
Samuel Pepys Thursday 9 August 1660
The chart reflects how many weeks in the 30-week occupancy of Belton a beverage was swigged. Every week saw small beer consumed by the servants. Every week the Tyrconnels and any guests consumed port of either type, French wine and bottled ale.
Servants
Typically 2 hogshead of small beer was quaffed each week, with more in the summer and over Tyrconnel's 16th November birthday. The latter excess may represent visiting servants of guests.
Based on 2-barrels per week and a 4- to 6-pint daily consumption of small beer, then this suggests 21 to 30 indoor servants.
During Tyrconnel's 19 week absence in London, we know Elizabeth Frith was caretaking. The consumption of 10.5 hogsheads of small beer over that period would suggest 1 to 2 servants remaining behind.
But on top of small beer, Tyrconnel's servants could slurp barrelled ale - alcohol, 5 to 6.5%. The Marquis of Kildare's rules gave a pint to each who supped in the Servants Hall. The cook got 2 quarts a day, while laundry maids were restricted to a quart twice a week.
William Hogarth's Beer Street exposes the culture behind beer. This print emphasised the health and productivity benefits of drinking beer. The year on the newspaper within the cartoon is 1748. Note the quart pots. The accompanying text reads,
Beer happy Produce of our Isle, can sinewy strength impart, and wearied with Fatigue and Toil, Can chear each manly heart.
Labour and Art upheld by Thee, successfully advance, We Quaff Thy balmy Juice with glee, And Water leave to France.
Genius of Health, Thy grateful Taste, Rivals the Cup of Jove, And warms each English generous Breast, with Liberty and Love.
And what did the Master and Mistress drink?
Pair of James II solid silver tankards 1686. Chinoiserie style, arms Brownlow impaling Sherard, conjugal crest of John Brownlow & Alice Sherard, builders of Belton. From what the Tyrconnels could sip. Sold at auction by the 6th Baron Brownlow, 1963 and again auctioned in 2000 for £938,750.
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784),
All the decent people in Lichfield got drunk every night and were not the worse thought of,
he wrote of his home town and added,
I have drunk three bottles of port without being the worse for it
The five commonest bottled drinks expressed as bottles consumed on average each day at Belton. "Absent" Tyrconnel's household accompanied him to London from January to June. The flame icons specify when expensive bees wax & spermaceti candles illuminated Belton, such as on Tyrconnel's birthday 16th November, feasibly when guests visited. Flame size reflect numbers. Spikes of potations occur during these weeks.
At Tyrconnel's table, the butler served daily an average of 8 bottles of red or white port, and one of French wine.
His table drank greater amounts of ale and cider June to October.
Cider
Although the cider apples are harvested in October, the fermentation process is typically carried out over the winter, resulting in a dry and still cider by early summer. Cyder may have run out by December.
Ale
The bottled ale was of the same brew as the barrelled ale. Hasledine notes laying them in together in Spring 1738 and another batch October that year.
Wine bottles from the first half of the 18th century (V&A).
Port
Hasledine uses the term laid in rather than laying down the wine. Typical bottle shapes had large, rounded bellies with names like onion, mallet, globe, bladder, balloon making them difficult to lay down essential to keep the corks moist and the wine sealed. The straight-sided cylindrical shaped bottle of today arrived in the 1770s. Hence, one reason why so much wine was ingested to avoid waste?
The quantity of port presumably drunk was not unusual, English gentlemen could afford to drink four bottles of port a night and did. Sir Robert Walpole's table in 1732 to 1733 got through an average of 10 bottles of wine each day, mainly port.
Red and white port were wines shipped from Portugal’s seaport city of Port. The fortified and sweet form of today appeared only in the latter half of the 18th century. Lead was added to the wine to sweeten it after its long voyage from Portugal. Lead acetate-sweetened cider would cause Devonshire colic in the C18. Evidence suggests that Beethoven could have died from lead sweetened red wine. In 2010, Champagne from bottles in a 19th-century shipwreck in the Baltic Sea revealed the presence of lead in those wines.
Gout secondary to lead-induced kidney damage is a long-term complication of lead exposure. The Earl of Chesterfield ranked diseases by class, declaring that rheumatism was for coachmen but "gout is the distemper of a gentleman.'' Others argued gout was hereditary and that it "ran in good families". Alice Brownlow, Tyrconnel's aunt, not a heavy drinker from accounts of her time suffered from gout.
Nevertheless, Henri Misson de Valbourg, author of Mémoires et observations faites par un voyageur en Angleterre (1718 translation) comments that English women were equal heavy drinkers to the men,
A tavern keeper told me that there was a Tun of Red Port drank at his Wife's burial, besides mulled white wine. Note, no men ever go to women's burials.
A tun equates to 4 hogsheads or 1,632 pints.
