A Gallup poll last week found that only 54% of American adults drank alcohol in 2025. Drinking among Republicans is in a rapid collapse, with only 46% of Republicans reporting that they drank in 2025, down from 65% two years ago. (Democrats, by contrast, are drinking only slightly less than before, 61% this year, down from 64% in 2023.) The phenomenon seems to be, at least in part, mimetic: President Trump doesn’t drink. RFK Jr. abstains. Charlie Kirk preaches sobriety. Tucker Carlson is sober.

This might seem like a winning issue for the Right — and one that unites the Trump coalition, since the tech libertarians who now finance the party don’t drink, either — but anyone who cares about human conviviality should be skeptical. 

Republican teetotaling is part of a general decline in having fun; partying — drinking, sex, going out — has slumped since the pandemic (during which public authorities told Americans that physical alienation from each other is a responsible social pattern). It turns out that when you lock up members of an already atomized, lonely society, people don’t easily recover the sociality that Aristotle taught is one of the fundamental characteristics of the human animal. Restless un-leisure — doom-scroolling, scrambled attention spans, ordering in — has gradually become more normal than being together. 

More From This Author

The sadist assault on the ‘Coldplay couple’

By Matthew Gasda

Across the board, alcohol consumption is declining — men, women, white, nonwhite, rich, poor. Biohackers like Bryan Johnson or self-optimizing influencers like Andrew Huberman believe no level of alcohol is safe. Sobriety or “California sober” — no alcohol, but plenty of cannabis — is another emerging trend and is increasingly normal among Gen Z and millennials, who prefer stimulants, nootropics and nicotine. GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic are also reducing consumption in general, drinking included.

Against the backdrop of a broad decline in social trust and socializing, the general decline in alcohol consumption becomes relevant — and the more specific decline in drinking among Republicans is especially ominous. 

To some extent, the embrace of sobriety on the Right is a reversal, since lately it’s been progressives who are anti-pleasure. But in the longer historical perspective, it’s a return to form. Over the last 150 years, temperance has been a consistently Republican virtue. The reputation for drinking and “fun” belonged to Democrats. 

It was the Republicans who were the “drys” during Prohibition, casting themselves as the party of sobriety, order, and Protestant reform, while Democrats were associated with saloons, ethnic political machines, and speakeasies. The old Republican rallying cry “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion” — caricaturing Democrats as the party of booze, Catholic immigrants, and Confederate nostalgia — was first uttered by a Protestant minister during the 1884 presidential campaign. 

Excess drinking and alcoholism are deadly, to be sure, and some people should never drink. For many others, not drinking is super fucking lame; moderate drinking is fundamental feature of a good life. Certainly, that’s been the position of Western civilization both before and after the advent of Christianity. “Mix stronger wine,” Achilles commands in Homer’s Iliad, “a cup for the hands of each guest — / Here beneath my roof are the men I love the most.” Wine is used for cooking, at meals and during religious rituals in the poem. The guests in the Platonic dialog The Symposium negotiate how much they’ll drink at the beginning of the evening — and then go on to imbibe more than planned, joking about their drunkenness and referring to each other as “o my companions in drink.” 

Christianity, of course, incorporates wine in the central mystery of the Eucharist, though sometimes some of the more dour denominations have substituted grape juice. Medieval paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder portray village life as scenes of rowdy and joyous drunken revelry, and the still life tradition in the 1800s showed tables laden with glasses, bottles and carafes. Private drinking parties made life tolerable, for me personally, during the pandemic; good dive bars are part of what justify the price of rent in New York City — or any other big city.

Anything that unites — even accidentally — the neuroticism of tech optimizers, progressive scolds, and rightoid incels is probably bad. Americans need convivial practices like drinking with friends. The decline of drinking is a decline in spending time with other people, learning about them, and knowing them. Temperance promotes isolation and alienation.

Politically, the neo-temperance movement also threatens the plurality and energy of the Trump coalition. Part of Trump’s appeal was his basically liberal attitude toward the good life (he doesn’t drink, but doesn’t proselytize about it, either). The better aspects of Trump-era populism implied solidarity, community, revelry, and a good time, and stood against the dominant qualities of the Left: moral superiority, hyper-rationalism, fear of the body, fear of spontaneous community, fear of mixing it up, fear of confession, fear of the local, the street, the bar, the friend. Drinking promotes a neighborliness and bonding essential to a conservative view of the polis.

Suggested article

Why girls deserve a drink

By Kathleen Stock

Republican neo-temperance, moreover, not only smacks of a 19th-century purity and social stiffness, but a 20th-century clubbiness and suburban rejection of blue-collar values of the union hall or the bar — and even of the emotions that emerge from working class people in the tempo of drinking. Temperance culture is repressive.

Similarly, a Calvinist-in-spirit shunning of imbibing and inebriation — the spurning of the social and even moral uses of alcohol — is suggestive of a larger rejection of courtship, reproduction, and communal behaviors. There’s something about energy drinks and Zyn that seems suited for staring at a screen, for locking in to a kind of isolated work practice, but not conducive to talking, flirting, boasting, taking pleasure in free-spirited afterwork hours.

The Trump coalition will endure if it stays chill. An abstemious, Puritan attitude threatens the gains of the post-pandemic counterrevolution against progressivism and Bidenism, against the antisocial, judgmental, unpragmatic, and anti-communal behaviors of late progressive culture. Neurotic liberals have already driven less-neurotic liberals out of the Democratic Party; Republicans should remember that those voters can move the other way.

Moreover, temperance is, whenever enacted, unpopular and a losing position. Sermonizing conservative Protestant neuroticism about drinking resembles sermonizing liberal post-Protestant neuroticism about everything else. If conservatives embrace and accelerate accidental temperance, they risk creating a mirror image of the progressive Left: afraid of doing things, afraid of the world, afraid of irrationality.

In the 2020s, a good rule of politics, policy, and culture might be: normal is good. Most of what people were doing 40 or 50 years ago was better than the antisocial mores of today. Social drinking is a traditional good that conservatives ought to be conserve.

Hygiene theatre is mostly gone now, but the habit of policing others’ choices has proven too hard to quit, and now one of its preferred targets is alcohol. This has been in the offing for some time: the temperance movement, which had struggled to shed the air of puritanism surrounding it since the repeal of prohibition in America, has refashioned itself in recent years through an emphasis on health. The first rumblings of alcohol hysteria could be detected in the relish of the abstemious when it turned out resveratrol, an antioxidant found in red wine, might not be the elixir of life it was once touted as. Then there was the clawing-back of guidelines for moderate drinking: in 2023, for example, Canada dropped its so-called “low-risk threshold” from 10 drinks per week for women and 15 for men to two or fewer for either sex.

More recently, the progressive press has jumped on the anti-alcohol dogpile, with headlines calculated to horrify. “There is No Such Thing as a Safe Level of Alcohol Consumption,” The Guardian warns us, while The New York Times, now a surrogate parent for those who stopped talking to their own parents because they voted for Trump or refused to tack a land acknowledgment onto the end of the Thanksgiving dinner prayers, chides readers virtually every day with articles like “Even a Little Alcohol Can Harm Your Health,” “Alcohol Carries New Risks in Middle Age,” and the condescending “Is That Drink Really Worth it to You?”

And worldwide, health authorities have responded. In 2026, Ireland will become the first EU country to place warning labels on alcoholic beverages. In 2024, the World Health Organization published its “Global Alcohol Action Plan” a masterpiece of bureaucratic jargon that employs the stock aims of “empowering people and communities”, “ending poverty”, and “achieving gender inequality” to encourage member states to monitor their citizens’ alcohol use, engage in anti-drinking campaigns, and ultimately reduce consumption by 20% by 2030. Finally, this past January, the US Surgeon General issued an alarmist report entitled “Alcohol and Cancer Risk”. I will not contest the Surgeon General’s findings, though they fail to include alcohol’s possible protective effects against kidney cancer, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, dementia, and other diseases. What I will not accept is their significance. In America, it appears, alcohol “contributes” to 100,000 cancer diagnoses and 20,000 cancer deaths each year. Putting aside that the nature of such a contribution is indeterminable — and that confounding factors, which there are in virtually every case, should be a motive for caution, rather than conclusiveness — this means that alcohol is deemed to be a factor in 5% of cancer diagnoses and 3% of cancer deaths per year. These deaths constitute .006% of all deaths in the United States — significantly lower than mortality due to influenza or unintentional falls.

The report goes on to state that alcohol is the third leading cause of preventable cancers, after smoking and obesity. But smoking is the only one of these where the link is clear-cut: around 14% of smokers will develop lung cancer, with the number higher for men than for women. For everything else, it’s a guessing game, because the factors are too difficult to disentangle: if an obese drug user who binges on processed food comes down with cancer of the colon, who is to say whether one or all of these, or none, caused those first cells to mutate?

Of course, cancer isn’t the only thing you can die of, and a mere month before the Surgeon General’s doomsaying appeared, the National Academies of Sciences, Medicine, and Engineering released its own report on moderate alcohol consumption and health outcomes, the findings of which reconfirmed two things: first, that moderate drinking is associated with a lower risk of heart attack and stroke, and second, that compared with abstinence, it also correlates with a lower risk of mortality. This last datum in particular is a source of consternation to the new temperance advocates, who have tied themselves into all sorts of interesting knots to explain it away. Most entertaining of these is the “sick quitter” theory which suggests that the pool of hale teetotallers is befouled by the wrecks of ex-drinkers who gave up the bottle too late, and remain ravaged by their years of sin; if only their numbers could be excluded, the appearance of any health benefits of alcohol would vanish.

More from this author

America will always be hooked on drugs

By Adrian Nathan West

This hypothesis is nonsense, and has been shown to be nonsense in repeated studies of lifetime abstainers; likewise, the faddish notion that moderate drinkers owe their health to their generally better socio-economic standing is not borne out by statistical data. Whence, then, the moral panic?

A hint, paradoxically, lies in the near absence of heavy drinking from these discussions. Because an alcoholic is an addict, and over the past several years, the addict has been configured as a powerless object of pity and solidarity, the alcoholic lies beyond censure; his “disease” is the likely product of trauma, and following the precepts of “harm reduction”, he must be coddled until he chooses to get better. The moderate drinker, on the other hand, is a being self-possessed, one who consciously takes a drink or two or five in full awareness of the minuscule danger, because he is enjoying himself, and would like to enjoy himself more. Contemporary progressive dogma is fundamentally anti-responsibility, placing the blame for social ills anywhere but on the subject; and the calculated risk-taker is a constant and exasperating reminder that maybe all that is bullshit, and that accepting the consequences for one’s possibly unwise actions is a basic criterion for participating in society. Moreover, as the editorializing classes have fallen for a “standpoint epistemology” according to which one’s measure of illness or trauma determined how much of a right one has to speak, the mere fact of self-composure has acquired the illiberal stink of “privilege”.

Suggested reading

Can prohibition be progressive?

By Tomiwa Owolade

I would put down the bottle if what I were offered in return were worthwhile, but I fear the antidote is worse than the poison. I am aware of drinking’s association with violence, sexual assault, deaths on the road, liver disease, and a host of other problems; this is what makes it a vice, though unlike the slow-motion disaster of legalized marijuana, at least it’s one we have lots of practice in handling. The harms of not drinking are harder to track, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there, and their consequences are ominous for our societies. In a 2010 study, Charles Holahan, a psychologist of the University of Austin, found associations between abstinence and an enormous suite of problems: obesity, depression, avoidance coping, poor social engagement, lack of support from friends, significantly decreased likelihood of marriage. He concluded: “All of these factors that were associated with abstention significantly predicted mortality.”

Why harp on these benefits, though? The social neurosis surrounding alcohol is no more concerned with health than Covid vaccine-shaming was five years ago (I say this as a believer in vaccines, but one who feels intransigence was a moral and policy failure). And even if we take others’ alleged concern for our bodies at face value, what is health, and what is the point of it? To quote Nietzsche, “In order to determine even what health involves for your body, what matters is your purpose, your horizon, your powers, your impulses, your errors and in particular the ideals and phantasms of your soul.” Life in itself is not an unalloyed good; it is only worthwhile to the extent that it is lived; and much of what people mistake to be health is preparation for a life they never get around to starting. “Is it not,” the Swiss novelist Hermann Burger wrote about his own weakness, tobacco, “far worse, more frustrating, to have to renounce life’s most sublime pleasure hundreds of thousands of times over than to pay for decades of wishes granted with a narrowing of the vessels in old age?” Quite so, I’d say, and if you’ll excuse me, I must step away to pour myself a glass.

Stumblingly, young Nige is starting to live out the two contradictory impulses that will frame his life. One: a conservative’s respect for, and needy desire to be part of, institutions. Two: a libertarian’s outsider fantasy of bomb-tossing nonconformity. Yeah, the boy loves the club, but he quite fancies running a bulldozer through those front doors too. Luck will let him do both.

Nigel Farage, for all his talents, was lucky. He was time-and-place fortunate. His pampered enemies underestimated him, and thought him a punchline until the joke brought their house down. Many of them were no life experience professional political hermits like Danny Alexander or Ed Miliband. They raised no whirlwinds. Mostly, as David Foster Wallace put it, they weren’t “enough like human beings even to hate.” They were overpumped with focus-grouped shrewdness, not human instinct.

Farage was messily and chaotically human. He is, in that dreaded national formulation, a character. He has an anuran face, an aquatic aspect — the ideally fishy tribune of an island where the moss is still damp and the rain is still thin.

In the 2010s he smashed through the Overton Window like a breeze block. First with Ukip, then with the Brexit Party. And even as he did so, he was being very badly behaved — not that this ever made a scratch in his popular image as a plain-speaking common sense merchant. Fortune favours the charming miscreant sometimes. The rest was Britain’s exit from the European Union.

At least, that’s the life that emerges from Michael Crick’s new biography of Farage. One Party After Another: The Disruptive Life of Nigel Farage feels, quite simply, long. Five hundred beigely judicious pages read like 5,000. Crick’s annoyingly pokey reportorial style — a staple of Channel Four News for decades — is absent here. It’s a dull, reasonably objective attempt to tell the truth. There is voyeurism (we buy books like this to peep through the bedroom keyhole, don’t we?) but not a single nose-turning jab of biographical GBH.

Crick comes perilously close to making Farage… boring. He drowns him under mudslides of irrelevant detail. There are paceless accounts of infighting among Ukip’s National Executive Committee; a whole chapter about a dodgy party call centre in Kent; more information on Neil Hamilton’s time as an MEP than even the most deranged politico could be expected to digest. Still, sanding away the trivia reveals two major themes: alcohol and luck. In Farage’s life they combine and recombine like clouds on a windy day.

More from this author

Farewell, then, Gina Miller

By Will Lloyd

His luck was personal and political. Ukip’s rise was only possible after the unexpected death of the wall-eyed billionaire tyrant James Goldsmith in 1997. His demise took his Referendum Party, Ukip’s lavishly financed rival, into the soil with him. Tony Blair’s decision to approve a new proportional voting system for the UK’s European parliamentary elections gave Ukip their first big breaks — and Farage’s first media appearances proper — in 1999.

Later on, Farage was sceptical about the need for a referendum. Ukip’s central policy was so outrageously unthinkable for most of Farage’s career that, in spite of his crashingly loud public idealism, it seems like he doubted whether it could ever happen. His electoral successes (not luck) eventually pushed David Cameron into promising a vote on exiting the EU in 2013 — but it was Cameron’s unexpected majority in 2015 that made the referendum happen.

During the campaign, Farage had the lowest personal popularity rating of any of the major party leaders. Jeremy Corbyn was more popular. Farage did have political nous, though. Like Cummings, he understood that the old Left and Right labels were meaningless. “We don’t want to represent a wing,” he said in 2004, “but the heart and wishbone of the nation.” He didn’t think that English politics had changed since the 17th century. “You are either a cavalier, a democrat, and a libertarian, or you are a doctrinaire, morally intolerant roundhead.” He had identified one of the oldest, deepest, most durable divisions on the island. Spookily, the political map of the Brexit vote ended up resembling the regional distribution of support for the King, Court and Tories against Parliament, Merchants and Whigs in the Civil War. Except in 2016 the cavaliers won. Whoops.

More from this author

Power is corrupting the Tories

By Will Lloyd

For years, Ukip suffered from the pandemonium of being a party staffed entirely by cavaliers. Crick (without any sense of humour) gives the impression that the whole trembling structure could come crashing down at any moment. But Farage’s luck holds. The early Ukip days are clogged with writs, squabbles, and changes to office locks. The dramatis personae are livestock auctioneers, umbrella makers, undertakers, investment brokers, hoteliers, Rowan Atkinson’s brother, and a barrister described, in a simile that is too fun to be Crick’s, as “an escapee from a Joanna Trollope novel”. Tiny factions of them argue obscurely in the bitter wilderness.

Like Shakespearean fools, they tell unspeakable truths and babblingly predict a future others cannot see. The first full-length account of the party, Mark Daniels’ Cranks and Gadflies, described the membership as “idiots, paranoiacs, and conspiracy theorists.” Daniels — real name Mark Fitzgeorge-Parker — was also Ukip’s press officer at the time. Farage admitted they were all “bumbling amateurs”.

Peak bumble came in 2010. Farage was in Buckingham on polling day, where he was going to fail to win a seat in Westminster, again. It was planned as a photo-opportunity, which would have been a very Farage way to die. A blue Wilga 35A plane — “rather like a tractor” Farage thought — would pull a Ukip banner and its leader into the air, then fly low over Buckingham and the surrounding area. “I just hope the plane doesn’t blow up and crash,” Farage joked to the press at the airfield. Five attempts were required for the plane to pick up the banner. This quickly wrapped itself around the tail and rudder. Powerlessly, the plane began to drop from the forever English sky. “Oh, fuck!” said Farage.

Suggested article

What can we learn from Southend West?

By Tanya Gold

​​He should have been buried. But he was pulled out bleeding from the sorrily pretzeled fuselage, and shakily tried to smoke a fag. This was the third time in his life he’d escaped death. At this point, some Brexiteers will see the hand of God at work. Remainers will mutter about Satanic power. If Farage had died in 2010, would Brexit have happened? Crick poses the question, then refuses to play around with it.

Clearly, Farage inspired voters who felt their plain lives were being mocked, and their succulent English liberties stolen. His public persona, all ebullient disrespect for starchy insider taboos and flashy Thatcherkind good time roller, was immensely appealing when set against Cameron, Miliband, and Clegg. Unlike them, as his aide Gawain Towler said, Farage spoke “fluent human”.

​​He told voters that over two decades in Britain there had been a “shocking widening of the class system, where the rich have got a lot richer and the poor are robbed of the opportunity to attain their best”. He was right. At times he seemed to hold England’s spleen in his hands, happy to squeeze its juices at his favourite targets: Westminster and Brussels.

Anger wasn’t going to be enough. Paradoxically, the better Farage did in the years before the referendum, the more support for his core mission dropped off. He only appealed to voters who already wanted to leave the EU; he alarmed soft-eurosceptics with his hard-edged rhetoric on migration and HIV; he energised pro-Europeans who saw him as an unholy mash-up of Wat Tyler and Adolf Hitler. As Dominic Cummings put it: “Farage put off millions of (middle class in particular) voters who wanted to leave the EU but who were very clear in market research that a major obstacle to voting Leave was ‘I don’t want to vote for Farage, I’m not like that.’” He made the Brexit vote possible, but if he had played the Boris Johnson role in the referendum, Leave would have lost.

Suggested article

Why Remain lost

By Fintan O'Toole

Practically every page of One Party After Another opens with the clink of bottles. Acquaintances speak to Crick about Farage with the awe accorded to people who live larger and harder than the rest of us. Ann Widecombe recollects Farage rowdily leading Brexit Party MEP’s in song. Another describes Farage picking up a small coffee table and pretending to play the bagpipes with it. “His ability to get by on a few hours’ sleep,” says Aaron Banks, “even after his usual heavy nights, never ceases to amaze.”

It sounds like fun, and sometimes it was. But there was a desperate edge to Farage’s gregariousness. The plane crash had left him in immense pain, and ended his golfing days. His personal life, a thicket of chaotic amatory escapades and unhappy marriages, was broken. Crick quotes one Brexit Party insider who was surprised to find that Farage was “not actually very confident. He’s quite a tense person really, not at all relaxed.”

Alcohol gave him fluency, and let him escape himself. The sad, casual cruelty of all those affairs was not exposed in full before the referendum. Depending on the public’s mood, it may have ruined him. Or they may have been content, as they have been with Johnson, to ignore what Farage got up to on his night shifts. As it always seemed to, his luck held.

Crick’s biography is the first; it tells us how it happened, but doesn’t tell us why. Whether he saved the club, or made a colossal wreck of it remains uncertain. One Party After Another doesn’t have the answers. Crick claims that Farage is one of the most significant politicians of the last fifty years. His reason? “Nobody can dispute that Nigel Farage achieved his goal of leaving the European Union.” Well, duh.

Yes, he rode his luck, and he won. Farage is still agitating; he’s now a two-legged media empire; a pundit, a poster, a YouTuber. Crick leaves Farage on a boat in the channel, bathetically posed, eyes and cameras scanning the choppy waters for fighting-age men in listing dinghies.

Of all the 2010s populists — Le Pen, Bolsonaro, Salvini, Bannon, Trump, Wilders, Petry — only Farage actually got what he wanted. In the process, his two contradictory impulses have resolved themselves. The libertarian beat up the conservative. The bomb-thrower exploded several British institutions. But like a pinstriped Alexander, Farage has no more worlds to conquer. His victories have handed him obsolescence.

It is an alarming tale, but it is not a new one – in fact it is probably the most ancient English story of all, a tragicomic relationship that runs through the country’s history for as long as history has been recorded. The melancholy and tragedy of those who sought comfort in ale, wine and spirits, and the public concern about drinking, are one of the oldest continuums in history.

When national newspapers warn about the growing problem of alcohol they are echoing a national fear that dates back at least to the earliest English speakers. As far as the eighth century St Boniface, a West Saxon from what is now Devon, wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury, complaining that among his people “the vice of drunkenness is too frequent. This is an evil peculiar to pagans and to our race. Neither the Franks nor the Gauls nor the Lombards nor the Romans nor the Greeks commit it.”

The Anglo-Saxons drank “oceanic” amounts of beer, as one historian put it, and even local government entirely revolved around beer-drinking sessions, with each parish having a guildhouse (a drinking house) where decisions were made. The communal meeting was known as “an assembly of drinkers,” and this might not have been an entirely terrible idea, since there is some research linking alcohol use with higher levels of trust. And decisions made under the influence of beer are always sensible.

More from this author

Everything you know about Europe is wrong

By Ed West

By “pagans” Boniface meant what we now call Germans (he became a patron saint of Germany) and Scandinavians, who were closely related to the Saxons of Britain and had a similar culture, although they still worshipped the old gods. Scandinavians would settle in large numbers in England in the following centuries, admittedly not as very welcome newcomers, and on top of violence, these “Vikings” were also famous for drinking parties that could go on for days and in which lethal amounts of alcohol were drunk. Hardicnut, one of two sons of King Canute to rule England, drank himself to death at typically boozy wedding feast after ruling for just two years.

Which is probably why you don’t hear much about him.

A few years later, the chronicler William of Malmesbury observed that the English “used to eat till they were surfeited and drink till they were sick” and “drinking in parties was an universal practice, in which occupation they passed entire nights as well as days”. This, the half-Norman monk believed, helped explain their defeat at the hands of the Normans, led by the abstemious William the Conqueror.

By the high medieval period the average English person — man, woman and child — put away 8 pints of (admittedly weak) beer a day and such was the general air of rowdiness that Church leaders had to occasionally ban ale at weddings; in 1223 the Bishop of Salisbury ordered that all marriages must be sober affairs, and “celebrated reverently and with honour, not with laughter or sport or at public potations or feasts”.

Yet booze was heavily integrated into every part of life, including religion; local parishes were often supported by “church ales”, marathon boozing sessions in which parishioners were encouraged to drink as much as possible. These events could go on for three days, and after a certain time bachelors still able to stand up were allowed to drink for free, the kind of thing that would have the Government Nudge Unit tearing their hair out today.

Suggested reading

Covid has left me alone with my monster

By Tanya Gold

On top of this the Church did a lot of the brewing; Cistercian monks at Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire produced 1,100 gallons (5,000 litres) of ale every week, both for consumption and sale, fitting in with our idea of medieval England featuring lots of ruddy-faced monks stumbling over. These later stereotypes could reflect some truth; a chronicler from Ely in East Anglia recalls a priest so drunk he could barely walk but who after trying to perform Mass vomited and defecated in front of the congregation.

Alcohol has also long been linked to crime. England has meticulous criminal records going back to the 12^th century, which give a captivating insight into a world of horrific murder rates and agricultural accidents, with drink almost invariably involved.

In one recorded incident, from Gloucester in 1221, a case of trial by battle took place in which men fought with clubs to determine who was guilty. This particular legal dispute, involving old friends called George and Thomas, had begun four years earlier when the two were on the way home, heavily drunk, and George hit Thomas over the head with a stick (years before this Thomas had slept his wife, so there was a simmering resentment). Thomas hit him back with an axe; then George raised the hue and cry, whereby every man in the local area, the hundred, was expected to form a “posse” to track down a wrongdoer. The trial ended with George winning, and his relatives cutting off Thomas’s testicles and throwing them to a group of local boys, who played football with them.

Today newspapers speak with horror about the “middle class” taking up booze but historically drunkenness has been one of the few things that crossed class lines; indeed in recent times alcohol use has correlated with high social status. Court records from 1306 recall how members of elite village families in Bedfordshire were involved in an enormous, drink-fuelled brawl in which John Ketel, “twice juror and twice ale taster… broke the head” of Nicholas, son of Richard Smith and badly beat Richard Benyt, “and moreover did hamsoken upon him”; John, son of Henry Smith, four times juror, “struck Robert Stekedec and drew blood from him,” while his brother Henry Smith “pursued John [Smith]… with a knife in order that he might strike and wound him”.

Then as now, horrific accidents were common, court rolls recording endless cases of individuals stabbing themselves to death, burning down their homes or drowning as a result of alcohol. Sometimes these mishaps could be catastrophic; in 1212 London Bridge caught fire, killing up to 3,000 people, after a so-called “Scot-ale”, bring-your-own-bottle events where “the highest credit was accorded to him who made the most of his fellows drunk and himself emptied the largest tankards” in the words of A.L. Poole.

Suggested reading

The day America went dry

By Henry Jeffreys

During the 12^th century Richard FitzNigel, Bishop of Ely and head of the treasury at the time of Henry II, said the English were “natural drunks”. Richard fitz Neal, a churchman in the service of Henry II, wrote that crime in England was generally explained by “the drunkenness, which is inborn in the inhabitants”. Another churchman, and early grammarian, Geoffrey de Vinsauf, wrote of “that drinker, England” (Anglia potatrix).

Leading by example for almost 20 years was King John, among the worst drunks to ever rule the country. The monarch kept 180,000 gallons of wine at his disposal, just in case he ever ran out, and his butler was personally responsible for ensuring a tun (240 gallons) or two of wine was waiting for him at his next stop, wherever he was. John was unfortunately not the best kind of drunk, either, both violent and lecherous; one low point was when he (allegedly) beat his nephew to death in a drunken rage; his infamous lechery towards the wives and daughters of noblemen is one cause for the rebellion that led to Magna Carta.

The modern anxieties about the English disgracing themselves in Magaluf or Faliraki are nothing new either, that reputation being centuries old. In medieval Paris, where the English comprised one-third of all students at the Sorbonne, they were famous for heavy drinking. In Robert Bartlett’s words they were seen as “most discerning… outstanding for their manners, elegant in speech and in appearance, strong in intelligence and wise in their advice” and yet having three failings – women, “Weisheil” and “Drincheil” the latter two being toasts.

Jacques de Vitry, a theologian and cardinal who lived in Paris at the end of the 12th century, described “the distinctive characteristics of each nation: the French were proud and womanish; the Germans furious and obscene; the Lombards greedy, malicious, and cowardly; and the English were drunkards and had tails.”

More from this author

Will coronavirus change the world?

By Ed West

The Franciscan friar Salimbene di Adam noticed that it was the Englishman’s habit always to drain off a beaker of wine, saying “he bi a vu” (I drink to you), implying by this that his friend must drink as much as he, and he “taketh it exceedingly ill if any do otherwise than he himself hath taught in word and shown by example”.

This “drinking culture”, as it came to be known in the modern era, has been the target of campaigners down the years; indeed Liberal politicians of the early 20^th century considered banning the rounds system, seeing it as pernicious in encouraging drink.

Yet by the modern era the drinking culture had been tamed considerably. Alcohol consumption in Europe had fallen from the seventeenth century, with the advent of coffee and tea, and aside from events such as London’s gin epidemic, the overall trend has been downward, in England and across the continent. Agricultural labour suited a certain amount of inebriation but industrialisation and urbanisation did not, the latter in particular giving rise to Christian temperance movements that were effective at stigmatising heavy alcohol use. Even in living memory attitudes to drink have changed a great deal, across Europe; the average French person drinks one-third of their equivalent in the 1950s, when primary school children were still given cider and wine at lunch (and the switch to milk was controversial). Even in the last two or three decades, views on lunchtime drinking and other previously-normal rituals have hardened.

Yet while the modern world indulges drunkenness far less, the national characteristic has changed little. The English, both in times of joy and fearful melancholy, will always retreat towards the comforting embrace of Anglia potatrix.