Brewsters

G’day

Further to a classic column concerning the name 'Brewster, I would like to add that the trade of brewing was not controlled by a guild. In mediaeval villages people would make ale in large batches, and then as they had no means of pasteurising or sealing it, they would sell off the surplus to their neighbours. Like most household production, this was done mostly by women. Women who followed this vocationo were called ‘alewives’, and most villages had officials called ‘aletasters’ to collect fines from the alewives.

Since a permanent sign was not wanted in the case of an episodic business, the custom emerged in at least some parts of an alewife displaying a bough of green leaves over her door when she had ale to sell. It is because of this customs, apparently, that England has a lot of pubs called “The Bush”.

Regards,
Agemegos

Possibly true; I’ll leave it to samclem to offer definitive evidence on etymology, but I notice that Merriam-Webster Online asserts that “alewife” is a woman who keeps an alehouse. Do you have any evidence supporting your theory on the derivation of the terms you discuss?

This column has previously struck me as being rather inadequate, precisely because it only considers the issue of guild membership, but to say that brewing was not controlled by guilds is equally wrong in the opposite direction. It all depends on which brewers we’re talking about.

Guilds of brewers did exist. The obvious example in England was the one that would become one of the London livery companies, the Brewers’ Company.

But such guilds did not exist in most places; usually they were to be found only within particular towns or cities. (Corporate towns were a special case for brewers anyway, as most civic corporations had the right to regulate the quality of beer sold there through the assize of beer.) But brewing was not a trade confined to towns. So the correct thing to say is that some brewers (including some women) belonged to guilds, but that most did not and many of those were women. One medieval historian, Judith M. Bennett, has written an entire monograph about them.

Incidentally, a particularly germane example of a ‘-ster’ word that was not gender-specific that Cecil missed would be ‘maltster’, a job often closely associated with that of brewer.

The sign of the bush was not limited to beer and ale; in Shakespeare’s time, it was proverbially associated with wine.

The nearest reference to hand is “Life in a Medieval Village”, by Frances and Joseph Gies, ISBN 0-06-092046-7. On p 152-153 (Harper Perennial paperback edition 1991) it says:

“One village craft was so widely practiced [sic] that it hardly belonged to craftsmen. Every village not only had its brewer, but had them all up and down the street. Many if not most of them were women.…Ale was as necessary to life in an English medieval village as bread, but where flour-grinding and bread-baking were strictly guardedseigneural monopolies, brewing was everywhere freely permitted and freely practiced. How the lords came to overlook this active branch of inustry is a mystery (though they found a way to profit by fining the brewers for weak ale or faulty measure).…The procedure was to make a batch of ale, display a sign, and turn one’s house into a temporary tavern. Some equipment was needed, principally a large cauldron, but this did not prevent poor women from brewing. All twenty-three persons indicted by the Elton ale tasters in 1279 were women. Seven were pardoned because they were poor.”

And on p. 103:

“Both men and women gathered in the ‘tavern’, usually meaning the house of a neighbour who had recently brewed a batch of ale….”

A mediaeval ‘alehouse’ was not a permanent specialist establishment for brewing and drinking, and the women who ran them were not guild members.