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I	James Brown: ‘The Space of the Alehouse in Early Modern England’
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I: James Brown: ‘The Space of the Alehouse in Early Modern England’

This paper aims to provide an overview of the spatial conventions of one of the most ubiquitous manifestations of the built environment in early modern England: alehouses. Using examples drawn from the port town of Southampton, and using categories of textual evidence rather than the testimony of fabrics, we will avoid an ‘illusion of transparency’ that would abstract these important locales into despatialised nodes of consumption and exchange devoid of material referents. The discussion falls into three parts. A first section embeds alehouses in the early modern urban landscape and sketches their distribution, some exterior characteristics and the means by which they might have been rendered ‘legible’ on the ground. Moving inside establishments, section two sketches the size and arrangement of premises and how they were configured and equipped for practice. A final section looks more broadly at the social formation of alehouse interiors, and provides some concrete instances of how their spatial arrangements became an ‘agentic’ force in the social relations they enclosed. Methodological reflections at various points in the paper argue that, rather than inducing ‘linguistic despair’, the written evidence of depositions and inventories offers the best prospects for ‘peopling’ this key social site.

Some Suggested Reading

M. Camille, ‘Signs of the City: Place, Power and Public Fantasy in Medieval Paris’, in B. A. Hanawalt & M. Kobialka (eds), Medieval Practices of Space (Minneapolis & London, 2000), pp. 1-36.
P. Clark, ‘The Alehouse and Alternative Society’, in D. Pennington & K. Thomas (eds), Puritans and Revolutionaries: Essays in Seventeenth-Century History Presented to Christopher Hill (Oxford, 1978), pp. 47-72.
P. Clark, The English Alehouse: A Social History 1200-1830 (London, 1983).
T. F. Gieryn, ‘What Buildings Do’, Theory & Society 31 (2002), pp. 35-74.
A. Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Cambridge, 1984).
J. Schofield, ‘Social Perceptions of Space in Medieval and Tudor London Houses’, in M. Locock (ed.), Meaningful Architecture: Social Interpretations of Buildings (Aldershot, 1992), pp. 188-206.
W. Whyte, ‘How do Buildings Mean? Some Issues of Interpretation in the History of Architecture’, History and Theory 45 (2006), pp. 153-177.
K. Wrightson, ‘Alehouses, Order and Reformation in Rural England 1590-1660’, in E. Yeo & S. Yeo (eds), Popular Culture and Class Conflict 1590-1914: Explorations in the History of Labour and Leisure (Brighton, 1981), pp. 1-27.

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