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Binge-drinking
On the eve of the Battle of Hastings, the Normans spent the night in quiet contemplation and prayer – while the English got bladdered. This first-hand account, written shortly after the battle, makes it clear that our brave lads went into battle with a massive hangover:
The English, being reveling before, had in the morning their brains arrested for the arrearages of the ingested fumes of the former night – and were no better than drunk when they came to fight.
(Peter Haydon, An Inebriated History of Britain. Sutton Publishing, 2005)
When Fyodor Dostoevsky visited England in the 1860s, he records the reality of what he saw:
On Saturday nights, a half-million workers flood the city like a sea, flocking into certain sections to celebrate the Sabbath all night until five in the morning. They stuff themselves and drink like animals ... They all race against time to drink themselves insensate. The wives do not lag behind their husbands but get drunk with them; the children run and crawl among them.
(Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1862 – quoted in Duncan Campbell 'In the Heart of Babylon' Guardian, January 6th, 2007 ).
And more quotes from 'An Inebriated History of Britain' which you’d be forgiven for thinking describe our present-day drinking habits:
What immoderate drinking in every place! How we flock to the tavern! As if we were born to no other end but to drink! Tis now come to pas that he is no gentleman, a very milksop, that will not drink...How we love a man that will be drunk, crown him and honour him for it, hate him that will not pledge him, stab him, kill him. A most intolerable offence not to be forgiven!
(Peter Haydon – An Inebriated History of Britain, Sutton Publishing, 2005)
We drink the very strongest liquors that can be brewed or distilled! The classes among us who are not decent are in the habit of getting mad-drunk, and of fighting after the manner of wild beasts, when we have a chance of using their fists, feet or teeth on each other, and on the Guardians of the law. Our places of licensed victualling are ugly dens, where the largest number of sots can get tipsy in the shortest space of time…They are the most horrible terrestrial inferno that the eye ever beheld, that the ear ever hears, or the heart ever sickened at.
(Peter Haydon – An Inebriated History of Britain.)
