Parliamentary deliberations and debates upon the drink traffic.

Date:
[between 1864 and 1870?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Parliamentary deliberations and debates upon the drink traffic. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    1/22
    PARLIAMENTARY DELIBERATIONS AND DEBATES UPON THE DRINK TRAEFIC. 1. Cobbett’s Parliamentary History of England from the Norman Conquest (1066) to the Year 1803. London: R. Bagshaw. .2, The Parliamentary Debates from the Year 1803 to the Present Time (1829). London: Longman and Co. 3. Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates. Third Seines. From the Accession of William IV. London : Hansard’s Office, 23, Paternoster Row. WHAT wonld the historian and antiquarian give for a volume of the proceedings and debates of an Anglo-Saxon Wittenagemot? If notes and journals of those venerable assem¬ blies were ever taken, their very memorial has long ago and for ever perished. A few copies of laws once in force in sections of the Octarchy are all that are left to awaken curiosity, with not a syllable of the speeches and consultations which pre¬ ceded their adoption. In the laws of Ina, promulgated early in the eighth century, mention is made of ale and ale-houses, and it is not very probable that the Ceapealetherum (places where ale was sold) escaped the animadversions of the wise men with whose consent the Saxon laws were enacted. Edgar or Eadgar (959-75) is said, acting under the advice of St. Dunstan, to have adopted two measures for reducing the evils connected with the liquor traffic of that early period; the one limiting each village to a single ale-house; the other prescribing that drinking cups or tankards should have pegs inserted in them at regular spaces, no man to drink more liquor than the quantity between two pegs. Dunstan’s popular fame rests upon a certain sharp bodily encounter with Dia- bolus, with which he was credited by his admirers; but, in truth, he was more of a statesman than a pious recluse, and his