Hailwood’s book is the twenty-first volume in The Boydell Press series Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History. The book’s appearance in the series is apt because it is a cultural, political, and social history of English alehouses from the middle of the sixteenth to the end of the seventeenth century. This period witnessed an increase in the number of alehouses and their establishment as a significant institution in English society. Hailwood bravely turns his focus from overstudied London to rural England and the England of small towns and villages. The title is incomplete: the last half of the book focuses on good fellowship, but the first half deals with authority, namely, efforts by those in a position of authority to prevent alehouses from becoming centers of recreational drinking. Hailwood has utilized archival sources and has a good command of the secondary literature, beginning with the pioneering social history of English alehouses by Peter Clark and continuing to the recent studies that adopt a cultural approach. Indeed, engagement with the secondary literature forms the basis of Hailwood’s method; he approaches most topics by first explaining the views of one historian. He proceeds next to a discussion of a historian with opposing views and sometimes even others before presenting his own evidence and conclusions, usually safely tucked in the middle between the two. The analysis is meanwhile often wrapped in historiographical issues of broad scope such as patriarchal society and popular culture. This approach produces intricate analysis more suitable for scholars and advanced students than for undergraduates and laypersons. Moreover, this approach, in combination with Hailwood’s tendency to include example after example of differing cases, can on occasion overwhelm the reader. I found it odd that the book contains few references to my publications; I encountered a very strong feeling of déjà vu, or, more appropriately, déjà écrit as Hailwood cited the sources that I used (over three hundred times) and repeated the arguments that I made, especially in my Alcohol, Violence, and Disorder in Traditional Europe (2007).

According to Hailwood, English authorities accepted the existence of a limited number of alehouses that had the limited function of providing drink as well as food for the poor and the traveler. What they refused to countenance was the alehouse serving as a center for popular recreation as a result of the fear that this could lead to disorder, and they accordingly waged a long and losing battle against the tendency. In chapter 1, Hailwood focuses on the establishment of the regulatory framework for alehouses, and chapter 2 examines the frequent failures of these regulations as a result of both the ambivalence of prosecuting authorities and the opposition of alehouse clients. The second part of the book turns from the regulation of alehouses to good fellowship, beginning in chapter 3 with the depiction of good fellowship in popular ballads. In this long, fifty-three-page chapter, Hailwood contends that the ballads’ praise of good fellowship reveals the values of recreational drinking in alehouses: good fellows drank heavily to enjoy the sociable occasion but not excessively to reach drunken stupor; they likewise spent liberally but not excessively, and did so with a cheerful outlook; they “exhibited anti-patriarchal codes of manhood” (165) and were opposed to sexual promiscuity. In the fourth and final chapter Hailwood uses diaries and legal sources to argue that the practice of good fellowship approximated the values elucidated in the ballads. In contrast to the traditional view that alehouse space was a male space where women were unwelcome, Hailwood produces both qualitative and quantitative evidence demonstrating that although good fellowship was a masculine construct it could and did include women. By way of conclusion, Hailwood argues that the good fellowship that accompanied recreational drinking in early modern English alehouses produced positive experiences and relationships that reinforced enduring bonds of friendship.