Drinking with Shakespeare: Early Modern Tavern Tokens

Heads up: your bar tab is over 400 years old. Well, the idea of bar tabs is that old, and if you can find an example of a special coin Shakespeare almost certainly carried in his pocket, you can technically still buy the Bard a drink.

I am not a stereotypical drunken writer, but as an artistic fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library, I came to the Reading Room to work on a historical novel, and while there I became fascinated by Early Modern drinking habits. We artistic fellows have fewer restrictions on our time than scholars do, and part of the joy of being in residence is how the Folger fosters creative discovery. I stumbled upon many unexpected objects and books that enriched my work simply by following a hunch or asking a librarian to open an archival box that caught my eye. One especially rewarding surprise came from exploring tavern/pub culture and how it overlaps with another interest of mine: fake money.

Before I explain the fake money part, it’s important to understand what a big deal taverns were during Shakespeare’s time. Thanks to the Protestant Reformation, church-centered social gatherings, which usually allowed or even endorsed wine and beer drinking, changed drastically—or simply disappeared—in 16^th century England. The Church of England preferred to separate sacred activities from putatively “profane” behaviors like alcohol consumption, so as the influence of the Catholic church collapsed across Britain, people needed new places to socialize and share a pint.

According to Peter Clark’s The English Alehouse (just one of many boozy books in the Folger’s stacks), by 1577 there were already 17,000 taverns, inns, and alehouses in England. Then came a massive growth spurt. In Alehouses and Good Fellowship in Early Modern England, Mark Hailwood estimates that during Shakespeare’s lifetime this number more than doubled to at least 30,000. Drinking establishments quickly became a “vital social space in Early Modern society,” writes Michelle O’Callaghan in A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth Century. This was particularly true in London, where O’Callaghan says “new forms of sociability” were forming around drinking and nightlife.

A note about terminology: there were big differences between the types of drinking establishments during this time. According to Hailwood, at an inn, customers could purchase meals and a bed for the night, along with alcohol. Inns were larger, more established businesses where drinking was not the primary activity. The lower classes had alehouses, homegrown spaces where working people could buy (heavily regulated) ale and beer. The average person in Elizabethan England drank two pints of ale per day, and manual laborers double that, so alehouses became essential social centers for them.

In population centers like London, it was the tavern where things were really buzzing. Taverns, unlike alehouses, were self regulating and subject to fewer governmental restrictions. The “public house” or pub did not exist until the 19^th century, but the concept is very similar. A tavern was the place to be for gentlemen and the emerging middle class in England, the origin of the businessman’s two-martini lunch, and the setting for much late-night banter between writers.

London taverns, particularly those near the theaters and centers of political power, catered to merchants, lawyers, and the political and social elite. They were also known for encouraging the arts. Taverns not only had public drinking spaces, but also private rooms where patrons could gamble, form drinking societies, share their latest poems—not all of which were fit to print¹—and debate political and social issues without fear of being censored. We know that Shakespeare frequented multiple taverns, and it is likely that much of his knowledge of contemporary artistic and political zeitgeist came from conversations at these watering holes.

Taverns like the Mermaid, the Boar’s Head, and the Mitre were popular with many prominent poets of the time, along with other emerging artistic and skilled classes. According to O’Callaghan, the Mermaid in particular became a “favored meeting place for men of wit” such as John Donne and Ben Jonson, who mentions the Mermaid in his works. Tavern drinking quickly became a literate, even gentlemanly pastime, one which soon developed its own rules and subculture. Tavern society publications from the period, such as Richard Braithwaite’s 1617 Law[es] of Drinking were, as O’Callaghan writes, “designed to teach the arts of drinking in polite society” by explaining how to toast someone’s health, when and how to buy a round, and perhaps most importantly, the strict courtesies of allowing tavern goers a freedom of expression not available elsewhere. As A Pleasing Sinne notes, Elizabethan conviviality rules took many liberties with behaviors and language otherwise forbidden in the everyday world—thus allowing for important cultural innovation.

Now that we understand the context, let’s get back to that fake money in Shakespeare’s pocket. I am the child of Kentucky coal miners who were paid in scrip, so I have a lifelong fascination with exonumia, or false currencies. I still have 1950s scrip coins that my grandfather was forced to accept instead of a real wage. Miners could only use these coins at the price-gouging “company store” until unions helped outlaw scrip.

False currencies have held similar personal significance for millions of people throughout history, and of course there are much more fun versions of this phenomenon—poker chips, coupons, and prize vouchers are livelier examples of the fake money phenomenon. The taverns where Shakespeare drank also used a unique and festive form of exonumia: drinking tokens.

Picture yourself on a dark London street in the early 17^th century. You’ve just seen a good play, and you’re thirsty and ready to party, or simply to discuss the finer points of the show with fellow patrons of the arts. You enter a busy tavern such as the Mermaid and find your money is no good at the bar. Or, rather, in order to drink, you must first exchange your cash for currency used only in that tavern: tokens printed exclusively by the tavern for use in their establishment.

The practice of using tokens was a win-win for both customers and barkeeps. After all, even if you follow the Law of Drinking, you still might not have your wits or your wallet about you at the end of the night. You might be mugged by one of the shady con artists discussed in The Elizabethan Underworld—a book I stumbled upon in the Folger’s stacks and which taught me some juicy street slang. Thus, the less cash you carried, the safer you’d be. And because a tipsy person can often be forgetful or lose coins in a drunken fumble, taverns made a sizable profit off tokens, many of which were never cashed in. (For a modern comparison, just think of all those unused gift cards you received last Christmas.)

Each tavern’s tokens were different, but all followed a similar format: the coins were small, about the size of a modern dime or penny, and made of cheap metal. This explains their rarity today, despite their prevalence at the time. Pub tokens were light and small, easily worn down, easy to lose, and of course, technically worthless. Thus, it’s surprising to find such well-preserved specimens as the ones held at the Folger.

Tokens also all had similar stamps: on one side is a tavern’s logo. On the other, the denomination of the coin and/or the name of the tavern owner. Tokens might use language like “Abraham Brown at the Bear” printed in a circle, inside of which is written “his half P.” In other words, here is the tavern and its proprietor (Abraham Brown), and this is his (or, very occasionally, her) money, good for a specific amount in that tavern only.

The experience of handling these coins at the Folger was a sensory and artistic delight for me, as were all my hands-on experiences here. Most of the Folger’s tavern tokens are kept exactly as they were acquired, painstakingly labeled and wrapped in thick paper by the (in)famous 19^th century Shakespeareana collector James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps. I requested every coin in Halliwell-Phillipps’ collection from the archives and unwrapped each one myself. I then tipped them all into my eager hands and imagined one of my characters using them. One little envelope contains three coins, and they made a pleasing, historically thrilling clink sound when I poured them out together.

For me, these tiny mementos of Elizabethan drunkenness felt both impossibly delicate and weighty at the same time. Scholarly archival research is uncommon among 21^st century novelists, but moments like this, where an artist has the opportunity to hold objects so connected to her creative interests, and yet so far removed from them, is what fiction writing is all about.