A very summary way had the City authorities in the sixteenth century, of treating any drink or victual which did not come up to the required standard of excellence. In 1597 we find it ordered that two and fifty pipes of corrupt beer, “being nether fitt for man’s body, nor to be converted into sawce (_i.e. vinegar_) . . . shall have the heades of all the same pipes beaten owte and the beer poured out into the channells, part in Cheapside, part in Cornhill and part in Bishopsgate.”
After the reign of Elizabeth the entries concerning the Brewers and their delinquencies become fewer and farther between. The prices of ale and beer were still fixed by law, but more common-sense views on the subject of trade and trade regulation were slowly beginning to prevail, and we soon lose all traces of the tyrannous and vexatious regulations of which so many instances occur in earlier times. One more such instance may be mentioned of an arbitrary attempt to force trade out of its natural channels, and to lower prices and compel sobriety at one and the same time. In 1614 the Lord Mayor, “finding the gaols pestered with prisoners, and their bane to take root and beginning at ale-houses, and much mischief to be there plotted, with great waste of corn in brewing heady strong beer, many consuming all their time and means sucking that sweet poison,” had an exact survey taken of all victualling houses and ale-houses, which were above a thousand. As above 300 { 147} barrels of beer were in some houses, the whole quantity of beer in victualling houses amounting to above 40,000 barrels, he had thought it high time to abridge their number and limit them by bonds as to the quantity of beer they should use, and as to what orders they should observe, whereby the price of corn and malt had greatly fallen. The Brewers, however, seem to have been too many for his Lordship, for though he limited the number of barrels to twenty per house, and the quality of the two sorts of beer to 4s. and 8s. a barrel, so that the price of malt and wheat was in a fortnight reduced by 5s. or 6s. per quarter, yet the Brewers brewed as before, alleging that the beer was to be used for export, and, “combining with such as kept tippling houses,” conveyed the same to the ale-houses by night, so that in a few weeks’ time the price of malt had risen to much the same figure as before.