Make Room for the Fat Alderman

I have spent the past few posts exploring the social dynamics of two rival 17th-18th century dining clubs, both of which met every Wednesday at separate rival taverns in the City of London.  But there were countless clubs and societies that met on a regular basis for the purposes of eating, drinking, conspiring and merry-making.  What makes the Wednesday's Club and the Centenary Club especially pertinent to the social history of dining?

One of the keys, I believe, resides within the professional identities of the men on the attendance rosters.  In addition to merchants, tradesmen, lawyers and doctors, I noticed that the number of aldermen represented in both clubs was uncommonly high.  Who were they?

Along with the Lord Mayor, these officials, each of whom represented one of London's 26 wards, wielded executive political authority within the Corporation of London.  This title was limited to an elite few; one had to own a sizable estate in order to even qualify for nomination.  Once appointed, aldermen held their offices for life.  To call them oligarchical would be of an understatement.

Coincidentally, the City Alderman possessed a unique cultural connection to the art of eating well, or, perhaps too well, I suppose.

A City Feast: Notice all the wasted food being ravaged by dogs in the corner
Gluttony and political corruption often went hand in hand

'Moderation' was an alien term to City politicians
Rowlandson, 1801 

  Just for kicks, I entered the term "fat alderman" into ECCO.  These were some of the hits I got:

Aldermen were often depicted as victims to
the medical consequences of overindulgence

"A fat alderman and a gluttonous knave have become synonymous terms."

          -- "The Batchelor, or Speculations of Geoffrey Wagstaffe" (1769)

"Next the fat alderman, 

whose pond'rous paunch,

is swell'd with turtle,

and with sav'ry haunch

as the last City-feast insur'd his fate,

where for the Public good he sweat

 –– and ate." 

       -- Ewan Clark (1769) 

These condemnations were often laced with accusations of political corruption.

"When shall the time come that an English alderman, like a Roman citizen, shall be contented with a frugal mess of turnips, ready to sacrifice his life for the good of his country, not the interest of his country to his belly?"

        -- "Freemasonry, the High Way to Hell" (1768)

So it's no great surprise that I started exploring these club records with an eye out for details of exquisite banquets and hefty bills.  Foodstuffs themselves are mentioned very sparingly in these two accounts, but I often ran across some curious notes.

In the summer for 1747, for example, the Wednesday's Club spent 6 pounds, 9 shillings, and 6 pence over the allocated 10 pounds for a dinner at Putney.  This record was accompanied by the grumbling resolution that these additional costs would be, in the future, collectively shared by all of the club members. 

Or take an example from the Centenary Club in 1765, when one member, "Mr Darker," bet a bottle of claret that the club had enjoyed two "venison dinners" in the past year.  But apparently Mr. Darker's memory had escaped him; we learn that he lost the bet.

And then there's the guy who tries to get out of being a paying club member and asks for "honorary status" instead by claiming that he has a bad case of gout.  Hmm.  Wonder why?  

What does one make of these excerpts?  They show us that eating well was certainly on the 18th century alderman's mind.  But is this evidence of insatiable bouts of gluttony?  Hardly.  Perhaps the image of the "fat alderman" is somewhat of an exaggeration.  Or perhaps the keeper of the books was particularly skilled in the arts of understatement.   

The Anatomy of Betrayal

In my last post, I brought up a very peculiar attendance record that seemed to indicate some degree of unhealthy strife among the Wednesday's Club members.  Here it is again.  Seems like the club basically stopped recording its meetings after a few months.  By 1695, eleven of these 20 members had been erased from the records.

The Wednesday's Club seemed to go on hiatus in April of 1694: Buy why?

But what happened?  Where did these men go?  To get to the bottom of this, I decided to look at the seven pages of rules instituted in 1695, designed “by the severall persons of this clubb for the better rule and government of this loving society.”

The first "rule" was particularly intriguing.  It states:

For Dismissing Old Members

“Wheras Mr. Johnson Senior, Mr Thatcher, Mr Hinde, Mr Johnson Junior, Mr Pooler, Mr Pickering, Mr Todd, Mr Dudson, Mr Barnes, Mr Owen and Mr Cheshire, former members of this Clubb have discontinued their appearances at this Clubb for Some time, and have met at a Separat Clubb at the Castle Tavern in Paternoster Row after the Place of meeting was by the majority of the votes of this Clubb upon on noting for that purpose given, fixed to be at the Fountaine Tavern at Aldersgate.  It is Ordered the said persons so discontinuing their appearances shall be dismissed from being members of this Clubb and that for the future this Clubb shall to consist of twenty members and no more. 

What have we here?  Up to now, I had thought that most of these eating clubs had decided to institute rules in order to prevent non-paying "stangers" from showing up to the tavern unannounced and mooching off of the pre-paid dinner.  The institutionalization of the Wednesday's Club –– manifested in its many rules governing dining, comportment and membership ––  apparently resulted from decidedly less happy circumstances.

Distance from the Fountain to the Castle Tavern
Courtesy of Google-Maps

But why did these guys leave and start their own club?  It certainly couldn't have been the commute; A quick search revealed that the walking distance between the the locations of the two taverns amounted to a paltry five minutes.

But as vast social, religious and political divisions can make themselves apparent within the smallest of distances, it was worth asking why the defectors went to Paternoster Row of all places.  In the early 18th century, this street was a mecca for booksellers and printers.  One contemporary described the streets being so jam packed with gentleman's coaches that regular folks couldn't even find a place to walk.  And apparently the Castle Tavern, the venue to which the members deserted, was a pretty classy place; a 1699 newspaper remarked that a Man and Woman could order "1/2 dozen Potch'd Eggs which were brought upon a Plate with as many Silver Spoons." 

But I still needed to know more about the circumstances of this desertion.  I tried to search the names of the deserters in order to answer this question, but I didn't come up with much.

Except for one thing:    

First Year of the Centenary Club: Looks like the defectors ended up here!

I know this is a little hard to read, but if you look closely, my efficacious readers will notice that the exact same names of the deserters showing up in founding document of the Centenary Club in 1695!  Because the rules and organization of both clubs were so similar, I had been convinced for some time that the two clubs had some sort of relationship with one another.  This document said it all.  

Still, the circumstances regarding this betrayal remain a mystery.  Was it a matter of religion?  (After all, London in the late Stuart age was marked by religious strife among Anglicans, Catholics, and myriad Dissenting groups; the Sacheverell riots were looming in the not too distant future.)  Or perhaps politics caused the split?  (The Centenary Club entertained Tory loyalties, but I am not sure as of yet where the Wednesday's Club allegiances lied.)  Or could this division have resulted from a personal squabble among a once cohesive group of friends?

More on this matter next time.

Mysteries in the Minute Books

I have been wondering lately how words –– not simply the ideas conveyed by them –– but the physical way words are put onto a page, can tell a story.

Fans gobbled up Samuel Richardson's novels,
most likely because the epistolary format
made his stories seem more "real" 

In our increasingly paperless age, it's easy to forget how important the ability to write once was.  During the 18th century, with more and more people gaining access to pens, paper and learning to read, letter writing became all the rage.  It's no coincidence that the epistolary novel –– entire 800 pagers written as a series of letters from different characters –– became so popular.  Just flip through one of Samuel Richardson's novels (I wouldn't attempt reading them, however, unless you have a lot of extra time on your hands) and it quickly becomes apparent that not only the content of letters, but also their execution –– the handwriting, the pens, the paper –– said a whole lot about your social status.

What does this have to do with the subject of my most recent musings: 18th century London eating clubs?  Well, what I love about handling these minute books is that, in doing so, I can appreciate how precious they were to these respective clubs.  Notes are often scribbled in margins to save space.  Buying a new book was always dutifully recorded in expense reports.  For example, the Wednesday's Club included this note in its minute book:

"Mr Treasurer Bate was requested to have a new minute book prepared to be ready for this society against the commencement of the new century 1800, the present book having been in use upwards of One Hundred Years."  

"Preparing" a minute book involved more than we might think, however, and often required binding together a series of loose pages at a not insignificant cost.  It is telling that Samuel Pepys, the great Restoration diarist, bound his cookery books; he didn't bind his porn.  Indeed, the Centenary Club made quite a big fuss about having their books bound, proclaiming:

"The Ancient Register of the Club at the Half Moon Tavern, London, was new bound in the year 1780, when Henry Cranke, Esq, auditor of Bridewell and Bethlam Hospitals, was High Steward."  

Given that the ability to transcribe events was so important, we must take particular notice, then, when written records don't look so pretty.  I was looking at the Wednesday's Club minute book the other day –– a heavy leather-bound volume of records from 1687 to 1815 –– and one page in particular caught my eye as unusual.

What is going on here?  Given that the Wednesday's Club was so meticulous about keeping its attendance records, I was surprised to find that this one from 1694 was so ... well ... unfinished.  Why do the records just stop in April?  Did the club simply cease to meet?  Did these guys have a fight?  A falling out?  And what's up with the squiggles and crossed out names?

It might not look like much, dear readers, but I suspect that this unfinished record bespeaks some kind of larger conflict among the club's members, the origins of which I am determined to investigate.  I'll report my findings in the next post.

Getting Sloshed with Mr. Steward

There is a card game that the Authoress of this Blog used to quite enjoy playing back in her college days.  Cursed with the rather indecorous name of "Asshole," the game was, essentially, a race to get rid of one's cards first and become the "President," where one could invoke a series of self-serving and arbitrary rules upon the other players.

18th Century Playing Cards
Not sure as of yet whether "Asshole" was played

The rest of the players would continue to get rid of their cards until the last man to hold a card was declared the "Asshole." This unfortunate player would not only have to forfeit his or her best cards to the President in future games, but would also be coerced into a series of symbolically degrading rituals.  (The most common of these was having to drink large quantities of very cheap and unpalatable canned beer.)

But where did this game originate?  Where did the rules come from?  In the past few days, I have been looking at the rules inscribed in two 18th century club minute books  –– those belonging to the Wednesday's Club and the Centenary Club –– and I was struck by their similarities.  Indeed, it appears as if the social dynamics suggested by these club rules shared many of the same traits as this ubiquitous 21st century college drinking game.

I'll point out a few examples...

Egotistical yet unproductive rules enacted to coddle the President's ego and reaffirm the status quo were in full force.  The Wednesday's club rule book declares  "if any member of this clubb shall during the time of the clubb call the steward by any office other than Mr. Steward, such members shall for every offense forfeit and pay to the steward for the use of this Society 6 pence."  (This rule is very frequently enacted by 21st century college-age "Presidents.")

Members of club were all equals before the rules
but that doesn't prevent the Steward from getting a special title
(I also enjoyed the goose drawing c. 1685) 

The injunction to drink (or not to drink) becomes the prerogative of the President.  For example, "in case any member of this society shall talke, or otherwise interrupt the steward or his deputy during the time the names of the members of this society are calling over, such member shall forfeit and pay to the steward for the time being for the the use of the society for every such offense 3d."

Indeed, the level of drunkenness among members was strictly policed by the President, who also controlled who, when and to whom toasts were raised.  Further, "Any member that shall at any time during the club come to be disordered by drinke," the Centenary Club's rule-book stated, "shall forfeit 6d."  Bringing a drunk friend cost a shilling.  As I read on in the minute book, however, the antics of the members made it clear that the club took a very liberal view of drunkenness.  

None of these rules and penalties –– either then or now –– carried any real meaning.  These assertions of status and hierarchy are purely symbolic, holding true only among the participants in a clearly demarcated space and time.

After all, we always say, it's "just a game."

Yet the fact that two distinct 18th century social clubs ascribed to "rules" that are so similar to those espoused by boisterous college students today is thought-provoking.  Historical distance from our objects of inquiry can easily fool us into attributing more profundity to the purpose of these clubs than they really deserve.  Indeed, I'm finding that, for many of them, the professed agenda amounted to little other than a night of laughs and intoxication.

A Predilection for (Food) Collection

As this Blog enters its seventh month of existence, my wise and efficacious readers most likely have gathered that the records of the Royal Society's semi-official dining club, "The Thursday's Club called the Royal Philosophers," have proven essential to the Lady of Quality's dissertation research.  Indeed, for 38 years –– from 1748 through 1785 –– this club assiduously recorded everything the members ate for dinner, from "Beef-Stake Pye" all the way down to the butter and cheese.

But alas.  In 1786, for some unknown reason, the treasurer ceased to record the 'Bill of Fare' in the dinner books.  (However, he unflaggingly continued to keep the attendance records for years.)

Why?  Did the Bill of Fare no longer matter to him?

In Annals of the Royal Society Club, published in 1917,  Sir Archibald Geikie attributes this unfortunate event to mere happenstance, proclaiming the two minutes of extra work being "too much for the increasingly feeble fingers of the devoted treasurer."

But I'm skeptical.  After all, the treasurer's hand-writing post-1786 resembles that of a man in perfectly good health (even for a physician, no less).  Thus, noble readers, I here propose an alternative explanation.  The 'Bill of Fare' ceased to be recorded in 1786 because it was no longer integral to the club's identity.

I implore you, noble reader, to hear me out.

Knowledge in the 18th century was often gleaned by
collecting and classifying like objects.
So why not food?

First, what we think of as "scientific research" today was, during the 18th century, heavily intertwined with the practice of antiquarian collecting (read more about it in my last post.)   Writing down what was eaten every week was an act of empirical observation.  When "chines of beef" were donated to the club, the treasurer would always weigh and measure them, duly recording his findings in the dinner books.  This zest for documentation also extended to the flavors of different foods.  For a bunch of guys who were trying exotic fruits for the very first time, the collective consensus that the flavor of cantaloupe was "equal if not superior to pine apple," was not just a piece of subjective whimsy.  It was a serious attempt to deduce standards of taste.  "Science" wasn't done in labs in those days; it was practiced in places like taverns and coffee-houses.  And more often than not, people would experiment on themselves.

Indeed, discerning the different flavors of fruit was a serious matter

But not only was the 'Bill of Fare' a matter of empirical observation; it also forged a "common taste" shared among the members.  I have already mentioned that members of the Thursday's Club did not all share the same social rank.  Sure, all of them were well-off by the standards of the day, but they could range from nobles to apothecaries, from politicians to poets.  By writing down everything that they ate, they were proclaiming to the world, and to posterity, that they were men who were cosmopolitan enough to know what a pineapple tasted like, but preferred the English "Apple Pye" to all other sweets.  They were men who happily dined on "Calves Head Hashed" and "Tongues and Udders," but disdained suspiciously French "Fricassees."  They were men who, by means of their urban street-smarts and savoir-faire, could dine on twenty different kinds of fresh fish and have cauliflowers in winter.  

By 1786, the Bill of Fare no longer performed the same scientific and social "work" that it once did.  Antiquarian collecting was losing relevance as the principal means of organizing knowledge.  And pineapples and cantaloupes were no longer complete edible novelties to those who could afford them.

In the 19th century, we start getting the menu with all of its a la carte options.  But the 18th century 'Bill of Fare' was an entirely different beast.

Lessons in Coin Collecting

What might a humble coin collector tell us about the 18th century meal?  In my last couple of posts, I introduced a new character to my worthy readers: Josiah Colebrooke, the punctilious treasurer to the Thursday's Club.

(New readers: you can catch up here.)

But I haven't yet figured out why he had such a bone to pick with the Earl of Chesterfield: the man who sought to enter the club based on a display of wit rather than a delectable edible gift, thereby going against the club rules.

Who was Josiah Colebrooke, after all?  An apothecary by trade, his long-standing membership in both the Society of Antiquaries and the Thursday's Club (he was the treasurer to both) suggests that he was dedicated to learning, self-improvement and the study of the past.

In 1776, shortly after his death, I found this document (to the left) advertising the auction of his most prized possession:  his coin collection.  Turns out that the guy had amassed a lot of them over the course of his life.  The document runs seven pages long.

The records show that Colebrooke possessed a variety of Roman, Greek and Byzantine coins, but the great majority were of English origin.  For a man of such dedication, I was surprised to find that most of them weren't terribly valuable; most cost between a pound or two: a respectable sum for the average guy, I suppose, but by no means a fortune.

I mean, Colebrooke was constantly asking his fellow Thursday's Club members to shell out a guinea (1 pound and 1 shilling) left and right to pay for all their "venison carriages" and bottles of claret.  His beloved coin collection would have been a pittance to them.  

(The priciest one, in case you were wondering, cost nearly seven pounds and is described as: "A very fine penny of Henry I, with the young face, very scarce.")

A penny of Henry I:
Who knows if this was  Colebrooke's most treasured coin?

I scoured ECCO for traces of Josiah Colebrooke, and found that he is remembered best for his accounting skills, his interest in antiquarian studies, and his coins.  But what might knowledge of his hobbies have to do with his obsession with keeping to "club rules" and his hostility to the Earl of Chesterfield?

A couple ideas:

In Colebrooke's letter of protest over the admission of Chesterfield, he draws a distinction between principles of admission based on substantial forms, such as may be tasted, and ephemeral, immeasurable things such as wit and humour.  Perhaps there's a parallel between Colebrooke's love of coins for their material uniqueness rather than their monetary value (otherwise, he wouldn't be collecting them!) and his privileging of ingestible foods over ineffable performances of "wit."

When venison was gifted to the club, it was served
as a haunch, as a neck, and in pasty form.

Additionally, learning a little more about Colebrooke's professional and social life makes it ever more apparent that he and the Earl of Chesterfield were born in very different social worlds.  Colebrooke was a guy with a day-job and no title, and ended up spending his free time keeping the books for the clubs he participated in.  In the same letter of protest to the club, he doesn't hesitate to single out Chesterfield's elite status.

"a nobleman chosen a member of a dining club for communicating a petition to the king, will appear very abstruse ... posterity will be at a loss, to know whether this petition etc was not a name given to some new dish of that nobleman's invention" 

Well, I'm not quite convinced that any 21st century reader would be fooled into thinking a "petition" was an Enlightenment delicacy.  Regardless, does Colebrooke suspect that the perception of Chesterfield's apparent "wittiness" is informed by his noble birth?  Maybe.  For even if venison and turtle were known as elite foods, they actually seem to level the playing field within the confines of the club.  After all, anyone –– nobleman or gentleman, the rules say –– may present them as gifts and reap the social rewards.  And once served up on the table, everyone is entitled to appreciate them.

We often think of "taste" as marking distinctions between individuals rather than bringing people together.  But for the petulant Mr. Colebrooke, it seems like the provision and sharing of food created for him a "common taste" that softened status distinctions within the society.

Meeting Questionable Standards in 1757

Did I mention that the year 1757 –– the same year that this conflict between Mr. Colebrooke and Lord Chesterfield went down –– was kind of a big deal in the history of "taste" among philosophers?

(For readers just catching up, my last post outlined a controversy within the Thursday's Club over the question of "wit" as an adequate criterion for honorary membership.)

For Hume, food was always
an apt metaphor
(Can't you tell?)

First, in 1757, David Hume penned his famous essay "Of the Standard of Taste," which likened the art of flavor detection to that of aesthetic judgment.  Both of these faculties, according to Hume, operated in the same way:  

Wherever the organs are so fine as to allow nothing to escape them; and at the same time so exact as to perceive every ingredient in the composition: this we call delicacy of taste, whether we employ these terms in the literal or metaphorical sense....

Gustatory taste, for Hume, was a particularly apt example of aesthetic taste: our faculty of judgment.  But virtually on Hume's heels came the publication of Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful.

If sweet was beautiful, what
tasted sublime?

Does anyone out there in the republic of bloggers happen to know what Edmund Burke's favorite food was?  The Enquiry makes him out to be quite the sugar fiend.  Indeed, "sweetness," in Burke's opinion, was "the beautiful of the taste."

But Burke didn't hold much confidence in our tongues.  After all, he asked, how can we really quantify the quality of our taste?  Do we truly enjoy the flavor of foods in of themselves, or do we simply enjoy the sensation of feeling full?  Do we really like the taste of opium?  Or do we like how it makes us feel?  Depending on our unique physiological constitutions, the sense of taste could be relentlessly subjective.  

Did the members of the Thursday's Club draw upon either of these ideas when it came to the subject of Lord Chesterfield and his witty letter?  As I write this, I'm still not sure.

For it seemed like Colebrooke's biggest bone to pick with Chesterfield was not whether a "standard of wit" could be devised.  Why of course it could!  (Guess he wasn't much of a skeptic.)  Instead, he appears more concerned about what the antiquarians of the future would think.

"The great difficulty and labour under is, how this minute may be interpreted by some future philosopher  into whose hands this manuscript may possibly fall ... when a higher entertainment is offered to our understandings, unless the ingredients that compose it are specified, posterity will be at a loss, to know whether this petition etc was not a name given to some new dish of that nobleman's invention..."

It's always comforting to know that even 250 years ago, someone was expecting that I would come along and try to explain the wheelings and dealings of this club to the entire blogosphere.  But I don't really know whether Colebrooke, by saying this, is merely rationalizing a dislike for the Earl of Chesterfield.  If he's so concerned about posterity, what aspect of the club's prestige is he trying to protect?