In 1641, England was not a happy place. On the brink of civil war, the country had only the previous year weathered the storm of a Scottish invasion in the north and more conflict was about to break out in Ireland. Throw into the mix a few violent storms, plague outbreaks, and radical religious sects for good measure — is it any wonder people flocked to the alehouses to drown their sorrows?
London’s printing presses were working overtime to spit out the mountains of pamphlets published at this time — and the presses seemed to be freer than ever. The Star Chamber and High Commission, key regulatory bodies, were shut down and the Stationers’ Company, which had previously wielded at least some authority over the trade on which it had a monopoly, collapsed. Pamphlets reported all kinds of “news”, of dubious veracity — stressing some political, religious, or moral truth, not a factual one — and did so with a newfound vociferousness. At the same time, parliament began what was to become an unprecedentedly vicious crackdown on seditious and clandestine printing.
The Earl of Strafford, a key supporter of Charles I, was executed in May and William Laud, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was about to find himself in the Tower of London on charges of treason. These developments spurred on a flurry of ballads and pamphlets (some of which I have covered before).
But nestled among these fiery polemical works, stuffed full of political and religious invective, are two unassuming pamphlets. They do not relate a terrible storm, a bloody battle, or a Papist conspiracy. No, they report something much more pressing — the perilous position of brewers, butchers, tapsters, and cooks.
The Lamentable Complaints…
The two pamphlets in question are The Lamentable Complaints of Nick Froth the Tapster, and Rulerost the Cooke (1641) and The Lamentable Complaints of Hop the Brewer and Kilcalfe the Butcher (1641). It is unknown which bookseller’s shelves these texts furnished, as they belong to the large mass of pamphlets printed at this time with no more information in their imprints than the year of their creation (‘Printed in the Yeare 1641’).
There is, then, no attributed publisher, printer, or author for these tremendously short works — both printed in quarto and constrained to a single sheet of four leaves. Each is decorated with a title page woodcut, clearly custom-made, which depicts the two titular complainants in dialogue with one another and identifies the trades involved through objects and items of clothing included in the illustration.
Nick Froth and Master Rulerost: Perfidious Publicans
Probably the more interesting of the two — and certainly the one with the more compelling woodcut — concerns tapster Nick Froth and a cook by the name of Rulerost.
Nick Froth is the figure on the left, pitcher in hand and flanked by a table of various drinking vessels. Behind him is a crude bird’s-eye perspective of an alehouse with four patrons seated at a table. Rulerost is on the right, pointing towards a spit loaded with some kind of meat and positioned in front of his kitchen, busy with two spits cooking meat over burning flames; Both figures are gesticulating towards one another. The perspective of the scene as a whole (and of its individual elements) is skewed and awkward — the product of a printer’s woodcutter, not a skilled artist — but it was common for these illustrations to deliberately compromise their spatial logic in order to generate as eye-catching a visual as possible. And this one, which would tell a 17th century customer all they needed to know about the work’s premise, fits the bill.
The pamphlet’s full title suggests the ensuing ‘complaints’ will concern ‘the restraint lately set forth, against drinking, potting, and piping on the Sabbath day, and against selling meate.’ Sure enough, the various parliaments of the 17th century (with the 1640s as no exception) had — alongside various Livery Companies — attempted to enforce commercial and recreational restrictions on Sundays (i.e. ‘blue laws’). The result, as Rulerost tells Froth, was that traders were ‘commanded not to sell meat nor draw drink upon Sundays, as we will answer the contrary at our perils’. It was the opinion of the authorities, a Long Parliament packed fuller with Puritans than any which had come before it, that alehouses were drawing parishioners away from Sunday Mass and leading them towards sin.
And so when Froth the tapster (responsible for serving the drinks) bumps into Rulerost the cook (charged with manning the spit), it is not good news which the latter has to report. That Rulerost is as sure that the newly-enforced restrictions are real as he is that he ‘ever roasted a fat Pig on a Sunday untill the eyes dropt out’ is evidence that the cook has form when it comes to Sabbath-breaking labour. Froth is not at all happy to hear this: ‘…if this be your news, you might have kept it, with a pox to you.’
The loss of business and profit this restriction to trading will have startles the two men greatly. Froth fears his landlord will have him locked up in debtor’s prison if he can’t pay the rent: ‘…I know not in which of the Compters I shall keep my Christmas.’ Both men are also in debt to other vendors who supply them, Rulerost owing nearly 90 pounds (well over £10,000 today) to Master Kilcalfe the butcher and Froth in a similar predicament with his brewer.
It is not just that these tradesmen are losing a day of profit which is the problem — it’s that it’s Sunday in particular. Both men stress that on the Sabbath day — and particularly during the time of divine service itself, when their patrons really should be in Church — their profits soar.
‘You know all my profit doth arise onely upon Sundays,’ remarks Froth, who says he would gladly shut up shop on all other days if he could do business on the Lord’s Day. Rulerost likewise laments that ‘those happy dayes’ of particularly profitable Sabbath sales ‘are now past’. Any remotely ‘godly’ reader in 1641 would find it difficult to sympathise with these men, who exploit a religious day for profit and brazenly admit they do so in the time of divine service — missing compulsory Mass themselves and encouraging others to do so by supplying them with food and drink. But they are rendered even more devious when it is explained why their profit margins are so large: it comes down to trickery and deceipt.
The tapster serves his thirsty patrons jugs of drink, alright, but they are ‘heapt with froth’ so that they appear full to the brim when in fact he has hardly dipped into his barrel of beer. The tapster’s name, ‘Nick Froth’, means that an early modern reader would have been waiting for this revelation as the complaint of overly-foamy drinks was a common one at the time. One mid-17th century ballad lists various things that would signify merrier times, among them ‘When Tapsters will not thrive by froth.’ Fictional tapsters often took on the surname ‘Froth’ — one such character appears in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (1603-4).
The first name ‘Nick’ is also not incidental — ‘nicking’ was the practice of selling drinks at an illegally high cost (prices being legally fixed) by using a false bottom to make a jug look like it held more volume than it really did. The two (nicking and frothing) were often coupled as ‘nick and froth’, as seen in the title of a late 17th-century ballad which warned of the ‘Grand abuse of the Society of Good-fellowship’ these tricks constituted. A 1624 prelude to John Skelton’s poem The Tunning of Elynour Rummyng (1521), and spuriously attributed to Skelton, sees the narrator brag that ‘We were not thus thwarted,/With froth-Canne and nick-pot’.
Rulerost’s duplicity is less clear. He simply says that he sells his ‘lusty Surloines of roast Beefe’ for an extortionate 18 pence ‘in service time’, though it costs him only 4 pence to procure it. He apparently achieves this by cutting the slices so thinly that he seems to provide more meat than he really does. His name is a play on the expression ‘to rule the roast’ — meaning either the cook in charge of a roast or the most important diner at a banquet. This saying seems to be the origin of ‘to rule the roost’, a more general expression referring to someone who commands a group.
*EBBA and EEBO attribute a date of 1641-1674, because these are the dates during which its publisher Richard Burton was active, but the ballad’s details (including the fashion of one of its other woodcuts) indicate a much later date than 1641.
It is implied that the tapster and cook are able to get away with this overcharging, which at other times might come under more scrutiny, because their customers have fewer options on Sundays. They could also hardly make an official complaint of malpractice if in doing so they’d have to reveal their own deviance — presumably an unattractive form of legal kamikaze.
Of course, as Rulerost references early in the exchange, there was always the threat of churchwardens, constables, and other local authorities. But our heroes have a cunning solution to this — bribery.
Froth says that he ‘was wont to be in fee with the Apparitors, because they should not bring me into the Bawdy Court [i.e. ecclesiastical court] for selling drinke on Sundayes’. Rulerost confesses he has done the same, though his bribery was achieved through supplying free food. Now that parliament is cracking down on Sunday-selling, Froth thinks these men will be unbribable, and so the restrictions hurt not only the tapster and the cook but also — says the notoriously selfless Nick Froth — the corrupt officials, whose ‘trade begins to be out of request’.
Nick Froth is probably most sympathetic when he talks about the ‘noble art of drinking’. Here are, he says, the benefits it provides:
…it is the soule of all good fellowship, the marrow of a Poets Minervs, it makes a man as valiant as Hercules, though he were as cowardly as a French man; besides, I could prove it necessary for any man sometimes to be drunk, for suppose you should kill a man when you are drunk, you shall never be hanged for it untill you are sober; therefore I thinke it good for a man to be alwayes drunk…
The two men part unsure of what the future holds for them, about to lose a substantial amount of profit and already considerably in debt.
Hop the Brewer and Master Kilcalfe: Cracked Creditors
The other pamphlet concerns a brewer named Hop and a butcher named Kilcalfe. Hop’s name obviously relates to the flowers used in brewing beer. Kilcalfe’s (i.e. kill-calf) is a generic fictional butcher’s name which can be found at least as early as 1592, in Robert Greene’s A Quip for an Upstart Courtier but probably pre-dates it quite considerably.
The woodcut which adorns this pamphlet’s title page is less detailed. The butcher is the figure on the left — one hand in his apron pocket, the other gesticulating in the direction of the brewer; his butcher’s knife is on a table behind him. Hop the brewer is on the right, one hand on his chest, and another holding what looks like a jug or flask — the table behind him has a cup and a flagon on it.
Of course, these are the same ‘Kilcalfe’ and (then-anonymous) ‘brewer’ referenced in the other pamphlet.
It is not clear which pamphlet, Froth and Rulerost or Hop and Kilcalfe came first — if they were not printed at almost the same time. The initial presumption would be that both pamphlets were printed and sold by the same people, but the pamphlets may well have separate printers. The woodcuts’ styles are distinct and the typeface looks different in each — even their composition is not identical. Even if they were printed by separate printers (and it’s possible it was just one printer using different techniques), the publisher is likely to be the same. There is, at least, no reason to suspect that one is a response to or parody of the other, as both are very similar in sentiment.
Perhaps the success of one pamphlet inspired the other. Because each pamphlet references the characters in the other, it’s possible that the commercial viability of one caused the publisher to employ a writer (probably the same one, as both are written in the same style) to churn out a sequel starring those people.
Really, the issue of chronology is most significant in determining which pamphlet is the lazier, because a good deal of the content is identical in each. Thus Hop and Kilcalfe may begin with a slightly different opening exchange between the two men, but much of the following text is recycled. Kilcalfe, like Rulerost, says he is as sure that new restrictions are inbound as he is that he has previously broken them; Hop, like Froth, scolds his fellow interlocutor for telling him such bad news; as in the other pamphlet, one man fears the wrath of his landlord if he can’t pay rent whereas another is already in debt (to a grazier). This copying, which would be called plagiarism if it was clear the writer was not the same for each, extends (almost verbatim) to specific lines. So, for example, Kilcalfe (just like Froth) says he ‘know[s] not which of the Counters I am like to keepe my Christmas in’.
Incidentally, a 1654 publication purporting to relate the petition of a group of ‘poor prisoners’ in the Woodstreet Compter saw them complain that, among other things, the beer and ale they were provided with (at an excessive cost) was poor quality and suffered from ‘nick and froth’.
When the brewer and the butcher reference Nick Froth and Rulerost (though the latter remains anonymous as ‘a Cooke’), the pamphlets’ connection comes full circle, in what is admittedly a fairly amusing sort of ‘Easter egg’. Another highlight is the way in which the ironic language of academia and intelligence is employed, as Hop says that Nick Froth is a ‘witty knave’ with ‘an excellent faculty in frothing’.
For Hop the brewer and Kilcalfe the butcher, their fear is that their debtors (who relied on deceptive Sabbath-selling) will now be unable to pay them and they will suffer as a result. It is for this reason that the Huntington Library described the pamphlet in 1962 as a ‘rare sarcastic pamphlet on credit abuses’, though this significantly overstates the attention paid to pecuniary concerns.
In Conclusion…
Really, both of these pamphlets are light-hearted commentaries on deceptive business practices employed by certain tradesmen. I say ‘light-hearted’ because it isn’t obvious what exactly the reader is supposed to take away with regard to restrictions on Sunday trading. The pamphlets are framed as ‘complaints’ but the reader can hardly be sympathetic to those making them — in addition to scamming patrons, the tapster and cook have essentially cheated their fellow complainants (the brewer and butcher) out of money, all while bribing officials and skipping Sunday mass.
This makes it especially curious that the conservative libertarian non-profit Liberty Fund presents the Froth and Rulerost pamphlet as a ‘Leveller Tract’, though it is presumably for the (very dubious) supposed ‘free trade’ message it contains, according to David M. Hart. Even if we accept that modern conservative libertarians can lay claim to Leveller heritage (and I suspect a few prominent Levellers would be turning in their graves at the suggestion) the pamphlet simply does not make the radically liberal political point that Hart and Liberty Fund seem to think it does — and its author is unknown, with no credible reason to suspect a Leveller pen was at play.
I don’t know who wrote these works, if it even was only one writer. But what stood out to me as I researched the pamphlets and their contexts was just how inescapable John Taylor, the self-styled ‘Water Poet’ and eccentric, was.
The idea of ‘nicking’ and ‘frothing’ was comfortably established in English culture by 1641, but Taylor seems particularly obsessed with making literary references to them. In The Colde Tearm (1621), he references customers turning to ‘Tapsters for Pots and Cans, with nick and froath’. In A Shilling Or, The Travailes of Twelve-pence (from the same year), he also uses the phrase. The character of ‘Froth the Tapster’ is referenced (even if only in passing) in The World runnes on Wheels (1623) and when praising ‘the great eater of Kent‘, Nicholas Woods, in a 1630 publication he says ‘Tapsters cannot nick this Nick with froth’.
In 1639, only two years before the Lamentable Complaints pamphlets, Taylor specifically decries among other tricksters ‘Nick Froth the Tapster with his curtall Kan’. This is not, of course, the only time the name is used by a writer — an anonymous pamphlet titled Bartholomew Faire, Or, Variety of fancies (1641) makes such a reference, for example.
Nicking and frothing are also alluded to in Taylor’s The Noble Cavalier Caracterised (1643) and again in his 1646 pamphlet attack on future-regicide Miles Corbet. But also of note, though less directly obvious, are two other things:
Firstly, that John Taylor may well have been the author of Old newes Newly Revived (1641), a pamphlet from the same year as the pamphlets this article concerns — and written in a very similar style.
Secondly, that just as Froth related alcohol to Herculean strength, so too did Taylor speak of ‘mighty Ale, that would formerly knock down Hercules’ in 1652 — the expression is used in the extended subtitle of The Vindication of Christmas (1652) which is probably also by him. Taylor also wrote, with tongue in cheek, that ‘Hercules [would] have never achieved or accomplished his twelve labors, but by the Vertue and Vigour of ALE’ in a 1651 pamphlet dedicated to ale: Ale Ale-vated into the Ale-titude.
The Froth and Rulerost and Hop and Kilcalfe pamphlets are of fairly low literary quality. Perhaps this makes Taylor (who had skill as a poet and writer) less likely as an author, or perhaps it explains why his name is not attached to either of the texts — not even as an anagram or pseudonym.
Ironically, the construction of these pamphlets — which share so much near-identical text as to be fairly laborious to read one after the other — resembles the criticism levelled against the tapsters of early modern England. Just as crafty Nick supplemented his ale with a great deal of foam to hide its meagre volume, the writer of these works (perhaps John Taylor?) has, in the course of transposing a substantial amount of text, supplemented his already-short word count with a great deal of narrative froth.
*Introductory description of England in 1641 informed by David Cressy, England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution 1640-1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 29-30.
*For information on the regulation of commercial/recreational activity on Sundays at this time, with a reference to one of the Lamentable Complaints pamphlets, see Margaret Dorey, ‘Controlling corruption: regulating meat consumption as a preventative to plague in seventeenth-century London’, Urban History, 36:1 (2009), 24-41 (pp. 30-31).
*For more on contemporary references to deceitful tapsters, see Burton Milligan, ‘Satire Concerning the Ale and Wine Trades in the Shakespearian Period and Later’, The Shakespeare Association Bulletin, 18:4 (1943), 147-155 (pp. 151-155).
