We will be exploring a number of pub-related themes in this study that are specific to Cambridge. Here, in no particular order, is a list of just some of the topics we will cover.
The Cambridge Yard
A look at the Cambridge Yard Glass (above), the Cambridge Yard of Butter and Cambridge Bedell’s Yard-wand. We will touch on on the 600-year-old feud between ‘town and gown’ over who had the right to police the weights and measures of the local tradesmen and innkeepers.
King Street Run
The King Street Run – a legendary crawl (half a pint of beer in each “without peeing or puking”) of all the pubs in King Street – has a history packed with contradictions. Most accounts tell us that it was started by St. John’s students in 1955. But then I have come across more than one story about it from WW2 – one of which involves Sir John Mills the actor. Some people say that there were originally 16 pubs on the pub crawl and some say 11. What is true, is that there are now only 5 pubs on the street, the university ‘banned’ it (unsuccessfully) in 1966, that one of the pubs (Waggon and Horses) changed its name to the King Street Run in the 1980s, that it features in Tom Sharpe’s novel Porterhouse Blue, and that at some stage in the 1950s Ted Dexter (England and Sussex cricketer) held the record for fastest time.
Audit Ale
Audit ale was a very strong ale traditionally brewed for the annual ‘audit’ at colleges of the University. The ales were formerly produced in college’s own brewhouses, but as these began to disappear from the beginning of the 19th century the ales were commissioned from local commercial breweries such as Bailey and Tebbutt (Cambridge), Dales (Cambridge), Hudson’s (Pampisford) and Lacons (Great Yarmouth).
Lacons, who produced a number of Audit Ales for Cambridge in the 1920s and 30s, produced an Audit Ale in 2019 that won Champion Winter Beer of Britain and was a finalist in the Champion Beer of Britain Awards. This ale has been exported to the USA in champagne style bottles from 1937.
May all good fellows that here agree
Hilaire Belloc
Drink Audit Ale in heaven with me,
And may all my enemies go to hell!
Noel! Noel! Noel! Noel!
May all my enemies go to hell!
Noel! Noel!
Cambridge Hostels
In its earliest days, the University had no premises of its own. Lectures, disputations and lodgings were found in private houses – ‘hostels’ and ‘inns’ . A few groups of Regent Masters, lawyers and theologians, began to build or hire larger premises for teaching and lodging in a group of buildings called the ‘Schools’. Eventually the hostels evolved or formed into colleges. A few of the hostels survived until the sixteenth century when they were acquired as part of the premises of Colleges or reverted to use a private house or became commercial inns. Unlike the Colleges, hostels had few endowments and were always privately owned. Henry VIII in 1546, combined two colleges (King’s Hall and Michaelhouse) and seven hostels namely Physwick (formerly part of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge), Gregory’s, Ovyng’s, Catherine’s, Garratt, Margaret’s and Tyler’s, to form Trinity College.
The Rotten Borough of Cambridge
From 1642 when Oliver Cromwell held meetings of the Eastern Counties Association and the Grand Committee at the Black Bear (Market Passage) through to when the Manners and Mortlock families met at the Eagle Tavern (Bene’t St.) and turned Cambridge into a ‘rotten borough’ – the pubs of Cambridge have provided a stage for political drama. In the 1840s and ’50s over 65 pub landlords became the drama’s central characters compelled as they were to give evidence to a succession of select committees of the House of Commons investigating bribery and fraud on the part of the politicians. Luckily, for historians, their testimony was reported verbatim by Hansard.
Town and Gown
We will look at the two distinct communities of Cambridge – the non-academic population (town) and academic population (gown) metonymically being the university community. In medieval Cambridge where these two separately governed bodies with different priorities and loyalties shared the same restricted space conflicts inevitably arose – especially around the pubs (whose licenses the university controlled up to 1856).