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A B S T R A C T . The article considers the rapid increase in the English market for alcohol and tobacco in the s and the set of concurrent influences shaping their consumption. It suggests that intoxicants were not merely a source of solace for 'the poor' or the lubricant of traditional community, as historians often imply. Rather, the growth in the market for beer, wine, and tobacco was driven by those affluent social groups regarded as the legitimate governors of the English commonwealth. For men of a certain disposition and means, the consumption of intoxicants became a legitimateindeed valorized and artfulaspect of their social identity: an identity encapsulated by the Renaissance concept of 'wit'. These new styles of drinking were also implicated in the proliferation (in theory and practice) of 'societies' and 'companies', by which contemporaries meant voluntary and purposeful association. These arguments are made by unpacking the economic, social, and cultural contexts informing the humorous dialogue Wine, beere, ale and tobacco. Contending for superiority. What follows demonstrates that the ostensibly frivolous subject of male drinking casts new light on the nature of early modern social change, in particular the nature of the 'civilizing process'.Wine : This ruffler may be troublesome, we were best admit him to our society, he is a dry companion, and you may observe, how he hath insinuated already with the greatest.

Company and sociability in early modern England* One day in June 1673 Thomas Squire, a 33-year-old civil lawyer in York, 'alighted at the house of one Widow Webster situate[d] in [Market] Weighton in which house were then drinking in company together one Mr John Robinson, Mr Reginald Hopwood, clerk, Thomas Webster of Weighton and some other persons into whose company this examinant (being invited) did go'. Squire later testified to the court of the Dean and Chapter that 'he did then very well see and observe . . . that the said Mr Hopwood was very much distempered and overtaken with drink'. He knew this 'insomuch that [Hopwood] vomited upon the table standing in the room where this examinant and the rest of the company then were, and laid his head down in the place where he had so vomited, being not then able (as this examinant conceives) to support the same'. Squire further testified that 'the said Mr Hopwood then acted several commonly tricks and in particular this examinant says that he observed that . . . the said Mr Hopwood suffered his yard or prick to hang naked out of his britches being (as this examinant conceives) either insensible thereof or not able to put the same up again'. It did not end there. Squire recollected that 'whereupon one of the company held his hot pipe to the said Mr Hopwood's yard or prick which being somewhat hot (as this examinant believes) made him cry out, but for all that he did not put it into his breeches'. When Squire finally 'left the room, he also left the said Mr Hopwood having his head upon the table being so drunk that he was not able to stir from the same without the help of some person'.

The Politics of Commonwealth offers a major reinterpretation of urban political culture in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Examining what it meant to be a freeman and citizen in early modern England, it also shows the increasingly pivotal place of cities and boroughs within the national polity. It considers the practices that constituted urban citizenship as well as its impact on the economic, patriarchal and religious life of towns and the larger commonwealth. The author has recovered the language and concepts used at the time, whether by eminent citizens like Andrew Marvell or more humble tradesmen and craftsmen. Unprecedented in terms of the range of its sources and freshness of its approach, the book reveals a dimension of early modern culture that has major implications for how we understand the English state, economy and 'public sphere'; the political upheavals of the mid-seventeenth-century and popular political participation more generally.

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