Whitsun Ale

The Parish ale was a festival in an English parish at which ale made and donated for the event was the chief drink.

The word "ale" was generally used as part of a compound term. Thus there was the leet-ale (held on "leet", the manorial court day); the lamb-ale (held at lamb-shearing); the Whitsun-ale (held at Whitsun), the clerk-ale, the church-ale etc. The word "bridal" originally derives from bride-ale, the wedding feast organised to raise money for the couple. The bid-ale, once very common throughout England, was a benefit feast to which a general invitation was given, and all those attending were expected to make some contribution to help the object of the benefit, usually a poor person or family or some other charitable cause.

These parish festivals were of much ecclesiastical and social importance in medieval England. The chief purpose of the church-ale (which was originally instituted to honour the church saint) and the clerk-ale, was to facilitate the collection of parish dues and to make a profit for the church from the sale of ale by the church wardens. These profits kept the parish church in repair, or were distributed as alms to the poor.

The churches must owe, as we all do know,
For when they be drooping and ready to fall,
By a Whitsun or Church-ale up again they shall go
And owe their repairing to a pot of good ale

In the gallery of the tower arch of St Agnes, Cawston in Norfolk is inscribed:

God speed the plough
And give us good ale enow ...
Be merry and glade,
With good ale was this work made.

On the beam of a screen in the church of Thorpe-le-Soken, Essex, is the following inscription in raised blackletter on a scroll held by two angels: "This cost is the bachelers made by ales thesn be ther med." The date is about 1480.

The feast was usually held in a barn near the church or in the churchyard. In Tudor times church-ales were held on Sundays; gradually the parish-ales were limited to the Whitsun season, and these still have local survivals. The colleges of the universities used to brew their own ales and hold festivals known as college-ales; some of these ales are still brewed and famous, like "chancellor" at Queen's College, and "archdeacon" at Merton College, Oxford, and "audit ale" at Trinity, Cambridge.

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