In Austria, the first brewery built at Vienna was on the Weidenstrasse and dates back as far as 1384. The oldest standing brewery in the same place is the St. Marx Brew-house, founded in 1706. In the Provinces of Flanders and Brabant a beer brewed of malt and hops was the national beverage as early as the fourteenth century, and brewers occupied an important position and were held in high esteem. History tells us that one of them, _Jacob Van Artevelde_ the Brewer of Ghent, a nobleman by birth, became a celebrated popular leader who drove Louis I., Count of Flanders, into France, held the government of the province and supported Edward III. of England until his death, July 17, 1345. His son Philip, who at one time was chosen ruler of the provinces and who died 1382, was as well known as a celebrated brewer as his father. To Flanders also belongs the celebrated Gambrinus, who under his real name of Jan Primus, Duke of Flanders, ruled Flanders and Brabant wisely, and became the protector of the beer brewing fraternity. Under the popular cognomen, however, (to which many mythical attributes have been attached) he is universally known, and perhaps held in higher esteem by a greater number of adherents than all the saints, even including Saint Patrick, who have been canonized up to the present day. In England beer was introduced by the Romans. The Saxons found it there and improved wonderfully upon the discovery. For centuries it received, in the modern literature of England, the constant attention and consideration of churchmen, historians, poets and political economists. The churchmen especially were active in the improvement of malt liquors. William of Malmsbury says that the best brewers in England at the time of Henry II. were to be found in the monasteries, and every reader of early English literature remembers frequent allusions not only to beer in general but to that of the holy fathers in particular. The monks were the first to discover the peculiar fitness of the waters of Burton on Trent for brewing purposes, and may thus be said to have paved the way for the development of the enormous establishments that now scatter their product over all the world. According to “Tennant’s Guide to London,” published at the beginning of the present century, there were in the reigns of the Tudors great breweries at London, situated on the river-side below St. Katherine’s. In 1492 King Henry VII. licensed a Flemish brewer, John Merchant, to export a large quantity of the so-called “berre,” and that the beer had to be of good quality and was under the surveillance of the authorities, is proved by the fact that Geffrey Gate, an officer of the king, twice destroyed the brew-houses on account of the weakness of the beer.