NINETEEN CENTURIES OF DRINK IN ENGLAND. CHAPTER I. ROMAN PERIOD. Little is known of the manners and customs of our island inhabitants before the Saxon period; hence, there can be no wonder that all is obscure before the Roman invasion. For the hints that have come to light we are indebted to such foreign historians as wrote in the century before the Christian era, the century of the invasion, and the age immediately subsequent. These hints, utterly meagre, but generally consistent, are supplied by such writers before Christ as Diodorus and Cæsar, and such historians of the first century as Strabo, Dioscorides, and Pliny. Diodorus (lib. v.) notes the simplicity in the manners of the British, and their being satisfied with a frugal sustenance, and avoiding the luxuries of wealth. He further observes:--‘Their diet was simple; their food consisted chiefly of milk and venison. Their ordinary drink was water. Upon extraordinary occasions they drank a kind of fermented liquor made of barley, honey, or apples, and when intoxicated never failed to quarrel, like the ancient Thracians.’ Cæsar (_De Bell. Gall._ v.) observes that the inhabitants of the interior do not sow grain, but live on milk and flesh. Strabo, whose description of Britain in his fourth book is barren, and not apparently independent (for he seems mainly to follow Cæsar), writes in the early part of the first century (probably about A.D. 18), that the Britons had some slight notion of planting orchards. Dioscorides, in the middle of the same century, affirms that the Britons instead of wine use _curmi_, a liquor made of barley. Pliny the Elder speaks of the drinks in vogue in his time of the beer genus, variously called _zythum_, _celia_, _cerea_, _Cereris vinum_, _curmi_, _cerevisia_. These, he says (lib. xiv.), were known to the nations inhabiting the _west of Europe_. He exclaims against the wide-spread intemperance: ‘The whole world is addicted to drunkenness; the perverted ingenuity of man has given even to water the power of intoxicating where wine is not procurable. Western nations intoxicate themselves by means of moistened grain.’ It is important to add that Tacitus asserts (_Vit. Agricol._) that the soil of this country abundantly produces all fruits except the olive, the grape, and some others which are indigenous to a warm climate. Putting together these scattered allusions we gather,--(1) that _wine_ was unknown to the Britons before the Roman conquest. It is absurd to suppose that a people as simple as the Britons, and holding so little intercourse with other nations, should as yet obtain from abroad such an article of luxury as wine, or prepare it from a fruit not a native of the soil. Indeed, it was only about a century before the Roman invasion of England that vines were cultivated to any extent in the Roman empire; so scarce had wines been previously that the libations to the gods were directed to be made with milk.