Social life is intimately connected with the social or festive board; in short, with eating and drinking, because these are a necessity of nature. Other customs and habits may be fleeting, but men must eat, men must drink. Food ministers not only to the principle of life, but to that of brain force also. Thought is stimulated, activity is excited, man becomes communicable. He then seeks society and enjoys it. Thus has social intercourse gathered round the social board. Eating and drinking are two indispensable factors in dealing with the history of a nation’s social life. Adopting the adage by way of accommodation, ‘In vino veritas,’ truth is out when wine is in, once know the entire history of a nation’s drinking, and you have important materials for gauging that nation’s social life. For obvious reasons, a division has been adopted of the subject into periods, in some respects artificial so far as the present inquiry is concerned. The Romano-British period has been selected as the _terminus a quo_. It might have been speculatively interesting to penetrate further into the arcana of the past, to have inquired who were the earliest inhabitants of this country? Were they aborigines, natives of the soil, or were they colonists? Had they an independent tribal existence, or were they originally a part of that great Asiatic family who emigrated into and peopled Western Europe, and to whom the Romans gave the name of Gauls? Had such an inquiry been relevant, the question would have been of immense importance; for drawing, as one must, considerably upon imagination in dealing with any period not strictly historic, one must either regard the primitive inhabitants as independent aborigines, and accommodate their supplies to their wants, or, regarding them as an offshoot from another nation, suppose them to have carried with them the customs of their parent tribe, and find the sought-for habits of the child in the ascertained habits of the parent. But we are concerned with fact; and must therefore date from a period when facts, however meagre and involved, are forthcoming. A chapter of _Bibliography_ is appended for the benefit of any who might wish to prosecute a study, of which the present effort is a mere outline. _A CONTRIBUTION TO THE BIBLIOGRAPHY OF DRINK._