The _taverns_ were crowded with morning drinkers. On the site occupied by the Bank of England, four inns used to stand; one of them was called _The Crown_. Sir John Hawkins, in his _History of Musick_, mentions that it was not unusual to draw a butt (120 gallons) in half-pints in the course of a single morning. The drinking at the _Universities_ was terrible. Henry Gunning, M.A., Christ’s College, Cambridge (a descendant of the Bishop of Ely, who wrote the prayer for the Church Militant), had great opportunities of judging of the Cambridge of his day, for he was born 1768 in a Cambridgeshire vicarage, went up to Cambridge at an early age, was made Esquire Bedell 1789, and continued in that capacity till his death early in 1854. In his charming _Reminiscences of the University, Town, and County of Cambridge, from the year 1780_, he observes:-- Drunkenness was the besetting sin of the period when I came to college. I need scarcely add that many other vices followed in its train. Again, speaking of a college friend:-- I do not remember ever to have seen him guilty of drunkenness, _at that time almost universal_. Again (pp. 147-148):-- For many years during Rev. Charles Simeon’s ministry (I speak from my own personal knowledge) Trinity Church and the streets leading to it were the scenes of the most disgraceful tumults. On one occasion an undergraduate, who had been apprehended by Simeon, was compelled to read a public apology in the church. Mr. Simeon made a prefatory address: ‘We have long borne during public worship with the most indecent conduct from those whose situation in life should have made them sensible of the heinousness of such offences; we have seen persons coming into this place in a state of intoxication; we have seen them walking about the aisles, notwithstanding there are persons appointed to show them into seats; we have seen them coming in and going out without the slightest reverence or decorum; we have seen them insulting modest persons, both in and after divine service; in short, the devotions of the congregation have been disturbed by almost every species of ill conduct.’ About 1788, Gunning was for some time a tutor in Herefordshire; there he observed that immense quantities of cider were drunk:-- In years when apples were abundant, the labourers in husbandry were allowed to drink as much cider as they thought proper. It was no unusual thing for a man to put his lips to a wooden bottle containing four quarts, and not remove them until he had emptied it. I have myself witnessed this exploit; but I never ventured to mention a circumstance apparently so incredible, until I read Marshall’s _History of Herefordshire_, in which he relates the same fact. George Pryme (_b._ 1781, _obiit_ 1868) in his _Autobiographic Recollections_, 1870, fully confirms Gunning’s picture of Cambridge:--