Home-brewed ale is still more commonly to be met with in some districts than many suppose. Even in the neighbourhood of the greatest brewery town in the world, Burton-on-Trent, there are small inns which rely upon their own brewing for the best of their ale. There is a very old brewhouse at Derby, at the _Nottingham Castle Inn_, into which any passer-by may step from the street and see, twice a week, a huge cauldron containing about a hundred and twenty gallons, bubbling and foaming in the corner. This brewhouse dates from the sixteenth century, and is one of the oldest buildings in the town; the _Dolphin_, whose licence dates from 1530, being another and perhaps older inn in the same neighbourhood. [Illustration: White Horse, Pleshy] A legion of brewers are named in Domesday Book, mostly women, and manorial assizes show a preponderance of the fairer sex. The price of bread and ale was fixed by statute in Henry III’s reign, and it was the business of the Ale-tester to see that the measures were of standard capacity and stamped with some recognized official mark. Alehouses abounded everywhere, known by a long pole surmounted by a tuft of foliage. An Act of 1375 regulates the length of the ale-stake at not more than seven feet over the public way. The poles had a tendency to become over long to the deterioration of the timber structures from which they depended, as well as danger to travellers passing on horseback. At Guildford, and some other cloth centres, the alehouses were required to exhibit a woolpack for a sign. These alehouses were of all sorts and sizes. There was the humble hedgeside cottage, looking like a mere sentry-box, illustrated in the fourteenth century MS.[9], where a hermit is being entertained by an alewife with a very large beer jug; or the little alehouse on the Watling Street, somewhere near Rainham, where Chaucer’s Pardoner dismounted to “Drynke and byten on a cake” before commencing his tale; or the establishment by Leatherhead Bridge, where Elinour Rummyng drove such a thriving trade, immortalised by the poet Skelton. Some of these larger alehouses were a cause of anxiety to well-disposed people, and no doubt the Church Houses were partly instituted with the idea of inducing the faithful to spend their time in a less disreputable manner. All kinds of bad characters resorted to the alehouse. Piers Plowman gives us a lurid picture of what went on there. How the glutton going to be shriven met the alewife and was induced to spend the afternoon and evening with “Tymme the tynkere and tweyne of his prentis Hikke the hakeneyman and Hughe the nedeler, Clarice of cokkeslane, and the clerke of the Cherche Dawe the dykere and a doziene other; Sir Piers of Pridie and Peronelle of Flanders, A ribidour, a ratonere, a rakyer of Chepe, A ropere, a redynkyng, and Rose the disheres, Gofrey of Garlekehithe, and Gryfin the Walshe, And upholderes an hepe.”