From a perusal of those queer old collections of quackery, magic, herb-lore and star-lore, the Saxon Leechdoms, it may be gathered that our Saxon ancestors brewed a goodly assortment of malt liquors. They made beer, and strong beer; ale, and strong ale; clear ale, lithe (clear) beer; and _twybrowen_, or double-brewed ale, the mighty ancestor of the “doble-doble” beer of Elizabethan times. Besides all these, there was foreign ale for those whose tastes were too fastidious to be satisfied with their native productions. {152} On the authority of the _Alvismál_, it may be said that no distinction was originally drawn between ale and beer, except, perhaps, that the latter was considered to be a somewhat more honourable designation; “öl heitir meth mönnum en meth Asum bjoor” (_i.e._, ale it is called among men, and among the gods beer). The _Exeter Book_, a collection of Anglo-Saxon poems, contains the expressions, “a good beer-drinker,” “angry with ale,” “drunken with beer,” in close juxtaposition and apparently without any distinction of meaning. A distinction must, however, have arisen in very early times, for in the collection of Saxon Leechdoms, mentioned above, a direction is to be found that a patient is on no account to drink beer, although he may partake in moderation of ale and wine; and the same work contains the remarkable and apparently impossible statement that while a pint of ale weighs six pennies more than a pint of water, a pint of beer weighs twenty-two pennies less than a pint of water. The word beer seems gradually to have given place to the word ale, and though the former may have lingered in some parts of the country, and the passage from _King Horn_ already quoted shows that in the thirteenth century it was not quite forgotten—ale became the usual word to express malt liquor. It was English _ale_ that strengthened the arm of English bowmen at Crecy and Poictiers, and on many another well-fought field; and English _ale_ was the “barley-broth” which “decocted” the cold blood of the dwellers in this land of fogs and mist “to such valiant heat” and stubborn endurance in their constant struggles with the valour and chivalry of France.