Banbury ale a half-yard pot The devil a tinker dares stand to ’t. {172} It must have been strong indeed, for according to the old proverb— Cobblers and tinkers Are your true ale drinkers. Dorsetshire, amongst the southern counties, has long been noted for a fine pale ale. This is the liquor mentioned in _English Ale_ (1737) as— Bright amber priz’d by the luxurious town, The pale hu’d Dorchester—— Its strength may be judged from the entry in John Byrom’s diary of about the same period (1725):—“I found the effect of last night’s drinking that foolish Dorset, which was pleasant enough, but it did not agree with me at all, for it made me very stupid all day.” These are the words of a man who has evidently loved not wisely but too well. Cox, in his _History of Dorsetshire_ (1700), states that “since by the French wars the coming of French wine is prohibited, the people here have learned to brew the finest malt liquors in the kingdom, so delicately clean and well tasted that the best judges . . . . prefer it to the ales most in vogue, as Hull, Derby, Burton, &c.” Great quantities of Dorchester beer were consumed in London during the seventeenth and the early part of the eighteenth centuries, but from that time the trade with London, for some reason—probably the expense of transit—gradually fell away. The excellence of the Dorset beer depended in a great measure upon the fact that the water of the neighbourhood possessed peculiarly good qualities for brewing purposes, and, that advantage being of a permanent character, there seems to be no reason why the Dorchester ales of the present day should not regain throughout the country the position they had at the beginning of last century. In the south and south-western portions of England they are held in very high esteem. Barnstaple was famous for its ales in the middle of the last century; a writer in the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ of Jan., 1753, says that they are as good as Derby ales, though not quite so famous. Mum, a popular drink early in the last century, was a strong ale brewed chiefly from wheat-malt with the addition of various aromatic herbs. Mum-houses were in existence in 1664, for Mr. Samuel Pepys records that on a certain occasion he went “with Mr. Norbury near hand to the Fleece, a mum-house in Leadenhall, and there drank _mum_, and by-and-by broke up.” A receipt of the date 1682, describes the brewing of mum as follows:— {173}