THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

I knew men who rarely went home sober from either market, fair, or meeting, or who never missed their daily potations, and carried on so for so many years – two of them lived to be over eighty – that many notes of admiration were employed in speaking of their marvellous endurance.  But many, sadly too many, came to grief in either (or both) body and substance, in consequence of their indulgences of this kind; and more than one I have known whom drink excited to such a degree that the lives of their wives and children were hardly safe on their return home drunk. 

Atkinson/Parish

Most excellent home-made wines were made by the clever housewives.  These were blackberry, gooseberry, cowslip, rhubarb, colt’s-foot, elderberry, and beetroot.  Some had been kept for some years and were decidedly potent and very clear.  A beverage frequently brewed too on those moorlands was species of mead called botchet, made from the moorland honey.  It was much too sweet to be pleasant taking, and decidedly heady.

Bishop/Patients