COMPARE AND CONTRAST ...

Beerhouse versus Alehouse

The Plough (P21), the Anchor (P22) and the Queen (P25) were all beerhouses (P13) when they started. It is said that the gentry would visit inns and alehouses but never went into beerhouses. Beerhouses were for the common people. At the time of the agricultural Swing Riots in 1830 (in the same year beerhouses first opened their doors) it was generally reckoned that beerhouses were hot-houses of sedition and incitement to riot and revolution. Why then did William Cave (P37), who was from the gentry class himself, open a beerhouse rather than a fully licensed public house selling wines and spirits? The Plough was in the centre of Yateley, across the road from the Manor House, convenient to St Peter's church, Was William Cave perhaps attempting to provide a beerhouse for parishioners who found the Dog and Partridge rather too full of the local great and good? The Plough had considerable competition. Down the road to the east was the Royal Oak (P15), also a beerhouse. Along the road towards Eversley the White Lion (P19) had just been opened. James Rogers (P7) held an full public house licence. So the Plough faced competition from two inns and a beerhouse. As a beerhouse William Cave might reasonably have expected to attract the common people and no gentry.

However by the time John Mills was writing his diary in the late 1870's the Plough, with Charles Bunch as tenant, was attracting some good "gentry class" custom, who forty years before, would not have been seen dead in a beerhouse. What did the Plough have going for it that the James Rogers' White Lion Inn and the Church's Dog & Partridge were missing?

It was the opposite story at the Anchor, which was situated in a remote area of Yateley with no gentry living close to it. When Simonds took title to the beerhouse, Thomas Bartlett, now their tenant, applied for and was granted a full public house licence. It therefore seems that William Cave and Henry & Charles Simonds, closely related by marriage, had spotted social trends in the late 1850s which were contrary to the received wisdom of current textbooks.

Back to 1997 Exhibition: Inns, Alehouses & Maltsters of Yateley

NEXT page in 1997 Exhibition

Original page written by P J Tipton for the Yateley Society's 1997 Exhibition: Inns, Alehouses & Maltsters

Additional research by Richard Johnston & Elizabeth Tipton

Original page may now have been revised to include the Society's latest Research

(c) The Yateley Society, 1997 & 2008

Page Exhib.1997.24