LOOSE ENDS
Postscript
The exhibition team has found researching this exhibition enormously exciting. For the first time we have really begun to feel how the people of Yateley went about the ordinary tasks of earning a living, enjoying themselves and often, at the same time, providing for their own poor and needy, out of their own pockets and by their own efforts.
We had no idea that Yateley and the surrounding villages were so involved in the brewing industry from barley and hop growing, to malting and brewing. We begin to feel the difference between the busy main road at Blackwater and the more rural backwater of Yateley Village. Until now we have seen Yateley as dominated by large landowners, sometimes absentee, with an underclass of largely subsistence-living husbandmen and farm labourers, intermingled with professional classes who worked in London, but raised their families away from the squalor and plagues of London. These people were all here in Yateley. But now we have other strata: innkeepers, beerhouse keepers, horse keepers, postboys and blacksmiths servicing the travelling public; and maltsters and brewers supplying, building and owning the inns and pubs for locals and travellers alike.
We had no idea that at the Yeoman level the web of marriage stretched so far into the surrounding parishes. We suspected that, whereas Yateley was oriented to Winchester for administration and legal matters, it was oriented to Reading for business. Half way between the two important brewing centres of Reading and Alton, with the Exeter Road running through its middle, it now seems hardly surprising that Yateley should be so actively involved in barley, hops, malt, beer, inns and coaching.
Back to 1997 Exhibition: Inns, Alehouses & Maltsters of Yateley
Original page written by Peter Tipton for the Yateley Society's 1997 Exhibition: Inns, Alehouses & Maltsters
Additional research by Richard Johnston, & Elizabeth Tipton
Original page has been revised to include the Society's latest Research
(c) The Yateley Society, 1997 & 2008
Page Exhib.1997.44
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