Almost 40,000 beerhouses2 were in business within ten
years of the Act being passed with the vast majority outside
London – the Act was eventually repealed in 1869, when
magistrates were again responsible for issuing licences.

Brewing in mid-Victorian rural areas demanded rigid
self-sufficiency with materials close at hand. In prime
barley growing areas malt was easy to come by; yeast, that
vital seed, was irresistibly passed from house to house and
villagers regularly set aside land for hop cultivation,
though it was nothing compared to the glory days of the
1760s when Essex was considered a serious hop growing
rival to Kent and Sussex. In the mid 1800s, Foxearth had
three acres set aside for growing hops, which yielded close
to fourteen hundredweight for brewing purposes.

The simple way in which pre-1869 licences had been
handed out, saw the proliferation of beerhouses in nearby
villages; two served Borley; Glemsford had three, Pentlow
one; Belchamp St Paul’s made do with three and Foxearth
had two up to 1868 when one was mysteriously burnt down
following a quarrel over a neighbour’s cat.

To make matters worse, the village had lost its solitary
alehouse in the late 1840s when The Fox public house had
been demolished to make way for a school. An adjunction to
the History of Essex, published May 1852, describes the
theory behind the demolition:

The majority of the harvest would have been sold to a
merchant with some kept back for brewing locally by people
such as Joseph Theobald, who in 1845, is recorded as
Foxearth's first beer retailer.

“The schools occupy the site of the village alehouse, which the
Rector [John Foster] purchased, with the double object of ap-

propriating it to the beneficial purposes of education, as well
as removing the source of idleness and intemperance.”

Doubtless  he  had  taken  advantage  of  the  1830
Beerhouse Act, which had been set down 15 years earlier
by the Duke of Wellington‘s government, ostensibly to help
the poor and to liberate an industry by allowing better
competition. To all intents and purposes, almost anyone
wishing to sell beer could do so by paying two guineas to
the Excise. Not surprisingly many of these ‘free-houses’ in
villages became haunts of criminals and helped to peddle
adulterated  beer, sometimes laced  with  all sorts  of
narcotics such as Deadly Nightshade and Sulphur. Though
penalties for brewing with anything other than malt and
hops were severe, the prosecution of brewers was heavily
reliant1 on people able to detect different substances in the
beer; but the Act did realise its original purpose by creating
a free-market.

Hedonism was a marked feature of labouring life in
agricultural districts and the village alehouse was usually
the only meeting place for workers; unfortunately, these
assemblies were often looked on by landowners according to
London’s Pall Mall Times nests of agitation where:‘…evil is
hatched, and from there men take their first journey on the road that

leads to gaol. The place is often crowded at night - there is scarcely
room  to  stand,  the  atmosphere  is  thick  with  smoke,  and  hoarse

jarring  of  voices  fills  it,  above  which  raises  the  stave  of  a  song,
shouted in one unvarying key or another from some corner.’

The remaining beerhouse in the village was The Lion,
located in The Street, the main road in Foxearth where the
brewery offices were later built. Joseph Theobald ran the

 Newspapers of the day regularly reported Excise men closing
down breweries and destroying brewing equipment.

 From A History of Beer & Brewing by Ian Hornsey published
by RSC Paperbacks