In 1656 the mayor of Salisbury, William Stone, opened a petition against ‘needless alehouses’ in his town with the following entreaty to the magistrates of Wiltshire:

As the previous chapter showed, such concerns with the ‘great disorders’ that were feared to occur in alehouses were prevalent amongst the middling and upper sort opponents of the institution, and served to underpin a regulatory framework designed to closely police the role played by the alehouse in early modern English communities. Such an analysis provides an important backdrop to understanding the ‘battle over the alehouse’, highlighting the motivations of some of those engaged in this conflict, and delineating the contours of the terrain on which it was fought out. It reveals little, however, about the motives and tactics of the ‘other side’ in this conflict – those alehouse-goers allegedly responsible for all varieties of ‘sin and wickedness’ – or of the character of the fighting itself. This chapter brings these issues into focus.

Undoubtedly the complaints that were directed at alehouses in petitions and presentments tell us something about the institution and its clientele. Many alehouses were indeed sites of ‘disorder’ as their opponents saw it. Petty crime, sex, violent confrontations, and excessive and profligate drinking certainly all occurred in alehouses. What is less clear is whether these examples constitute plausible evidence, as William Stone argued, that alehouse-goers respected no authority whatsoever, that they were enemies of church and state. As Peter Clark memorably put it, for opponents of the alehouse such transgressions instinctively aroused deeper fears that alehouses ‘served as the stronghold of popular opposition to the established religious and political order’ and as the ‘command post of men who wanted to turn the traditional world upside down and create their own alternative society’. If it seems sensible to accept that alehouses did play host to forms of what today might be labelled ‘antisocial behaviour’, it is important to explore at greater length whether it really did act as a centre of serious political and religious subversion.