The Pilgrim Brewer
Introducing John Barleycorn
The craft of brewing comes to us with a thousand-year history in verse. Starting in the 11th century with the Exeter Book of Riddles, the Anglo-Saxon Riddle 28 spells out what would later be translated in John Bickerdyke’s The Curiosities of Ale and Beer as the Simposii Fnigmata, the direct ancestor of the tale of John Barleycorn.1
John Barleycorn is the anthropomorphized process of brewing, expressed as a Passion Play. (The traditional folk song John Barleycorn Must Die is the most renowned form of this poem, and is included in its entirety in Appendix A: John Barleycorn Must Die.) In it, the luckless character of Mr. Barleycorn is summarily sentenced in the first verse:
There were three men came out of the west
Their fortunes for to try,
And these three men made a solemn vow
John Barleycorn must die.
John Barleycorn is promptly killed and plowed into the soil, but surprises his tormentors by springing back to life and growing a beard, thereby becoming a man. Events continue to go very badly for Mr. Barleycorn after this. Through the remainder of the poem’s ten verses, our hero is scythed at the knee, pricked by a pitchfork, bound to a cart, flayed with sticks, and crushed between stones.
At the end however, the resurrected Barleycorn outlasts his tormentors:
And little Sir John and the nut brown bowl
And his brandy in the glass
And little Sir John and the nut brown bowl
Proved the strongest man at lastThe huntsman, he can’t hunt the fox
Nor so loudly to blow his horn,
And the tinker, he can’t mend kettle nor pots
Without a little barley corn.
The analogy to Christ’s Passion is obvious, and poems of this type were popular in mediæval England for that reason, positioning brewing as a divinely virtuous activity.
The connection between John Barleycorn and Christianity is reinforced in the same time period by the anonymous poem The Origins of Beer, wherein one Good King Cambrinus dreams while sleeping in a field of barley, imploring both the heathen gods and the Christian God to show him how to provide his people with drink, as his land can produce neither meade nor wine. He is visited by an angel, who reveals to him the recipe for beer. His conversion is instantaneous, and the poem closes with the concurrent erection of both churches and breweries. 2
Given this type of historical pedigree, it seems obvious that brewing can contribute more to architecture than just the logic of its industrial processes.