Heavy drinking has always been part of the British character

Heavy drinking has always been part of the British character – and one that has differentiated the inhabitants of these islands from their neighbours on the Continent of Europe. The eighth century missionary and reformer Saint Boniface had been born in Devon but spent most of his life working on the Continent. In his old age he wrote to the Cuthbert, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in which he referred to a report that ‘In your dioceses the vice of drunkenness is too frequent. This is an evil peculiar to pagans and our race. Neither the Franks not the Gauls nor the Lombards nor the Romans nor the Greeks commit it.’

A. Barr, Drink: a social history (1995), 25