Taverns were once wine shops for the rich and dens for rogues
The Latin taberna meant a shed or a market stall, and the English word tavern appears from the 13th century. In its heyday a tavern sold wine rather than beer, which was left to cheaper alehouses, and served roast meat, bread, cheese and herring to anyone who could pay.
Wine carried prestige, so English taverns often courted the upper classes, clustering around places such as Oxford to catch a wealthier crowd. Yet many playwrights of the day preferred beer, and some taverns stocked it simply to lure them in. The Mermaid Tavern near St Paul's Cathedral was the most famous of its era, helped by a probably mythical story that Shakespeare drank there. Two of its tokens survive, an early kind of bar tab: you swapped money for tokens on arrival and spent them round by round. The Great Fire of 1666 destroyed it, along with the Boar's Head Inn that Shakespeare placed in Henry IV, Part I.
In France taverns were so disreputable that women of standing kept away. After 1500 a tangle of rising wine taxes turned keepers into smugglers who hid barrels and refilled casks from secret stocks. Before 1789 the village tavern was a hub of social and political life and a symbol of opposition to the regime and the church. It also fed into dining history: in 1782 Beauvilliers opened what many regard as the first true Parisian restaurant, the Grande Taverne de Londres, on the Rue de Richelieu.
Elsewhere, drinking followed strict codes. In 16th-century Augsburg it could raise a man's standing, provided he still met his duties as head of a household. In Eskilstuna, a Swedish town of blacksmiths, buying rounds between 1820 and 1850 built the goodwill that workers relied on for favours.
Greece still dines at the taverna, a tradition traced to the Ancient Agora of Athens, while Czechs head to the hospoda, a word related to hospitality itself.
Source: Tavern
