A History of the Ale-Conner

The Ale-Conner is one of the oldest surviving civic offices in England. Rooted in medieval consumer protection, shaped by centuries of regulatory change, and preserved in the City of London’s unique governance, the office tells a story that stretches from the reign of Henry III to the present day.

Origins: The Assize of Bread and Ale

The office owes its existence to the Assisa Panis et Cervisiae (Assize of Bread and Ale), a statute attributed to the reign of Henry III, conventionally dated to approximately 1266–1267. It was the first law in English history to regulate the production and sale of food and drink, establishing a sliding scale that linked the price of ale to the prevailing cost of grain. When a quarter of wheat sold for three shillings, brewers in cities could sell two gallons of ale for a penny.

The word ‘conner’ derives from the Middle English meaning ‘one who tries, tests, or examines’. The office has been known by several names across different periods and places: ale-taster, ale-founder, ale-kenner, and in Latin, gustator cervisiae – taster of beer. The variation reflects the localised nature of the role. These were not Crown appointments. They were manorial and borough officers, appointed through the court leet.

The Assize created the mechanism by which ale-conners operated. Quality was to be ascertained by sworn officers, appointed annually, who would taste the ale, check the measures, and present any defaulting brewer to the court. The Assize remained in force, in various amended forms, for nearly six hundred years, until its formal repeal by the Statute Law Revision Act 1863.

The Court Leet

Ale-conners were officers of the court leet, a manorial court exercising delegated Crown jurisdiction over minor offences and local regulation. The court met typically twice a year, after Michaelmas and after Easter, and all residents were obliged to attend.

Among the specialist officers elected by the jury of freehold tenants were the ale-taster, the carniter or flesh-taster (who checked the freshness of meat), and the bread weigher (who verified weight and quality). Together, these officers represented an early form of consumer protection and trading standards enforcement, centuries before either concept was formally recognised.

It was not a popular appointment. Ale spoiled quickly in the centuries before the widespread introduction of hops as a preservative, which meant the tasting was not uniformly pleasant. And the officer who dispensed fines was rarely thanked for it. Ale-conners sometimes had to be pressed into service, and the post was often rotated among a number of reluctant individuals.

London in 1309: The Scale of the Trade

By the early fourteenth century, ale was central to London’s daily economy. Henry Wheatley, in The Story of London (1904), records that the City in 1309 contained 354 taverns and 1,334 brewers – a town then numbering perhaps eighty thousand souls. The trade was almost entirely in the hands of women, the brewsters, and remained so until well into the early sixteenth century, when the rise of male-dominated brewing companies and hopped beer began to shift the trade’s character.

Against that scale, the sworn officers of each Ward had real and continuous work. Wheatley, summarising the procedure laid down in the Liber Albus, captures the practical mechanic plainly:

A list of names recorded in 1377 shows that most wards elected four ale-conners apiece. Taken together, that put nearly a hundred sworn officers in the City at any one time, working in parallel across the wards to ensure that ale was good for man’s body, sold at reasonable prices, and in proper measures. The office was not a curiosity at the margins of City life. It was a substantial standing administration.

The Liber Albus: Ordinance and Oath

The most important primary source for the City of London’s ale-conners is the Liber Albus (the White Book of the City of London), compiled in 1419 by John Carpenter, Common Clerk, during the mayoralty of Richard Whittington. It was the first systematic codification of the City’s laws and customs. Book III, Part III contains both a substantive ordinance regulating ale and ale-conners, and the oath sworn by the officers themselves. Together they describe the office in operational detail.

The ordinance is unambiguous about what the office did. As soon as a brewing was finished, the brewer or brewster was required to send for the ale-conners of the Ward in which they dwelt, to taste the ale. No ale could be sold before the ale-conners had assayed it. The penalty for selling unassayed ale was forfeiture of the cask – half to the City Chamber, half to the ale-conners themselves.

Ale-conners were elected in each Ward, on the advice and assent of the Alderman and reputable men of the Ward, and could be removed at pleasure. At least two had to be ready at all times to taste ale on demand, on pain of imprisonment at the will of the Mayor. Their duty was to certify that each new brewing was ‘as good ale, or better’ than the brewer was previously ‘wont to brew’. Where ale was found below standard, the Alderman and ale-conners together set a price beneath the regulated maximum – 1½d per gallon for the best, 1d for the second – at which it could still be lawfully sold.

Brewers who broke the assize faced escalating fines: 40d for a first offence, half a mark for the second, a mark for the third, and forswearing the trade in London for ever on the fourth. Hucksters, the door-to-door retailers, were forbidden from buying ale for resale at all. A fourteenth-century ordinance had taken a more pragmatic line, authorising the ale-conners to levy a fine of 40d on any huckster who charged more than the regulated 1½d a gallon for best ale – half of every fine paid into the Chamber of London, the ale-conner ‘allowed to recompense himself for his diligence by retaining the balance’.

The ale-conners themselves were policed. Any ale-conner who, for gift, promise, or favour, screened a brewer, brewster, or huckster, or who failed to perform the office, faced eight days’ imprisonment without redemption, plus a fine at the Mayor’s discretion. The office was honourable; it was not a soft post.

The oath itself, sworn before God and the Saints, survives in full. The ale-conner swore to know of no brewer, brewster, cook, or pie-baker in his Ward who sold ale above the regulated price, or otherwise than by sealed measure full of clear ale; to certify the Alderman of any contravener and their names; to be ready to taste any ale on demand; to set a reasonable price by the Alderman’s assent where ale was below standard; not to conceal, spare, or wrongly aggrieve any tradesman for gift, promise, knowledge, hate, or other cause; and never to absent himself from a tasting without true and reasonable cause.

The verbs throughout the ordinance and the oath are taste and assay. The instrument of the office, repeatedly and exclusively, is the palate. The primary source contains no reference to leather breeches, to wooden benches, or to any tactile method of testing.

A related ordinance of 1388 sharpened the consumer’s side of the same protection. From that date ale could not be sold in drinking cups at all, only in the authorised sealed measures; the customer received a measure and a pot or cup to pour from – rather, as Alderman Truscott put it summarising the practice, ‘as one receives a decanter of wine and a glass’. The point was to keep the unit of sale honest and visible. What was poured out for drinking was secondary; what had been measured into the sealed gallon, pottle, or quart was the thing the assize watched.

From Wardmote to Common Hall

The medieval system of ward-elected ale-conners did not last. The City’s Constitution Book – the Corporation’s official register of its offices – records that ale-conners were appointed for each ward at the annual wardmotes only until the middle of the fifteenth century. By the mid-sixteenth the practice was long in abeyance, and the rise of hopped beer – brewed at first by foreigners from Holland and Zeeland – had created a parallel trade requiring its own oversight. An Act of Common Council of 1551 separated the alebrewers and beerbrewers into distinct crafts, and named four ‘able, wise and discreet’ persons as Surveyors of the Beerbrewers, to be elected each year on 1 August in the same manner as the Bridgemasters. The first four, named on 14 February 1551, were John Royse, mercer; Stephen Cobb, haberdasher; Henry Fyssher, skinner; and Richard Grafton, grocer.

A further Act followed on 1 October 1556; then, on 25 October 1564, a comprehensive Act of Common Council running to some 3,500 words broke down the distinction between alebrewers and beerbrewers and merged the ale-conners and the Surveyors of Beer into a single office with authority over both. The Act provided that the Court of Aldermen could each July nominate, elect, and swear four persons as Surveyors of the Beerbrewers, with their names published to the Commons by the Common Serjeant. ‘In theory,’ Alderman Sir Denis Truscott observed in 1963, ‘this Act is still in force.’

Election by Common Hall came later, and by drift rather than by statute. From 1565 to 1585 the Court of Aldermen nominated four Surveyors at their July meeting, with Common Hall recording them as elected by the Mayor and Aldermen. By an Act of 1 August 1586 the Common Council moved election day to the Feast of St. John the Baptist – Midsummer Day. Through the seventeenth century the Aldermen contented themselves with nominating a list of candidates from which Common Hall chose four. By 1679 the nomination is recorded as being made by the Commonalty alone; by 1738 by the liverymen. The shift from Aldermanic nomination to election by the liverymen was, as Truscott noted, ‘a clerical rather than a practical change’.

That drift is now settled law. The Constitution Book records that the right of nomination and election has been exercised by the liverymen in Common Hall since the late seventeenth century, and that the phrase ‘other officers chosen by the liverymen’ – where it appears in the Act of Common Council of 21 June 1695 regulating elections in Common Hall, in the Election Act 1725, and in the City of London Ballot Act 1887 – is interpreted as referring to the ale-conners. The procedure for their nomination, election, and poll is the same as that for the Chamberlain, the Bridgemasters, and the Auditors. An office born in the wardmote had become, by settled interpretation, one of the elective offices of the liverymen of London.

The title itself preserves this layered history. The early ward officers were ale-conners. The officers appointed centrally from 1551 were Surveyors. The City’s Latin records rendered them Supervisores Cervisiae et Birrae – Surveyors of Ale and Beer – from the sixteenth century onwards. The records turned to English only during the Commonwealth, when Latin was forbidden, and the officers were then plainly called ale-conners. Latin returned with Charles II, then yielded again in the early eighteenth century to the form still used in the official minutes of Common Hall: ‘Surveyors of Ale and Beer commonly called Aleconners’.

Notable Holders: Stow and Grafton

Two of the most consequential chroniclers of Tudor London both held the office – a coincidence that has gone almost entirely unremarked in subsequent histories of the City.

That two of the most important antiquarian voices in Tudor London were also ale-conners is more than a curiosity. It is evidence that the office was, in its working life, a serious civic post held by serious men – not the sinecure it later became.

The Office in the City of London

Four ale-conners have been elected annually by the liverymen of the City of London at Common Hall, held at Guildhall on Midsummer Day. This election takes place alongside the election of the Sheriffs, Bridgemasters, and Auditors. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica confirms that the four ale-conners’ duty was ‘to examine the measures used by beer and liquor sellers to guard against fraud’, and that they were ‘still chosen annually by the liverymen in common hall assembled on Midsummer Day’.

Candidates must be Freemen of the City of London. No further qualifications are prescribed. A 2013 report to the Court of Common Council confirmed that ‘both posts are honorary and even the ceremonial duties are very limited in the present day’. In practice, elections have historically been uncontested, with vacancies arising only when a holder dies or steps down.

The Constitution Book states the modern position with a perfectly straight face: the ale-conners ‘have no official duties although occasionally they assist at ceremonies to celebrate some memorable day in the history of a tavern’. It is perhaps the most agreeable sentence anywhere in the City’s constitutional records.

In 2007, Dr Christine Rigden, past Sheriff of London, became one of the four ale-conners – the first woman appointed to the position in the role’s history within the City.

The Warrant of 1800

What the Midsummer election conferred – and how much of the medieval office still stood, on paper at least, at the turn of the nineteenth century – survives in a remarkable document: the warrant of appointment issued to the ale-conners for the year 1800, a transcription of which was later circulated by the City of London Information Centre. It is addressed to Joseph Brooks, Roger Enever, Thomas Lambard, and Richard Sanders, who ‘on the Feast of St. John the Baptist last past’ had been ‘by the Livery of the several Companies of the City of London in Common Hall assembled duly elected Ale Conners of the said City’.

The medieval office is intact in every line: liquors good and wholesome for man’s body, measures sealed and marked against the Guildhall standard, the conners empowered to act ‘any two’ together – the direct descendant of the Liber Albus rule that at least two be ready at all times – and the whole grounded, in the old formula, ‘in pursuance of the Statute in that case made and provided’. Offenders were to be reported to the Lord Mayor or another City magistrate; every seller of liquor was required to pay the conners ‘their accustomed dues’; and the City’s constables and peace officers were commanded to be ‘aiding and assisting’ the ale-conners in whatever they should lawfully do.

The warrant was given under the hand and seal of the Lord Mayor on 8 February 1800. The typescript renders the signature ‘H. C. Comley’ – a misreading, evidently, of H. C. Combe: Harvey Christian Combe, Lord Mayor 1799–1800, Member of Parliament for the City, and head of Combe, Delafield & Co. of Long Acre, one of the great porter breweries of London. The commission empowering the City’s ale-tasters to search, taste, and try therefore went out over the signature of one of the largest brewers in England. Within two years, the ale-conners were before the Common Council, complaining that the publicans on whom their ‘accustomed dues’ depended refused to pay them at all.

From Regulation to Ceremony

The office became progressively less functional through three key developments, each of which stripped away a layer of the ale-conner’s practical authority.

By the beginning of the eighteenth century it had become customary to elect to the office ‘respectable tradesmen who had been unsuccessful in business’; by the late eighteenth century it had been reduced to a pension for ‘decayed citizens’. A petition of the ale-conners to the Common Council in 1785 reported that their income from fees was much diminished, the victuallers refusing to pay, and that they met with ‘more insult than emolument’. A further petition in 1796 stated that one Robert Oldaker, late ale-conner, had spent two years in Mile End Workhouse before he died. A third in 1802 observed that ‘it had become customary to bestow the office upon aged industrious, but unfortunate citizens as an asylum for the remainder of their lives’.

The publicans, for their part, had a point of law as well as a grievance: the fees the conners sought – between 2/6 and 1/- a visit – were, they objected, charges ‘without lawful authority’. On 27 January 1803 the Common Council settled the matter, fixing the salary at £10 per annum for the expenses of discharging the duties and ordering the Hallkeeper to provide new gowns of office – the gowns supplied, as the City’s Information Centre later drily observed, ‘doubtless with a view to assisting them to exact payment of their “fees”’.

By 1911 the Encyclopaedia Britannica could describe the title as ‘a sinecure’. A guidance note by Nigel R. Pullman, past chairman of the Livery Committee, confirmed in 2018 that ‘today, four conners each test ales, maybe once a year. It’s a purely ritualistic and ceremonial process now, and has no legal bearing.’

The Ale-Conner Beyond London

The office was never exclusive to the City. Ale-tasters were appointed in manorial courts leet across England wherever the Assize was enforced. Some of the most notable examples survive in the historical record.

The Leather Breeches: A Myth Examined

No history of the ale-conner is complete without addressing the most persistent story attached to the office. The claim runs as follows: that ale-conners tested ale by pouring it on a wooden bench and sitting in the puddle while wearing leather breeches. If the breeches stuck to the bench after thirty minutes, the ale contained too much unfermented sugar and was therefore impure.

The earliest known print appearance of the story is in Frederick Hackwood’s Inns, Ales, and Drinking Customs of Old England (London, 1909), at pp. 107–108. Read on its own terms, Hackwood’s passage tells against the myth as much as it advances it:

Three features of Hackwood’s account undermine its application to the medieval ale-conner of the City of London. First, his source is anonymous: ‘we are informed by an authority’ – no name, no document, no archive. Second, he calls the figure the ‘ale-tester’, not the ale-conner, and locates the practice in the ‘later period’ of testing, ‘a couple of hundred of years ago’, framing it as eighteenth-century rather than medieval. Third, the test he describes is specifically for sugar, which fits post-Reformation anxieties about adulteration far better than it fits the medieval Assize’s concern with quality, measure, and price.

The late beer historian Martyn Cornell (1952–2025) conducted the most thorough investigation of the claim. He found that it appears in none of the major nineteenth-century works on beer, that no medieval source describes any such practice, and that Hackwood’s unnamed ‘authority’ cannot be traced. Cornell also identified parallel versions of the tale circulating across Europe: a German variant involving trousers of stag’s leather, a Flemish version, an Alsatian account where the bierkieser sat for an hour, and a Czech variant in which the brewer rather than the tester sat in the ale. He concluded that the story was folklore with no basis in documented practice.

As the previous section shows, the verbs of the Liber Albus ordinance and oath are taste and assay. The instrument of the office is the palate. Despite this, the leather-breeches ceremony has been adopted with good humour by modern ceremonial ale-conners as a piece of heritage theatre. The distinction between history and tradition matters, but there is room for both.

An Office Worth Reviving

The office of ale-conner progressed through three distinct phases: an active regulatory role from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries, during which ale-conners held real powers to taste ale, set prices, and present defaulting brewers; a transitional period from the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries, as justices of the peace and then excise officers absorbed the ale-conner’s practical functions; and a ceremonial phase from the seventeenth century onwards, in which the office persists as a recognised sinecure within the City’s governance framework.

The question now is whether a fourth phase is possible. The regulatory powers are gone and will not return. But the principle behind the office – that someone should champion quality, fairness, and the public interest in the drinks trade – is as relevant today as it was in 1266. The City of London is home to over 180 pubs and bars. The drinks industry is central to its economy and character. The Ale-Conner can once again serve a purpose: not as a regulator, but as a champion.