Stuart Walton reminisces about a time when wine could be drawn from public taps in London.
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Stuart Walton contemplates a sadly faded English custom of celebrating coronations and other significant events with free wine flowing from fountains.
The coronation of King Richard II in the summer of 1377 was a particularly remarkable event. After skipping a generation, the crown had reverted to him from his grandfather, Edward III, whose lengthy reign had been marked by military successes over the persistent French adversaries. Richard’s father, a distinguished warrior known as the Black Prince, along with his older brother, had passed away during the reign of the elderly king. A period of intense uncertainty was dispelled by the splendid splendor of a procession traversing the sunlit streets of the capital towards Westminster.
The new monarch of England exuded an air of solemn dignity, carrying his ten years with a regal elegance that seemed innate. Following the grandeur of the coronation, London erupted the next day into a jubilant celebration. The streets were alive with music, dancing, and cheering, and to symbolize the victory of merriment over seriousness, free wine flowed from the Cheapside conduit.
In her insightful examination of the intertwined destinies of Richard II and Henry IV, The Eagle and the Hart (2024), Helen Castor observes that during Richard’s coronation, crowds celebrated with “noisy enthusiasm, their good humour lubricated by the wine that flowed for hours from the public conduits.” This use of plural is somewhat permissible in its rhetorical flourish, as in 1377, there was only one conduit in the city of London. It was commissioned by Henry III in 1237 to transport water from the springs at Tyburn through wooden and lead pipes to a column fountain with a tap at the eastern end of Cheapside, directly across from the Mitre tavern, providing fresh water for the daily needs of its citizens.
Other similar conveniences were introduced shortly after Richard’s coronation, in the 1380s, leading to the original being referred to as the Great Conduit to differentiate it from its smaller counterparts. Historically speaking, the coronation day of 15 July 1377 marked the first instance of wine flowing from it, thus establishing a delightful precedent. When Henry VI made his way through Cheapside in procession after returning safely from France in 1432, the fountain flowed with red wine, a tradition that continued throughout the Tudor era to commemorate coronations and weddings, such as that of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn in 1533. This festive practice soon spread to other regions. For instance, in 1451, Exeter welcomed Henry VI by allowing its conduits to run with wine. As recently as 1685, during the conferral of a new Civic Charter on Lincoln, the city’s Mayor famously drank claret from the Tudor-era public taps at the medieval church of St Mary-le-Wigford.
The exact method behind the miraculous transformation of water into wine remains elusive. Contemporary accounts suggest that wine flowed through a plumbing system rather than being simply added to the conduit itself. It is possible that there was some mixing with water, though that seems improbable. The most plausible theory is that the water flow was halted at various points, causing precarious backups that increased pressure on the pipes, allowing wine to be added and travel down to the public spigot through gravity, much like the water at Tyburn. One can only envision the lively crowd gathered around the single tap and the careless wastage as much of it splashed into the drainage ditch.
The beverage in question was likely part of the vast supply of wine imported from England’s colonies in southwestern France, known at the time as Aquitaine. Richard II had actually been born in Bordeaux. For every true-born English subject, French wine was a birthright until ongoing conflicts with France led to a patriotic shift towards Portugal.
There was surely something idealistic about public fountains dispensing free wine, akin to what one might hope for if such a practice were resurrected today. It echoed themes from the Promised Land repeatedly referenced in the Hebrew Bible, transforming the flowing milk and honey to flowing claret. One of the four rivers in the paradisiacal garden of Islam flows with wine—a bounty ample enough for even the most extravagant celebrations, and all at no cost. At a more spiritual level, it also invoked the first miracle of Jesus at the wedding in Cana, when water was transformed into an endless supply of celebratory wine that the guests had anticipated.
When did this joyful tradition come to an end? The public fountain at Carfax in central Oxford flowed with wine during the proclamation of each royal accession from the Restoration until the ascension of George III in 1760, when it was filled with claret for the last time. Its predecessor, the original Cheapside conduit, did not survive the Great Fire of London in 1666. Today, a commemorative plaque marks its former location. It took a fire of biblical proportions to extinguish a municipal semblance of the scriptural land of abundance.
1Helen Castor, The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV (London: Allen Lane, 2024), 30.