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Abstract
Alcohol was an accepted and at times necessary complement to work in preindustrial England. It enabled laborers to endure the hardship of performing manual labor for 12 or more hours a day, and additionally enabled them to endure extremes of heat and cold. Employers' attitudes toward drinking on the job tended to vary according to the availability of labor: when it was scarce, as it was from the second half of the fourteenth century until the end of the Middle Ages, employers had no choice but to tolerate fairly heavy drinking both on and off the job; when labor was plentiful, as it was throughout the Tudor and Stuart periods, employers sought to control recreational drinking, while continuing to tolerate strictly occupational drinking.