LICENSED VICTUALLER. A "licensed victualler," in the original English meaning of the term, was the keeper of what the old licensing statutes called a "victualling house." As a descrip tive term the name is one of considerable historical interest and importance. It bears clear witness to the intention and purpose of the State in the institution of the liquor licensing system, and also to the character of the social service which the licensee was expected and required to render to the community. He was not, and was not intended to be, a mere dram-seller, i.e., a retailer whose primary and practically exclusive business it was to sup ply alcoholic liquors to the public, but a victualler, i.e., a retailer of food and drink other than, and in addition to, the alcoholic beverages commonly consumed, the sale of which by the licensed victualler was merely an ancillary part of his victualling trade.
The idea, like other institutional ideas, did not long endure in practice, although until the 17th century at least it continued to represent the intention and object of the State. Lax and negligent administration and—much later—fiscal and legislative changes ob scured the idea until it ceased to govern or even to influence the trading methods of the licensee. The "licensed victualler" became a publican whose primary and practically sole business was and is the retailing of alcoholic beverages. The name has lost its ancient and specific meaning. In modern (and accepted trade) usage it applies only to the holder of an ordinary "full" (publi can's) licence, and is so restricted in the rules of the Incorporated Society of Licensed Victuallers, the oldest and most prosperous of "trade" benevolent societies.
Changes in the connotation of names and terms are not un common in the history of social institutions, but such changes are usually changes of expansion, involving an enlargement and improvement of the scope of the service rendered. In the case of the public-house (the licensed "victualling house") the change has been of a different kind. It has not been, in the strict sense, an evolutionary change, but a departure from a governing idea which was the raison d'ętre of the institution itself, and it has involved not an enlargement, but an unhappy restriction, of the social service which the institution was intended to render. In the process of the change the "victualling house" became, against law and State intention, a "drinking house." That the State sub sequently, but not until the beginning of the 18th century, ac cepted and accelerated the change by legalizing the worst form of dram-shop is true, but the "victualling house" by that time had disappeared, and the name alone survived in the statute-book. It is only in recent years that the name itself has fallen into legal (legislative) disuse.
to the play and pressure of commercial motives and was made possible by the default of the controlling authority. The incen tives were plain. The victualling trade was, in the nature of things, a limited trade with natural bounds set to its expansion. It ministered to a limited demand. Profits were relatively small and not easily earned. The sale of liquor, on the other hand, was a simple trade ; the expenses were small, the profits ample and quickly earned, and the demand was one which was easily fos tered and dependable. The liquor business drew a larger, surer, more profitable patronage than a strictly victualling business. Given faciiities, it provided a livelihood for a much greater number of sellers.
Even so, the incentives, powerful as they were, could not, unless tolerated and encouraged, have prevailed over the intention of the law. They found their opportunity in lax administration of the law. Licences were granted by justices in many districts with a careless and often a shameless disregard of local needs which drew upon them repeated admonitions from the Privy Council and from judges of assize, and required frequent resort to sum mary measures of licence suppression. These suppressions were sporadic and intermittent and they had no appreciable effect in re-establishing the public-house as a "victualling house." The intention of the law, nevertheless, remained clear and it was the reassertion of this intention in the notorious Tippling Acts of James I. (1603-4 and 1623-24) and Charles I. (1625) that gives these futile acts their historical significance. The object of this special legislation was made plain in the preamble to the first of the Tippling Acts. It was to restore the "ancient, true and principal use of inns, ale-houses, and victualling houses" as places "for the recent, relief and lodging of wayfaring people travelling from place to place, and for such supply of the wants of such people as are not able by greater quantities to make their pro ' vision of victuals and not meant for entertaining and harbouring of lewd and idle people to spend and consume their money and time in lewd and idle manner." The Tippling Acts notoriously failed. Prolonged inefficiency in regulative control and widespread maladministration of the licensing statutes had gone too far to make a summary cure pos sible; but the clearly avowed object of the Tippling Acts is of great historical importance in a survey of the original purpose and intention of the English licensing system. The ultimate responsibility for the final departure from the original idea of a victualling house rests, however, with the State, which, by its unhappy fiscal and legislative policy at the end of the seventeenth and in the early decades of the eighteenth century, took the first of two steps, each of which had demoralizing social effects, which finally sealed and disastrously aggravated a departure in aim and policy which heretofore had casually developed from adminis trative negligence.