Many old drinking usages, still kept alive by the class that clings to all traditions, are con nected with occasions of births. baptisms, mar riages, and deaths. The gloomy festivity of the lykeirakc, or wake, over the corpse of the de ceased. in Scotland and Ireland, and the former drinking of the •ircilgy (dirge) after funeral solemnities, are relics of very ancient customs.
As regards miscellaneous drinking observances at one time common, we can refer but to few of the more prominent. Apprentices. on being intro duced to a workshop, paid so much entry money to be spent in drink, and similar exactions were made from journeymen on entering a new em ployment. This was called paying their footing. When Benjamin Franklin. on getting employ ment in a printing office in London, refused to comply with this mischievous custom. he experi enced. as lie tells us, a variety of petty annoy ances. Among shipwrights the penalty of mm payment was flogging with a handsaw from time to time and other maltreatment. Ilappily, the abolition of these usages has kept pace with the increasing intelligence of the working classes, but even nowadays the last student entering the French atelier must treat the rest. Prisoners, on hieing lodged in jail—as related in the novels of Smollett and others—were obliged to pay garnish for drink to the brotherhood of which they had become members. The efficacy of modern prison
discipline has done away with such exactions.
The giving of rails (Lat. rale, farewell) to ser vants on quitting a gentleman's house, which be came so intolerable in the eighteenth century as at length to be given up by universal consent, meant, donbtless, a gift to he spent in drink to the health of the donor, and was analogous to the custom of giving a Trinkgeld in Germany and a pourboire in France to servants. drivers of car riages, and others. There were at one time nu merous drinking usages connected with depar tures. We need only notice the bonailie (Fr. bon. alter), or. as it is sometimes called, a by (Fr. roic), a festive drinking at the going away of servants or of persons in a still higher degree. once common in the lowlands of Scotland: also the stirrup-cup, or, as it is called in the High lands. clench an dorris, or drink on getting on horseback and being ready to set off. For the decline of drinking habits in general. see the article TEMPERANCE in this Encyclopaedia. Con sult Dunlop, Drinking Usages of Great Britain (London, 1839) ; and Mew and Astion, The Drinks of the World (London. 1593).