Taverns hung an ivy bush outside to show that wine was sold. It is the oldest advertising in Europe and it is why so many pubs are called the Bush.
The Bush Tavern has a hundred and four reviews and a 4.5, and its name is the oldest piece of advertising in Europe.
The bush
Roman taverns hung a bunch of vine leaves outside to show that wine was for sale. The vine was sacred to Bacchus, everybody understood the signal, and it worked in a world where nobody could read.
The practice came to Britain and adapted. There are no vines, so they used ivy – which is evergreen, which is also associated with Bacchus, and which survives an English winter.
An ivy bush on a pole, above the door. That is what it meant: wine is sold here.
And a separate signal, the ale-stake, meant ale – and by the fourteenth century it was a legal requirement in some places to display one, because the ale-conner could not test what he could not find.
Good wine needs no bush
The proverb is medieval and it is still in use, and almost nobody who says it knows what a bush is doing in it.
It means: a genuinely good thing does not need advertising. Word will get round. If the wine is good, you do not have to hang anything over the door.
Shakespeare uses it. Rosalind says it directly to the audience in the epilogue of As You Like It – that a good play needs no epilogue, just as good wine needs no bush – and it is, in that moment, a joke about the fact that she is standing there doing an epilogue.
Which is the whole argument of this magazine
Three hundred and two articles, two postcodes, two hundred and forty venues.
And the finding has been the same every time: the best-rated bars in both surveys are small rooms with short lists and somebody behind the bar who knows – and not one of them is themed, not one has a rope, and not one is famous.
Bedford Street Wines. The Clipper Lounge. Amaro. Kioku. Stables. Ricco. Old Mary’s. Archive and Myth.
Meanwhile the venues with the ropes, the hidden doors, the Prohibition premises, the Victorian explorers and the colour-changing cocktails are, almost without exception, sitting on 4.1s and 4.2s and wondering why.
Good wine needs no bush. They knew it in 1400. We have spent six hundred years forgetting it and installing a velvet rope instead.
The bar
A hundred and four reviews is a modest sample and a 4.5 on it is a good, believable, unremarkable number.
Twenty to thirty pounds. Small. Warm. Nobody is going.
Verdict
Go. It is the correct kind of room and it has the correct kind of name, and the name is telling you not to need the name.
The ale-conner
Since we have mentioned him, he deserves a paragraph, because the job was real and the method was extraordinary.
An ale-conner was a parish official appointed to test the quality of ale offered for sale. And the traditional method – repeated in enough sources that something like it probably happened – was that he poured a measure onto a wooden bench, sat in it in leather breeches for half an hour, and then stood up.
If the breeches stuck to the bench, there was too much residual sugar. The ale had not been properly fermented, and the brewer was cheating.
A public official, sitting in a puddle of beer, in leather trousers, as a matter of law. Shakespeare’s father held the post in Stratford.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
