7 John Clare Society Journal 37 2018 ‘Common Sense and Ale’: Cobbett, Clare, and the 1830 Beer Act Patrick Vincent On 10 October 1830, two pieces of legislation arguably more radical than the Great Reform Act of 1832 came into force, undoing three centuries of state regulation while effectively improving the condition of the labouring classes. The first of these repealed the Beer Tax, a 130 year-old excise duty on the sale of beer, lowering the retail price of beer by approximately twenty percent. 1 The second, so-called ‘Duke of Wellington Beerhouse Act’ authorized anyone to sell beer or cider upon payment of a two-guinea license, and extended public house opening times from fifteen to eighteen hours a day. 2 The aim of these two bills was to increase competition and to encourage people to drink beer rather than spirits. Unlike the Reform Act, which reminded the majority of Britons that they were still unenfranchised, 3 these reforms had an immediate effect on several million lives across the kingdom. Within five years, 40,000 new licenses were issued, notably in the Midlands and the north where hundreds of new beerhouses (limited to on premise drinking) and ‘Tom and Jerry’-type beer shops opened, powerful regional monopolies such as Whitbread were sensibly weakened, and the consumption of beer increased steeply after a century of stagnation. 4 The Monthly Review gives us a sense of the elation, if not intoxication, produced by this liberalization of the beer trade, noting that ‘there is not a man in England or a friend to his species in any region of the world who if he were to reflect on the consequences which are likely to spring from this measure would not note it down in white characters as among the very highest festivals of humanity’. 5 The fact that so many people rallied around what historian James Nicholls calls ‘a clear victory of free trade capitalism over the political and economic establishment’ is not altogether surprising. 6 ‘In an era when the public was increasingly enamored of free trade and hostile towards anything resembling a monopoly’, Nicholas