Copy of article published in: McShane and Walker eds., 2010. The Extraordinary and the Everyday in Early Modern England. Palgrave Macmillan.

In May 1650, A Perfect Diurnall of Some Passages and Proceedings of Parliament and in Relation to the Armies in England and Ireland reported that 'very lately [...] at Milton in Barkeshire' a 'company of [5] Royalists at an alehouse, being drunke, they out of zeale of affection to their King at Bredagh, would drink his health in blood, and to effect this, unanimously agreed to cut a peece of their Buttocks, and fry their flesh that was cut off on a grid-iron'. In this article, the cultural contexts in which this remarkable episode in Milton took place, and from which contemporary behaviours and their meanings were inevitably constructed, are explored: demonstrating how such events, rather than simply appealing to our taste for the bizarre and spectacular, can illuminate something of the everyday experience of royalists in interregnum England. Multiple imaginary readings of the report drawn from the very real discourses and milieu of 1650s England are examined, offering a broad range of perspectives from which contemporary readers of opposing political and religious stances might have received the piece. It will also be argued that these unusual drunken antics might be read as an attempt to enact a secular sacrament, expressing and strengthening a loving bond with the absent King, and as a means to heal and strengthen the blood of the dismembered 'body politic: reflecting, more broadly, a politicisation of drinking, developing from the mid-seventeenth century that was to have far reaching consequences, perhaps even to our own day.