From Church to Tavern

The parish church was an obvious public space, although it would have been under the control and oversight of the ecclesiastical authorities (at least nominally, but perhaps most often in a very real and tangible sense). The nature of this public space would have shifted with the reformation, as the profane activities allowed in the pre-reformation church were banned, causing them not to disappear, but to shift location, and this was primarily to pubs and taverns, transforming these into the de facto centers of public life.

— From Thomas Brennan, Public Drinking in the Early Modern World: Voices from the Tavern, 1500-1800, 4 vols. (2011).