THE debate about problem drinking and how to stop it nowadays centres mostly on the working-class young. They are highly visible—and audible—as they clog city centres on Saturday nights. But a chapter in a forthcoming book, “Intoxication and Society”, by Philip Withington, a Cambridge historian, argues that it was the educated elite who taught Britons how to drink to excess.

In the 17th century, England experienced a rise in educational enrolment unsurpassed until the early 20th century. Illiteracy declined and the universities of Cambridge and Oxford, as well as the Inns of Court and Chancery where barristers learned their craft, brimmed with affluent young men. This was the crucible in which modern drinking culture was formed.

Mr Withington's description of 17th-century drinking practices will sound familiar to anybody who has been within a few miles of a British university. It was characterised by two conflicting aims. Men were to consume large quantities of alcohol in keeping with conventions of excess. Yet they were also supposed to remain in control of their faculties, bantering and displaying wit. Students and would-be lawyers formed drinking societies, where they learned the social—and drinking—skills required of gentlemen.

A market in instruction quickly emerged. Miscellanies filled with jokes, quotes and fun facts proliferated, promising to teach, as John Cotgrave's “Wits Interpreter” put it, “the art of drinking, by a most learned method”. Mirroring the standardisation of language after the invention of the printing press, codes of intoxication were disseminated to a wider audience as society became more literate and censorship declined.

Outside London, ritualised heavy drinking arrived not just in pamphlet form but also in the shape of returning sons as men of influence. One story unearthed by Mr Withington involves a cleric and two lawyers in Yorkshire. Sitting in an alehouse, the trio “began to be merry” in a manner that started with a faux-Latin competition and ended with the cleric's penis hanging out of his trousers while one of the lawyers burned it with his pipe.

Although intoxication was a classless pursuit in the 17th century, it was the privileged who turned it into a cultural phenomenon. The affluent are still boozy. The Institute for Fiscal Studies, a think-tank, finds that 83% of the richest one-tenth of households by expenditure regularly buy alcohol, compared with just 29% of the poorest one-tenth. Fiona Measham, a criminologist at Lancaster University, has used surveys to show that British women in managerial or professional jobs drink more alcohol overall and at a sitting than do women in lower-paying jobs. The wit is still there, too—although it is likely to seem funnier after the listener has had a few drinks as well.