The debate about problem drinking and how to stop it nowadays centres most on the working-class young. They are【M1】______ highly visible—and inaudible—as they clog city centres on【M2】______ 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 whom taught Britons how to drink to【M3】______ excess. In the 17th century, England experienced a rise in educational enrolment unsurpassedly until the early 20th century. Illiteracy inclined and the universities of Cambridge and Oxford,【M4】______ as well as the Inns of Court and Chancery where barristers learned their craft, brimming with affluent young men. This was the【M5】______ crucial period which modern drinking culture was formed. Mr【M6】______ Withingtons 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 qualities of alcohol in keeping with【M7】______ conventions of excess. Yet they also supposed to remain in control【M8】______ 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. Collections filled with jokes, quotes and fun facts proliferated, promised to teach, as【M9】______ John Cotgraves 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 many a wider audience as society became more【M10】______ literate and censorship declined.
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