The center of the trouble is Buckfast Tonic Wine, a strong mixture of vino, caffeine, and other secret ingredients. The potion is made by Benedictine monks at Buckfast Abbey in Devon (southwestern England), but has become a cult favorite in northern England, Ireland, and Scotland. Read some of comments in the above link; the drink has fans all over the British Isles.
Recently featured in a report on the BBC network, and in this New York Times article, Scottish authorities are blaming the brew for a series of violent crimes in depressed industrial areas between Glasgow and Edinburgh.
According to the article,
"In a survey last year of 172 prisoners at a young offenders’ institution, 43 percent of the 117 people who drank alcohol before committing their crimes said they had drunk Buckfast. In a study of litter in a typical housing project, 35 percent of the items identified were Buckfast bottles. And the police in the depressed industrial district of Strathclyde recently told a BBC program that the drink had been mentioned in 5,638 crime reports between 2006 and 2009 (the bottle was used as a weapon in 114 of them)."Buckfast Abbey has denied that the drink is the cause of any extraordinary violence in southern Scotland, and feels it is being singled out unfairly. The abbey does make the excellent point that there were a total of 424,589 reported crimes in Strathclyde last year alone, so Buckfast Tonic Wine is likely responsible for only four crimes out of every 1,000 committed.
But clearly, this mixture inflames something in the dark and volatile viking blood of northern Britons, causing them to go berserk. But what could be causing this outbreak of temporary insanity?
Historians believe that the fearsome vikings drank a mixture of alcohol and either psychedelic mushrooms or a plant called bog myrtle to whip themselves into a killing frenzy, called "berserkergang," and make them capable of incredible feats of battlefield endurance and strength.
Buckfast Tonic Wine could very well be based on, or even exactly modeled after, the concoction quaffed by those ruthless viking warriors that swept through Great Britain and Ireland during the 10th and 11th centuries.
Implausible? Perhaps. Impossible? Not by a long shot. One only need to look more closely at the history of Buckfast Abbey to see truth come to light, like a torch thrown onto a thatched-roof cottage.
The abbey was originally founded in 1018 by the viking jarl Aylward, two years after Cnut the Great conquered England. (Jarls were viking knights, and the root of the English noble tile "Earl.") Cnut the Great started his invasion of England in 1015 from the kingdom of Wessex, which controlled the lands where Buckfast Abbey now sits. Cnut the Great held more land in the British Isles than any other viking lord in history; clearly, he was doing something right.
(In the map above, Cnut's domain is in red, his vassals' lands are in orange, and allies' in green. Thanks to "Briangotts" for sharing the map under the Creative Commons license!)
Benedictine monks - especially the Cistercian kind, which Buckfast converted to in the 12th century and who take a vow of silence - don't have much to do other than to copy sacred manuscripts and hold on to important knowledge for centuries on end. What could be more important than a recipe that would send warriors into an uncontrollable blood-lust and grant super-strength? It sounds like that could come in handy in a pinch.
Buckfast Abbey sat on the same locale for 521 years, until 1539 when King Henry VIII had the monastery shut down. Henry VIII founded the Church of England, not only as an excuse to legally divorce and behead several wives, but as scheme to shut monasteries down across the country and steal every last piece of gold and silver owned by the Catholic Church in England. (It totally worked, by the way, on both accounts; we all know about the wives, but during the wave of closings that claimed Buckfast, the King collected one and a half tons of gold for his treasury.)
Henry VIII and his tax collectors claimed ownership of the land in the name of the king, and eventually the land was sold to the very taxman who closed Buckfast Abbey's doors.
The land remained a private residence until 1882, when the owner, a Dr. James Gale, decided to sell the land and manor back to a group of monks exiled from France. Buckfast was back as a full-time monastery in 1883, after 343 years.
Now, is it so far-fetched that as a last act of defiance against Henry VIII, the original monks of Buckfast buried their secret berserker recipe somewhere on the grounds, unable and unwilling to forfeit such a dangerous weapon to an already bloodthirsty maniac?
The modern monks claim Buckfast Tonic Wine is the result of a French recipe the exiled monks carried with them from France, but that may be only because the wine used in the mixture is French. The concoction was made available commercially in the early 1920s, and was often prescribed to unhappy miners in Scotland for a bit of a pick-me-up before that, according to the NY Times.
So with the historical facts as they are, the only real question is: how long until a horde of Buckfast-drinking neo-barbarians descends on polite society, and pillaging and burning begin? That may only depend on the rise and fall of the bog myrtle harvest, and just how hard it will be for Scottish authorities to stop their citizens from drinking before lunch.
