Toby Jug – a popular object in early modern Britain amongst consumers; and its primary function was to store and serve alcohol.


The precise origins of this fairly fictious character are somewhat unknown. The jug of alcohol, tobacco pipe resting at his side and name ‘Toby’ all associate it with the tavern, specifically referencing tales of an eighteenth-century Yorkshireman, with similar features, who supposedly drank two-thousand gallons of ale from a jug.



Elizabeth Wallace acknowledges that the character took influence from a ‘Yorkshire drinker’ named ‘Toby Filpot’; it was spread and ‘memorialized’ by the poet Francis Fawkes, whose tale, The Brown Jug, refers to a similar drunkard.