Definition
Keeping a tippling house is an archaic criminal offense consisting of the unlicensed retail sale of spirituous liquors on premises where patrons consume the liquor on-site. The offense targets the operator of the establishment rather than individual customers, and its essence is the commercial, retail character of the sales combined with the absence of lawful authority to conduct them. The term functions as a specific charging formula in older indictments: to "keep" a tippling house is to maintain the premises habitually for that unlawful purpose, not merely to make a single unauthorized sale.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Tippling house" — an establishment where alcoholic liquors are sold and consumed on the premises; a low tavern or drinking establishment.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Tippling house" — a place where liquors are sold in small quantities to be drunk on the premises; a dram shop.
The ordinary meaning of "tippling house" is essentially neutral — a place where drinks are sold and drunk. The legal offense of keeping a tippling house adds the element of unlawfulness: it is the retail sale without a license that constitutes the crime. A licensed tavern keeper was not guilty of this offense even though his establishment was, in the common sense, a tippling house. The legal definition thus captures only a subset of what the ordinary language describes.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term belongs to a dense cluster of archaic liquor-offense vocabulary — alongside keeping a disorderly house, keeping a dram shop, and common nuisance — that appears heavily in nineteenth-century criminal records, grand jury indictments, and municipal court dockets. Researchers working in pre-Prohibition American legal records will encounter this phrase as a standard charging formula, and its meaning is not self-evident from the words alone.
Several research traps are worth noting. First, the phrase is jurisdiction-sensitive: some states codified the offense under this exact name; others used "dram shop," "groggery," or simply "unlicensed sale." When searching corpus materials, a negative result for "tippling house" does not mean the underlying conduct went unregulated — it may simply mean the jurisdiction used different terminology. Second, the offense is distinct from mere unlicensed sale: "keeping" imports a course of conduct and regular maintenance of the premises, which affected what prosecution had to prove and how indictments were drawn. Third, the offense largely disappears from American legal writing after Prohibition (1920–1933) and does not meaningfully revive in post-Prohibition liquor law, which restructured the entire regulatory vocabulary. Researchers examining sources across that divide should not expect terminological continuity.
For corpus navigation, this term clusters with public order and morals offenses in treatises, with licensing statutes in session laws, and with nuisance doctrine in equity materials. Its appearance in an indictment signals a state or territorial jurisdiction operating under a retail liquor licensing regime, which provides useful dating and geographic context for undated or ambiguously located documents.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary offers a compact and serviceable entry: "Keeping a tippling house imports an unlawful selling of spirituous liquors by retail, without license." Bouvier's entry is notable for what it makes explicit — the retail character of the sale and the absence of license are both essential — and for its citation to a Kentucky appellate decision, confirming that the definition was judicially tested rather than merely theoretical. The entry is consistent with the general understanding of the offense across nineteenth-century American jurisdictions, though Bouvier does not canvass variation across states.
What Bouvier does not address is the "keeping" element — the habitual or continuous maintenance of the premises — which courts treated as integral to the offense and which distinguished it from a one-time unlicensed sale. This gap is characteristic of Bouvier's compressed treatment of minor criminal offenses; researchers should not read the silence as indicating the element was unimportant in practice.
No other historical dictionary in the Law Mind corpus provides a separate entry for this term. Its treatment elsewhere is typically subsumed under broader entries for "nuisance," "disorderly house," or "liquor offenses."
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Jurisdictional Note
The offense was recognized across most American states in the nineteenth century but varied in name and statutory formulation. Some jurisdictions folded the conduct into broader dram shop acts or disorderly house statutes rather than maintaining a distinct "tippling house" offense. Post-Prohibition liquor regulation displaced this vocabulary almost entirely, and the term has no meaningful presence in modern licensing law.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Liquor Licensing
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Public Order Offenses
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