From Alehouses and Good Fellowship in Early Modern England.

This case may have simply been the misogynistic insult of a disgruntled alehouse customer, but its implication that sex could be had with female alehouse workers was not entirely unfounded - though more often than not it was serving maids, rather than alewives, who were thought to be sexually available. There were undoubtedly cases involving a degree of complicity and consent, but serving maids were treated by many male customers as "public property" for whom ‘attempts on their virtue seem to have gone with the territory’. This could lead to some terrifying experiences, including rape. In one appalling incident that occurred in an alehouse in Snargate, Kent, in 1598, five men were found guilty of sexually assaulting the alewife and her maids, and gang-raping one fourteen year-old maid who later died of her injuries - actions that were initially dismissed by the local JP as "but a trick of youth." The alehouse could, then, be pervaded by a sexually aggressive masculinity. A less dramatic but more commonplace feature of this was a culture of bragging about sexual conquests.