"Sober as a judge" vs. "Drunk as a lord". Why judge? Why lord?

Solution 1:

Drunk as a Lord

John Ray, A Collection of English Proverbs (1678) has an interesting comment on "drunk as a lord," which he views as having supplanted the older "drunk as a beggar": ¹

As drunk as a beggar

This Proverb begins now to be disused, and in stead of it people are ready to say, As drunk as a Lord : so much hath that vice (the more is the pity) prevail'd among the Nobility and Gentry of late years.

Indeed, the expression "drunk as a beggar" seems to have been so largely forgotten by 1800 that the author of "The Manners of the Great Not Essential to the Manners of the Nation," in The Scots Magazine (November 1799) seizes upon "drunk as a lord" as an instance of popular opinion holding the aristocracy to a higher standard than they apply to everyone else:

Still, however the situation of the great is so eminent, that it is impossible for us to take our eyes off, and continually viewing men of high distinction, we are apt to imagine there must be something highly distinguished even in their follies ; that a debt contracted by a lord has something more faulty than one contracted by a tradesman ; that an amour between two right honourables is something more licentious than one between a plain master and miss, and that a shopkeeper cannot possibly arrive at the wickedness of being "as drunk as a lord."

Nathan Bailey, Dictionarium Britannicum (1736) offers this comment on the phrase "as drunk as beggars":

as DRUNK as beggars

By this proverb one would be apt to judge this vice was formerly peculiar only to the meaner sort of people. But experience as well as a saying, now more us'd, (As drunk as a lord) teaches us that it has got footing among the Nobility.

"The Feast of Wit: Or, Sportsman's Hall," in Sporting Magazine (July 1793)—offers a joke based on the various "drunk as a" similes then extant:

As drunk as an owl, as drunk as a sow, as drunk as a beggar, as drunk as the devil, as drunk as a lord. These are the principal comparisons of drunkenness, and the explanation is as follows:—a man is as drunk as an owl, when he cannot see ; he is as drunk as a sow when he tumbles in the dirt ; he is as drunk as a beggar, when he is very impudent ; he is as drunk as the devil, when he is inclined to mischief ; and as drunk as a lord, when he is every thing that is bad.

Ebenezer Brewer, Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (Wordsworth reprint 2001) has this note on "drunk as a lord":

Drunk as a lord. Before the great temperance movement set in, in the latter half of the 19th century, those who could afford to drink thought it quite comme il faut to drink two, three, or even more bottles of port wine for dinner, and few dinners ended without placing the guests under the table in a hopeless state of intoxication ; hence the expression.

Sober as a Judge

Robert Hendrickson, The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins (1997) has an interesting (though roundabout) theory of the origin of this phrase:

sober as a judge. In the play Don Quixote in England (1734) one of Henry Fielding's characters [who is quite drunk and is behaving outrageously] says: "I am as sober as a judge." Perhaps it was simply Fielding's observation that judges are almost always sober on the bench, but the phrase may have its source in the saying AN APPEAL FROM PHILIP DRUNK TO PHILIP SOBER. Sober is the exact opposite of the Latin word for "in his cups," deriving from so, "apart from," and bria, "cup."

Hendrickson's entry for that phrase is as follows:

appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober. A woman petitioned King Philip of Macedon [the father of Alexander the Great] for justice for her husband and was refused. "I shall appeal against this judgment!" she exclaimed, and Philip—while still in his cups—roared: "Appeal—and to whom will you appeal?" "To Philip sober," the woman replied, and according to Valerius Maximus, who tells the tale, she won her case.

The connection between the "sober as a judge" saying and the "appeal to Philip sober" saying is clever and appealing (in a Philip sober way), but it would be more plausible if (1) the earliest instance of "sober as a judge" weren't from 1682 (as the OP reports; the earliest Google Books matches are from 1701 and 1702), and (2) the earliest reference to the "Philip sober" story in a Google Books search weren't from 77 years later, in a letter by David Hume to the editor of The Critical Review, dated April 1759:

I appeal from your sentence, as an old woman did from a sentence pronounced by Philip of Macedon:—I appeal from Philip, ill-counselled and in a hurry, to Philip, well-advised, and judging with deliberation.

A second instance occurs in a Parliamentary debate of February 7, 1799:

He [Mr. Windham] had no doubt but that, when the present fury should have evaporated, he should see the people of Ireland as eager for the measure [Union with the United Kingdom] as they now were against it. ... He wished, therefore, to appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober ; he wished to appeal from the Irish, mad with independence, that is to say, independent of reason, independent of argument, to the Irish in a fit mood to examine the proposition that was offered them.

But the timing seems wrong for the "Philip sober" story to have strongly influenced "sober as a judge" in English idiomatic usage.

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¹Robert Dent, Proverbial Language in English Drama Exclusive of Shakespeare, 1495–1616, volume 2 (1984) gives a first occurrence date of 1616 for "drunk as a beggar," but also mentions earlier possible occurrences from 1612 and 1609. Fynes Moryson, A Description of Ireland (between 1603 and 1616) uses the expression "as drunk as beggars": "And not only the common sort, but even the lords and their wives, the more they want this drink [Spanish wine or Irish usquebaugn] at home the more they swallow it when they come to it, till they be as drunk as beggars." Earlier still is this instance from Walter Raleigh, The Discovery of Guiana (1596): "But when we came in first to the House of the said Timitwara, being upon one of their Feast-Days, we found them all as drunk as Beggars, and the Pots walking from one to another, without rest : ..." A servant's remark in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra (1607) about the inebriation of Lepidus—"Lepidus is high Conlord/They haue made him drinke Almes drinke."—prompts this comment in Hilda Hulme, "The Spoken Language and the Dramatic Text," in A Reader in the Language of Shakespearean Drama (1987): "There would, I suggest, be no difficulty of interpretation could we suppose that, with the words 'drink alms-drink' the servant is merely changing the known idiom 'drunk as a beggar', getting his laugh by delaying recognition of a current phrase."

Solution 2:

A judge sitting on the bench certainly ought to be sober. Also, sober also means serious, and a judge in a case certainly is serious so this might even be the ultimate origin of the phrase.

As to the other, young sons of the nobility were notorious partiers, and had lordships until their fathers died. Young, no responsibilities, money, and the ability to get out of most legal scrapes leads to a number of memorable scenes.

Solution 3:

The origin appears to be from commonsense ( a sober judge) and drinking habits ( of Lords).

Sober as a judge

• Why judges should be equated with sobriety is not known, but the simile was first recorded in 1694. Possibly due to there important staus in society

Drunk as a Lord

• It just means really drunk. Why "as a lord"? Well, I know very little about English peers, but I suppose some of them used to drink heavily. The expression dates from around 1891 or before.

• In the 1700s and 1800s overindulgence was considered a sign of gentility and was considered gentlemanly.

• Back then men of status would vie in a one-upmanship of drinking each other under the table---hence your simile.

Source:http://www.phrases.org.uk/bulletin_board/42/messages/1465.html