 Preface for the Social History of Smoking. This is the first attempt to write the history of smoking in this country from the social point of view. There have been many books written about tobacco, F. W. Fairhold's History of Tobacco, 1859, and the Tobacco, 1857, of Andrew Steinmetz, are still valuable authorities. But hitherto no one has told the story of the fluctuations of fashion in respect of the practice of smoking. Much that is fully and well-treated in such a work as Fairhold's History is ignored in the following pages. I have tried to confine myself strictly to the changes in the attitude of society toward smoking and to such historical and social sidelights as serve to illuminate that theme. The tobacco pipe was popular among every section of society in this country in an amazingly short space of time after smoking was first practiced for pleasure, and retained its ascendancy for no inconsiderable period. Signs of decline are to be observed during the latter part of the seventeenth century, and in the course of its successor smoking fell more and more under the ban of fashion. Early in the nineteenth century tobacco smoking had reached its née-deer from the social point of view. Then came the introduction of the cigar and the revival of smoking in the circles from which it had long been almost entirely absent. The practice was hedged about and obstructed by a host of restrictions and conventions, but as the nineteenth century advanced the triumphant progress of tobacco became more and more marked. The introduction of the cigarette completed what the cigar had begun. Barriers and prejudices crumpled and disappeared with increasing rapidity until at the present day tobacco smoking in England by pipe or cigar or cigarette is more general, more continuous, and more free from conventional restrictions than at any period since the early days of its triumph in the first decades of the seventeenth century. The tracing and recording of the social history of the smoking habit, touching as it does so many interesting points and details of domestic manners and customs, has been a task of peculiar pleasure. To me it has been a labor of love, but no one can be more conscious of the many imperfections of these pages than I am. I should like to add that I am indebted to Mr. Vernon Rendell, editor of the Athenaeum, for a number of valuable references and suggestions. L.A. Hayward's Heath, September 1914. The first pipes of tobacco smoked in England. Before the wine of Sunny Rhine, or even Madame Clicose, let all men praise, with loud hurrahs, this panacea of Nicos. The debt confess, though nonetheless they love the grape and barley, which Frenchmen owe to good Nicole and Englishmen to Raleigh. D. Hull. There is little doubt that the smoke of herbs and leaves of various kinds was inhaled in this country and in Europe generally, long before tobacco was ever heard of on this side of the Atlantic. But whatever smoking of this kind took place was medicinal and not social. Many instances have been recorded of the finding of pipes resembling those used for tobacco smoking in Elizabethan times, in positions and in circumstances which would seem to point to much greater antiquity of use than the form of the pipe supports. But some, at least, of these finds will not bear the interpretation which has been put upon them, and in other cases the presence of pipes could reasonably be accounted for otherwise than by associating them with the antiquity claimed for them. In any case, the entire absence of any allusions, whatever, to smoking in any shape or form, in our pre-Elizabethan literature, or in medieval or earlier art, is sufficient proof that from the social point of view smoking did not then exist. The inhaling of the smoke of dried herbs for medicinal purposes, whether through a pipe-shaped funnel or otherwise, had nothing in it akin to the smoking of tobacco for both individual and social pleasure, and therefore lies outside the scope of this book. It may further be added that though the use of tobacco was known and practiced on the continent of Europe for some time before smoking became common in England, it was taken to Spain from Mexico by a physician about 1560, and Jean-Nicolle about the same time sent tobacco seeds to France, yet such use was exclusive for medicinal purposes. The smoking of tobacco in England seems, from the first, to have been much more a matter of pleasure than of hygiene. Who first smoked a pipe of tobacco in England? The honour is divided among several claimants. It has often been stated that Captain William Middleton, or Middleton, son of Richard Middleton, Governor of Denby Castle, a Captain Price, and a Captain Cote, were the first who smoked publicly in London, and that folk flocked from all parts to see them. And it is usually added that pipes were not then invented, so they smoked the twisted leaf or cigars. This account first appeared in one of the volumes of penance, tour, and wales, but the late Professor Arbor, long ago, pointed out that the remark as to the mode of smoking by cigars and not by pipes was simply penance speculation. The authority for the rest of the story is a paper in the Sibbride Messenger, which, in an account of William Middleton, has the remark, it is said that he, with Captain Thomas Price of Place Sollin, and one Captain Cote, were the first who smoked, or as they called it, drank tobacco publicly in London, and that the Londoners flocked from all parts to see them. No date is named, and no further particulars are available. Another Elizabethan who is often said to have smoked the first pipe in England is Ralph Lane, the first Governor of Virginia, who came home with Drake in 1586. Lane is said to have given Sir Walter Raleigh an Indian pipe and to have shown him how to use it. There is no original authority, however, for the statement that Lane first smoked tobacco in England, and, moreover, he was not the first English visitor to Virginia to return to this country. One Captain Philip Amadas accompanied Captain Barlow, who commanded on the occasion of Raleigh's first voyage of discovery, when the country was formally taken possession of, and named Virginia in honor of Queen Elizabeth. This was early in 1584. The two Captains reached England in September 1584, bringing with them the natives of whom King James I, in his counterblast to tobacco, speaks as some two or three savage men who were brought in together with the savage custom, i.e., of smoking. It is extremely improbable that Captains Amadas and Barlow, when reporting to Raleigh on their expedition, did not also make him acquainted with the Indian practice of smoking. This would be two years before the return of Ralph Lane. But certainly pipes were smoked in England before 1584. The plant was introduced into Europe as we have seen about 1560, and it was under cultivation in England by 1570. In the 1631 edition of Stowe's Chronicles, it is stated that tobacco was first brought and made known by Sir John Hawkins about the year 1565, but not used by Englishmen in many years after. There is only one reference to tobacco in Hawkins's description of his travels. In the account of his second voyage, 1564 to 65, he says, the Floridians, when they travel, have a kind of herb dried, which with a cane, and an earthen cup in the end, with fire, and the dried herbs put together, do smoke thorough the cane the smoke thereof, which smoke satisfies their hunger, and therewith they live four or five days without meat or drink. Smoking was thus certainly known to Hawkins in 1565, but much reliance cannot be placed on the statement in the Stowe of 1631 that he first made known the practice in this country, because that statement appears in no earlier edition of the Chronicles. Moreover, as opposed to the allegation that tobacco was not used by Englishmen in many years after, 1565, there is the remark by William Harrison in his chronology 1588 that in 1573 the taking in of the smoke of the Indian herb called tobacco by an instrument formed like a little ladle, whereby it passeth from the mouth into the head and stomach, is greatly taken up and used in England. The little ladle describes the early form of the tobacco pipe with small and very shallow bowl. King James, in his reference to the first author of what he calls this abuse, clearly had Sir Walter Raleigh in view, and it is Raleigh with whom in the popular mind the first pipe of tobacco smoked in England is usually associated. The tradition is crystallized in the story of the schoolboy, who, being asked, what do you know about Sir Walter Raleigh, replied, Sir Walter Raleigh introduced tobacco into England, and when smoking it in this country said to his servant, Master Ridley, we are today lighting a candle in England which by God's blessing will never be put out. The truth probably is that whoever actually smoked the first pipe, it was Raleigh who brought the practice into common use. It is highly probable also that Raleigh was initiated in the art of smoking by Thomas Harriet. This was made clear, I think, by the late Dr. Brushfield, in the second of the valuable papers, on matters connected with the life and achievements of Sir Walter, which he contributed under the title of Raleighana to the transactions of the Devonshire Association. Harriet was sent out by Raleigh for the specific purpose of inquiring into and reporting upon the natural productions of Virginia. He returned in 1586, and in 1588 published the results of his researches in a thin quarto with an extremely long-winded title beginning, a brief and true report of the new-found land of Virginia, and continued for a further 138 words. In this report, Harriet says of the tobacco plant, there is an herb which is sowed apart by itself and is called by the inhabitants Wumpum. In the West Indies it has diverse names, according to the several places and countries where it grows and is used. The Spaniards generally call it tobacco, the leaves thereof being dried and brought into powder. They use to take the fume or smoke thereof by sucking it through pipes made of clay into their stomach and head. From whence it purges superfluous fleam and other gross humours, openeth all the pores and passages of the body, by which means the use thereof not only preserveeth the body from obstructions, but if also any be so that they have not been of too long continuance, in short time breaketh them, whereby their bodies are notably preserved in health, and know that many grievous diseases wherewithal we in England are often times afflicted. So far Harriet's report regarded tobacco from the medicinal point of view only, but it is important to note that he goes on to describe his personal experience of the practice of smoking in words that suggest the pleasurable nature of the experience. He says, we ourselves during the time we are there, used to suck it after their manner, as also since our return, and have found many rare and wonderful experiments of the virtues thereof, of which the relation would require a volume by itself. The use of it by so many of late men and women of great calling as else, and some learned physicians also, is sufficient witness. Who can doubt that Harriet, and reporting direct to Sir Walter Raleigh, showed his employer how to suck it after their manner? All the evidence agrees that whoever taught Raleigh it was Raleigh's example that brought smoking into notice and common use. Long before his death in 1618 it had become fashionable, as we shall see, in all ranks of society. He is said to have smoked a pipe on the morning of his execution before he went to the scaffold, a tradition which is quite credible. Everyone knows the legend of water or beer thrown over Sir Walter by his servant when he first saw his master smoking, and imagined he was on fire. The story was first associated with Raleigh by a writer in 1708 in a magazine called The British Apollo. According to this yarn Sir Walter usually indulged himself in smoking secretly two pipes a day, at which time he ordered a simple fellow who waited to bring him up a tankard of old ale and nutmeg, always laying aside the pipe when he heard his servant coming. On this particular occasion, however, the pipe was not laid aside in time, and the simple fellow, imagining his master was on fire as he saw the smoke issuing from his mouth, promptly put the fire out by sowsing him with the contents of the tankard. One difficulty about the story is the alleged secrecy of Raleigh's indulgence in tobacco. There seems to be no imaginable reason why he should not have smoked openly. Later versions turned the ale into water, and otherwise buried the story. But the story was a stock jest long before it was associated with Raleigh. The earliest example of it occurs in the jests attributed to Richard Tarleton, the famous comic performer of the Elizabethan stage, who died in 1588, the year of the Armada. Tarleton's jests appeared in 1611, and the story in question, which is headed how Tarleton took tobacco at the first coming up of it, runs as follows. Tarleton, as other gentlemen used, at the first coming up of tobacco, did take it more for fashion's sake than otherwise, and, being in a room set between two men, overcome with wine, and they never seeing the like wondered at it, and seeing the vapor come out of Tarleton's nose, cried out, fire, fire, and threw a cup of wine in Tarleton's face. Make no more stir, quoth Tarleton, the fire is quenched. If the sheriffs come, it will turn to a fine as the custom is. And drinking that again, fire, says the other, what a stink it makes. I am almost poisoned. If it offends, says Tarleton, let everyone take a little of the smell, and so the saver will quickly go. But tobacco whiffs made them leave him to pay all. In the early days of smoking, the smoker was very generally set to drink tobacco. Another early example of the story occurs in Barnaby's rich Irish hubbub, 1619, where a certain Welchman coming newly to London, and for the first time seeing a man smoking, extinguished the fire with a bowl of beer which he had in his hand. Various places are traditionally associated with Raleigh's first pipe. The most surprising claim, perhaps, is that of Penzan's, for which there is really no evidence at all. Miss Courtney, writing in the folklore journal, 1887, says, There is a myth that Sir Walter Raleigh landed at Penzan's quay when he returned from Virginia and on it smoked the first tobacco ever seen in England. But for this I do not believe that there is the slightest foundation. Several western ports, both in Devon and Cornwall, make the same boast. Miss Courtney might have added that Sir Walter never himself visited Virginia at all. Another place making a similar claim is Hemstridge, on the Somerset and Dorset border, just before reaching Hemstridge from Milburn Port, at the crossroads there is a public house called the Virginia Inn. There, it is said, according to Mr. Edward Hutton, in his highways and byways in Somerset, Sir Walter Raleigh smoked his first pipe of tobacco and, being discovered by his servant, was drenched with a bucket of water. At the fifteenth century manor house at South Racksell, Wilcher, the Raleigh room is shown, and visitors are told that, according to local tradition, it was in this room that Sir Walter smoked his first pipe when visiting his friend, the owner of the mansion, Sir Henry Long. Another tradition gives the old pied bullet Eilington long since demolished, as the scene of the momentous event. It is said, in its earlier days to have been a country house of Sir Walter's, and, according to legend, it was in his dining room in this house that he had his first pipe. Hone, in the first volume of the everyday book, tells how he and some friends visited this pied bull, then in a very decade condition, and smoked their pipes in the dining room in memory of Sir Walter. From the recently published biography of William Hone by Mr. F. W. Hackwood, we learned that the jovial party consisted of William Hone, George Cooke-Shank, Joseph Goodyear, and David Sage, who jointly signed a humorous memorandum of their proceedings on the occasion, from which it appears that, each of us smoked a pipe, that is to say, each of us one or more pipes, or less than one pipe, and the undersigned George Cooke-Shank having smoked pipes innumerable or more or less, and that several pots of porter, in aid of the said smoking, were consumed, followed by bowls of negus made from the port wine, at three shelling six pence per bottle, duty knocked off lately, and other ingredients. Speeches were made, and toasts proposed, and altogether, the four who desired to have the gratification of saying, hereafter, that we have smoked a pipe in the same room that the man who first introduced tobacco smoked in himself seemed to have thoroughly enjoyed themselves. Wherever Raleigh is known to have lived or lodged, we are sure to find the tradition flourishing that there he smoked his first pipe. The assertion has been made of his birthplace Hayes Barton, although it is very doubtful if he ever visited the place after his parents left it, some years before their son had become acquainted with tobacco, and also with more plausibility of his home at Ugal, in the south of Ireland. Fraud, in one of his short studies, quotes a legend to the effect that Raleigh smoked on a rock below the Manor House of Greenaway, on the River Dart, which was the home of the first husband of Catherine Champernoun, afterwards Raleigh's wife, and Devonshire guidebooks have adopted the story. Perhaps the most likely scene of Raleigh's first experiments in the art of smoking was Durham House, which stood where the Adelphi Terrace and the streets between it and the Strand now stand. This was in the occupation of Sir Walter for twenty years, 1583 to 1603, and he was probably resident there when Harriet returned from Virginia to make his report and instruct his employer in the management of a pipe. Walter Thornbury, in his Haunted London, referring to the story of the servant throwing the ale over his smoking master, says, there is a doubtful old legend about Raleigh's first pipe, the scene of which may be not unfairly laid at Durham House where Raleigh lived. The ale story is mythical, but it is highly probable that Sir Walter's first pipes were smoked at Durham House. Dr. Brushfield quotes Hepworth Dixon in Her Majesty's Tower as drawing an imaginary and yet probable picture of him and his companions at a window of this very house overlooking the silent highway. It requires no effort of the fancy to picture these three men, Shakespeare, Bacon and Raleigh, as lounging in a window of Durham House, puffing the new Indian weed from silver bowls, discussing the highest themes in poetry and science, while gazing on the flower beds and the river, the darting barges of dame and cavalier, and the distant pavilions of Paris Garden and the Globe. This is a pure effort of the fancy so far as Bacon and Shakespeare are concerned. Shakespeare's absolute silence about tobacco forbids us to assume that he smoked, but of Raleigh the picture may be true enough. The house had, as Aubrey tells us, a little turret that looked into and over the Thames, and had the prospect which is as pleasant perhaps as any in the world, and it would be strange indeed if the owner of the noble house did not often smoke a contemplative pipe in the window of that pleasant turret. The only mention made of tobacco by Raleigh himself occurs in a testamentary note made a little while before his execution in 1618. Referring to the tobacco remaining on his ship after his last voyage, he wrote, Sir Louis Stuckley sold all the tobacco at Plymouth of which for the most part of it I gave him a fifth part of it as also a role for my Lord Admiral and a role for himself. I desire that he may give his account for the tobacco. As showing how closely Sir Walter's name was associated with it long after his death, Dr. Brushfield quotes the following entry from the diary of the great Earl of Cork. September 1, 1641. Sent by Travers to my infirm cousin Rajavan, pot of Sir Walter Raleigh's tobacco. In the Wallace Collection at Headford House is a pouch or case labeled as having belonged to and been used by Sir Walter Raleigh. This pouch contains several clay pipes. It was perhaps the same pouch or case which once upon a time figured in Ralph Thorispy's Museum at Leeds and is described by Thorispy himself in his Decadus Leo D'Ansis, 1715. Curiously enough, a few years ago when excavations were being made around the foundations of Raleigh's house at Ugoal, a clay pipe bowl was dug up which in size, shape, etc., was exactly like the pipes in the Wallace exhibit. Raleigh lived and no doubt smoked in the Ugoal house, so it is quite possible that the bowl found belonged to one of the pipes actually smoked by him. In the garden of the Ugoal house, by the way, they used to show the tree, perhaps still do so, under which Raleigh was sitting, smoking his pipe when his servant drenched him. Thus the tradition, which as we have seen, dates from 1708 only, has obtained two local habitations, Ugoal and Durham House on the Adelphi site. In November 1911 a curiously shaped pipe was put up for sale in Mr. J. C. Stevens' auction room, Covent Garden, which was described as that which Raleigh smoked on the scaffold. The pipe in question was said to have been given by the doomed man to Bishop Andrews, in whose family it remained for many years, and it was stated to have been in the family of the owner who sent it for sale for some two hundred years. The pipe was of wood constructed in four pieces of strange shape, rudely carved with dogs' heads and faces of red Indians. According to legend, it had been presented to Raleigh by the Indians. The auctioneer, Mr. Stevens, remarked that unfortunately a parchment document about the pipe was lost some years ago, and declared, if we could only produce the parchment the pipe would fetch five hundred pounds. In the end, however, it was knocked down at seventy-five guineas. The form and make of the first pipe is a matter I do not propose to go into here, but in connection with the first pipe smoked in this country, Aubrey's interesting statements must be given. Writing in the time of Charles II, he said that he had heard his grandfather say that at first one pipe was handed from man to man round about the table. They had first silver pipes. The ordinary sort made use of a walnut shell and a straw, surely a very unsatisfactory pipe. Tobacco in those earliest days, he says, was sold for its weight in silver. I have heard some of our old yeoman neighbors say that when they went to Momsbury or Chippinham Market, they called out their biggest chillings to lay in the scales against the tobacco. End of chapter one. Chapter two of the Social History of Smoking. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Reading by Mary Rodie. The Social History of Smoking by GL Apperson, ISO. Chapter two, Tobacco Triumphant Smoking Fashionable and Universal. Tobacco engages both sexes, all ages, the poor, as well as the wealthy, from the court to the cottage, from childhood to dotage, both those that are sick and the healthy. Whits Recreation, 1640. This chapter and the next deal with the history of smoking during the first 50 years after its introduction as a social habit, roughly to 1630. The use of tobacco spread with extraordinary rapidity among all classes of society. During the latter part of Queen Elizabeth's reign and through the early decades of the 17th century, tobacco pipes were in full blast. Tobacco was triumphant. Perhaps the most noteworthy thing about smoking at this period from the social point of view was its fashionableness. One of the market characteristics of the galant, the bow or dandy or swell of the time, was his devotion to tobacco. Earl says that a galant was one that was born and shaped for his clothes, but clothes were only a part of his equipment. Bishop Hall, satirizing the young man of fashion in 1597, describes the delicacies with which he was accustomed to indulge his appetite and adds that having eaten, he quaffs a whole tunnel of tobacco smoke. And old Robert Burton, insaturately enumerating the accomplishments of a complete, a well qualified gentleman, names to take tobacco with the grace, with hawking, riding, hunting, card playing, dicing, and the like. The qualifications for a galant were described by another writer in 1603 as, to make good faces, to take tobacco well, to spit well, to laugh like a waiting gentlewoman, to lie well, to blush for nothing, to look big upon little fellows, to scoff with the grace, and, for a need, to ride pretty and well. A curious feature of tobacco manners among fashionable smokers of the period was the practice of passing a pipe from one to another, after the fashion of the Loving Cup. There is a scene in Greens to quawk 1614, laid in a fashionable ordinary, where the London galants meet as usual, and one says to a companion who is smoking, please you to impart your smoke. Very willingly, sir, says the smoker. Number two takes a whiff or two, and curiously says, in good faith, a pipe of excellent vapor. The owner of the pipe then explains that it is the best the house yields, whereupon the other immediately depreciates its saying effectively. Had you it in the house, I thought it had been your own. It is not so good now as I took it for. Another writer of this time speaks of one pipe of tobacco sufficing three or four men at once. The rich young gallant carried about with him his tobacco apparatus, often of gold or silver, in the form of tobacco box, tobacco tongs, where with, to lift a live coal to light his pipe, ladle for the cold snuff into the nostrils, and priming iron. Sometimes the tobacco box was of ivory, and occasionally a gallant would have looking glass set in his box, so that when he took it out to obtain tobacco, he could at the same time have a view of his own delectable person. When our gallant went to dine at the ordinary, according to the custom of the time, he brought out these possessions and smoked while the dinner was being served. Before dinner, after taking a few turns up and down Paul's Walk in the old cathedral, he might look into the bookseller's shops and pipe in mouth inquire for the most recent attack upon the divine weed. The contemporary tobacco literature was abundant, or drop into an apothecaries, which was usually a tobacco shop also, and there meet his fellow smokers. In the afternoon the gallant might attend what Decker calls a tobacco ordinary, by which may possibly have been meant a smoking club, or more probably the gathering after dinner at one of the many ordinaries in the neighborhood of St. Paul's Cathedral of Tobaconists, as smokers were then called, to discuss the merits of their respective pipes and of the various kinds of tobacco, whether your cane or your pudding be sweetest. Of course he often bragged, like Julio, in Day's Law Tricks, tobacco, the best in Europe, cost me ten crowns and ounce by this vapor. An amusing example of the bragging Tobaconist is pictured for us in Ben Johnson's Boba Deal. Boba Deal may perhaps be somewhat of an exaggerated caricature, but it is probable that the dramatist in drawing him simply exaggerated the characteristic traits of many smokers of the day. This hero, drawing tobacco from his pocket, declares that it is all that is left of seven pounds which he had bought only yesterday with seven night. A consumption of seven pounds of tobacco in eight days is a pretty tall order. Then he goes on to brag of its quality, your right Trinidado, and to assert that he had been in the Indies where the herb grows, and where he himself and a dozen other gentlemen had for the space of one and twenty weeks known no other nutriment than the fume of tobacco. This, again, was tolerably steep even for this false staff-like braggart. He continues with more bombast in praise of the medicinal virtues of the herb, virtues which were then very firmly and widely believed in, and as replied to by Cobb, the anti-tobaconist, who, with equal exaggeration on the other side, denounces tobacco, and declares that four people had died in one house from the use of it in the preceding week, and that one had voided a bushel of soot. The properly accomplished galant not only professed to be curiously learned in pipes and tobacco, but his knowledge of prices and their fluctuations, of the apothecaries and other shops where the herb was sold, and of the latest and most fashionable ways of inhaling and exhaling the smoke, was, like Mr. Weller's knowledge of London, extensive and peculiar. It was knowledge of this kind that gained for a galant reputation and respect by no means to be acquired by mere scholarship and learning. The satirical decker might class tobacconists with feather-makers, cobweb lawn-weavers, perfumers, young country gentlemen, and fools, but he bears invaluable witness to the devotion of the fashionable men of the day to the costly and gentlemen-like smoke. It was customary for a man to carry a case of pipes about with him. In a play of 1609, every woman in her humor, there is an inventory of the contents of the gentleman's pocket, with a value given for each item which displays certainly a curious assortment of articles. First comes a brush and comb worth five pence, and next a looking-glass worth three half pence, with these aids to vanity or a case of tobacco pipes valued at four pence, half an ounce of tobacco valued at six pence, and three pence in coin, or as it is quaintly worded, in money and gold. Satirus, of course, made fun of the smoker's pocket full of apparatus. A pamphlet here of 1609 says, I beheld pipes in his pocket. Now he draught forth his tinder-box and his touchwood, and falleth to his tacklings. Sure, his throat is on fire, the smoke flyeth so fast from his mouth. It may be noted, by the way, that the gaunt had no hesitation about smoking in the presence of ladies. Gustanzo, in Chapman's All Fools, 1605, says, and for discourse in my fair mistress's presence I did not, as you barren gaunts do, fill my discourses up, drinking tobacco. And in Ben Johnson's, every man out of his humor, 1600, fastidious brisk, a neat spruce affecting courtier, smokes while he talks to his mistress. A feather-headed gaunt, when in the presence of ladies, often found himself, like others of his tribe of later date, grabbled for lack of matter for conversation, and the puffing of tobacco smoke helped to occupy the pauses. When our gaunt went to the theatre, he loved to occupy one of the stools at the site of the stage. There he could sit and smoke and embarrass the actors with his audible criticisms of play and players. It chanced me gazing at the theatre to spy a locked tobacco chevalier, clouding the loth-air with foggy fume of docked tobacco-friendly photo-room. Says a versifier of 1599, who did not like smoking in the theatre and so abused the quality of tobacco smoked, though admitting its medicinal virtue. Decker suggests, probably with truth, that one reason why the young gaunt liked to push his way to a stool on the stage, notwithstanding the muse and hisses of the opposed's rascality, the muse must have been the squeals or whistles produced by the instrument which was later known as a cat-call, was the opportunity such a prominent position afforded for the display of the best and most essential parts of a gaunt. Good clothes, a proportionable leg, white hand, the Persian lock, and a tolerable beard. Apparently, too, serving boys were within call, and thus lights could easily be obtained, which were handed to one another by the smokers on the points of their swords. Ben Johnson has given us an amusing picture of the behavior of gaunts on the Elisa Beathen stage in his Cynthia's Rebels. In this scene, a child thus mimics the obtrusive bull. Now, sir, suppose I am one of your genteel auditors, that I come in, having paid my money at the door with much adieu, and here I take my place and sit down. I have my three sorts of tobacco in my pocket, my light by me, and thus I begin. By this light I wonder that any man is so mad to come to see these rascally tits play here. They do act like so many wrens, not the fifth part of a good face amongst them all. And then their music is abominable, able to stretch a man's ears worse than ten pillories and their deadies, most lamentable things, like the pitiful fellows that make them poets. By this vapor, aren't we not for tobacco? I think the very smell of them would poison me. I should not dare to come in at their gates. A man were better visit fifteen jails, or a dozen or two hospitals, than once adventure to come near them. And the young rascal, who, at each pause marked by a dash, had puffed his pipe, no doubt blowing an extra-large cloud when he swore, by this vapor turns to his companions and says, How is it, well? And they pronounce his mimicry excellent. Smoking was not confined to the auditors on the stage, who paid six pence each for a stool. There was the Lord's room over the stage, which seems to have corresponded with the modern stage boxes. The price of admission to which appears to have been a shilling, where the pipe was also in full blast. Decker tells how a goant at a new play would take a place in the twelfth penny room, next a stage, because the lords and you may seem to be hail fellow well met. And Johnson, in every man out of his humor, sixteen hundred, speaks of one who pretended familiarity with courtiers, that he talked of them as if he had taken tobacco with them over the stage in the Lord's room. Among the general audience of the theater, smoking seems to have been usual also. The anti-tibaconess among those present, few of whom were men, must have suffered by the practice. In that admirable burlesque comedy by Beaumont and Fletcher, the night of the burning pestle, 1613, the citizen's wife addressing herself either to the gaunt on the stage, or to her fellow spectator sitting around her, exclaims, Fie! this stinking tobacco kills men! What there were none in England! Now I pray, gentlemen, what good does this stinking tobacco do you? Nothing, I warrant you. Make chimneys are your faces. But many women view tobacco differently, as we shall see in the chapter on Smoking by Women. Moreover, this good woman herself, in the epilogue to the burlesque, invites the gentleman whom she has before abused for smoking to come to her house where she will entertain them with a bottle of wine and a pipe of tobacco. Hensner, the German traveller, who visited London in 1598, speaks of smoking being customary among the audience at plays, who were also supplied with fruits such as apple, pears, and nuts, according to the season, carried about to be sold as well as ale and wine. He was struck by the universal prevalence of the tobacco habit. Not only at plays, but everywhere else, he says, the English are constantly smoking tobacco, and then he proceeded to describe how they did it. They have pipes on purpose made of clay, into the further end of which they put the herb, so dry that it may be rubbed into powder, and, putting fire to it, they draw the smoke into their mouths, which they puff out again through their nostrils, like funnels, along with it plenty of flagellum and deflections from the head. This suggests that the unpleasant and quite unnecessary habit of spitting was common with these early smokers, a suggestion which is amply supported by other contemporary evidence. Tobacco was smoked by all classes and in almost all places. It was smoked freely in the streets. In some verses prefixed to an addition of Skelton's Eleanor Rumming, which appeared in 1624, the ghost of Skelton, who was poet laureate to King Henry the Eighth, was made to say that he constantly saw smoking. As I walked between Westminster Hall and the Church of St. Paul, and so through the city, where I saw and did pity my countrymen's cases, with fiery smoke faces, sucking and drinking a filthy weed stinking. Tobacco selling was sometimes curiously combined with other trades. A Fleet Street Tobaconist of this time was also a dealer in worsted stockings. A Mercer of Mansfield, who died at the beginning of 1624 and who apparently carried on business also at Southwell, had a considerable stock of tobacco. In the inventory of all his chattels and goods, which is dated 24 January 1624, there is included item in tobacco—19 pounds worth of tobacco, considering the then value of money was no small stock for a Mercer Tobaconist to carry. But the apothecaries were the most usual salesmen, and their shops and their ordinaries were the customary day meeting places for the more fashionable smokers. The taverns and inns, however, were also filled with smoke, when taverns were frequented by men of all social grades. Dicker speaks of the gaunt leaving the tavern at night, when the spirit of wine and tobacco walks in his train. On the occasion of the accession of James I, 1603, when London was given up to rejoicing and revelry, we are told that Tobaconists, i.e. smokers, filled up whole taverns. King James himself is an unwilling witness to the popularity of tobacco. He tells us that a man could not heartily welcome his friend without at once proposing a smoke. It had become, he says, a point of good fellowship, and he that would refuse to take a pipe, among his fellows, was accounted peevish and no good company. Yay, he continues, with rising indignation, the mistress cannot in a more mannerly kind entertain her servant than by giving him out of her fair hand a pipe of tobacco. Smoking was soon as common in the country as in London. On Wednesday, April 16, 1621, in the course of a debate in the House of Commons, Sir William Stroud, who seems to have been a worthy disciple of that tobacco-hater King James I, moved that he would have tobacco banished wholly out of the kingdom, and that it may not be brought in from any part, nor used amongst us. And Sir Grey Palms said, that if tobacco be not banished, it will overthrow a hundred thousand men in England, for now it is so common that he hath seen plowmen take it as they are at plow. Perhaps this terrible picture of a plowman smoking as he followed his lonely furrow did not impress the House so much as Sir Grey evidently thought it would. At all events, tobacco was not banished. Peers and squires and parsons and peasants alike smoked. The parson of Thornton, in Buckinghamshire, was so devoted to tobacco that when his supply of the weed ran short, he is said to have cut up the bell-ropes and smoked them. This is dated about 1630. In the well-known description of the famous country squire, Mr. Hastings, who was remarkable for keeping up old customs in the early years of the seventeenth century, we read how his hall-tables were littered with hawks, hoods, bells, old hats with their crowns thrust in, full of pheasants' eggs, tables, dice, cards, and store of tobacco pipes. Sir Francis Vier, in the account of his services by sea and land, which he wrote about 1606, mentions that on an expedition to the Azores in 1597, the Earl of Essex, waiting for news of the enemy at St. Michael, called for tobacco, and so on horseback, with those noble men and gentlemen on foot beside him, took tobacco whilst I was telling his lordship of the men I had sent forth and orders I had given. Presently came the sound of guns, which made his lordship cast his pipe from him, and listened to the shooting. Another famous nobleman, Lord Herbert of Sherbury, all virtuous Herbert on whose every part truth might spend all her voice, fame all her art, was a smoker, as we know from a very curious passage in his well-known autobiography. He appears to have smoked not so much for pleasure as for supposed reasons of health. It is well known, he wrote, to those that wait in my chamber, that the shirts, waist-cuts, and other garments I wear next to my body are sweet beyond what either can easily be believed or hath been observed in any else, which sweetness also was found to be in my breath above others, or I used to take tobacco, which towards my latter time I was forced to take against certain rooms and catars that trouble me, which yet did not taint my breath for any long time. The autobiography was written about 1645, so as Lord Herbert did not smoke till towards the latter part of his life, he died in 1648, he clearly was not one of those who took to tobacco in the first enthusiasm for the new indulgence. When Robert, Earl of Essex, and Henry, Earl of Southampton, were tried for high treason in Westminster Hall on February 19, 1600, or 1601, the members of the House of Lords, who with the judges formed the court, if we may believe the French ambassador of the time, behaved in a remarkable and unseemly manner. In a letter to Monsieur de Rohan, the ambassador declared that while the earls and the counsel were pleading, their lordships guzzled and smoked, and that when they gave their votes condemning the two earls, they were stupid with eating an irred tobacco, drunk with smoking. This was probably quite untrue as a representation of what actually took place, but it would hardly have been written had smoking not been a common practice among noble lords. Queen Elizabeth, Secretary of State, Sir Robert Cecil, would appear to have been a smoker. In a letter addressed to him, John Watts, an alderman of London, wrote, According to your request, I have sent the greatest part of my store of tobacco by the bearer, wishing that the same may be to your good liking. But this tobacco I have had the six months which was such as my son brought home, but since that time I have had none. At this period there is none that is good to be had for money. Wishing you to make store thereof, for I do not know where to have the like, I have sent you of two sorts. Mincing Lane, 12 December, 1600 A curious scene took place at Oxford in 1605, when King James visited the university. Two subjects were debated by Lernet Donnes before his majesty, and one of them, at his own suggestion, was whether the frequent use of tobacco is good for healthy men. Among those who spoke were doctors Aylworth, Gwen, Gifford, and Chainel. The discussion, needless to say, being conducted in the presence of the author of the counterblast to tobacco, was not favourable to the herb. The king summed up in a speech which hopelessly begged the question, while it contained plenty of strong denunciation. After his majesty had spoken, one Lernet doctor Chainel, who is described by the recorder Isaac Wake, the public orator of the university, as second to none of the doctors, had the courage to rise, and with the pipe held forth in his hand, to speak both wittily and eloquently in favour of tobacco from the medicinal point of view, praising it to the skies, says Wake, as a virtue beyond all other remedial agents. His wit pleased both the king and the whole assembly, whom he had moved to laughter. But when he had finished, his majesty made a lengthy rejoinder in which he said some curious things. He objected to the medicinal use of tobacco, and quite agreed with previous speakers that such a use must have arisen among barbarians and Indians, who he went on to say had as much knowledge of medicine as they had of civilized customs. If, he argued, there were men whose bodies were benefited by tobacco smoke, this did not so much redown to the credit of tobacco, as it did reflect upon the depraved condition of such men, that their bodies should have sunk to the level of those barbarians, so as to be affected by remedies, such as were effective on the bodies of barbarians and Indians. His majesty kindly suggested that doctors who believed in tobacco as a remedial agent should take themselves and their medicine of pollution off to join the Indians. Chapter 3 of the Social History of Smoking Tobacco Triumphant Continued Sellers of Tobacco and Professors of Smoking Abuse and Praise of Tobacco This is my friend Abel, an honest fellow, he lets me have good tobacco. Ben Johnson, the Alchemist The drugists and other tradesmen who sold tobacco in Elizabethan and Jacobian days had every provision for the convenience of their numerous customers. Some so-called drugists, it may be shrewdly suspected, did much more business in tobacco than they did in drugs. Decker tells us of an apothecary and his wife who had no customers resorting to their shop for any physical stuff, but whose shop had many frequenters in the shape of gentlemen who came to take their pipes of the divine smoke. That tobacco was often the most profitable part of a drugist's stock is also clear from the last sentence in Bishop Earl's character of a tobacco seller, one of the shortest in that remarkable collection of characters which the bishop issued in 1628 under the title of Micocosmography. A tobacco seller, says Earl, is the only man that finds good in it which others brag of but do not, for it is meat, drink, and close to him. No man opens his wear with greater seriousness or challenges your judgment more in the approbation. His shop is the rendezvous of spitting, where men dialogue with their noses and their communication is smoke. It is the place only where Spain is commended and preferred before England itself. He should be well experienced in the world, for he is daily trial of men's nostrils and none is better acquainted with humours. He is the piecing commonly of some other trade which is bod to his tobacco, and that to his wife, which is the flame that follows his smoke. This brief character is hardly so pointed or so effective as some of the others in the Micocosmography, but it would seem that the bishop was not very friendly to tobacco. In the character of a drunkard, he says, tobacco serves to air him after a washing, that is, a drinking about, and is his only breath and breathing while. In another, a tavern is the common consumption of the afternoon, and the murderer or maker away of a rainy day. It is the torrid zone that scorches the face and tobacco the gunpowder that blows it up. The druggist's tobacconists were well stocked with abundance of pipes, those known as Winchester pipes were highly popular. With maple blocks for cutting or shredding the tobacco upon, juniper wood charcoal fires, and silver tongs with which the hot charcoal could be lifted to light the customer's pipe. The maple block was in constant use in those days, when the many present forms of prepared tobacco and varied mixtures were unknown. In Middleton and Decker's roaring girl, 1611, the mincing and shredding of tobacco is mentioned, and in the same play, by the way, we are told that a pipe of rich smoke was sold for six pence. The tobacco tongs were more properly called ember, or brand tongs. They sometimes had a tobacco stopper riveted in near the axis of the tongs, and thus could be easily distinguished from other kinds of tongs. An example in the Guildhall Museum, made of brass and probably of late 17th century date, has the end of one of the handles formed into a stopper. In the same collection, there are several pairs of ember tongs with handles or jaws decorated. In one or two, a handle terminates in a hook, by which they could be hung up when not required for use. In that delightful book of pictures and gossip concerning old household and farming gear, and old-fashioned domestic plenishings of many kinds, called Old West Surrey, Ms. Jekyll figures two pairs of old ember or brand tongs. One of these quite deserves the praise which she bestows upon it. Its lines, says Ms. Jekyll, fill one with the satisfaction caused by a thing that is exactly right, and with admiration for the art and skill of a true artist. These homely tongs are fashioned with a fine eye for symmetry, and indeed, for beauty of design and perfect fitness for the intended purpose. The ends, which were to pick up the coal, are shaped like two little hands, while the edges have slight moldings and even a low bead enrichment. The circular flat on the side away from the projecting stopper has two tiny engraved pictures, on one side of the joint a bottle and tall wine glass, on the other a pair of long clay pipes crossed, and a bowl of tobacco shown in section. This beautiful little implement bears the engraved name of its Surrey maker and the date 1795. Country folk nowadays often light their pipes in the old way by picking up a live coal, or in Ireland a fragment of glowing peat from the kitchen fire with the ordinary tongs and applying it to the pipe bowl, but the old ember tongs are seldom seen. They may still be found in some farmhouses and country cottages, which have not been rated by the agents of dealers in antique furniture and implements, but examples are rare. This is a digression, however, which has carried us far away from the early years of the 17th century. It is pretty clear that not a few of the drugists who sold tobacco were great rascals. Ben Johnson has led us into some of their secrets of adulteration, the treatment of the leaf with oil and the leaves of sack, the increase of its weight by other artificial additions to its moisture, washing it in muscadelle and grains, keeping it in greased leather and oiled rags buried in gravel underground and by like devices. Other writers speak of black spice, galanga, aqua vitae, Spanish wine, aniseeds, and other things as being used for purposes of adulteration. Trickery of another kind is revealed in a scene in Chapman's play A Humorous Day's Murth, 1599. A customer at an ordinary says, Hark you, my host, have you a pipe of good tobacco? The best in town, says my host after the manner of his class. Boy, dry a leaf. Quietly the boy tells him, There's none in the house, sir. To which the worthy host replies Sato voce, dry a dock leaf. But the diner's petitions must have been powerful if they had left him unable to distinguish between the taste of tobacco and that of dried dock leaf. Sometimes colt's foot was mixed with tobacco. Ursula, the pigwoman and refreshment boothkeeper in Bartholomew Fair, in Ben Johnson's play of that name, says to her assistant, Three pence a pipeful I will have made of all my whole half-pound of tobacco and a quarter of a pound of colt's foot mixed with it too to eek it out. The leaves were used as a remedy in cases of difficulty of breathing, both in ancient Roman times and in Tudor England. Light, in his translation, 1578, of Rodeon's history of plants, says of colt's foot, The perfume of the dried leaves laid upon quick coals, taken into the mouth through the pipe of a funnel or tunnel, helpeth such as are troubled with the shortness of wind and fetch their breath thick or often, and do break without the stems of the breast. The leaves of colt's foot and of other plants have often been used as a substitute for tobacco in modern days. A correspondent of Notes and Queries in 1897 said that when he was a boy he knew an old Calvinist minister who used to smoke a dried mixture of the leaves of whorehound, yarrow, and foalsfoot, intermingled with a small quantity of tobacco. He said it was a very good substitute for the genuine article. Similar mixtures, or the leaves of clone, have often been smoked in bygones by folk who could not afford to smoke tobacco only. The number of shops where tobacco was sold in the early days of its triumph seems to have been extraordinary. Barnaby Rich, one of the most prolific parents of pamphlets in an age of prolific writers, wrote a sad tire on The Honesty of This Age, which was printed in 1614. In this production, Rich declares that every fellow who came into an ale-house and called for his pot must have his pipe also, for tobacco was then a commodity as much sold in every tavern in an ale-house as wine, ale, or beer. He goes on to say that apothecary shops, grocer shops, and Chandler shops were almost never without company, who, from morning to night, were still taking tobacco, and what a number there are besides, he adds, that do keep houses set open shops that they have no other trade to live by but the selling of tobacco. Rich says he had been told that a list had been recently made of all the houses that traded in tobacco in and near about London, and that if a man might believe what was confidently reported, there were found to be upwards of 7,000 houses that lived by that trade, but he could not say whether the apothecaries, grocers, and Chandler shops where tobacco was also sold were included in that number. He proceeds to calculate what the annual expenditure on smoke must be. The number of 7,000 seems very large and is perhaps exaggerated. Round numbers are apt to be over rather than under the mark. Another proof of the extraordinary popularity of the new habit is to be found in the fact that by the 17th year of the reign of James I, the arch-enemy of tobacco, that is by 1620 the society of tobacco pipe smokers had become so very numerous and considerable a body that they were incorporated by royal charter and bore on their shield a tobacco plant in full blossom. The motto was happily chosen. Let brotherly love continue. A further witness to the prevalence of smoking and to the enormous number of tobacco seller shops is Camden, the antiquary. And in his annals, 1625, he remarks with curious detail that since its introduction, that Indian plant called tobacco, or nicotiana, is grown so frequent in use and of such price that many, nay the most part, with an insatiable desire, do take it. Drawing into their mouth the smoke thereof, which is of a strong scent, through a pipe made of earth inventing it again through their nose. Some for wantonness, or rather fashion's sake, and other for health's sake, in so much that tobacco shops are set up in greater number than either ale houses or taverns. One result of the herb's popularity was found in frequent attempts by tradesmen of various kinds to sell it without being duly licensed to do so. W.G. Bell, in his valuable book on Fleet Street in Seven Centuries, mentions the arrest of a Fleet Street grocer by the Star Chamber for unlicensed trading in tobacco. He also quotes from the St. Dunstan's Wardmoat Register of 1630 several cases of complaint against unlicensed traders and others. Four men were presented for selling ale and tobacco unlicensed, and for annoying the judges of sergeants in whose stanch and smell of their tobacco, which looks as if the judges were of King James's mind about smoking. The same register of 1630 records the presentment of two men of the same family name, Thomas Boreng and Philip Boreng, for keeping open their shops and selling tobacco at unlawful hours and having disorderly people in their house to the great disturbance of all the inhabitants and neighbors near them. The Ram Alley Fleet Street, mentioned above, was notorious in sundry ways. Mr. Bell mentions that in 1618 the Wardmoat laid complaint against Timothy Lausse and John Barker of Ram Alley for keeping their tobacco shops open all night and fires in the same without any chimney, and suffering hot waters, spirits, and selling also without license to the great disquietness and annoyance of that neighborhood. It was uncertain when licenses were first issued for the sale of tobacco. Probably they were issued in London some time before it was considered necessary to license dealers in other parts of the country. Among the municipal records of Exeter is the following note 358, Whitehall, 31 of August 1633. The Lords of the Council to the Chamber. Whereas His Majesty to prevent the excess of the order against those that regrate and sell or utter it by retail, who observe no reasonable rates or prices, nor take care that it be wholesome for men's bodies that shall use it, has caused letters to be sent to the chief officers of cities and towns requiring them to certify in what places it might be fit to suffer ye retailing of tobacco and how many be licensed in each of those places to use trade. The Lords sent a list of those who are to be licensed and order that no others be permitted to sell. In the neighboring county of Somerset, the Justices of the Peace sent presentments to the Council in 1632 of persons within the Hundred of Milverton and Kingsbury West thought fit to sell tobacco by retail, and for Wevella's comb, Mr. Hancock says in his book on that old town a Mercer and a Hozier were selected. It would seem, as smoking were not allowed in public houses. In the account book of St. Stephen's Church in Parish, Norwich, the income for the year 1628-29 included on one occasion twenty shillings received by Wevella Fine from one Edmund Knuckles for selling a pot of beer wanting in measure contrary to the law, and another sovereign from William Howland's for like offense. This is right and intelligible enough, but on the other hand, the first man, who presumably were alehousekeepers, had to pay thirty shillings, a substantial sum considering, then, the value of the money, for the same offense and for suffering parishioners to smoke in his house. I have been unable to obtain any information as to why a publican should have been fined an additional ten shillings for the heinous offense of allowing a man to smoke in his house, but in Puritan, New England, they were abundant. In the early days of the American colonies, the use of the creature called tobacco was by no means encouraged. In Connecticut, a man was permitted by the law to smoke once if he went on a journey of ten miles, but not more than once a day and by no means in another man's house. It could hardly have been difficult to evade so absurd a man of inhaling and exhaling the smoke of tobacco. A singular feature of the enthusiasm for tobacco in the early years of the seventeenth century was the existence of professors of the art of smoking. Some of the apothecaries whose shops were in most repute for the quality of the tobacco kept took pupils and taught them the slights as tricks with a pipe were called. These included exhaling the smoke in little globes, rings, and so forth. Every man out of his humor, sixteen hundred, describes one sogliardo as an essential clown yet so enamored of the name of a gentleman that he will have it though he buys it. He comes up every term to learn to take tobacco and see new motions. Sogliardo was accustomed to hire a private room to practice in. The fashionable way was to expel the smoke through the nose. In a play by field of sixteen eighteen, a foolish nobleman is asked by some companions in a tavern. Will your lordship take any tobacco? When another sneers, shirt, he cannot put it through his nose, his lordship was apparently not well versed in the slights. Taking tobacco was clearly an accomplishment to be studied seriously. Shift, a professor of the art in Johnson's play, puts up a bill in St. Paul's, the recognized center for advertisements and commercial business of every kind in which he offers to teach any person who wishes to be as exactly qualified as of the best of the ordinary hunting gallants are to entertain the most gentleman like use of tobacco, as first to give it the most exquisite perfume, then to know all the delicate sweet forms for the assumption of it, as also the rare corollary in practice of the Cuban evolution, Eripus and Whiff, which he shall receive or take in here at London in evaporated Uxbridge or farther if it please him. Taking the whiff it has been suggested may have been either a swallowing of the smoke or retaining it in the throat for a given space of time, but what may be meant by the Cuban ebullition or the Eripus is perhaps best left to the imagination. Ebullition is simply a variant of ebullition and ebullition, as applied with burlesque intent to rapid smoking, the vapor bubbling rapidly from the pipe-bowl is intelligible enough, but why Cuban? Eripus was the name in ancient geography of the channel between Euboa, Negro Pont, and the mainland, a passage which was celebrated for the violence and uncertainty of its currents, and hence the name was occasionally applied by our older writers to any straight or sea channel having light characteristics. The use of the word in connection with tobacco may, like that of ebullition have some reference to furious smoking, but the meaning is not clear. If one contemporary writer may be believed, some of these early smokers acquired the art of emitting the smoke through their ears, but a healthy skepticism is permissible here. The accomplished shift promises a would-be pupil in the art of taking tobacco that if he pleases to be a practitioner he shall learn in a fortnight to take it plausibly in any ordinary theater or in the tiltyard, if need be, in the most popular assembly that is. The tiltyard was in the Whitehall palace and was the frequent scene of sports in which Queen Elizabeth took the greatest delight. Here took place, not only tilting properly so-called, but rope-walking performances, bear and bull-baiting, dancing, and other diversions which Her Majesty held in high favor. Consequently the tiltyard was constantly the scene of courtly gatherings, and if smoking were permitted on such occasions, as shifts boasting promises would appear to indicate, then it may be that she did not entertain the objections to the new practice that her successor, King James, set forth with such vehemence in his famous counter-blast to tobacco. There is, however, no positive evidence one way or the other to show what the attitude of the Virgin Queen towards tobacco really was. A tradition as to her smoking herself on one occasion is referred to in a subsequent chapter, that on smoking by women. Although tobacco was in such general use it yet had plenty of enemies. It was extravagantly abused and extravagantly praised. Robert Burton, of anatomy of melancholy fame, like many other writers of his time, was prepared to admit the medicinal value of the herb, though he detested the general habit of smoking. Tobacco was supposed in those days to be good for a surprising variety of ailments and diseases, but to explore that little section of popular medicine would be foreign to my purpose. Burton believed in tobacco as medicine, but with habitual smoking he was a worthy follower of King James, the strength of whose language he sought to emulate and exceed when he denounced the common taking of tobacco by most men, which take it as tinkers do ale, as a plague, a mischief, a violent purger of goods, lands, health, hellish, devilish and damned tobacco, the ruin and overthrow of body and soul. No anti-tobacco-ness could wish for more whole-hearted denunciation than that. Thomas Decker, to whose pictures of London's social life at the opening of the 17th century we are so much indebted for information both with regard to smoking and in respect of many other matters of interest, was himself an enemy of tobacco. He politely refers to that great tobacconist, the prince of smoke and darkness, Don Pluto, and in another place addresses tobacco as, thou beggarly monarch of Indians and set her up of rotten lunged chimney-sweepers and proceeds in a like strain of abuse. One of the most curious of the early publications on tobacco in which an attempt is made to hold the balance fairly between the legitimate use and the licentious use of the herb is Tobias Venner's tract with the long-winded title, a brief and accurate treatise concerning the taking of the fume of tobacco which very many in these days do too licentiously use in which the immoderate, irregular and unseasonable use thereof is reprehended and the true nature and best manner of using it perspicuously demonstrated. Venner described himself as a doctor of physics in Bath and his tract was published in London in 1637. Venner says that tobacco is of ineffable force for the rapid healing of wounds, cuts, sores, and so on by external application, but thanks little of its use for any other purpose. Like others of his school, he attacks the licentious tobacconist smokers who spend and consume not only their time, but also their health, wealth, and wits in taking of this loathsome and unsavory fume. He admits the popularity of the herb, but expresses his own personal objection to the detestable savor or smack that it leave its behind upon the taking of it, from which one is inclined to surmise the doctor's first pipe was not an entire success. With an evident desire to be fair Venner, notwithstanding his dislike of the savor, refuses to condemn tobacco utterly because of what he considers its valuable medicinal qualities, and he goes so far as to give ten precepts in the use of tobacco. The sixth is that you drink not between the taking of the fumes as our idle and smoky tobacconists are wont. There must be no alliance in short between the pipe and the cheerful glass. The tenth and last precept is that you go not abroad into the air presently, immediately upon the taking of the fume, but rather refrain there from the space of an hour or more, especially if the season be cold or moist. The suggestion that the smoker, when he has finished his pipe, shall wait for half an hour or so before he ventures into the outer air is very quaint. Venner goes on to give a terrible catalogue of the ills that will befall the smoker who uses tobacco contrary to the order and the way I have set down. It is a dreadful list which may possibly have frightened a few nervous smokers, but probably it had no greater effect than the terrible curse in the Jack-Daw of Reims. Another tract which may be classed with Venner's treatise was the Nepenthes, or the virtues of tobacco, by Dr. William Barclay, which was published at Edinburgh in 1614. This is sometimes referred to and quoted as by Fairholt as if it were a wholehearted defence of tobacco taking, but Barclay enlarges mainly on the medicinal virtues of the herb. If tobacco, he says, were used physically and with discretion, there were no medicaments in the whole world comparable to it. And again, in tobacco there is nothing which is not medicine, the root, the stalk, the leaves, the seeds, the smoke, the ashes. The doctor gives sundry directions for administering tobacco, to be used in infusion, in decoction, in substance, in smoke, in salt. But Barclay clearly does not sympathise with its indiscriminate use for pleasure. As concerning the smoke, he says, he is taken more frequently for the set effects, but always fasting and with empty stomach, not as the English abusers do, which make a smoke box of their skull, more fit to be carried under his arm that selleth at Paris, du noir un noisir, to black men's shoes, than to carry the brain of him that cannot walk, cannot ride except the tobacco pipe be in his mouth. He goes on to say that he was once in company with an English merchant in Normandy, but was constantly wanting a coal to kindle his tobacco. The Frenchman wondered, and I laughed, at his intemperancy. It is a little curious, considering the devotion of latter-day men of letters to tobacco, that in their early days so many of the men who wrote on the subject attack the social use of tobacco with violence and virulence. Perhaps courtier-like, they followed the lead of the British Solomon, King James I. Their titles are characteristic of their style, a writer named Deacon Acorto entitled, tobacco tortured in the filthy fumes of tobacco refined. But Joshua Sylvester had easily surpassed this when he wrote his, tobacco battered, and the pipes shattered about their ears, that idly idolized so base and barbarous a weed, or at least over-love so lonesome a vanity, by a volley of holy-shot thunder from Mount Helicon, 1615. Controversialists of that period rejoiced in full-worded prayers and in full-blooded praise or abuse. Deacon, as the title of his book just quoted shows, was very fond of alliteration, and one sentence of his diatribe may be quoted. He warned his readers that tobacco smoke was very pernicious unto their bodies, too profluvious for many of their purses, and most pastiferous to the public state. Much may be forgiven, however, to the introducer of so charming a term of abuse as profluvious. Deacon's book takes the form of a dialogue, and after nearly 200 pages of argument in which the unfortunate herb gets no mercy, one of his interlocutors, a trader in tobacco, is so convinced of the iniquity of his trade, and of his own parlous state, if he continues therein, that he declares that the 200 pounds worth of this beastly tobacco, which he owns, shall presently pack to the fire, or else be sent swimming down the Thames. Many good folk would seem to have associated smoking with idling. In the rules of the grammar school at Chigwell, Essex, which was founded in 1629, it is prescribed that the master must be a man of sound religion, neither a papist nor a Puritan, of a grave behavior, and sober and honest conversation, no tipler or haunter of ale houses, no puffer of tobacco. A worthy Derbyshire man, named Campbell, in his will dated 20 October 1616, left all his household goods to his son on this condition, that if at any time hereafter any of his brothers or sisters shall find him taking of tobacco, that then he or she so finding him shall have the said goods, a testamentary arrangement which suggests to the fancy some amusing strategic evasions and maneuvers on the part of the conditional Ligati and his watchful relations. A converse view of smoking may be seen in Isaac Walton's life of Sir Henry Watten, who died in 1639. Walton says that Watten obtained relief to some extent from asthma by leaving off smoking which he had practiced somewhat immoderately as many thoughtful men do, the italics are mine. Tobacco, as has been said, was praised as well as abused extravagantly. Much absurdity was written in glorification of the medicinal and therapeutic properties of tobacco, but a more sensible note was struck by some lauders of the road in 1607, music, tobacco, sack, and sleep, the tide of sorrow backward keep. An ingenious lover of his pipe declared ironically in the same year that he had found three bad qualities in tobacco, for it made a man a thief, which meant danger, a good fellow, which meant cost, and a niggered, the name of which is hateful. It makes him a thief, he continued, for he will steal it from his father, a good fellow, for he will give a beggar, a niggered, for he will not part with his box to an emperor. A character in one of Chapman's plays, 1606, calls tobacco the gentleman's saint and the soldier's idol. A little-known bard of 1630, Barton Holliday, wrote a poem of eight stanzas with chorus to each in praise of tobacco, in which he showed with a touch of burlesque that the herb was a musician, a lawyer, a physician, a traveler, a critic, an ignis fatus, and a whiffler, that is, a braggart. The first verse may suffice as a specimen. Tobacco's a musician, and in a pipe delighteth, it descends in a close through the organ of the nose with a relish that inviteeth. These are merely a few examples of both the praise and the abuse which were lavished upon tobacco at this early stage in the history of smoking. It would be easy to fill many pages with the like testimonials and denunciations, especially the latter, from writers of the early decades of the 17th century. Perhaps the most curious thing, in connection with the immense number of illusions to smoking in the literature of the period, is that there is no mention, whatever, of tobacco or smoking in the plays of William Shakespeare. As Edmund Spencer in The Fairy Queen speaks of, the sovereign weed divine tobacco, it may be presumed that he was a smoker. End of Chapter 3 Chapter 4 of the Social History of Smoking This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org The Social History of Smoking by G. L. Apperson Chapter 4 Cavalier and Roundhead Smokers A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs and in the black stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible, Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless, James I, a counter-blast to tobacco. The Social History of Smoking from the point of view of fashion during the period covered by this and the next two chapters may be summarized in a sentence. Through the middle of the 17th century, smoking maintained its hold upon all classes of society, but in the later decades there are distinct signs that the habit was becoming less universal and it seems pretty clear that by the time of Queen Anne, smoking, though still extensively practiced in many classes of society, was to a considerable extent out of vogue among those most amenable to the dictates of fashion. It is certain that the armies of the Parliament were great smokers for the fines of 17th century pipes on the sites of their camps that have been numerous. A considerable number of pipes of the Caroline period with the usual small elongated bowls were found in 1902 at Chai Chester in the course of evacuating the foundations of the old Swan Inn East Street for building the present branch of the London and County Bank. We know also that the round-head soldiers smoked in circumstances that did them no credit. In the account of the trial of Charles I, written by Dr. George Bates, principal physician to His Majesty and to Charles II also, we read that when the sentence of the court presided over by Bradshaw, condemning the king quote, to death by severing his head from his body, had been read, the soldiers treated the monarch with great indignity and barbarity. They spat on his clothes as he passed by and even in his face. And they blew the smoke of tobacco, a thing which they knew His Majesty hated in his sacred mouth, throwing their broken pipes in his way as he passed along. Time brought its revenges. The dead protector was not treated too respectfully by his soldiery. Evelyn, describing Cromwell's superb funeral, says that the soldiers in the procession were drinking and taking tobacco in the streets as they went. Whether the use of tobacco prevailed as generally among the Cavalier forces is less certain, but as King Charles hated the weed, courtiers may have frowned upon its use. One distinguished Cavalier, however, either smoked his pipe or proposed to do so on a historic occasion. In Markham's Life of the Great Lord Fairfax, there is a lively account of how the duke, then Marquis of Newcastle, with his brother Charles Cavendish, drove in a coach and six to the field of Marston Moor on the afternoon before the battle. His grace was in a very bad humor. He applied to Rupert, says Markham, for orders as to the disposal of his own most noble person and was told that there would be no battle that night and that he had better get to his coach and go to sleep, which he accordingly did. But the decision as to battle or no battle did not rest with Prince Rupert. Cromwell attacked the royal army with the most disastrous results to the king's cause. His grace of Newcastle woke up, left his coach and fought bravely, being, according to his duchess, the last to ride off the fatal field, leaving his coach and six behind him. So far Markham, but according to another account, when Rupert told him that there would be no battle, the duke who took himself to his coach lit his pipe and making himself very comfortable fell asleep. The original authority, however, for the whole story, is to be found in a paper of notes by Clarendon on the affairs of the north, preserved among his manuscripts. In this paper, Clarendon writes, the Marquis asked the prince what he would do. His highness answered, we will charge them tomorrow morning. My lord asked him whether he was sure the enemy would not fall on them sooner. He answered, no. And the Marquis thereupon, going to his coach hard by and calling for a pipe of tobacco, before he could take it when the enemy charged, and instantly all the prince's horse were routed. Gardener evidently follows this account for his version of the story is, Newcastle strolled toward his coach to solace himself with a pipe, before he had time to take a whiff the battle had begun. The incident was made the subject of a picture by Ernest Croft's A.R.A., which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1888. It shows the duke leaning out of his window with his pipe in his hand. Among the documents in the possession of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, there is a letter patent under the great seal of Charles I in 1634 granted for the purpose of correcting the irregular sales and restraining the immoderate use of tobacco in Scotland. The letter states that tobacco was used on its first introduction as a medicine, but had since been so largely indulged in and was of such bad quality as not only to injure the health but deprave the morals of the king's subjects. These were sentiments worthy of King James. Dr. Matthew Livingstone, who has calendered this document, says that the king therein proceeds in order to prevent such injurious results of the use of tobacco to appoint Sir James Leslie and Thomas Dalmohoy to enjoy for seven years the sole power of appointing licensed vendors of the king. These vendors under due examination as to their fitness were to be permitted on payment of certain compositions and an annual rent in augmentation of the king's revenue to sell tobacco in small quantities. The letter further directs that the licensees so appointed shall become bound to sell only sound tobacco and admirable provision if a trifle difficult to enforce and to keep good order in their homes and shops. The latter clause adds Mr. Livingstone would almost suggest that the tobacco was to be sold for consumption on the premises as I have no doubt it was and that the smokers were probably in the habit at their own symposiums of using even as they may still I dare say other indulgences not so soothing in their effects as the coveted weed, a suggestion for which there seems little foundation in the clause to which Livingstone refers. One inference at least may be fairly drawn I think from this document and that is that smoking was very popular north as well as south of the tweed. Tobacco was certainly cheap in Scotland. The following entries are from a manuscript document of household expenses kept by the minister of the parish of Eastwood near Glasgow the Reverend William Hamilton. They cover two months only and show that the minister was a furious smoker. The prices given are in Scots currency, the pound Scots being worth about 20 pence sterling. May 1651 Item to Andrew Karndorf for four pounds of tobacco, one pound. Item to Robert Hamilton Chapman for tobacco, 18 shillings. Item, 9 June to my wife to give for six trenchers and tobacco, one pound 13 and four pence. Item, 10 June the said day for tobacco and stuffs, 13 and four pence. 28 June item for tobacco, 13 and nine pence. It may perhaps be interesting to compare with these prices from which apparently it may be inferred that near Glasgow tobacco could be bought for some five pence a pound which seems incredibly cheap. The occasional expenditure upon tobacco of a worthy citizen of Exeter some few years earlier extracts from the financial diary of this good man whose name was John Hain and who was an extensive dealer in surges and woollen goods generally as well as in a smaller degree of cotton goods also were printed some years ago with copious annotations by the late Dr. Brushfield. In this diary covering the years 1631 to 43 there were some 40 entries concerning the purchase of what is always save in one case called tobacco. These entries give valuable information as to the prices of the two chief kinds of tobacco. One was imported from Spanish America which up to 1639 Hain calls verines and after that date Spanish. The other was imported from English colonies chiefly from Virginia. The verines kind Dr. Brushfield suggests was obtained from Verena near the foot of the range of mountains forming the west boundary of Venezuela and watered by a branch of the Orinoco River. Hain also notes the purchase of Turtudos tobacco but what that may have been I cannot say. From the various entries relating respectively to verines or Spanish tobacco and to Virginia tobacco it is clear that the former ranged in price from 8 shillings to 13 shillings per pound while the latter was from 1 shilling 6 pence to 4 shillings per pound. There is one entry of Perfumed Tobacco 10 ounces of which were bought at the very high price of 15 shillings 6 pence. The variations in price of both Spanish and Virginia tobacco were largely due to the frequent changes in the amount of the duty thereon. In 1604 King James I newly come to the throne and full of iconoclastic fervor against the weed raised the duty to 6 shillings 8 pence per pound in addition to the regular duty of 2 pence. On March 29, 1615 there was a grant to a licensed importer of the late imposition of 2 shillings per pound on tobacco which shows that there must have been considerable fluctuation between 1604 and 1615 while in September 1621 the duty stood at 9 pence. Through James's reign much dissatisfaction was expressed about the importation of Spanish tobacco and the outcome of this may probably be seen in the proclamations issued by the King in his last 2 years forbidding the importation buying or selling tobacco which was not of the proper growth of the colonies of Virginia and the Somers Islands. These proclamations were several times confirmed by Charles I the latest being on January 8, 1631 but they do not seem to have had much effect. Haines Diary contains 1 or 2 entries relating to smokers requisites. In September 1639 he spent 2 pence on a new spring to his tobacco tongs. These were the tongs used for lifting a live coal to light the pipe to which I have referred in a previous page. On the last day of 1640 Haines paid Dr. Drake's man 1 shilling 5 pence for 6 dozen tobacco pipes. From the various entries in the diary relating to the purchase of tobacco it seems clear that there was no shop in Exeter devoted specially or exclusively to the sale of the weed. Haines bought his supplies from 4 of the leading goldsmiths of the city who can be identified by the fact that he had dealings with them in their own special wares also from 2 drapers 1 grocer and 4 other tradesmen on a single occasion each whose particular occupations were unknown. But to turn from this worthy Exeter's citizen to more famous names he may not know of any good evidence as to whether or not Cromwell smoked although he is said to have taken an occasional pipe while considering the offer of the crown. But John Milton certainly did. The account of how the blind poet passed his days after his retirement from public office was first told by his contemporary Richardson and has since been repeated by all his biographers. His placid day ended early. The poet took his frugal supper at 8 o'clock and at 9 having smoked a pipe and drunk a glass of water he went to bed. Apparently this modest allowance of a daily evening pipe was the extent of Milton's indulgence in tobacco. He knew nothing of what most smokers regard as the best pipe of the day the after breakfast pipe. It is somewhat singular that the Puritans who denounced most amusements and pleasures and who frowned upon most of the occupations or diversions that make for the joy and the enjoyment of life did not as Puritans denounced the use of tobacco. One or two of their writers abused it roundly but these were not representative of Puritan feeling on the subject. The explanation doubtless is that the practice of smoking was so very general and so much a matter of course among men of all ranks and of all opinions that the mouths of Puritans were closed, so to speak by their own pipes. A precision, however, could take as tobacco with a difference. The 17th century diarist Abraham de la Prime says that he had heard of a Presbyterian minister who was so precise that he would not as much as take a pipe of tobacco before that he had first sate grace over it. George Wither, one of the most noteworthy of the poets who took the side of the parliament was confined in Newgate after the restoration and found comfort in his pipe. Some of the Puritan colonists in America took a strong line on the subject. Under the famous blue laws of 1650 he was ordered by the general court of Connecticut that no one under 21 was to smoke nor any other that hath not already accustomed himself to the use thereof. And no smoker could enjoy his pipe unless he obtained a doctor's certificate that tobacco would be useful for him and also that he hath received a license from the court but the unhappy smoker having passed the doctor and obtained his license was still harassed by restrictions for it was ordered that no man within the colony after the publication of the order should take any tobacco publicly in the street, highways, or any barnyards or upon training days in any open places under the penalty of six pence for each offense against this order. The ingenuities of petty tyranny are ineffable. It is said that these blue laws are not authentic. But if they are not literally true they are certainly well invented for most of them can be paralleled and illustrated by laws and regulations of undoubted authenticity. Mrs. Alice Morse Earle in her interesting book Abounding and Curious Information on the Sabbath in Puritan, New England says that the use of tobacco was absolutely forbidden under any circumstances in the Sabbath within two miles of the meeting house which since at that date all the houses were clustered round the church green was equivalent to not smoking it at all on the Lord's Day if the law were obeyed. But wicked backsliders existed poor slaves of habit who were in Duxbury fixed ten shillings for each offense and in Portsmouth not only were fined but to their shame be it told set as jailbirds in the Portsmouth cage. In Sandwich and in Boston the fine four drinking tobacco in the meeting house was five shillings for each drink which I take to mean chewing tobacco rather than smoking it. Many men were fined for thus drinking and solacing the weary hours though doubtless they were as sly and kept themselves as unobserved as possible. Four Yarmouth men old sea dogs perhaps who loved their pipe were in 1687 fined four shillings each for smoking tobacco in the end of the meeting house. Silly ostrich grained Yarmouth men to fancy to escape detection by hiding round the corner of the church and to think that the tithing man had no nose when he was so argous eyed. On weekdays many New England Puritans probably smoked as their friends in Old England did. A contemporary painting of a group of Puritan divines over the mantlepiece of Parson Lowell of Newbury shows them well provided with punch bowl drinking cups, tobacco, and pipes. One Parson, the reverent Mr. Bradstreet of the First Church of Tarrelstown was very unconventional in his attire. He seldom wore a coat but generally appeared in a plaid gown and was always seen with a pipe in his mouth. John Elliott the noble preacher and missionary to the Indians warmly denounced both the wearing of wigs and the smoking of tobacco but his denunciations were ineffectual both matters, heads continued to be adorned with curls of foreign growth and pipe smoke continued to ascend. In this country tobacco is said to have invaded even the House of Commons itself. Dr. J. H. Byrne in his descriptive catalogue of London tokens writes about the middle of the 17th century it was ordered that no member of the house do presume to smoke tobacco in the gallery or at the table of the house sitting as committees. I do not know what the authority for this order may be but there is no doubt that smoking was practiced in the precincts of the house. In Mercurious Pragmaticus December 19-26 1648 the writer says on December 20 speaking of the excluded members Colonel Pride standing sentinel at the door denied entrance and caused them to retreat into the lobby where they used to drink ale and tobacco. There is a curious entry in Thomas Burton's diary of the proceedings of Cromwell's Parliament which suggests that there may have been the luxury of a member's smoking room. Burton was a member of the parliaments of Oliver and Richard Cromwell from 1656 to 1659 and made a practice for which historical students have been and are much his debtors of taking notes of the debates as he sat in the house. Members sometimes objected to and protested against this note taking but Burton quietly went on using his pencil and though his summaries of speeches were often difficult to follow argument and sense suffering by compression he has preserved much very valuable matter. Referring to a debate on January 7 1656-57 on an attempt to go behind the previously passed act of oblivion the diarist records that Sir John Reynolds had numbered the house and at rising there were 220 at the least besides tobacconists. This can only mean that there were at least 220 members actually present in the house when it rose not counting the tobacconists or smokers who were enjoying their pipes not in the chamber itself but in some conveniently adjoining place which may have been a room for the purpose or may have simply been the lobby referred to above in the extract from a curious pragmaticus. Specifically that Richard Cromwell was a smoker in 1689 long after he had retired into private life and had ample leisure for blowing clouds. He sent to a friend a box of tobacco which was described as A. J. Bodd Bodden's Best Virginia In a letter to his daughter Elizabeth dated 21 January 1705 there is a reference to this same dealer whom he described as tobacconist in George Yard, Lumber Lombard Street. The illusion is worth noting as a very early instance of the colloquial trick of abbreviation familiar in later days in such forms as bacchi and bacca and their compounds. End of Chapter 4