Chapter 5 Part 3
SMOKING IN THE RESTORATION PERIOD
When excavations were in progress early in 1901, preparatory to the
construction of Kingsway and Aldwych, they included the removal of
bodies from the burying-grounds of St. Clement Danes and St.
Mary-le-Strand; and among the bones were found a couple of the curious
tobacco-pipes called "plague-pipes," because they are supposed to have
been used as a protection against infection by those whose office it
was to bury the dead. These pipes have been dug up from time to time
in numbers so large that one antiquary, Mr. H. Syer Cuming, has
ventured to infer that "almost every person who ventured from home
invoked the protection of tobacco."
These seventeenth-century pipes were largely made in Holland of
pipe-clay imported from England—to the disgust and loss of English
pipe-makers. In 1663 the Company of Tobacco-Pipe Makers petitioned
Parliament "to forbid the export of tobacco pipe clay, since by the
manufacture of pipes in Holland their trade is much damaged." Further,
they asked for "the confirmation of their charter of government so as
to empower them to regulate abuses, as many persons engage in the
trade without licence." The Company's request was granted; but in the
next year they again found it necessary to come to Parliament, showing
"the great improvement in their trade since their incorporation, 17
James I, and their threatened ruin because cooks, bakers, and
ale-house keepers and others make pipes, but so unskilfully that they
are brought into disesteem; they request to be comprehended in the
Statute of Labourers of 5 Elizabeth, so that none may follow the trade
who have not been apprentices seven years."
Tobacco-pipe making was a flourishing industry at this period and
throughout the seventeenth and following century in most of the chief
provincial towns and cities as well as in London.
"Old English 'clays,'" says Mr. T.P. Cooper, "are exceedingly
interesting, as most of them are branded with the maker's initials.
Monograms and designs were stamped or moulded upon the bowls and on
the stems, but more generally upon the spur or flat heel of the pipe.
Many pipes display on the heels various forms of lines, hatched and
milled, which were perhaps the earliest marks of identification
adopted by the pipe-makers. In a careful examination of the monograms
we are able to identify the makers of certain pipes found in
quantities at various places, by reference to the freeman and burgess
rolls and parish registers. During the latter half of the seventeenth
century English pipes were presented by colonists in America to the
Indians; they subsequently became valuable as objects of barter or
part purchase value in exchange for land. In 1677 one hundred and
twenty pipes and one hundred Jew's harps were given for a strip of
country near Timber Creek, in New Mexico. William Penn, the founder
of Pennsylvania, purchased a tract of land, and 300 pipes were
included in the articles given in the exchange."
The French traveller, Sorbière, who visited London in 1663, declared
that the English were naturally lazy and spent half their time in
taking tobacco. They smoked after meals, he observed, and conversed
for a long time. "There is scarce a day passes," he wrote, "but a
Tradesman goes to the Ale-house or Tavern to smoke with some of his
Friends, and therefore Public Houses are numerous here, and Business
goes on but slowly in the Shops"; but, curiously enough, he makes no
mention of coffee-houses. A little later they were too common and too
much frequented to be overlooked. An English writer on thrift in 1676
said that it was customary for a "mechanic tradesman" to go to the
coffee-house or ale-house in the morning to drink his morning's
draught, and there he would spend twopence and consume an hour in
smoking and talking, spending several hours of the evening in similar
fashion.
Country gentlemen smoked just as much as town mechanics and tradesmen.
In 1688 Hervey, afterwards Earl of Bristol, wrote to Mr. Thomas
Cullum, of Hawsted Place, desiring "to be remembered by the witty
smoakers of Hawsted." A later Cullum, Sir John, published in 1784 a
"History and Antiquities of Hawsted," and in describing Hawsted Place,
which was rebuilt about 1570, says that there was a small apartment
called the smoking-room—"a name," he says, "it acquired probably soon
after it was built; and which it retained with good reason, as long as
it stood." I should like to know on what authority Sir John Cullum
could have made the assertion that the room was called the
smoking-room from so early a date as the end of the sixteenth century.
No mention in print of a smoking-room has been found for the purposes
of the Oxford Dictionary earlier than 1689. In Shadwell's "Bury Fair"
of that date Lady Fantast says to her husband, Mr. Oldwit, who loves
to tell of his early meetings with Ben Jonson and other literary
heroes of a bygone day, "While all the Beau Monde, as my daughter
says, are with us in the drawing-room, you have none but ill-bred,
witless drunkards with you in your smoking-room." As Mr. Oldwit
himself, in another scene of the same play, says to his friends,
"We'll into my smoking-room and sport about a brimmer," there was
probably some excuse for his wife's remark. These country
smoking-rooms were known in later days as stone-parlours, the floor
being flagged for safety's sake; and the "stone-parlour" in many a
squire's house was the scene of much conviviality, including, no
doubt, abundant smoking. The arrival of coffee and the establishment of coffee-houses opened a
new field for the victories of tobacco. The first house was opened in
St. Michael's Alley, Cornhill, in 1652. Others soon followed, and in a
short time the new beverage had captured the town, and coffee-houses
had been opened in every direction. They sold many things besides
coffee, and served a variety of purposes, but primarily they were
temples of talk and good-fellowship. The buzz of conversation and the
smoke of tobacco alike filled the rooms which were the forerunners of
the club-houses of a much later day. |
