Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 5:

A Sussex rector, the Rev. Giles Moore, of Horsted Keynes, in 1656 and again in 1662, paid 1s. for two ounces of tobacco, i.e. at the rate of 8s. per lb. Presumably the rector bought the more expensive Spanish tobacco and the squire the cheaper Virginian. At the annual parish feast held at St. Bride's, Fleet Street, London, on May 24, 1666, the expenses included 3d. for tobacco for twenty or more adults. This too was doubtless Virginian or colonial tobacco. The North Elmham Church Accounts (Norfolk) for 1673 show that 12s. 4 d. was paid for "Butter, cheese, Bread, Cakes, Beere and Tobacco and Tobacco Pipes at the goeing of the Rounds of the Towne." On the occasion of a similar perambulation of the parish boundaries in 1714-15 the churchwardens paid for beer, pipes and tobacco, cakes and wine. The account-books of the church and parish of St. Stephen, Norwich, for 1696-97 show 2s. as the price of a pound of tobacco. These entries, and many others of similar import, show that at feasts and at social and convivial gatherings of all kinds, tobacco maintained its ascendancy. Pipes and tobacco were included in the usual provision for city feasts, mayoral and other; and smoking was made a particular feature of the Lord Mayor's Show of 1672. A contemporary pamphleteer says that in the Show of that year were "two extreme great giants, each of them at least 15 foot high, that do sit, and are drawn by horses in two several chariots, moving, talking, and taking tobacco as they ride along, to the great admiration and delight of all the spectators." Among the guests at a wedding in London in 1683 were the Lord Mayor, Sheriff and Aldermen of the City, the Lord Chief Justice—the afterwards notorious Jeffreys—and other "bigwigs." Evelyn records with grave disapproval that "these great men spent the rest of the afternoon till 11 at night, in drinking healths, taking tobacco, and talking much beneath the gravity of judges, who had but a day or two before condemned Mr. Algernon Sidney."

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 4:

Mrs. Alice Morse Earle, in her interesting book, abounding in curious information, on "The Sabbath in Puritan New England," says that the use of tobacco "was absolutely forbidden under any circumstances on 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 10s. for each offence, and in Portsmouth, not only were fined, but to their shame be it told, set as jail-birds in the Portsmouth cage. In Sandwich and in Boston the fine for 'drinking tobacco in the meeting-house' was 5s. 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 4s. each for smoking tobacco around the end of the meeting-house. Silly, ostrich-brained Yarmouth men! to fancy to escape detection by hiding around the corner of the church; and to think that the tithing-man had no nose when he was so Argus-eyed."

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