Tobacco History:
The Social History of Smoking
by George Latimer Apperson
First published in 1914
"The Social History of Smoking" by George Latimer Apperson, can be purchased at Amazon.com in two different versions. Depending on the quality of the edition, prices range between $35 and $104.
From Chapter 1: 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 honour 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 "Counter-blaste to Tobacco," speaks as "some two or three Savage men," who "were brought in, together with this Savage custome," 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.
From Chapter 6: The local authorities in our eastern counties seem to have had some curious ideas of their own as to where tobacco should or should not be smoked. In a previous chapter we have seen that at Norwich, ale-house keepers were fined for permitting smoking in their houses. At Methwold, Suffolk, the folk improved upon this. The court-books of the manor of Methwold contain the following entry made at a court held on October 4, 1695: "We agree that any person that is taken smoakeinge tobacco in the street shall forfitt one shillinge for every time so taken, and itt shall be lawfull for the petty constabbles to distrane for the same for to be putt to the uses abovesaid [ i.e. "to the use of the town"]. Wee present Nicholas Baker for smoakeinge in the street, and doe amerce him 1 s." The same rule is repeated at courts held in the years 1696 and 1699, but no other fine is mentioned at any subsequent courts. The good folk at Methwold may have been adepts at petty tyranny, but such an absurd regulation must soon have become a dead letter. While we are in the eastern counties we may note that in 1694 there died at Ely an apothecary named Henry Crofts, who owned, among some other unusual items in his inventory, casks of brandy and tobacco, which shows that even at that date, when regular tobacconists' shops for the sale of tobacco had long been common, the old business connexion between apothecaries and tobacco still occasionally existed.
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