From 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 10
s. 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 5
s. 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 4
s. 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."
From Chapter 5: 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."