Dan Snow's History Hit - How Coffee and Tobacco Captivated Britain

Episode Date: July 9, 2021

When tobacco arrived in Britain in the 1560s, it was hailed as a "holy herb", a miracle cure to improve health and a catalyst for wit and creativity. The coming of coffee - "black as hell, strong as death, sweet as love" - in the mid-17th century, led to the establishment of coffee houses where debates flourished and innovations were born that helped to shape the modern world.In this episode from our sibling podcast Not Just the Tudors, Suzannah Lipscomb talks to Dr. Matthew Green - author of London: A Travel Guide Through Time - about how nicotine and caffeine changed the British way of life.

Hey everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. On this episode of the podcast we've got a total treat for you. Tobacco and coffee arrived in Britain in the 16th century and they were wildly popular. Coffee was described as black as hell, strong as death, sweet as love. Today I've got an episode of Professor Susanna Lipscomb's brilliant podcast, not just the Tudors, it's one of our sibling podcasts, and it's all about coffee and tobacco. She talks to the very brilliant Dr Matthew Green. He's just a fantastic communicator.

You're going to love him. He knows all about how nicotine and caffeine change the British way of life. And there is not one second this pod is not crammed with utterly breathtaking facts and information and insight. This is how new substances transformed Britain and its people. If you want to listen to more episodes of Not Just the Tudors without the ads, you can do so at historyhit.tv.

It's our new digital platform. It's like a TV channel, but with audio as well. So you get all of these podcasts, mine and Susie's and everybody's. You also get hundreds of hours of history documentaries. It's a pretty sweet deal, to be honest. You should go and check it out. It's a month for free if you sign up today. Go to historyhit.tv. But in the meantime, everyone, pour yourself a strong, strong coffee. Forget your troubles and disappointments and enjoy this pod. disappointments and enjoy this part. Matt, we really ought to be sitting in some sort of dark, smoky pub, or at least some sort of dark, smoky coffee house, shouldn't we?

Yes. Well, either of the two would be fine by me. But the smoke is long gone. Imagine us there, listeners, but actually in practice, we're on Zoom. And we are talking about two psychotropic drugs that we don't necessarily associate with the Tudors and with the Stuarts, but indeed actually originate there. So let's take them each in turn. Let's start with the fags. When did Europe first learn of tobacco? When did Europe first learn of tobacco? It appears to have been introduced to Europe by the merchant adventurer John Hawkins around about 1565. And then it took a while to catch on, but it really did catch on and triggered this huge tobacco boom,

which, as far as I can see, seems to have been sort of written out of history. You don't really associate, as you were just saying, with the Tudor period. But from the 1560s right through into Jacobean times, London in particular was pretty much the smoking capital of the world. So Hawkins, why do we then associate tobacco with water rawly or rarly? He popularised it at court. So everyone going to court wants to kind of be au fait with the latest of vogues and novelties. He went round explaining what this thing was and demonstrating it. And it was a real performance. When we smoke today, we're sort of rare breed. I'm sort of including myself,

but I'm trying very hard to give up, but very unsuccessfully. But back then it was a spectacle. There's this apocryphal story. I assume it's apocryphal that his servant came in and Raleigh was meant to have his back to the servant and he was smoking and the servant thought he was on fire and got a huge bucket of water and poured it over his head. So it's probably not true, but it does kind of goes to show that it was this very strange thing to do.

If you think about what you're actually doing, you're just putting nicotine and smoke, yanking it through the lung. It's weird. We kind of desensitized to it today, but back then it was exotic and exciting and a sign of status and actually much more. nicotine and smoke yanking it through the lung. It's weird, we kind of desensitized to it today, but back then it was exotic and exciting and a sign of status and actually much more. And it had been a Native American practice to smoke pipes with tobacco in, and that's how Hawkins had discovered it, I suppose.

It was the sort of tendency to smoke it actually wrapped up in leaves so more like cigars than cigarettes and as it filtered through Europe they began to put it into these little clay pipes called ladles and it's an astonishing thing these are just utterly ubiquitous if you go mudlarking have you been mudlarking and I have yes yeah and indeed there was a book out quite recently about this kind of thing but one of the most common things that are dredged up on the banks of the Thames are these little clay pipes, particularly around Bankside, what we will call the South Bank today, because that's where the playhouses were and people would just smoke their three half pence of tobacco and then just toss it into the Thames. So by that stage, you'd buy a pipe full of tobacco rather than the Native American custom, which was to have it as a cigar.

And you said that tobacco quickly caught on. How and why? First of all, it was a novelty. It was exotic. But this was backed up with all sorts of highly mendacious medical claims as well. Just to give you an idea of the scale of the boom, it was unknown. There was no such thing as a tobacco house really from earlier than 1565. the boom. It was unknown. There was no such thing as a tobacco house really from earlier than 1565. But then according to one pamphlet, by 1614, there were 7,000 all over London. So the population of London was only about 200,000 at the time. So it was almost more than one on every street corner. It was almost like a lamppost. They were absolutely everywhere. The 7,000 figure could just be shorthand for an awful lot. But this is backed up by eyewitness accounts.

You could barely walk down a street and you'd see men, women, children piping up. People would keep their tobacco pipes beneath the pillow at night in case they had cravings to gratify their longings. And even if you looked through the windows into schools, you'd see the school teacher teaching the young boys how to smoke in this sort of Alamod fashion.

How on earth did this become and why? Well, people were told it was a miracle cure, rather ironically and tragically. In fact, they said it would cure you of dropsy-scurvy gout, depression. Pregnant women in particular were told to smoke as much tobacco as they could because it's thought that the warm, moist qualities of tobacco was going to be good for nurturing the baby in the womb. Indeed, people who were dying of the plague were routinely informed that if only they'd smoked a bit more, then they wouldn't be on their way to the nearest plague pit. So there was the medicinal element. But I think the most interesting, if you think about what was going on at this wonderful

efflorescence of playhouses and creativity in the later Tudor period. There was a belief that it was a catalyst for divine wit, I think is the way I would put it. They actually believed that the warm, humid qualities of the tobacco was going to heat up the cold, moist chambers of the brain, kindling a sort of deft and lyrical wit, allowing people to fulfill their divinely apportioned creative faculties and actually bringing them closer to God, in the same way as the Mayans believed that your prayers would rise up to heaven in the smoke. So when we talk about chain-smoking

intellectuals, you know, the French existentialists in the cafes in Paris, all that sort of mid-20th century stuff. But actually, as far as I can see, the first generation of chain-smoking intellectuals, people like Shakespeare and Marlowe and Johnson, Thomas Decker and more, was in your period because people thought that it was going to make them sort of hammer out more artful prose and better ideas Shakespeare and Marlowe and Johnson, Thomas Decker and more, was in your period, because people thought that it was going to make them sort of hammer out more artful prose and better ideas. It really did catch on. I suppose that the fact that they believe in the four humours medically is crucial here. And this idea about heat, that men have more reason because they've got more heat driving them, you know, and they have bigger shoulders with more heat going up to the top of their body, that actually something that produces

heat, you can understand why they make connections between that and the production of reason and wit. That's fascinating. Yes, you're absolutely right. It all links back to the four humours. Without that, it sort of wouldn't really make any sense. And, you know, it seems absurd now, knowing what we do, that this could somehow be good for you. But I think the sort of cultural history of tobacco does still linger, because look at rock stars or film directors, this idea that a creative genius somehow needs to be puffing away all the time, less so these days, but certainly a couple of decades ago. And I think that can be traced back to the marketing campaign in Tudor England. Actually, I remember there were some campaigns for cigarettes in the, I say I remember as if I

were old enough to remember, but in the 1920s, using Drake and Raleigh's faces on the packets. So the association with the Tudors perhaps wasn't lost at that point, but we have certainly lost it since. I don't quite understand why. I mean, Shakespeare obviously appears in popular culture a lot, but he's never smoking. I mean, I don't think I've ever seen portrayals of the great playwriting blades just chain smoking away. It's absent. It's been airbrushed out. Given all these slang terms that we have for tobacco and cigarettes today, you know, we've both said fags and backy and all sorts of things. Did they have nicknames in the Tudor period as well?

Oh yes, very much. They had some fantastic names in the Tudor period. It was heralded variously as the divine Nicotian weed. That was quite common. The holy herb, in the words of one wit in particular, I think it was Johnson, it was, the most sovereign and precious weed that nature did ever tender for the use of man. Holy herb caught on divine negotiation. You actually see that in newspaper advertisements way into the 18th century, the purveyor of the holy herb. It sounds like they're talking about marijuana, but they're not. It's just tobacco at this stage. Yes, and a preponderance of beautiful domestic scenes just inside someone's parlour and the stage. Yes, the preponderance of beautiful domestic scenes, just sort of inside someone's parlour, and the sort of gentleman, and sometimes the woman of the household as well. They're just smoking with blissful abandon, whilst their children are doing

various tasks. It really did permeate society in a way that I don't think is sufficiently recognised. Well, I've got two questions coming from that. So do you have any idea why we've overlooked it? You say you can't think of depictions of Shakespeare smoking, but does Shakespeare even mention tobacco? He does. People start smoking in the plays. Absolutely. It's not sort of made a big thing of. I'm not sure why it would be because it becomes so habitual. It almost would have been sort of strange to go out of your way to emphasise it. There's one playwright called Thomas Decker who does mention it. One of his characters says the tobacco will make your breath stink like the piss of a fox. So there's a few kind of discordant voices, if you like, but it's mainly in the

pamphlets, the pamphlet literature, which is, you know, obviously at this stage, it's still censored. Pre-publication censorship doesn't evaporate for good until the 1690s. But there's a lot of tracts about the merits of tobacco smoking. And it's picked up on. One of the reasons I love this period is because you really got the birth of the tourism industry, not necessarily just for the grand elites, but for the middling sort as well. And people like the Swiss medical student Thomas Plater and the Venetian chaplain Horatio Bocino. It's a wonderful text, they're all online. Just vivid eyewitness accounts of witnessing people drinking tobacco, as it was known.

You didn't smoke it, you drank it. So when you see the pictures, it's always a tobacco drinker. You're meant to permeate yourself so fully. It was almost like with the force of an ocean tide being sort of pulled into your lungs. And then you were meant to kind of eject it with as much spittle and phlegm as you possibly could. It's not really spotlighted, but it's picked up in these amazing diary journal sources and later on in the newspapers as well. That is interesting. I remember in my research during the French Wars of Religion, it sounds very 40 towers, but one of the things they don't mention is the war, right? So they don't talk about everything that's going on around them.

And I guess people don't mention things that are ubiquitous. So actually, by its absence, it almost points towards its presence everywhere, perhaps. And you've mentioned that it's popular both amongst men and women, which is initially surprising to me. And do you think it was popular among people of different ranks of society as well? Or was it particularly confined to the wealthy? Yes, overall, it would have been members of the elite, not really the labouring classes, but definitely the people in the middle, the sort of burgeoning middling sorts. Playgoing was not restricted to the elite. And that was the sort of prime smoking venue. I mean, people, believe it or not, used to turn up to the Globe with

their own stool. And they'd actually go and sit on the stage with an enormous silver tobacco pipe and just smoke whilst the players were acting around. So, you know, Hamlet and Laertes having their duel and there's some pompous young man just sitting there smoking, becoming part of the action. So, yeah, I would say it's not exactly popular for everybody, but it's not something that's completely restricted to the elites. And if there's 7,000 tobacco houses, then that's quite an incentive because it would pique the curiosity. Yeah, that is an extraordinary number. But it also suggests if that figure comes from 1614, as you say, maybe a bit suspect, but the attitudes aren't changing with the new monarch.

Is that the case? Or does Stuart England have a different attitude towards tobacco? It's a very curious case, really, because as far as we know, Elizabeth I doesn't seem to have particularly strong opinions about the defined equation. But James I unequivocally does. He dislikes this. He's highly suspicious of this sort of newfangled trend. And he actually goes so far as to write pamphlets against monstrous regiments of tobacco smokers. And he sort of says it's ridiculous the

way that, like, two men greeting in the streets before long, they're just instantly sort of lighting up and puffing away, the sort of nasty puffing engines. And perhaps ironically, because he wasn't exactly un-effeminate himself, but he thinks it's going to sort of weaken the bodies of the tobacco smokers, of the drinkers, and thereby spread through the populace and weaken the body politic and make England ripe for an invasion. So he's not too keen on it. And he actually does something quite extraordinary. He tries to outlaw the consumption of tobacco. And I think we can just about say without too much kind of violence to the truth that this is the first chapter on the war on drugs. He increases taxes on tobacco by 4,000%, which of course only

has the effect of driving it into the black market, into the arms of the smugglers. Eventually he capitulates because imports of tobacco increase year upon year upon year. And he loves the flow of it from the new colonies in the new world and just basically gives up. And then imports increase just exponentially so far as by the Victorian times, they actually gouged behind that marshy landscape, the Wapping and Rotheray tobacco dock, which is still there. So he doesn't like it, but it's not really on medical grounds, because this is the interesting thing. Very few people actually object to it on the grounds of this might be a nefarious harmful substance. There's one

physician called Filarettis, presumably not his real name. He does write a pamphlet and he goes so far as actually distributing it at the gates of St. Paul's Cathedral, which is one of the most public places in London. The pamphlet's called like Work for Chimney Sweepers. And he's obsessed with the idea that if you dissect the lungs of a smoker, you see that they're covered in this unctuous, oily kind of residue. And he's convinced this is not a good thing, but roundly ignored in the main. And it wouldn't really be until I think the mid 20th century that the harmful effects of it are promulgated and made public. And even then it's controversial. So it takes a while. So we have this substance, which everyone thinks is a good thing,

that it brings medicinal benefits, that it's socially popular. I mean, you can see why it's so attractive. But one thing I'm intrigued by, and this may not be something you thought about, but I'm really struck by the fact that James I is thinking it makes men look effeminate. And yet we've also talked and maybe inferred this idea about it sort of giving you a kind of great increase of wit and reason, which they would have associated with being male. I wonder if we can tie it up with gender histories or if that's too far of a stretch. I think it's important to distinguish between the consumption of tobacco in general and the tobacco house as a space,

I suppose a public space. In these tobacco houses, just to sketch it out briefly, because they're not really feminine zones, I've never seen a prince or a reference to women actually going in and partaking in the culture of the tobacco house. You have these curtains

and then it's just a trestle table, men sitting around with all the kind of accoutrements of smoking, you know, with the kind of silver tobacco pipes and the embers and the maple block to shred the leaf and spittoons to capture the fun. And it's a place of chatter and dialogue and debate. When you look at the cartoons, it's quite clever, actually, because they sort of mimic the motions of the smoke, even though they're kind of captions. And these invariably would have been places where financial matters were discussed, political matters were discussed. And I invariably would have been places where financial matters were discussed,

political matters were discussed. And I don't think women were a part of that. And as I think, perhaps you're suggesting that, yes, this idea that it's boosting these sort of latent genius qualities that are more, as they saw it, inherent to men than to women. But then at the same time, we do know women smoked it because they repeatedly go on about how pregnant women should have as much tobacco as they possibly can. And there are references in the journals to women just kind of smoking in the streets. So I wouldn't know quite how to load a conclusion upon it, but there's definitely sort of avenues that warrant further investigation, I suppose. tobacco houses sounds quite like the coffee houses that we're going to get into. Because once we fast forward a few decades to, say, the 1650s, during the days of the protectorate, people didn't just have to look to tobacco, they could get their buzz another way. When does this reach England? Well, early 17th century, but it's only really when it becomes public that extraordinary things happen. So early in the 17th century, it's kind of restricted to a sort of elite courtly scientific circles.

But then in the year 1652, England's first coffeehouse opens. And that's where an extraordinary gentleman called a Pasquale Rosé, who was an Orthodox Greek. Everyone thought he was Turkish because he sort of looked a bit Turkish. And they liked the idea that there was a, you know, a fearsome Turk

dispensing the diabolical concoctions. But he was the servant, agent, broker, many more things to a British Levant merchant called Daniel Edwards. Daniel Edwards was posted to Smyrna in Turkey and quite simply he became addicted to coffee. So you imagine him reclined on his divan staring out over the glistening Aegean with a pile of contracts by his side. And Pasquale was said to serve the best coffee in the whole of the Ottoman Empire. He drank it

black as hell, strong as death, sweet as love. Sounds wonderful. It does, yeah. Business eventually recalled this merchant from his sun-kissed Turkish paradise back to the cold, drizzly city of London. And he simply couldn't imagine his life without the coffee, nor his trusted servants. So they begin to concoct it just for his friends in his townhouse in Walbrook. But being a sort of moneyed man, he's like, well, this is ripe for rather a handsome profit. So he goes out into those amazing warrens of medieval alleyways that Christopher Wren wanted to get rid

of them, but never quite managed, around St. Michael's Church, just in the heart of the old city. And they established the first coffee house, or rather coffee shack. It didn't have the things that we associate with houses. It didn't have tables or chairs or even a roof. It was actually on fire half the time. Think of a tent at a music festival, or that booth in the Tom Hanks film Big, with the slightly sinister, weird, exotic. It was a bit like that.

And people flogged to it in prodigious numbers to try out what was most commonly known, not really as coffee. Again, tobacco had all these strange names. So did coffee. It was called the Bitter Mohammedan Gru, the Soot Coloured Ninny Broth, the Hell Burnt Nasty Liquor, or simply Politician's Porridge.

So that's what you would go to pour down your gullet you're listening to dan snow's history we've got an episode not just the tudors we're talking coffee and tobacco more after this land a viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisonisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, be spies, teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer.

Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. some years back we met for a tv show and i had the experience of drinking some 17th century style coffee that you had prepared for me describe to those who weren't there the experience of drinking this coffee. Yes, it's revolting. It's horrible. You're very polite about it. Some people, when I do coffee house tours, some people just spit it out. It's oily, pungent, it's bitter, it's black. The way it was prepared, the beans were overcooked like hell. Some of them didn't release the aromatic oils that makes coffee so nice. It was overboiled. It wasn't really filtered.

For some unknown reason, they mixed it with eggshells and mustard. I've got no idea why, but they did. And it was served up boiling hot. And you're actually encouraged to take the coffee cup and snort the steam, rather like an aardvark. A few people like it. If you're into Turkish coffee, then it's got that sort of damp, gritty, granular, I think was the word you used back in the day. But most people who are attuned to their delicious, silky smooth flat whites or their espresso macchiato are just like, this is rank.

Which begs the question, why on earth was it so popular? It really does. And I think about you almost every day when making coffee, because I remember you saying that they reused grounds. And so when I'm cleaning grounds off my AeroPress, I think about reusing grounds in the 17th century. Is that part of it as well? Yes, they did. And not just that, actually, it's really kind of gross, but in the coffee houses, they would,

when the cauldron of coffee got too low, they would sometimes pour the spit that had been collected in the spittoons into the culture, they'd also let cats relieve themselves. And some people, according to one pamphlet, that was meant to make it taste better. Of course, it's a satirical pamphlet, but it's riffing on the idea that something so disgusting could be... Because it's not. If you just drink coffee, it's not actually very nice. That's why we add all the stuff. Tobacco is not particularly.

It's the effects. I think today, just as much as then, we have a more Epicurean culture and we sort of obsess over the fine coffee. But back then, they just wanted their hits, much like with the tobacco. And of course, I think it's interesting because these were places where people are smoking as well. You always see that if you look at the prints, if you look at the accounts of a wonderful journal called Ned Ward's London Spy, just someone walking around London and feigning horror and despair, but actually revelling in the sort of scurrilous eye when it's coming. Everyone's smoking, as he puts it, the nasty puffing engines. They're drinking their gruel and sucking away on their nasty puffing engines. So there's an evolution from these rather rudimentary tobacco houses to what

become more established institutions, eventually with beautiful casement windows and a shaved wooden floor and even a roof on occasion. But it's intriguing because no one actually liked it. It's not just the case that our taste buds have become more refined. People at the time thought it was disgusting as well. It was compared to oil, ink, soot, mud, sometimes just excrement. One early sampler compared it to a syrup of soot and the essence of old shoes. I can't imagine Starbucks unleashing that for their autumnal gingerbread latte. So they knew it was disgusting. They certainly write that down. But I mean, I suppose we know what coffee does for you. It makes you more alert. I guess it makes ideas fizz around in your brain. Was it that that they were looking for?

Yeah, that's a big part of it. It speeds up the brain, makes you want to talk, makes you want to socialise, sharpens the wit, makes you fit for business, as one of Pascua's pamphlets put it. And of course, it's an exaggeration to say, people do say that everyone was drunk all day long but there's something in that you know most people didn't drink water not at least in cities and towns because just think of london the river water utterly polluted you know the river fleet used to run red with blood on slaughter day and the tanneries and the breweries belching out their filth into the thames you wouldn't do Well water, risky because little boys used to go and fetch the peels and fall in and die and corrupt the supply. Piped water, again, you wouldn't really want to drink out of those lead pipes. So people generally are

drinking small ale, small beer, not quite as strong as what we have today. That's for the hoi polloi. But if you've got a modicum of wealth, you drink this delicious light pink rose from Gascony, sometimes out of coconut shells. And the idea of these windows of sobriety was revelatory. So it laid the foundations for, I think, for spectacular, undeniable social and economic and cultural growth in the decades that followed, as people are thinking more clearly. Things like the stock markets, the auctioneering, the insurance industry, culture of democratic debate, if not democracy, a free press, free-ish press. England will have the most advanced printing newspaper press of the 1695, I think, in the world. And other things like nurturing a culture of scientific empiricism as well. Would some of these things happen without a coffee house? Yes, of course, but it was definitely given a boost. It was given a kick. And a lot of actually the backbone of

capitalism emerged from these coffee houses. Like where was insurance? Where did that coalesce? Lloyd's Coffee House. Where was the stock market? Jonathan's, auctioneering, Garroway's. All the original buildings have long since crumbled. Most of them. There's a few. The legacy lives on. It's something that I think draws upon these traditions of sociability in the Tudor period. But that connection, I don't think anyone has ever really studied it. And if I was still an academic, no doubt I would. But if you were to go through newspaper adverts in the 17th, 18th century, I bet you could find instances of identified tobacco houses, just almost quite organically

becoming coffee houses, because it seems unlikely they would have been seen as completely different, because the main things that went on there, like the consumption of these exotic drugs, the circulation of news, the self-fashioning of public personae, they're all very big on presenting their fake personas and becoming sort of better people. And, you know, more prosaic things like reading letters and checking news all took place within these venues. And the coffee set the tone. It wasn't necessarily all because of the Mohammedan guru, but it's kind of hard to imagine all that happening at that time without it.

land a viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal j in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. So you're talking about a sort of behaviour that's coming out of the culture of these coffee houses. I suppose when we go into coffee shops today, we tend to sort of take our cafe

latte and put our heads down and bury them in a phone or if we're feeling more virtuous, our book. But that's not what we should imagine happening in these places at all. The whole point of going to a 17th, 18th century coffee house was to engage with people. You could select the type of person you want to meet. So say if you wanted to meet a politician, which district of coffee houses would you head to? Today, I would head to Westminster. Exactly. And it was the same then. You'd go to Waghorns or the Parliament Coffee House. If you wanted to meet people talking about legal cases, then which part of London would you head

to? Near the Inns of Court. Exactly. The Temple. So that's where the Grecian was, these great legal coffee houses. And the whole kind of topography meant you could tune into a certain type of person. You want to meet players and rakes and libertines, then you'd go to Covent Garden, you'd go to Buttons. If you want to meet financiers, you'd go to the city, politicians, Westminster. And these young people on the make in the 17th and 18th century, extraordinary. If you go through the diaries, full diary of this law student called Dudley Ryder, it's the vast 2000 pages long written in a shorthand code for good reason, because he has quite a few things he'd rather not people found out about, but we have subsequently. It's from 1715 to 16, but he's going to about seven,

eight different coffee houses each day, just drifting around from coffee house to coffee house. And these are news networks. This is the way people became au fait with what was going on, not just in their own country. Obviously by that stage, parliament has to sit every year. So you've got a preponderance of political news in the West, but you've got all these ships coming in in the East from all over the world. So there's news from further afield as well. And then the printing press, the newspapers amplify what's being discussed. The coffee house was the prime news gathering venue because that's where people are talking about the news. If you walked into a coffee house, although the technical currency was money, it cost a penny to actually to get out

rather than to get in. The real currency was news and gossip. Everyone was such a loo. What news have you? Your servant, sir, what news from Tripoli? Before you could even sit down, you had to divulge a nugget of information. And everyone else around you would sink their teeth into that. Didn't even really matter if it was true or not. It could be fake news. But people wanted to just discuss what was going on in the world.

And it was always news that broke the ice. And extraordinary, like a merry-go-round of topics could be twined from a single conversational thread. So this Dudley Ryder goes into the Grecian coffee house in Devra Court in the temple, and he's just watched a brilliant beheading, Tower Hill, of a rebel Jacobite lord, the Earl of Doanwater. And he goes back and he says, it's brilliant that the king has had the fortitude to do this. Then there's someone sitting next to him who fancies himself as a natural philosopher. And he said, well, do you think that's the easiest way to die? And they're like, well,

what do you mean? And he's like, I had a snake in my garden in Islington and I cut it in half and the two ends slithered off in different directions. And then a philosopher next to him says, well, that proves the duality of the soul. Then there's a clergyman who says, you shouldn't be saying that. That's kind of heretical. And it spins off. But it's always the news that gets it going. Sociability was such an imperative. These places were designed to maximise the interaction between customers.

And I think the tobacco houses in their day as well were within a smaller scale. Whereas today, it's not that at all. I'm really struck by the fact that if you dive into sort of Ian Mortimer's time traveller's guides, for example, to Elizabethan England or Restoration London, I don't know whether he draws on this. But the idea that if we turned up in this world, that we would have to be far more sociable than we are naturally. And there's been a real change in culture since it starts in the late 16th through to the 17th, into the 18th centuries. At some point that changes. That's something I hadn't really thought about I hadn't really known about this period before that's fascinating and also it makes sense therefore that if you're going to do that that produces a kind of performative culture you're going in and pretending to be friendly

pretending to be polite in a way that maybe not comes naturally to you so it might not be about a change in how people naturally feel about interacting with strangers so much as what they're expected to do. Yeah, a lot of the time it was performative. They were brutal theatres of judgment. If you can't meet a sort of witty remark with a sufficiently ingenious bon mot or some kind of riposte, then people will remember. They will exchange nasty sideways glances next time you go in and your social credit will go down. And what we're seeing is the birth of British politeness. Think of Hyacinth Bouquet and keeping up appearances. You must never actually say what you think. You must always put on this persona and flatter people and project the best version

of yourself. And people are doing that. And you really see it, actually. If you read Samuel Pepys's diary, he's sort of raw and salty and guttural. But by the time you get to Dudley Ryder or James Boswell or later on in the 18th century, everyone seems to be performing. And what really interests me is that there's a point where even the people themselves can't really distinguish between the performance, what's famed and what is real. And politeness gets a bad press because it's seen as in some quarters as artificial. And it may not have been the sort of seismic paradigm shift. It could have just been that there was a lot of performance going on. But I do think that there was a kind of social imperative to talk in a way that's quite alien to us today. But you are implying that coffee

houses were for men only. And so is coffee being drunk outside coffee houses or unlike tobacco? Is it something you have to go and buy in situ? No, it most certainly is being bought outside coffee houses. It's quite difficult to brew. Tea is easier. Tea is actually more expensive and highly taxed. So that's more socially restricted at this stage. But yes, people outside are drinking it, including women.

Because when you read the medicinal pamphlets, again, a bit like with the tobacco, they're sort of encouraging women to drink coffee. But inside the spaces themselves, it's very, very, very hard to find any reference to women actually going in and contributing to the kind of culture of politics and debate and commerce that went on within. Right at the uppermost and lowermost end of the social pyramid, it did happen. Like a duchess could go into the Grecian coffeehouse

to listen to a lecture on astronomy, or prostitutes could and did go into coffeehouses, but nothing really in between. And I forget her name, but there's a wonderful diary of an actress and she has to dress up as a man to get admittance into these coffeehouses. And then that gleans all sorts of

fascinating information. But this all came to a head in 1674 with the Women's Petition Against Coffee. And it lambasts, as they put it, they say, the men of the coffee house outbabble an equal number of women at gossiping all at once, insensibly and swiftly. And then it has this sort of crescendo of rage and it says, the excessive use of that newfangled, abominable, heathenish liquor, coffee, has so eunuched our men and crippled our kind of gallants that they become as impotent as age and as unfruitful as those deserts whence the berry is said to be wrought. I don't know how many times I've had to recite that, but it's basically saying that, again, like tobacco,

like James I has said, coffee is an effeminising agent, and it's going to make men like women. So very cleverly, I think the women who wrote it are holding up a mirror to the folly of the gender stereotypes and the idea of women being garrulous and feather-brained and unable to sustain intellectual thought. They're sort of saying, well, goodness me, if you drink enough of this, then you're going to become like us. And it's a grievance that's reflected elsewhere in Spectator and the Tatler. There's an example of the political upholsterer, who's a man who's so obsessed with finding out what's going on in the battlefields of Europe. He spends all day just

ensconced, a nice sort of fireside seat in the coffeehouse, whilst his business goes to rack and ruin and his wife has to take over everything and they end up starving on the kind of margins of deprivation. So there was this grievance amongst women that men were just paying this one pence to get in. Even if you were an unskilled labourer, you'd earn nine pence a day. So it wasn't entirely unaffordable. And they were just sitting there all day and not really getting on with anything useful. They'd become coffeehouse politicians, which I think is a sort of forerunner of perhaps the champagne socialist or the armchair commentator, this idea that it's not useful. They're just idling away their time. They're frittering it away, like we do online today. Yes, I mean, I would say that

we've had a coffeehouse revolution in what, the last 20 years? When I was at university, we'd go to the pub. We didn't go to coffee houses, they were a later thing. And then last thing, you mentioned in passing that it's a sort of founding place for commerce and for the stock exchange. Tell us just a bit more about that. Yes, there's a triptych of coffee houses in Exchange Alley in Cornhill. And the reason this happens is because at the time of the coffeehouse boom, the economy is expanding because the overseas trading empire is expanding. London is the fulcrum of it. These coffeehouses incidentally exist in all the major towns and cities all over the country, but not in as great a number as London. People are being asked to finance ever riskier ventures. to finance ever-riskier ventures. So they take the idea of fire assurance,

and Lloyd's Coffeehouse in particular becomes a mecca of overseas news. And literally, when a ship docked, these runners would pump the ship captain for information, they would leg it back and just belt out the news. So almost organically, the presence there of foreign news, of merchants, ship captains, cartographers, coalesces into the idea of insurance. So you've now got people who are able to make these riskier ventures. You want to import 50 civic cats from North Africa to make perfume. You can do it. You're not going to be ruined because you can be insured. Then you have Garraways, which provides a domestic market for overseas goods. That was like the eBay of its day, where you had these auctions by candlelight. But the whole kind of wherewithal of it, the whole muscle comes from Jonathan's because the stocks and shares obviously existed before, but it becomes kind of

institutionalized in that institution after the stockbrokers get expelled from the piazza of the rural exchange, which was nearby. They gravitate towards the nearest site that allows the free flow of information within a largely sober milieu. Up until that point, the coffee house had been known for its porpoise dissections, obviously. And it's out with the porpoises and in with the stockbrokers. They publish the securities every couple of days. And the middle classes are being asked to invest. This is the time when the Bank of England is established to service the national debt so Britain can fight against wars. It's not really equipped in and of itself to fight because it's a smaller country than these Catholic nemeses across the water. So people buy government stock. People are investing

in the East India Company, South Sea Company, Royal Africa Company, and it's the coffee houses is where they go to do it. So it becomes something of a middle-class obsession. And not everybody likes it. Daniel Defoe, he was actually-class obsession. And not everybody likes it. Daniel Defoe, he was actually a perfume merchant. He had lots of Civic Cats in Stoke Newington until the creditors carried them all away. He said he didn't like this idea of virtual money, of stocks and shares. He said it was a trade founded in fraud, born of deceit and nourished by all sorts of tricks and delusions. And he had a point because people were going into the coffee houses and just spreading fake news in an effort to artificially inflate or deflate the price of stock, to hoodwink people

out of their savings. And when he walked down those alleyways, it was ricocheting with anguished bellows of freshly bankrupted people for that reason. But the more Britain wished to expand overseas, the more beholden the country became to the capitalistic systems that were devised and directed and concocted in the coffee house. And it was by no means all good. I mean, the slave trade was conducted in the Jamaica coffee house, which is kind of on the site of Pascua's, but there was no actual connection. But it was the fulcrum of all sorts of different forms of commerce, some of which was absolutely horrific. One needs to be a bit careful with thinking of it as this force of untrammeled good and enlightenment, because a lot of it as this force of untrammeled good and enlightenment

because a lot of it wasn't. Slaves were sometimes actually bought and sold in coffee houses. So they were very much ingrained into the fabric of society. Yes, in fact, that neatly connects up our two because there is this sort of dark underside. Well, obviously tobacco is not great

for you in the first place, but John Hawkins, who introduced tobacco, also is the founder of the slave trade, really, and one of the first, at least, to take slaves from West Africa to the Americas. And then here we have the coffee houses being the place where that is continued. So there is this awful underside to both these substances. Absolutely. And that individual in particular has got a lot of blood on his hands in more ways than one. So yes, it's true. And in the historiography, I guess, to use the term, coffee houses have traditionally been seen as beacons of enlightenment and polishing venues.

And that sort of went out of fashion. People began to say, well, surely it's been exaggerated. This kind of thing could have happened in the taverns and the bookshops and the lending libraries. Indeed, it did to some extent, but not to that much of an extent. And it is important, even though I think the primacy of the coffee has largely been recognised in the literature, it needs to be offset with just these things that you were mentioning. And so acknowledge that they were of their time, they weren't these kind of utopian beacons. There's a lot of Marxist theory, actually, that prized and favoured and triumphed the coffee houses because it was seen as a classless zone. The idea being that social distinctions were left at the door and it was only your capability intellectually and your wit that divided people. And then you get these rather

absurd ideas that a boot blackener will be sitting next to a baronet debating the South Sea. I don't really think that happened very much because why would a boot blackener be in a St. James's coffee house? He'd probably be in a whopping coffee house. But it does give, particularly after 1989, it gave some historians a chance to get away from this endless casting of history as a kind of class struggle. And so saying there were these utopian spaces. So it's true, people were given their chance to speak, but I don't think social rank was really just evaporated magically with the aroma of coffee up your nostrils. Well, Matt, thank you so much for this tour. It has been a great stimulant, more than nicotine or caffeine to listen to you talking

about these things and such an education. I think it makes us reconceptualise our ideas about this period as well. So thank you so much. Thank you for having me. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thanks for listening, everyone. That was an episode of Not Just the Tudors

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