No catalogue of early references can permit us to determine precisely when coffee, tea, and chocolate first significantly entered the English awareness. However, some indirect evidence can shed light on the question. Shakespeare (1564–1616), who uses more tropes of language and a greater range of vocabulary than any other writer and whose work features treatments of virtually every aspect of daily life, including, of course, food, drink, and the habits and delicacies of the table, both in England and the exotic city-states of Italy and ancient Greece and Rome, makes no mention of coffee, tea, or chocolate. Because of the comprehensive nature of the Shakespearean universe of discourse, the absence of these references helps fix the time after his death as the earliest boundary for their general presence in England even by reputation.
The first mention of tea and coffee in print in English. This page is from a 1598 edition of Linschoten’s Travels, in a chapter entitled “Of the Island Japan,” translated from Latin by Bernard Ten Broeke Paludanus. Coffee appears as “Chaona” in the second line of the text notation by Paludanus. Note that this interpolated text on coffee appears in a Roman typeface inserted into the Gothic typeface of the original text. Tea appears as Chaa in the first column, two lines from the bottom. (W.H.Ukers, All about Tea)
Less than ten years after Shakespeare died, Francis Bacon (1561–1626), lord chancellor of England and one of the fathers of empiricism, whom some suppose to have been the true author of the Bard’s works, makes two references to coffee, which he almost certainly never saw, much less tasted, unless it was from the hands of his physician, Dr. William Harvey. The first Baconian reference occurs in the Historia Vitae et Mortis (1623): “The Turkes use a kind of herb which they call caphe.” By 1624, when Bacon wrote Sylva Sylvarum (1627), he must have read a few more of the early travelers’ accounts of Middle Eastern coffee use, phrases from which recur in his discussion of a variety of Oriental drugs:
They have in Turkey a drink called coffa made of a berry of the same name, as black as soot, and of a strong scent, but not aromatical;…and they take it, and sit at it in their coffa-houses, which are like our taverns. This drink comforteth the brain and heart, and helpeth digestion. Certainly this berry coffa, the root and leaf betel, the leaf tobacco, and the tear of poppy (opium) of which the Turks are great takers (supposing it expelleth all fear), do all condense the spirits, and make them strong and aleger. But it seemeth they were taken after several manners; for coffa and opium are taken down, tobacco but in smoke, and betel is but champed in the mouth with a little lime.3
Notice that Bacon classifies “coffa” with opium, tobacco, and betel, as a fortifying and analeptic drug, not a beverage, and distinguishes these drugs as drugs only according to how they are taken, whether eaten, smoked, or chewed.
Other early references by Englishmen include remarks made in the 1626 correspondence of the twenty-year-old aristocrat Sir Thomas Herbert, who traveled in the company of Sir Dodmore Cotton, ambassador to the Persian shah. Herbert alludes to caffeine’s effects when he reports to his friends that Persian coffee “is said to be healthy, dispelling melancholy, drying tears, allaying anger, and producing cheerfulness.”4 Robert Burton, quoted in an epigraph to our introduction, added a reference to coffee in the 1632 edition of Anatomy of Melancholy, in the chapter called “Medicines.” Burton apparently heard about coffee sometime after the publication of the first edition in 1621, in which he does not mention the drink.
The English physicians of the day enjoyed at least a limited respect from their countrymen,5 and their approval of the caffeinated drinks helped caffeine to make quick progress in their homeland. The influence of these medical men is apparent in the first printed advertisement in England for a caffeinated beverage, appearing on May 19, 1657, in the Public Adviser, which lists the maladies it was believed to cure:
In Bartholomew Lane on the backside of the Old Exchange, the drink called Coffee, which is a very wholsom and Physical drink, having many excellent vertues… , fortifies the heat within, helpeth Digestion, quickneth the Spirits, maketh the heart lightsome, is good against eye-sores, Coughs, or Colds, Rhumes, Consumptions, Head-ach, Dropsie, Gout, Scurvy, Kings Evil, and many others is to be sold both in the morning and at three of the clock in the afternoon.6
The Great Instauration: The Oxford Coffee Club and the Birth of the Royal Society
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as now, university students were frequently travelers, aficionados of the exotic, and members of the avant-garde. It was such a student from abroad, Nathaniel Conopios, a Cretan, who was first documented to have prepared and served coffee in England. Before coming to England, Conopios was educated in the Greek Orthodox Church and served as primore to the patriarch of Constantinople. When his employer was murdered by strangulation, Conopios, to avoid meeting the same end, escaped to England. He presented his credentials to Archbishop Laud, who sponsored his entry to Balliol College, Oxford.
The eclectic scholar and Oxonian diarist John Evelyn, F.R.S., provides an eyewitness account of Conopios drinking coffee, the earliest dated record of this practice in England, in a retrospective entry for May 1637. He states:
There came in my Time to the College one Nathaniel Conopios, out of Greece sent into England…and was the first that I ever saw drink Caffé, not heard of then in England, nor till many years after made a common entertainment all over the nation, as since that the Chineze Thea; Sack & Tobacco being till these came in, the Universal liquor & Drougs.7
Anthony a Wood (1632–95), an historian of Oxford life, confirms Evelyn’s account, commenting that although Conopios was soon expelled from the university by “Parliamentry Visitors,” his brief tenure initiated the use of coffee there:
It was observed that while he continued in Balliol College he made the drink for his own use called Coffey, and usually drank it every morning, being the first, as the antients of that House have informed me, that was ever drank in Oxon.8
The story of the first coffeehouse in the Western world is known through the chronicles of the same Anthony Wood, published as Athenae Oxonienses: An Exact History of all the Writers and Bishops who have had their Education in the most ancient and famous University of Oxford from the Fifteenth Year of King Henry the Seventh Dom. 1500 to the end of the Year 1690 (London, 1692), which was written with considerable research assistance from the biographer John Aubrey. Wood was a “suspicious, lonely, intolerant” man, more at home with old books than with his fellows, and, as he admitted of himself, he was “a Person who delights to converse more with the Dead, than with the Living.”9 Because there were no existing records, he depended on personal interviews to provide the information he needed for his history. To collect much of this oral intelligence, the reclusive, cantankerous Wood relied on the affable Aubrey. Though Wood was much disliked by his contemporaries, today we owe him thanks for recording some of the most authoritative early accounts of coffeehouse life in England. Wood relates that in 1650 a Lebanese Jew arrived in Oxford in the service of a Turk, bringing with him both a supply of coffee beans and the knowledge of their use:
In this year a Jew by the name of Jacob opened a coffeehouse…at the Angel in the parish of St Peter in the East…[in this establishment, coffee was]…by some who delighted in noveltie, drank.10
A few years later, Jacob took his business to London, opening a coffeehouse in Holborn. Confusingly enough, he may have turned over the Angel to a man named “Jacobson,” a recent Jewish convert to Monophysite Christianity. Speaking of this latter “outlander,” Wood reports in an entry dated 1654:
Cirques Jacobson, a Jew and a Jacobite, born in the vicinity of Lebanon, sold coffee in a house at Oxford between Edmund Hall and Queen’s College Corner…at or neare the Angel within the East Gate of Oxon.
In another reference, Wood speaks of Jacobson as selling both coffee and chocolate, a bill of fare that was to become common in London over the next decade. Establishing what must be the world’s record for café longevity, the original coffee ro
om of Jacob’s Angel remained in use as a restaurant for more than three hundred years.
Within a decade, coffeehouses multiplied and became the rage at Oxford. Their success elicited opposition from some, who, like Wood, thought them inimical to rather than productive of serious intellectual activity. In 1661, Wood declared, the conversations of the University men of his day, instead of talk about academic matters, consisted of “nothing but news, and the affairs of Christendome is discoursed off and that also generally at coffeehouses.” A few years later, he blamed this cultural deterioration on the rise of the coffeehouse:
Why doth solid and serious learning decline, and few or none follow it now in the university? Answer: Because of coffeehouses, where they spend all their time; and in entertainments…in common chambers whole afternoons and thence to the coffeehouse.11
The Oxford University administrators apparently agreed with Wood and attempted, without much success, to curtail or eliminate the coffeehouse dissipation. In 1677, an order of the vice chancellor barred coffee vendors from opening after evening prayers on Sundays and also from selling the drink as a carry-out “to prevent people to drink it in their houses.” A few years after, the mayor tried to completely shut down the coffeehouses on Sunday. Despite these reactionary efforts, in Oxford, as elsewhere, coffee’s popularity continued to grow.
The ancient rivalry between Oxford and Cambridge seems, in respect of coffee usage, to have been settled in Oxford’s favor, for the first coffeehouse in Cambridge is not reported until the early 1660s. We read about it in a letter by Roger North in which he refers to the student days of Dr. John North (1645–83), an older relation who went on to become a master of Trinity College. While John North was an undergraduate, this coffeehouse, owned by a man named Kirk, became a favorite haunt for academics. It was also the publication site of The Trade of News, the first newsletter to appear as an alternative to the “publick Gazette.12
As a result of Kirk’s success, several new coffeehouses opened in Cambridge within a few years. Their popularity as student hangouts was noticed in the Cambridge University Statutes, which, on November 9, 1664, ordered, “all in pupillari statu that shall go to coffeehouses without their tutors leave shall be punished according to the statute for the haunters of taverns and ale-houses.” However, despite these reformatory efforts, the coffeehouse was destined to become as popular at Cambridge as it had already become at Oxford. In 1710, by which time the institution had clearly become well accepted, von Uffenbach, a young German visitor to Cambridge, speaks of a coffeehouse that was a favorite of the senior faculty and of an atmosphere marked more by collegiate congeniality than by dissipation, a place where after 3 o’clock in the afternoon, “you meet the chief Professors and doctors who read the papers over a cup of coffee and a pipe of tobacco, and converse on all subjects.”13
In 1655 a group of Oxford students and young Fellows persuaded Arthur Tillyard, a local apothecary, whom Wood refers to as an “Apothecary and Great Royalist,” to prepare and sell “coffey publickly in his House against All Soules College.” This Oxford Coffee Club, an informal confraternity of scientists and students, was the beginning of the Royal Society, which quickly became and remains today one of the leading scientific societies in the world. Its academic members had something in common with Timothy Leary, the Harvard professor who experimented with LSD, in that they were dabbling in the use of a new and powerful drug unlike anything their countrymen had ever seen. Surviving recorded accounts confirm that the heavily reboiled sediment-ridden coffee of the day was not enjoyed for its taste, but was consumed exclusively for its pharmacological benefits.
Although he admired many of its members, the dour Wood was contemptuous of the Oxford Coffee Club itself, perhaps because he had little interest in the scientific topics that furnished the subjects for its discussions. He evidently believed, in this case at least, that the whole was less than the sum of its illustrious parts, because he derisively records in his history that a club was built, “at Tillyards, where many pretended wits would meet and deride all others.” The first participants included Hans Sloane, founder of the British Museum, Sir Edmund Halley, the great astronomer, and Sir Isaac Newton, originator of the calculus, celestial mechanics, and the postulates of classical physics. The members’ avid curiosity prompted hands-on scientific investigation: Sloane, Halley, and Newton are said to have dissected a dolphin on a table in the coffeehouse before an amazed audience.
The Oxford Coffee Club quickly absorbed the membership of a competing science club, which had been set up concurrently by an Oxford tutor, Peter Sthael of Strasbourg. Christopher Wren (1632–1723), in Evelyn’s words, “the prodigious young scholar,” who had not yet become an architect but who was already reputed a philosopher, inventor, mathematician, and the man in whom many of the intellectual ideals of his age were embodied, was among those who were initiated into the Oxford Coffee Club at the time of this acquisition. As Wood explains:
After he [Sthael] had taken in another class of six, he translated himself to the house of Arthur Tillyard, an apothecary, the next door to that of John Cross (saving one, which is a tavern), where he continued teaching till 1662.
Perhaps energized by their peppy potations, the Oxford Coffee Club members soon took their coffee tippling to London. They may have joined forces with existing London groups that, from about 1645, had held weekly meetings to discuss science, or “what hath been called the New Philosophy of Experimental Philosophy.” These were probably the societies referred to by the chemist Sir Robert Boyle when he spoke of the “Invisible College.” In any case, it is known that the Oxonians convened in London sometime before 1662, for in that year they were granted a charter by Charles II as the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge. They soon settled into headquarters at Gresham College, taking their favorite drink at the Grecian coffeehouse, in Devereux Court, near Temple Bar. Wren, having come to London with the club, was soon appointed professor of astronomy at Gresham College.14
Early Coffeehouses: Penny Universities or Seminaries of Sedition?
Pasqua Rosée established the first coffeehouse in London in 1652, and his original handbill promoting coffee’s pharmacological benefits survives in the British Museum (See Appendix A). Pasqua’s story is told in a handwritten note by William Oldys (1696–1761), a celebrated English antiquary, bibliographer, and herald:
Mr. Edwards, a Turkey merchant, brought from Smyrna to London one Pasqua Rosée, a Ragusan youth, who prepared this drink for him every morning. But the novelty thereof drawing too much company to him, he allowed his said servant, with another of his son-in-law, to sell it publicly, and they set up the first coffeehouse in London, in St. Michael’s alley, in Cornhill. The sign was Pasqua Rosee’s own head.15
Such coffeehouse signs soon became mailing addresses for their regular customers. For example, a writer and friend of Rosée’s addressed verses “to Pasqua Rosee, at the Sign of his own Head and half his Body in St. Michael’s Alley, next the first CoffeeTent in London.” From a curious book, The Character of the Coffee-House by an Eye and Ear Witness (London, 1665), we learn that these signs, often mock-Oriental in style, had by the date of its publication become a common sight over the doorways of public houses throughout the city. Bryant Lillywhite, in his meticulously documented compendium, London Coffee Houses (London, 1963), records more than fifty houses using the Sign of the Turk’s Head. A desire to evoke the splendor of Suleiman the Magnificent (r. 1520–86), the fourth emperor of the Turks, inspired the use of this emblem by coffeehouse keepers both on signs and the tokens they commonly issued because of a shortage in the supply of small coins.
The partnership between Rosée, the immigrant servant, and Bowman, the coachman of Edwards’ son-in-law, prospered and was quickly imitated. In 1656, a barber and tavern keeper, James Farr, sometimes given as Ffarr, Farre, or Far, converted his pub into London’s second coffeehouse. According to Aubrey, this was the Rainbow on Fleet Street. It was so successful tha
t it aroused the jealousy of Farr’s taproom competitors. On December 21, 1657, they filed the “Wardmote Inquest presentment” under the section of Disorders and Annoys:
Item, we pr’sent James Ffarr, barber, for makinge and selling of a drink called coffee, whereby in makeing the same, he annoyeth his neighbours by evil smells and for keeping of ffire for the most part night and day, whereby his chimney and chambr. hath been sett on ffire, to the great danger and affrightment of his neighbours.16
Despite this opposition, the Rainbow carried on, surviving even the Great Fire of 1666 (which destroyed the buildings in St. Michael’s alley), and, when it was razed in 1859, another Rainbow was built and still stands on the same spot today. The original Rainbow was a favorite of Sir Henry Blount, often called “the father of the English coffeehouse,” a great champion of coffee as a temperance drink, of whom Aubrey writes:
Since he was [unreadable] years olde he dranke nothing but water or Coffee
I remember twenty yeares since he inveighed much against sending youths to the Universities—quaere if his sons were there—because they learnt there to be debaucht Drunkeness he much exclaimed against, but wenching he allowed. When Coffee first came in he was a great upholder of it, and hath ever since been a constant frequenter of Coffee houses, especially Mr. Farre at the Rainbowe, by Inner Temple Gate, and lately John’s coffeehouse, at Fuller’s rents.17
The World of Caffeine Page 23