Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 7:

The London clergy seem to have smoked at one time as a matter of course at their gatherings at Sion College, their headquarters. An entry in the records under date February 14, 1682, relating to a Court Meeting, runs: "Paid Maddocks [the Messenger] for Attendinge and Pipes 6d." How long pipes continued to be concomitants of the meetings of the College's General Court I cannot say; but smoking and the annual dinners were long associated. At the anniversary feast in 1743 there were two tables to provide for, the total number of guests being about thirty, and two "corses" to each. The cost of the food, as Canon Pearce tells us in his excellent and entertaining book on the College and its Library, was £19 15s., or rather more than 13s. a head. The bill for wines and tobacco amounted to five guineas, or about 3s. 6d. a head, and for this modest sum the thirty convives enjoyed eleven gallons of "Red Oporto," one of "White Lisbon," and three of "Mountain," to the accompaniment of two pounds of tobacco (at 3s. 4d. the pound) smoked in "half a groce of pipes" (at 1s.).

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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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