The World of Caffeine (27 page)
Read The World of Caffeine Online
Authors: Bonnie K. Bealer Bennett Alan Weinberg
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
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 that 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
Though Aubrey praises the Rainbow as an asylum of sobriety, this early London coffeehouse was also the scene of political turbulence. On May 8,1666, Samuel Speed (d. 1681), a stationer, bookseller, and writer headquartered at the Rainbow, was arrested on charges of publishing and selling treasonable books.
18
Although the Rainbow continued doing business without interruption by the king’s Proclamation of 1675, discussed below, “Farr’s Coffee-house the Rainbow near the Temple” and Blount appear in a list of suspicious houses and persons published in 1679.
19
A good idea of how coffee was being enjoyed in these Restoration coffeehouses can be gotten from this London recipe from 1662:
To make the drink that is now much used called coffee
The coffee-berries are to be bought at any Druggist, about three shillings the pound; Take what quantity you please, and over a charcoal fire, in an old pudding-pan or frying-pan, keep them always stirring until they be quite black, and when you crack one with your teeth that it is black within as it is without; yet if you exceed, then do you waste the Oyl, which only makes the drink; and if less, then will it not deliver its Oyl, which makes the drink; and if you should continue fire till it be white, it will then make no coffee, but only give you its salt. The Berry prepared as above, beaten and forced through a Lawn Sive, is then fit for use.
Take clean water, and boil one third of it away what quantity soever it be, and it is fit for use. Take one quart of this prepared Water, put in it one ounce of your prepared coffee, and boil it gently one-quarter of an hour, and it is fit for your use; drink onequarter of a pint as hot as you can sip it.
20
In the beginning, these coffeehouses served only coffee, but soon chocolate, tea, and sherbet were added to the bill of fare. Although some coffeehouses served ale and beer as early as 1669, the position of the coffeehouses as bastions of temperance was not seriously eroded until at least twenty years later. Elford the younger, around 1689, said that “Drams and cordial waters were to be had only at coffeehouses newly set up.” During this time, private consumption of the caffeinated beverages was beginning to take hold, as evidenced in a 1664 advertisement for the Grecian coffeehouse, which announced the sale of chocolate and tea and also offered free lessons in how to prepare them.
One of the new coffeehouses was Miles’, in New Palace Yard, Westminster, at the Sign of the Turk’s Head. In 1659, the famous Coffee Club of the Rota convened there. The Rota was one of the first clubs in England, “a free and open Society of ingenious gentlemen” who were happy to be free from the tyranny of Cromwell. Aubrey, Andrew Marvell, and possibly even John Milton were members of this group, which Pepys called simply “the Coffee club,” and which became proverbial for its literary censures in the phrase “damn beyond the fury of the Rota.” Its founder, the political writer, James Harrington (1611–77), held meetings nightly.
21
The Rota is also famous as the forum of the first ballot box in England, a novelty that created even more excitement among its members than coffee did.
22
For all the hubbub, the club burned itself out quickly. Pepys describes what was to be its final meeting, in 1660: “After a small debate upon the question whether learned or unlearned subjects are best, the club broke up very poorly, and I do not think they will meet any more.”
After the Great Fire of 1666, many new and larger coffeehouses sprang up all over the city. Ironically, because of their reputation as refuges for sobriety, they attracted increasing numbers of disreputable fugitives from the taverns, who sought to remediate their reputations by changing their venue. As a result, many of the distinctive features of the original coffeehouses began to become effaced. Of this pejoration we shall speak more later. However, any novel social practice or institution, should it meet with quick acceptance by many, will incite disapproval from some. The history of coffee drinking and coffeehouses is no exception.
In 1674, perhaps after spending too many lonely nights at home while their husbands regaled at the coffeehouses, which, according to the custom of the English, were forbidden to women, the wives of London, echoing the Persian Mahmud Kasnin’s sultana’s complaint, published
The Women’s Petition against Coffee, representing to public consideration the grand
inconveniences accruing to their sex from the excessive use of the drying and enfeebling Liquor,
a broadside which asserted that coffee made men