Tobacco-pipe making was a flourishing industry at this period and throughout the seventeenth and following century in most of the chief provincial towns and cities as well as in London.
"Old English 'clays,'" says Mr. T.P. Cooper, "are exceedingly interesting, as most of them are branded with the maker's initials. Monograms and designs were stamped or moulded upon the bowls and on the stems, but more generally upon the spur or flat heel of the pipe. Many pipes display on the heels various forms of lines, hatched and milled, which were perhaps the earliest marks of identification adopted by the pipe-makers. In a careful examination of the monograms we are able to identify the makers of certain pipes found in quantities at various places, by reference to the freeman and burgess rolls and parish registers. During the latter half of the seventeenth century English pipes were presented by colonists in America to the Indians; they subsequently became valuable as objects of barter or part purchase value in exchange for land. In 1677 one hundred and twenty pipes and one hundred Jew's harps were given for a strip of country near Timber Creek, in New Jersey. William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, purchased a tract of land, and 300 pipes were included in the articles given in the exchange."
The French traveller, Sorbière, who visited London in 1663, declared that the English were naturally lazy and spent half their time in taking tobacco. They smoked after meals, he observed, and conversed for a long time. "There is scarce a day passes," he wrote, "but a Tradesman goes to the Ale-house or Tavern to smoke with some of his Friends, and therefore Public Houses are numerous here, and Business goes on but slowly in the Shops"; but, curiously enough, he makes no mention of coffee-houses. A little later they were too common and too much frequented to be overlooked. An English writer on thrift in 1676 said that it was customary for a "mechanic tradesman" to go to the coffee-house or ale-house in the morning to drink his morning's draught, and there he would spend twopence and consume an hour in smoking and talking, spending several hours of the evening in similar fashion.
Country gentlemen smoked just as much as town mechanics and tradesmen. In 1688 Hervey, afterwards Earl of Bristol, wrote to Mr. Thomas Cullum, of Hawsted Place, desiring "to be remembered by the witty smoakers of Hawsted." A later Cullum, Sir John, published in 1784 a "History and Antiquities of Hawsted," and in describing Hawsted Place, which was rebuilt about 1570, says that there was a small apartment called the smoking-room—"a name," he says, "it acquired probably soon after it was built; and which it retained with good reason, as long as it stood." I should like to know on what authority Sir John Cullum could have made the assertion that the room was called the smoking-room from so early a date as the end of the sixteenth century. No mention in print of a smoking-room has been found for the purposes of the Oxford Dictionary earlier than 1689. In Shadwell's "Bury Fair" of that date Lady Fantast says to her husband, Mr. Oldwit, who loves to tell of his early meetings with Ben Jonson and other literary heroes of a bygone day, "While all the Beau Monde, as my daughter says, are with us in the drawing-room, you have none but ill-bred, witless drunkards with you in your smoking-room." As Mr. Oldwit himself, in another scene of the same play, says to his friends, "We'll into my smoking-room and sport about a brimmer," there was probably some excuse for his wife's remark. These country smoking-rooms were known in later days as stone-parlours, the floor being flagged for safety's sake; and the "stone-parlour" in many a squire's house was the scene of much conviviality, including, no doubt, abundant smoking.
The arrival of coffee and the establishment of coffee-houses opened a new field for the victories of tobacco. The first house was opened in St. Michael's Alley, Cornhill, in 1652. Others soon followed, and in a short time the new beverage had captured the town, and coffee-houses had been opened in every direction. They sold many things besides coffee, and served a variety of purposes, but primarily they were temples of talk and good-fellowship. The buzz of conversation and the smoke of tobacco alike filled the rooms which were the forerunners of the club-houses of a much later day.