To this deterioration, our witty Knight, as his convivial hours were usually spent in taverns, was, of course, peculiarly subject. Houses of this description were very numerous in our author's days, and, there is reason to think, fully as much frequented as are similar places in the present age. The Boars Head Tavern in Eastcheap, and the Mermaid in Cornhill, immortalised in the writings of Shakspeare, Ben Jonson, and Fletcher, are enumerated in a long list of taverns given us in an old black-letter quarto, entitled Newes from Bartholomew Fayre[133:A]; and to these we must add, as of equal poetical celebrity, the Tabard Inn or Tavern, noticed by Stowe, in 1598, as the most ancient in Southwark[133:B], and endeared to us as the "Hosterie" of the never-to-be-forgotten pilgrims, in that delightful work, the Canterbury Tales of Chaucer.
A tavern, says a writer, who lived in these times, and who published in 1628, "is the common consumption of the afternoon, and the murderer or maker-away of a rainy day.—To give you the total reckoning of it; it is the busy man's recreation, the idle man's business, the melancholy man's sanctuary, the stranger's welcome, the inns-of-court man's entertainment, the scholar's kindness, and the citizen's
curtesy. It is the study of sparkling wits, and a cup of canary their book."[134:A]
At these places were regular ordinaries, which Decker tells us were of three kinds; namely, "an ordinary of the largest reckoning, whither most of your courtly gallants do resort;" a twelve-penny ordinary frequented by "the justice of peace or young knight;" and a three-penny ordinary, "to which your London usurer, your stale batchelor, and your thrifty attorney do resort."[134:B]
From the same author we also learn, that it was usual in taverns, especially in the city, to send presents of wine from one room to another, as a complimentary mark of friendship:—"Enquire," directs he, "what gallants sup in the next room; and, if they be any of your acquaintance, do not you, after the city fashion, send them in a pottle of wine and your name."[134:C] This custom, too, is recorded by Shakspeare, as a mode of introduction to a stranger, where Bardolph, at the Garter Inn, Windsor, addressing Falstaff, says,—"Sir John, there's one master Brook below would fain speak with you, and be acquainted with you; and hath sent your worship a morning's draught of sack[134:D];" a passage which Mr. Malone has illustrated by the following nearly contemporary anecdote:—"Ben Jonson," he relates, "was at a tavern, and in comes Bishop Corbet, (but not so then,) into the next room. Ben Jonson calls for a quart of raw wine, and gives it to the tapster. 'Sirrah,' says he, 'carry this to the gentleman in the next chamber, and tell him, I sacrifice my service to him.' The fellow did, and in those words. 'Friend,' says Dr. Corbet, 'I thank him for his love; but 'pr'ythee tell him from me that he is mistaken; for sacrifices are always burnt."[134:E]
The most singular and offensive practice, however, at least to
modern manners, which occurred at this period in taverns, a practice common, too, even among the higher ranks, is likewise related by Decker, when giving advice "How a Gallant should behave himself in an Ordinary" of the first class:—"You may rise in dinner time," he tells his "courtly gallant," "to ask for a closestool, protesting to all the gentlemen that it costs you an hundred pounds a year in physick, besides the annual pension which your wife allows her doctor; and, if you please, you may, as your great French lord doth, invite some special friend of yours from the table to hold discourse with you as you sit in that withdrawing chamber; from whence being returned again to the board, you shall sharpen the wits of all the eating gallants about you, and do them great pleasure to ask what pamphlets or poems a man might think fittest to wipe his tail with."[135:A] Gross as this habit now appears to us, it was prevalent upon the continent until nearly the close of the last century.
To the reign of Elizabeth is to be attributed the introduction of a luxury, which has since become almost universal, the custom of using, or, as it was then called, of taking tobacco. This herb, which was first brought into England by Sir Francis Drake, about the year 1586, met with an early and violent opposition, and gave birth to a multitude of invectives and satires, among which the most celebrated is King James's "Counterblast to Tobacco." This monarch entertained the most rooted antipathy to the use of tobacco in any form, and closes his treatise by asserting that it is "a custom loathsome to the eye, hatefull to the nose, harmfull to the braine, dangerous to the lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stigian smoake of the pit that is bottomless."[135:B] He also
tells us in another work, that were he to invite the devil to a dinner, "he should have these three dishes—1. a pig; 2. a poole of ling and mustard; and 3. a pipe of tobacco for digesture."[136:A]
Tobacco may be said, indeed, to have made many inroads in domestic cleanliness, and, on this account, to have deservedly incurred the dislike of that large portion of the female sex on whom the charge of household economy devolved. "Surely," says James, "smoke becomes a kitchin farre better than a dining chamber," a remark which is as applicable now as it was then; but we cannot help smiling when he adds, with his usual credulity, "and yet it makes a kitchin also oftentimes in the inward parts of men, soyling and infecting them, with an unctuous and oily kind of soote, as hath bene found in some great Tobacco takers, that after their death were opened."[136:B]