Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 14:

Evidently the intention was to make things pleasant for the royal foe of tobacco during his visit. It would appear to be a fair inference from the wording of this prohibition that when the King was not at Cambridge, graduates and scholars and students could resume their liberty to resort to inns, taverns, ale-houses and tobacco-shops, and presumably to take tobacco in St. Mary's Church, without question.

The prohibition, in the regulation quoted, of smoking in St. Mary's Church, referred, it may be noted, to the Act which was held therein. Candidates for degrees, or graduates to display their proficiency, publicly maintained theses; and this performance was termed keeping or holding an Act.
It is, of course, conceivable that the prohibition, so far as the church and Trinity College Hall were concerned, was against the taking of snuff rather than against smoking; but the phrase "to take tobacco" was at that time quite commonly applied to smoking, and, considering the extraordinary and immoderate use of tobacco soon after its introduction, it is not in the least incredible that pipes were lighted, at least occasionally, even in sacred buildings.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 13:

King James I in his famous "Counter-blaste to Tobacco," hinted that the husband, by his indulgence in the habit, might "reduce thereby his delicate, wholesome, and cleane complexioned wife to that extremitie, that either shee must also corrupt her sweete breath therewith, or else resolve to live in a perpetuall stinking torment." His Majesty's style was forcible, if not elegant. There are also one or two references in the early dramatists. In Ben Jonson's "Every Man in his Humour," for instance, which was first acted in 1598, six years before King James blew his royal "Counter-blaste," Cob, the water-bearer, says that he would have any "man or woman that should but deal with a tobacco-pipe," immediately whipped. Prynne, in his attack on the stage, declared that women smoked pipes in theatres; but the truth of this statement may well be doubted. The habit was probably far from general among women, although Joshua Sylvester, a doughty opponent of the weed, was pleased to declare that "Fooles of all Sexes haunt it," i.e. tobacco.

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