Tobacco in English Social Life 71 



that scorches the face and tobacco the gunpowder 

 that blows it up.' James held that smoking was a 

 great incentive to drunkenness — an idea still errone- 

 ously held — and among the regulations imposed on 

 a Boniface of the period his license enacted : ' Item : 

 you shall not utter nor willingly suffer to be uttered, 

 drunke or taken any tobacco within your house, 

 cellar, or other place thereunto belonging.' 



A further glimpse of the opinion then held in some 

 quarters of tobacco is seen in the regulations laid 

 down by Archbishop Harsnett in 1629 for his school 

 at Chigwell in Essex. The master was to ' be a man 

 of sound religion, neither papist nor puritan, of a 

 grave behaviour, and sober and honest conversation, 

 no tippler or haunter of alehouses, and no puffer of 

 tobacco.' Other ecclesiastics did not hold the same 

 opinion of the herb. Fletcher, Bishop of London, 

 imprisoned by Elizabeth for taking unto himself a 

 wife, solaced his durance vile with a pipe, and died in 

 1596 'while sitting in his chair taking tobacco.' In 

 1680 Aubrey said that ' within these thirty-five years 

 it was considered scandalous for a divine to take 

 tobacco.' But a writer ten years earlier admitted 

 that though tobacco ' be an heathenish word, it is 

 a great help to Christian meditations, which is the 

 reason I suppose that recommends it to your parsons, 

 the generality of whom can no more write a sermon 

 without a pipe in their mouths than a concordance in 

 their hands.' 



The use of tobacco was not confined to the lower 

 and uneducated classes. Dr. Cheynell, of Oxford, 

 did not flinch from upholding the virtues of tobacco 



