On the title-page of Middleton’s comedy, “The Roaring Girle,” 1611, is a picture of the heroine, Moll Cutpurse, in man’s apparel, smoking a pipe, from which a great cloud of smoke is issuing.

In the record of an early libel action brought in the court of the Archdeacon of Essex, some domestic scenes of 1621 are vividly represented.  We need not trouble about the libel action, but two of the dramatis personae were a certain George Thresher, who sold beer and tobacco at his “shopp in Romford,” and a good friend and customer of his named Elizabeth Savage, who, sad to say, was described as much given to “stronge drincke and tobacco.”  In the course of the trial, on June 8, 1621, Mistress Savage had to tell her tale, part of which is reported as follows: 

“George Thresher kept a shoppe in Romford and sold tobacco there.  She came divers tymes to his shoppe to buy tobacco there; and sometimes, with company of her acquaintance, did take tobacco and drincke beere in the hall of George Thresher’s house, sometimes with the said George, and sometimes with his father and his brothers.  And sometimes shee hath had a joint of meat and a cople of chickens dressed there; and shee, and they, and some other of her freinds, have dined there together, and paid their share for their dinner, shee being many times more willing to dine there than at an inne or taverne.”

Elizabeth was evidently of a sociable turn, and though she turned her nose up at a tavern, there seems to have been little difference between these festive dinners at Mr. Thresher’s “shopp,” where Mistress Savage indulged her taste for ale and tobacco, and similar pleasures at an inn or tavern.

Some of the references to women smokers occur in curious connexions.  When one George Glapthorne, of Whittlesey, J.P., was returned to Parliament for the Isle of Ely in 1654, his return was petitioned against, and among other charges it was said that just before the election, in a certain Martin’s ale-house, he had promised to give Mrs. Martin a roll of tobacco, and had also undertaken to grant her husband a licence to brew, thus unduly influencing and corrupting the electors.

Women smokers were not confined to any one class of society.  The Rev. Giles Moore, Rector of Horsted Keynes, Sussex, made a note in his journal and account book in 1665 of “Tobacco for my wyfe, 3d.”  As from other entries in Mr. Moore’s account book we know that two ounces cost him one shilling, we may wonder what Mrs. Moore was going to do with her half-ounce.  There is no other reference to tobacco for her in the journal and account book.  Possibly she was not a smoker at all, but needed the tobacco for some medicinal purpose.  There is ample evidence to show that in the seventeenth century extraordinary medicinal virtues continued to be attributed to the “divine weed.”