Hentzner, the German traveller, who visited London in 1598, speaks of smoking being customary among the audience at plays, who were also supplied with “fruits, such as apples, pears and nuts, according to the season, carried about to be sold, as well as ale and wine.”  He was struck with the universal prevalence of the tobacco-habit.  Not only at plays, but “everywhere else,” he says, the “English are constantly smoking tobacco,” and then he proceeds to describe how they did it:  “They have pipes on purpose made of clay, into the further end of which they put the herb, so dry that it may be rubbed into powder; and putting fire to it, they draw the smoak into their mouths, which they puff out again through their nostrils, like funnels, along with it plenty of phlegm and defluxions from the head.”  This suggests that the unpleasant and quite unnecessary habit of spitting was common with these early smokers, a suggestion which is amply supported by other contemporary evidence.

Tobacco was smoked by all classes and in almost all places.  It was smoked freely in the streets.  In some verses prefixed to an edition of Skelton’s “Elinour Rumming” which appeared in 1624, the ghost of Skelton, who was poet-laureate to King Henry VIII, was made to say that he constantly saw smoking: 

As I walked between Westminster Hall And the Church of Saint Paul, And so thorow the citie, Where I saw and did pitty My country men’s cases, With fiery-smoke faces, Sucking and drinking A filthie weede stinking.

Tobacco-selling was sometimes curiously combined with other trades.  A Fleet Street tobacconist of this time was also a dealer in worsted stockings.  A mercer of Mansfield who died at the beginning of 1624, and who apparently carried on business also at Southwell, had a considerable stock of tobacco.  In the Inventory of all his “cattalles and goods” which is dated 24 January 1624, there is included “It. in Tobacco 19.li 0. 0.”  Nineteen pounds’ worth of tobacco, considering the then value of money, was no small stock for a mercer-tobacconist to carry.

But the apothecaries were the most usual salesmen, and their shops and the ordinaries were the customary day meeting-places for the more fashionable smokers.  The taverns and inns, however, were also filled with smoke, and taverns were frequented by men of all social grades.  Dekker speaks of the gallant leaving the tavern at night when “the spirit of wine and tobacco walkes” in his train.  On the occasion of the accession of James I, 1603, when London was given up to rejoicing and revelry, we are told that “tobacconists [i.e. smokers] filled up whole Tavernes.”

King James himself is an unwilling witness to the popularity of tobacco.  He tells us that a man could not heartily welcome his friend without at once proposing a smoke.  It had become, he says, a point of good-fellowship, and he that would refuse to take a pipe among his fellows was accounted “peevish and no good company.”  “Yea,” he continues, with rising indignation, “the mistress cannot in a more mannerly kind entertain her servant than by giving him out of her fair hand a pipe of tobacco.”