At the time of the Restoration tobacco-boxes which were considered suitable to the occasion were made in large numbers.  The outside of the lid bore a portrait of the Royal Martyr; within the lid was a picture of the restored king, His Majesty King Charles II; while on the inside of the bottom of the box was a representation of Oliver Cromwell leaning against a post, a gallows-tree over his head, and about his neck a halter tied to the tree, while beside him was pictured the devil, wide-mouthed.  Another form of memorial tobacco-box is described in an advertisement in the London Gazette of September 15, 1687.  This was a silver box which had either been “taken out of the Bull’s Head Tavern, Cheapside, or left in a Hackney Coach.”  It was “ingraved on the Lid with a Coat of Arms, etc., and a Medal of Charles the First fastened to the inside of the Lid, and engraved on the inside ’to Jacob Smith it doth belong, at the Black Lyon in High Holborn, date August 1671.’”

Smokers of the period were often curious in tobacco-boxes.  Mr. Richard Stapley, gentleman, of Twineham, Sussex, whose diary is full of curious information, was presented in 1691 by his friend Mr. John Hill with a “tobacco-box made of tortoise.”  Seven years earlier Stapley had sold to Hill his silver tobacco-box for 10s. in cash—­the rest of the value of the box, he noted, “I freely forgave him for writing at our first commission for me, and for copying of answers and ye like in our law concerns; so yt I reckon I have as good as 30s. for my box:  5s. he gave me, and 5s. more he promised to pay me ... and I had his steel box with the bargain, and full of smoake.”  Apparently Mr. Hill’s secretarial labours were valued at 20s.  This same Sussex squire bought a pound of tobacco in December 1685 for 20d., which seems decidedly cheap, and in the following year a 5 lb. box for 7s. 6d.—­which was cheaper still.

A Sussex rector, the Rev. Giles Moore, of Horsted Keynes, in 1656 and again in 1662, paid 1s. for two ounces of tobacco, i.e. at the rate of 8s. per lb.  Presumably the rector bought the more expensive Spanish tobacco and the squire the cheaper Virginian.  At the annual parish feast held at St. Bride’s, Fleet Street, London, on May 24, 1666, the expenses included 3d. for tobacco for twenty or more adults.  This too was doubtless Virginian or colonial tobacco.  The North Elmham Church Accounts (Norfolk) for 1673 show that 12s. 4d. was paid for “Butter, cheese, Bread, Cakes, Beere and Tobacco and Tobacco Pipes at the goeing of the Rounds of the Towne.”  On the occasion of a similar perambulation of the parish boundaries in 1714-15 the churchwardens paid for beer, pipes and tobacco, cakes and wine.  The account-books of the church and parish of St. Stephen, Norwich, for 1696-97 show 2s. as the price of a pound of tobacco.  These entries, and many others of similar import, show that at feasts and at social and convivial gatherings of all kinds, tobacco maintained its ascendancy.