These seventeenth-century pipes were largely made in Holland of pipe-clay imported from England—­to the disgust and loss of English pipe-makers.  In 1663 the Company of Tobacco-Pipe Makers petitioned Parliament “to forbid the export of tobacco pipe clay, since by the manufacture of pipes in Holland their trade is much damaged.”  Further, they asked for “the confirmation of their charter of government so as to empower them to regulate abuses, as many persons engage in the trade without licence.”  The Company’s request was granted; but in the next year they again found it necessary to come to Parliament, showing “the great improvement in their trade since their incorporation, 17 James I, and their threatened ruin because cooks, bakers, and ale-house keepers and others make pipes, but so unskilfully that they are brought into disesteem; they request to be comprehended in the Statute of Labourers of 5 Elizabeth, so that none may follow the trade who have not been apprentices seven years.”

Tobacco-pipe making was a flourishing industry at this period and throughout the seventeenth and following century in most of the chief provincial towns and cities as well as in London.

“Old English ‘clays,’” says Mr. T.P.  Cooper, “are exceedingly interesting, as most of them are branded with the maker’s initials.  Monograms and designs were stamped or moulded upon the bowls and on the stems, but more generally upon the spur or flat heel of the pipe.  Many pipes display on the heels various forms of lines, hatched and milled, which were perhaps the earliest marks of identification adopted by the pipe-makers.  In a careful examination of the monograms we are able to identify the makers of certain pipes found in quantities at various places, by reference to the freeman and burgess rolls and parish registers.  During the latter half of the seventeenth century English pipes were presented by colonists in America to the Indians; they subsequently became valuable as objects of barter or part purchase value in exchange for land.  In 1677 one hundred and twenty pipes and one hundred Jew’s harps were given for a strip of country near Timber Creek, in New Jersey.  William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, purchased a tract of land, and 300 pipes were included in the articles given in the exchange.”

The French traveller, Sorbiere, who visited London in 1663, declared that the English were naturally lazy and spent half their time in taking tobacco.  They smoked after meals, he observed, and conversed for a long time.  “There is scarce a day passes,” he wrote, “but a Tradesman goes to the Ale-house or Tavern to smoke with some of his Friends, and therefore Public Houses are numerous here, and Business goes on but slowly in the Shops”; but, curiously enough, he makes no mention of coffee-houses.  A little later they were too common and too much frequented to be overlooked.  An English writer on thrift in 1676 said that it was customary for a “mechanic tradesman” to go to the coffee-house or ale-house in the morning to drink his morning’s draught, and there he would spend twopence and consume an hour in smoking and talking, spending several hours of the evening in similar fashion.