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London Coffee Houses

© James Dixon

In Bartholomew Lane, on the backside of the old Exchange, the drink called Coffee, which is a very wholesome and Physical drink, having many excellent virtues, closes the orifice of the Stomach, fortifies the heat within, helpeth Digestion, quickeneth the Spirits, maketh, the heart lightsom, is good against Eye-sores, Coughs or Colds, Rhumes, Consumptions, Headache, Dropsie, Gout, Scurvy, King's Evil, and many others, is to be sold both in the morning; and at three of the clock in the afternoon. - an advert printed in the Public Advertiser, 19.5.1657

The first English coffee-house opened in Oxford in 1650, followed two years later by one in London. At this time coffee cost nearly $30 per pound because it was costly to import and subject to excise duty. Not surprisingly, the coffee was heavily watered down and by today's standards and not particularly pleasant to drink. However, it was not the coffee that attracted people to coffee-houses.

One contemporary described coffee houses as "a dirty, dissipated shed where they dole out a spartan mixture of which it is difficult to ascertain the ingredients but which is served as coffee." Coffee-houses were attractive because they provided a place where the rich and poor could learn about and discuss political issues, an illegal activity at the time. They became a the focus for the dissemination of political information and people could mingle freely to discuss manuscript literature, especially political poems which circulated in the underground world of the coffee-houses.

In the early 1660s the keeper of a coffee house in Bread Street met daily with a clerk of the House of Commons, who passed on an account of what had happened that day in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords. The keeper then made this information available to his patrons.

During the 1660s and 1670s the government feared coffee-houses, believing them to be the great resort not only of "idle and disaffected persons, but also of tradesman, who wasted of their time which should have been spent at their work." There was even a women's petition against coffee in 1974 declaring it "unhealthy for men to spend so much time away from their homes" and coffee makes "men as unfruitful as the deserts whence that unhappy berry is said to be brought."

By the end of 1675 the government decided to try and suppress the coffee-houses, and a proclamation to this effect was issued on new year's day 1675 describing coffee-houses as "seminaries of sedition."

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