In 17th- and 18th-century England, coffeehouses served as public social places where men would meet for conversation and commerce. A penny bought admission and a cup of coffee. During the mid-17th century, travellers introduced coffee as a beverage; previously it had been consumed mainly for its supposed medicinal properties. Coffeehouses also served tea and hot chocolate as well as light meals.

The historian Brian Cowan describes English coffeehouses as "places where people gathered to drink coffee, learn the news of the day, and perhaps to meet with other local residents and discuss matters of mutual concern". The absence of alcohol created an atmosphere allowing more serious conversation than in an alehouse. Coffeehouses also played an important role in the development of financial markets and newspapers.

Topics discussed included politics and political scandals, daily gossip, fashion, current events, and debates surrounding philosophy and the natural sciences; political groups frequently used coffeehouses as meeting places. Historians of the 17th and 18th centuries often associate English coffeehouses with the intellectual and cultural history of the Age of Enlightenment; they were an alternate sphere, supplementary to the university.

Origins

Early European knowledge of coffee Europeans first learned about coffee consumption through exotic accounts of travels in the empires of Asia. According to Aytoun Ellis, travellers recounted how men would consume an intoxicating liquor, "black in colour and made by infusing the powdered berry of a plant that flourished in Arabia". Native men consumed this liquid "all day long and far into the night, with no apparent desire for sleep but with mind and body continuously alert, men talked and argued, finding in the hot black liquor a curious stimulus quite unlike that produced by fermented juice of grape".

Brian Cowan describes how initial European perceptions of the oriental consumption of coffee were gradually transformed, and how the English "virtuoso fascination with the exotic" was perhaps motivated by a "utilitarian project for the advancement of learning and the national interest".

Experiments with coffee led to supposed cures for ailments such as "head-melancholy", gout, scurvy, smallpox and excessive drunkenness. But some were cautious of the properties of coffee, fearing that it had more unfavourable than positive effects, and that excessive consumption could result in languor, paralysis, heart conditions and trembling limbs, as well as low-spiritedness and nervous disorders.

Early Oxford coffeehouses

During the mid-17th century, coffee was no longer viewed solely as a medicinal plant; and this change in perception created a novel opportunity for serving coffee to patrons. A ripe location for this was Oxford, with its unique combination of exotic scholarship interests and energetic experimental community. Thus the first English coffeehouse was established in 1650 at the Angel coaching inn in Oxford by a Jewish entrepreneur named Jacob.

Oxford was important for the creation of a distinctive coffeehouse culture throughout the 1650s. The first coffeehouses established there offered an alternative to structural academic learning, while still being frequented by the English virtuosi, who pursued advances in human knowledge. The coffeehouses would charge a penny for admission, which would include access to newspapers and conversation. Reporters called "runners" went around to the coffeehouses announcing the latest news.

This environment attracted an eclectic group of people who met and mingled. In a society that placed a high importance on class and economic status, the coffeehouses were unique because the patrons were from all levels of society. Anyone who had a penny could come inside. Students from the universities also frequented the coffeehouses – in Anthony Wood's opinion, squandering time better spent on their studies.

Brian Cowan states: "The coffeehouse was a place for like-minded scholars to congregate, to read, as well as to learn from and to debate with each other, but was emphatically not a university institution, and the discourse there was of a far different order than any university tutorial."

Contemporary evaluations varied. A contrasting pair are: "So great a Universitie / I think there ne're was any; / In which you may a Schoolar be / For spending of a Penny." (1672) "A School it is without a Master. Education is here taught without Discipline. Learning (if it be possible) is here insinuated without Method." (1661)

As described in the memoirs of Anthony Wood and John Evelyn, the earliest coffeehouses had an air of exclusivity, catering to the virtuosi. Early Oxford coffeehouse virtuosi included Christopher Wren, Peter Pett, Thomas Millington, Timothy Baldwin, and John Lamphire.

These Oxford coffeehouses helped set the tone for future coffeehouses in England, differing from alehouses and taverns. "The coffeehouse was a place for 'virtuosi' and 'wits', rather than for the plebes or roués who were commonly portrayed as typical patrons of the alcoholic drinking houses." Ellis concludes, "[Oxford's coffeehouses'] power lay in the fact that they were in daily touch with the people. Their purpose was something more than to provide a meeting-place for social intercourse and gossip; there was serious and sober discussion on all matters of common interest."

Although most works on the early English coffeehouses say that Jacob's in Oxford was the first, this claim has been questioned. Markman Ellis writes that Anthony Wood originally wrote that coffee was first drunk in Oxford in 1650, and at some time in 1654 or 1655 that coffee was "publickly solde at or neare the Angel within the East Gate of Oxon ... by an outlander or a Jew". In his revision of 1671 Wood altered this to "Jacob a Jew opened a coffey house at the Angel in the parish of S. Peter, in the East Oxon", a claim, Ellis says, "conjecturally dated by Wood's editor Andrew Clark at 'March 1651' but there is no evidence to support this earlier date...."

Early London coffeehouses

The Oxford-style coffeehouses, which acted as centres for social intercourse, gossip, and scholastic interest, spread quickly to London, where coffeehouses became part of popular and political culture. Pasqua Rosée, a native of Smyrna (western Turkey) who was a servant of a Levant Company merchant named Daniel Edwards, established the first London coffeehouse in 1652. London's second coffeehouse was established by James Farr in 1657 at Temple Bar and named the Rainbow.

The London coffeehouses do not seem to have been popular until the mid-1660s or later. When James Harrington's Rota club began to meet in a London coffeehouse known as the Turk's Head, to debate "matters of politics and philosophy", coffeehouse popularity began to rise. This club had as its raison d'être the art of debate, "contentious but still civil, learned but not didactic". However:

it was not entirely the "free and open academy unto all comers" that the club's own rhetoric proclaimed it to be. There was an admission fee: Samuel Pepys paid the not inconsiderable sum of 18 to become a member of the club; and just as important were the informal means of exclusion which obtained....

Despite Rota's banishment after the Restoration of the monarchy, its members' "discursive ideal" set the tone for coffeehouse conversation throughout the rest of the 17th century. By the early 18th century, London boasted more coffeehouses than any other city in the western world, except for Constantinople.

Popular period

Character

During the third quarter of the 17th century, each coffeehouse tended to have its own character, and writers of contemporaneous descriptions of each "seem anxious to impart to a curious and much wider public a knowledge of the town's latest noveltie and something of its unique attraction". A relaxed atmosphere, their relative cheapness and the frequency with which they could be visited contributed to sociability and their rise in demand.

Neither London's plague of 1665 nor its fire of 1666 caused their popularity to wane. Ellis explains:

Londoners could not be entirely subdued and there were still some who climbed the narrow stairs to their favourite coffeehouses although no longer prepared to converse freely with strangers. Before entering they looked quite around the room, and would not approach even close acquaintances without first inquiring the health of the family at home and receiving assurances of their well-being.

English coffeehouses acted as public houses in which all who paid the price of a penny were welcome. Ellis describes the variety of men present in a typical coffeehouse in the post-Restoration period: "Like Noah's ark, every kind of creature in every walk of life [frequented coffeehouses]. They included a town wit, a grave citizen, a worthy lawyer, a worship justice, a reverend nonconformist, and a voluble sailor." Some historians claim that coffeehouses acted as democratic bodies due to their inclusive nature: "Whether a man was dressed in a ragged coat and found himself seated between a belted earl and a gaitered bishop it made no difference; moreover he was able to engage them in conversation and know that he would be answered civilly."

Coffeehouse conversation was supposed to conform to a particular manner. The language of polite and civil conversation was considered essential to coffeehouse debate and conversation. There is dispute among historians as to the main role that civility played. Lawrence E. Klein argues that the portrayal to the public of utmost civility was imperative for the survival of coffeehouse popularity throughout the period of Restoration-era anxieties.

Brian Cowan applies the term "civility" to coffeehouses in the sense of "a peculiarly urban brand of social interaction which valued sober and reasoned debate on matters of great import, be they scientific, aesthetic, or political". He argues that although "very few formal means of exclusion operated to keep undesirables out", "there were a whole host of informal means". These included conventions outlined by clubs, such as Harrington's Rota club, when frequenting coffeehouses. Cowan maintains that these "rules" had a great impact on coffeehouse sociability.

Erin Mackie argues that Addison and Steele's popular periodicals, The Tatler and The Spectator, infused politeness into English coffeehouse conversation, as "[The Tatler] stated as its explicit purpose the reformation of English manners and morals". Aytoun Ellis explains that because Puritanism influenced English coffeehouse behavior, intoxicants were forbidden, allowing for respectable, sober conversation. He offers an example of one coffeehouse patron who, upon seeking ale within a coffeehouse, was asked to leave and visit a nearby tavern.

Various coffeehouses catered to diverse groups of individuals who focused on specific topics of discussion. The variety of topics and groups to which the coffeehouses catered illustrates the heterogeneity of English society during the period. After the Restoration, coffeehouses continued to cater to a range of gentlemanly arts and acted as alternative centres of academic learning, with lessons in French, Italian or Latin, dancing, fencing, poetry, mathematics and astronomy.