Notas del episodio
When coffee reached 17th century England, doctors claimed it cured head melancholy, gout, and scurvy, and skeptics feared paralysis and heart failure, all in a country where unsafe water meant most people drank ale around the clock. In 1650 a Jewish entrepreneur named Jacob opened what is considered the first English coffee house at the Angel coaching inn in Oxford, moving coffee from the apothecary's cabinet to a social room. In 1652 Pasqua Rosée, a servant of a Levant Company merchant who came from Smyrna in western Turkey, opened London's first coffee house using traditional roasting and brewing. Londoners kept visiting through the Great Plague of 1665 and rebuilt their coffee houses right after the Great Fire of 1666.
Contemporaries compared the crowded tables to Noah's Ark, though historian Brian Cowan points to unwritten codes of civility that filtered who fit in. A 1674 broadside, The Rules and Orders of the Coffee House, seated gentry with tradesmen, banned cards and dice, capped debate bets at five shillings, and fined swearing 12 pence. Royalists feared the political talk, and James Harrington's republican Rota Club even voted on state matters with a ballot box. Women were largely shut out as patrons, though historian Paula McDowell shows female news hawkers shaped what customers read. Tea consumption rose from around 800,000 pounds in 1710 to over a million by 1721.
- A penny bought shelter, a fire, coffee, and access to newspapers, earning the nickname penny universities.
- One patron who asked for ale was told to leave and find a tavern.
- Some houses specialized in French, mathematics, or astronomy, while Moll King's mixed courtiers with Covent Garden traders speaking flash talk.
- Proprietors' plan for a Coffee House Gazette written unpaid by customers was ridiculed and cost them their authority.
- Historian Aytoun Ellis concluded the coffee houses served their purpose and were simply no longer needed.