18th century coffeehouses (part 1)

seventymilestobabylon:

good God if I am going to do this much research then it might as well benefit the rest of the Black Sails fandom, so here’s a post about 18th-century coffeehouses and what went on at them and what people drank and stuff. This is going to be a multi-part post because it is a whole book’s worth of information.

it is my brand new headcanon just formed this instant while reading this one book about libraries in the Atlantic world that Miranda and Thomas, in addition to doing salons like the big old rhetoric nerds that they are, were regulars at London coffeehouses

This is all coming from The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse by Brian Cowan (Yale UP, 2005), which is excellent. I skipped the bits about coffee and commerce because I didn’t care, but hmu if you have questions about that side of things and I will try to find out the answers. Putting this under a cut bc it’s going to be long.

I shall invent a coffeehouse that I have not yet named but it will be run by a single lady with a teenage son and she will be Miranda’s pal because poor Miranda, I want her to have some friends in old-time London. And also that my book says occasionally coffeehouses were run by single ladies. All the information is under the cut.

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Drinks you could get:

• weak coffee (or mixed with milk to make “milk coffee”) (also this was made with Thames water so try not to think about that too hard)
• tea
• chocolate drinks (sometimes mixed with eggs, sugar, milk, or a bit of bread, ew)
• chocolate with flour in for “breakfast chocolate” (ew)
• chocolate with wine in (ew)
• sage tea
• “content” which was mainly milk and eggs (seriously ew, wtf England)
• ratesia (“a drink fortified with brandy”, no further information given)
• also alcohols: “mum, mead, metheglin, cider, perry, usquebaugh, brandy, aqua vitae, strong-waters, beer, and ale”

Hours: as early as 6AM to as late as 9 or 10 PM. There were laws against places staying open much later than this, but of course some people flouted that. Still, coffeehouses that were open later than 9 or 10 were suspect in terms of propriety.

Pretty early on in the life of London coffeehouses, there would be clubs that met there regularly for vigorous intellectual debate. The Rota was an early such club; Samuel Pepys paid one and six to be a member. An estimated forty percent of former Rota-men went on to become fellows of the Royal Society. Though the Rota club didn’t last super long, people really remembered it (and made fun of its armchair philosophers), and it established a pattern for coffeehouses as a site of intellectual debate.

Unlike a lot of other places you could go to socialize (like taverns), coffeehouses lacked the association with various kinds of sins. The idea was that men of widely different social status could come and exchange ideas and hang out on relatively equal terms. It was cheap and convenient!

By the 1690s, there were separate chocolate houses. These were posher than coffeehouses. IDK why.

Many coffeehouses acknowledged the Turkish origin of the drink and would have names like The Turk’s Head or The Sultan’s Head or Murad the Great. They were prone to employing vaguely orientalist decorating patterns.

Coffeehouses were Ground Zero for auctions in England. Who the hell knew! Book and art auctions were particularly popular, as well as auctions for rare manuscripts and curios from faraway countries. Will’s Coffeehouse in Westminster was so well known for auctions that it changed its name to the Auction House in 1691. One satire that occurred in pamphlets in the seventeenth century (though it stopped by the eighteenth) was that bachelors and women were being auctioned off. A lot of people found this extremely unamusing; the Athenian Mercury (run by a guy who looooooved the Society for the Reformation of Manners) said “‘Tis a teaguish sort of witticism to dispose of what’s another bodies, without their consent.” TRUE.