Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 1:

So far Hariot's "Report" regarded tobacco from the medicinal point of view only; but it is important to note that he goes on to describe his personal experience of the practice of smoking in words that suggest the pleasurable nature of the experience. He says: "We ourselves during the time we were there used to suck it after their maner, as also since our returne, and have found maine [? manie] rare and wonderful experiments of the vertues thereof: of which the relation woulde require a volume by itselfe: the use of it by so manie of late, men and women of great calling as else, and some learned Physitians also, is sufficient witness."

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 2:

Smoking was soon as common in the country as in London. On Wednesday, April 16, 1621, in the course of a debate in the House of Commons, Sir William Stroud, who seems to have been a worthy disciple of that tobacco-hater, King James I, moved that he "would have tobacco banished wholly out of the kingdom, and that it may not be brought in from any part, nor used amongst us"; and Sir Grey Palmes said "that if tobacco be not banished, it will overthrow 100,000 men in England, for now it is so common that he hath seen ploughmen take it as they are at plough." Perhaps this terrible picture of a ploughman smoking as he followed his lonely furrow did not impress the House so much as Sir Grey evidently thought it would; at all events, tobacco was not banished.

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