Shopping list may show UK’S earliest cup of tea

A recently unearthed 374-year-old shopping list may be the earliest reference to someone drinking a cup of tea in England.

Curator Rachel Conroy from Temple Newsam House, near Leeds, found the 1644 bill for medicinal ingredients bought by the estate, which mentions bottles of “China drink”, the old name for tea, in the West Yorkshire Archives.

It is a full 16 years before the diarist Samuel Pepys made one of the earliest references to tea, in 1660: “I did send for a cup of tee (a China drink) of which I never had drank before.”

Each bottle listed was priced at four shillings and would have been a “status symbol”, Ms Conroy said.