How coffee changed our culture and the effect it had on men
Jeremy Knight, curator at Horsham Museum & Art Gallery, provides an account of the rise of the coffee shop culture and the town’s first known café, providing a place for men to meet and debate
One of the great discussions of the economic impact of the pandemic has been that of its effect on coffee shops, so, today, Horsham Museum is looking at the early days of coffee drinking and the town’s first known café. The 17th century saw the rise of two great drinks, coffee and chocolate, and though not known about as much, there were chocolate shops serving hot chocolate. It was coffee that caught the imagination, partly because of its role in developing the news trade and stock markets, becoming a meeting house for people who worked from home but wanted a place to meet and discuss – a similarity that is 250 years old.
Coffee houses were a relatively new concept in drinking, a space that was not an ale house, did not make you drunk and that was a male preserve. Introduced into London in 1652 at the height of the puritanical Commonwealth, which attacked licentious behaviour, the hot bitter black drink from Turkey proved a hit, spreading quickly through urban merchant areas.
As with anything new, it is through copying that people learn. In this case, the coffee shop in Horsham would have mimicked those in London and other towns and cities where merchants and men circulated. The drinking of coffee, the coffee house and the creation of a male space were building a brand and a culture that was unique.
The experience was such that it led to satires being written about the culture, satires which help explore how the space functioned and how people responded to it, both men and women. As a caveat, it is impossible with the documentary material we have available to know for certain if Horsham viewed the coffee shop in the same cultural way as London but London was not alien to Horsham, Horsham was not parochial.
Before we explore the culture of the coffee shop, a certain matter needs to be explored. Originally, in the 16th century and earlier, the coffee houses of Istanbul employed young attractive boys to serve clients coffee and intimate favours. It was reported on by travellers and explorers. It could therefore be questioned whether the male preserve of the coffee house led to a similar culture developing in London, and by extension, Horsham.
The answer has to be ‘no’. All references in the late 17th and 18th century satires and descriptions of coffee houses are of men being enticed in by a flirtatious woman, or linking the coffee house to female prostitutes, though young ‘coffee boys’ were present. However, the coffee boy was seen as an apprentice, more akin to a butler, doing errands, collecting newspapers, serving coffee, etc.
The very male preserve of the coffee house led to some serious concerns about the effects of coffee on men’s performance. Though such concerns were expressed in satire and the occasional medical survey, the most well-known satire was The Women’s Petition Against Coffee, ‘representing to public consideration the grand inconveniences accruing to their sex from the excessive use of that drying enfeebling liquor, presented to the Right Honourable Keepers of the Liberty of Venus’ in 1674. This was full of double entendres attacking coffee for making Englishmen ‘effeminate’ because they spent their time talking, reading and pursuing their business, rather than carousing, drinking and whoring, ‘that men will soon out-talk women’.
This attack was riposted with The Men’s Answer to the Women’s Petition Against Coffee, published in the same year, which argued the coffee shop man bent over backward to please women, going on the argue that coffee in fact made men vigorous.
It was in so many ways a new space and a transforming space, enabling new ideas to circulate and develop. It also allowed into the discussion those who could afford a cup of coffee, 1d, thus allowing a democratisation of discussion and debate.
And it spread to Horsham, as the probate list dated 1701-2 for The Star, in Horsham’s Market Square, reveals.
The innkeeper Henry Waller leased the large building, which seemed to function as an inn and a coffee shop. It is, though, the room listed in the probate as ‘the Cooffe Rume’ which concerns us. It had a fire, easy chairs and tables and chairs. The kitchen had ‘coofee potts mille and rostar’, to roast, grind and serve the sludge-like coffee, which was drunk, dark, unfiltered and sweet. Whether we can envisage London-style coffee shops with newssheets and merchants debating the cost of trade and local news is open to question, but Henry Waller did have ‘30 pounds in the Sheare of A vessel at sea’.
Representing to public consideration the inconveniences from the excessive use of that drying enfeebling liquor THE WOMEN’S PETITION AGAINST COFFEE