Friday, January 17, 2014

“. . . and makes the Heart Lightsome.”


I’m a confirmed tea drinker, but I take a cup of coffee after an excellent meal, and I admit that a really good coffee tastes better than my usual cuppa….

You may already know that coffee was introduced from “Arabia” to London in the early 17th century, and, as we now say, went viral.

By mid-century, there were thousands of coffee shops in London , more or less everyone was drinking coffee and talking in those first-ever chat rooms.


The “Vertue of the COFFEE Drink” was proclaimed by a marketing-savvy coffee shop owner in St. Michael’s Alley named Pasqua Rosee, who advised his customers that this “simple innocent thing” was of good taste and would cure or prevent all manner of ailments, including “. . . Fumes . . . Head-ach . . . the Cough of the Lungs . . . Dropsy . . . Scurvy . . .Hypocondriack . . . Winds, or the like.”

Seems that drinking coffee took up a lot of time. While men hung out in the coffee shops, the women of London published a Women’s Petition Against Coffee in 1674, arguing that “Excessive use of that Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish Liquor called COFFEE” was the cause of a decline in England’s birthrate. The coffee shop boys denied it, of course.

King Charles II tried to suppress the coffee shops a year later, because he was afraid that treasonous talk might start cropping up in the establishments of Pasqua Rosee and others.

But coffee was too popular by then….the rest is history.

Mr. Rosee said it best: coffee “ . . . quickens the Spirits, and makes the Heart Lightsome.”







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