THE CLAY TOBACCO-PIPE
11
CHAPTER TWO
The clay tobacco-pipe
IT took no more than two or three years for the clay pipe to
assert its superiority over the experimental rivals of metal or
nut-shell, so that we find the earliest references to clay pipes in
the last decade of the sixteenth century. A German lawyer and
historian, Paul Hentzner, who visited the Bear Garden at South-
wark in 1598, noted there the use of clay pipes, and enlarged
upon the manner of smoking in England, and the cost of tobacco7.
EFFECT OF HIGH PRICE OF TOBACCO
The price of tobacco in the early days of its use was enormous :
in 1594, the price was 3/- an ounce, equivalent to about 80/- of
our money to-day. Even by 1626, although the price had fallen
fivefold, Sir H. Oglander recorded in his diary that he had paid 5 / -
(then worth some £5 in to-day's value) for half-a-pound of
tobacco7.
The consequences of this high price were twofold: early pipes
for smokers had tiny bowls, often no more than 3/8" in diameter
and 1" deep; also, among the lower orders at least, a company of
men would pass a pipe round from one to another with the tyg of
beer, both being drawn upon by all in turn. This latter practice
persisted into the nineteenth century; as by then, tobacco prices
had fallen to permit greater extravagance, such 19th century
communal pipes were often made with giant bowls, as much as
4" in bowl-diameter7, for use in working men's clubs, and such
giant pipes were not unknown even a century earlier.
FAIRY PIPES
The tiny pipes used for individual smoking at the end of
Elizabeth I's reign were so strikingly small compared with the
clay pipes of less than a century later, that when such small pipes
were found in excavations, or in long-forgotten cupboards, they
were known variously among the credulous peasants as 'fairy'
or 'elfin' pipes (to the Scots), 'mab' pipes in the West country—
so soon was their real origin forgotten21.
Indeed, in superstitious Ireland, the fairy pipe, when found,
was sometimes re-buried within a 'fairy-ring' on the meadow, or
interred with a corpse at a convenient funeral, to return the pipe
to its supposed rightful owners.