Picture a petition from "several Thousands of Buxome Good-Women, Languishing in Extremity of Want." Their enemy is coffee, accused of leaving London's husbands useless in bed. This is The Women's Petition Against Coffee, printed in London in 1674, and few documents in coffee's history are as funny or as crude.
Behind the bawdy jokes, the pamphlet shows how strange this drink once looked to the English. It also takes us inside the early coffeehouse: its noise, its idle talk, and the people it kept out. But it is satire, so it has to be read as a joke before it can be read as evidence.
The quotations below keep their period spelling, and their period crudeness.
Who wrote to the "Keepers of the Liberty of Venus"?
The pamphlet carries its date on the title page: "London, Printed 1674." A digitized microfilm copy on the Internet Archive, from the collection Early English Books 1641-1700, shows just six numbered pages after the title page. The full title sets the tone at once:
"The Women's Petition Against Coffee. Representing to Publick Consideration the Grand Inconveniencies accruing to their Sex from the Excessive Use of that Drying, Enfeebling Liquor."
The text is "Presented to the Right Honorable the Keepers of the Liberty of Venus." No real authority answers to that name. The petition itself opens with a salute to "The Worshipful Court of Female-Assistants, &c." and closes by wishing the ban to apply "throughout the Utopian Territories". The solemn form of a petition is the first joke.
The title page names no author, only "By a Well-willer". Many scholars suspect a man wrote it, although this cannot be proved. It may have come from men who thought their case against coffee would carry further in women's voices.
The title says "women", but no one knows who wrote this text, or whether women had any part in it. It gives us no direct word on what London's women really thought. At root it is a work of humor, an exaggerated version of a position that early opponents of coffee really held.
"As Lean as Famine": what did coffee do to London's husbands?
The basic argument is simple: coffee was making London's men unable to satisfy their wives in bed. The petitioners tell it as a fall from grace. England is praised as "A Paradise for Women", they say, thanks to the "brisk Activity" of its men, once "justly esteemed the Ablest Performers in Christendome".
"Never did Men wear greater Breeches, or carry less in them of any Mettle whatsoever." Then comes a tall tale: a Prince of Spain "was forced to make a Law, that Men should not Repeat the Grand Kindness to their Wives, above NINE times in a night". The sigh follows at once: "But Alas! Alas! Those forwards Days are gone."
The culprit is "that Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish Liquor called COFFEE". The charge sheet starts with "Drying up the Radical Moisture" and quickly gets worse. Coffee, the petitioners write:
"has so Eunucht our Husbands, and Crippled our more kind Gallants, that they are become as Impotent, as Age, and as unfruitful as those Desarts whence that unhappy Berry is said to be brought."
The "continual sipping of this pittiful drink" can "bewitch Men of two and twenty, and tie up the Codpice-point without a Charm." Drinkers turn "as Lean as Famine, as Rivvel'd as Envy". They "come from it with nothing moist but their snotty Noses, nothing stiffe but their Joints, nor standing but their Ears."
One line may make a modern coffee drinker smile: "They pretend 'twill keep them Waking, but we find by scurvy Experience, they sleep quietly enough after it."
The military jokes finish the job. Like young militiamen called to duty, the husbands present arms "but cannot give Fire, or at least do but flash in the Pan".
Inside the coffeehouse the petitioners mocked
Pasqua Rosee opened London's first coffeehouse in 1652, so the pamphlet came some twenty years in. Rosee had his own one-page pamphlet, The Vertue of the Coffee Drink. It promised that coffee would "prevent Drowsiness, and make one fit for busines". It even called coffee "very good to prevent Mis-carryings in Child-bearing Women", a claim opposite in spirit to the Women's Petition.
Inside, you could watch the dissection of a dolphin, see an elephant or a rhinoceros on display, or buy books at a candle auction. You could also bet on bear fights, trade stocks, buy tulips or pornographic pamphlets, and read mail delivered to your table. Women, though, were typically not allowed in, unless they were serving drinks or working as prostitutes. If women did write the petition, they may have been protesting that exclusion more than the drink itself.
Noise, and nothing but noise
The petition accuses the men of out-talking the women. Coffee drinkers are "like so many Frogs in a puddle, they sup muddy water, and murmur insignificant notes". Half a dozen of them "out-babble an equal number of us at a Gossipping", with neither "Moderator nor Rules".
Their "hot Contests" concern "what colour the Red Sea is of; whether the Great Turk be a Lutheran or a Calvinist; who Cain's Father in Law was". Nor do they threaten the government, being "too tame and too talkative to make any desperate Politicians". In talk they may "now and then destroy a Fleet, or kill ten thousand of the French". In person they "are scarce fit to be of the Life-guard to a Cherry-tree".
The cost at home
The drink itself gets no mercy: "a little base, black, thick, nasty bitter, stinking, nauseous Puddle-water". The poor, with "scarce Twopence to buy their Children Bread, must spend a penny each evening in this Insipid Stuff". That penny comes from a satire, so it proves nothing about the real price. A husband sent to call a midwife still "must stay an hour by the way drinking his two Dishes, & two Pipes".
The coffeehouse, in this telling, is "only a Pimp to the Tavern". Husbands, "like Tennis Balls between two Rackets", are "bandied to and fro" between the two all day. Their wives wait alone until twelve at night.
Behind the jokes: what does the petition really reveal?
The petitioners claim their verdict follows "a serious Enquiry, and Discussion of the Point by the Learned of the Faculty". That joke has real medicine behind it. Humoral medicine held that the body had four humors, whose imbalance caused illness. The idea that coffee lowers desire was already old. The physician Rhazes wrote that it "is a drink that is good for those with hot nature, but it decreases the libido".
Doctors did not all agree. Writing in the 1640s and 1650s, the Oxford physician Thomas Willis linked coffee with sobriety rather than inebriation. France had its own attacks: in 1679, a Marseilles doctor accused coffee of turning people away from wine. Several years later, another physician blamed it for "general exhaustion, paralysis, and impotence".
Pamphlets like this one exaggerated "the sober warnings of contemporary medical opinion". In the words of Brian Cowan, "the texts actually deflated the gravity of those concerns". So the joking tone may have helped coffee spread.
A foreign drink in a nervous country
"Heathenish" was no random insult. Coffee had deep roots in the Muslim world, and it was spread largely by Jewish or Armenian immigrants from the Ottoman Empire. Many Europeans knew alcohol but not stimulants, and found coffee's effects bewildering. The outcry over its "heathen" Turkish origins also increased public interest in it: bad publicity worked.
National pride drives the pamphlet too, in a fight between home-grown ale and imported coffee. Its men are "Frenchified", and it defends the "good old primitive way of Ale-drinking" against "Forraign Liquors" in the hope of a "Race of Lusty Hero's".
It belongs to the Restoration too, the three decades after Cromwell's rule, a time of bold experiment with sex, drugs, social life and new kinds of writing. Women were allowed to act on public stages, and the writer Aphra Behn began to win wide recognition in print. A bawdy text in women's voices fits that climate well.
After the petition: did anyone stop drinking coffee?
The final demand is precise: "the Drinking COFFEE may on severe penalties be forbidden to all Persons under the Age of Threescore", meaning sixty. In its place come "Lusty nappy Beer, Cock-Ale, Cordial Canaries, Restoring Malago's", and "Back-recruiting" chocolate. Husbands would then give "some other Testimonial of their being Men, besides their Beards and wearing of empty Pantaloons". They would no longer "run the hazard of being Cuckol'd by Dildo's".
None of it happened. The petition had no effect on the rise of coffee in England. Coffeehouses and consumption kept growing into the eighteenth century. A shortened version did return twenty-six years later, as the "City Wife's Petition Against Coffee".
By 1663, 82 coffeehouses were reported in the City of London alone, the square mile at the capital's commercial heart. In 1739, a later count recorded 144 in the City and 551 in the whole metropolis, about one for every 1,000 inhabitants. It was tea, later on, that displaced coffee in Britain.
The real threat came from elsewhere. After 1660, Charles II twice moved against coffeehouses, which he saw as centers of opposition. Each time his ministers dissuaded him, pointing to the use his own supporters made of them.
A proclamation by the king also ordered magistrates to "recall and make void all Licenses" for selling "any Coffee Chocolet, Sherbett, or Tea". It complained that "many Tradesmen and others do herein mis-spend much of their time". Due to take effect on January 10, 1676, it was withdrawn two days earlier. Nothing we found ties it to the pamphlet.
Side stories from coffee's early years in England
The lament of Tom Farthing
The petition breaks into a mock song: "Tom Farthing, Tom Farthing, where hast thou been, Tom Farthing?" The next lines supply the punchline: "Twelve a Clock e're you come in, Two a Clock e're you begin, And then at last can do nothing".
The play Samuel Pepys could not stand
Coffee first reached the English stage in 1667, in Tarugo's Wiles, or the Coffee House by Thomas St. Serf. Charles II and the Duke of York attended the first performance. Samuel Pepys called it "the most ridiculous and insipid play I ever saw in my life".
The first cup John Evelyn ever saw
John Evelyn, a scholar at Balliol College, Oxford, wrote that Nathaniel Conopios, a visitor from Greece, "was the first I ever saw drink coffee".
What a 350-year-old dirty joke still tells us
The petition does not prove that London's women rose up against coffee, because we do not know who wrote it. It tells us nothing reliable about what coffee does to the body. And it stopped nothing: the "nasty bitter" drink it attacked kept winning customers.
Its value lies elsewhere. Read closely, it shows a society meeting a new stimulant and a new kind of room at the same time. The fear of foreign influence, the doctors' warnings and the anger at absent husbands all landed on the same cup.
The mockery also points at something real. Coffeehouses gave people of various political persuasions a public space to meet, plan and debate. The "Frogs in a puddle" were sometimes doing serious business. Lloyd's Coffee House on Tower Street, established in 1688, gave rise to the Lloyd's of London insurance market, still running today.
So the next time you linger over a coffee and put the world to rights, remember the pamphlet. Someone once found that habit ridiculous enough to write six pages of filthy jokes about it.
