ary, Mr. H. Syer Cuming, has
ventured to infer that "almost every person who ventured from home
invoked the protection of tobacco."

These seventeenth-century pipes were largely made in Holland of
pipe-clay imported from England--to the disgust and loss of English
pipe-makers. In 1663 the Company of Tobacco-Pipe Makers petitioned
Parliament "to forbid the export of tobacco pipe clay, since by the
manufacture of pipes in Holland their trade is much damaged." Further,
they asked for "the confirmation of their charter of government so as
to empower them to regulate abuses, as many persons engage in the
trade without licence." The Company's request was granted; but in the
next year they again found it necessary to come to Parliament, showing
"the great improvement in their trade since their incorporation, 17
James I, and their threatened ruin because cooks, bakers, and
ale-house keepers and others make pipes, but so unskilfully that they
are brought into disesteem; they request to be comprehended in the
Statute of Labourers of 5 Elizabeth, so that none may follow the trade
who have not been apprentices seven years."

Tobacco-pipe making was a flourishing industry at this period and
throughout the seventeenth and following century in most of the chief
provincial towns and cities as well as in London.

"Old English 'clays,'" says Mr. T.P. Cooper, "are exceedingly
interesting, as most of them are branded with the maker's initials.
Monograms and designs were stamped or moulded upon the bowls and on
the stems, but more generally upon the spur or flat heel of the pipe.
Many pipes display on the heels various forms of lines, hatched and
milled, which were perhaps the earliest marks of identification
adopted by the pipe-makers. In a careful examination of the monograms
we are able to identify the makers of certain pipes found in
quantities at various places, by reference to the freeman and burgess
rolls and parish registers. During the latter half of the seventeenth
century English pipes were presented by colonists in America to the
Indians; they subsequently became valuable as objects of barter or
part purchase value in exchange for land. In 1677 one hundred and
twenty pipes and one hundred Jew's harps were given for a strip of
country near Timber Creek, in New Jersey. William Penn, the founder
of Pennsylvania, purchased a tract of land, and 300 pipes were
included in the articles given in the exchange."

The French traveller