indulged her taste for ale and tobacco, and similar
pleasures at an inn or tavern.

Some of the references to women smokers occur in curious connexions.
When one George Glapthorne, of Whittlesey, J.P., was returned to
Parliament for the Isle of Ely in 1654, his return was petitioned
against, and among other charges it was said that just before the
election, in a certain Martin's ale-house, he had promised to give
Mrs. Martin a roll of tobacco, and had also undertaken to grant her
husband a licence to brew, thus unduly influencing and corrupting the
electors.

Women smokers were not confined to any one class of society. The Rev.
Giles Moore, Rector of Horsted Keynes, Sussex, made a note in his
journal and account book in 1665 of "Tobacco for my wyfe, 3d." As from
other entries in Mr. Moore's account book we know that two ounces cost
him one shilling, we may wonder what Mrs. Moore was going to do with
her half-ounce. There is no other reference to tobacco for her in the
journal and account book. Possibly she was not a smoker at all, but
needed the tobacco for some medicinal purpose. There is ample evidence
to show that in the seventeenth century extraordinary medicinal
virtues continued to be attributed to the "divine weed."

In some letters of the Appleton family, printed some time ago from the
originals in the Bodleian Library, there is a curious letter, undated,
but of 1652 or 1653, from Susan Crane, the widow of Sir Robert Crane,
who was the second wife of Isaac Appleton of Buckman Vall, Norfolk.
Writing to her husband, Isaac Appleton, at his chamber in Grayes Inn,
as his "Afextinat wife," the good Susan, whose spelling is marvellous,
tells her "Sweet Hart"--"I have done all the tobakcre you left mee; I
pray send mee sum this weeke; and some angelleco ceedd and sum cerret
sed." How much tobacco Mr. Appleton had provisioned his wife with
cannot be known, but it looks as if she were a regular smoker and did
not care to be long without a supply. In 1631 Edmond Howes, who edited
Stow's "Chronicles," and continued them "onto the end of this present
yeare 1631," wrote that tobacco was "at this day commonly used by most
men and many women."

Anything like general smoking by women in the seventeenth century
would appear to have been confined to certain parts of the country.
Celia Fiennes, who travelled about England on horseback in the reign
of William and Mary, tells us that at St. Austell in Cornwall ("St.
Austins," s