Reeking Gallants: Elizabethan Tobacco Culture

The contemporary writer Dekker employs the term "artillery" to describe the elaborate smoking paraphernalia of these fashionable dandies who, especially at the Elizabethan theater, earned themselves the title of "reeking gallants." Such a "tobacconist" might carry a set of Winchester clays (or those ornamented with silver and gold), an ivory or metal box which contained up to a pound of tobacco, silver tongs for lifting the glowing ember to light his pipe, a pick, a knife to shred the tobacco, and a small scoop for drying the leaf. With such equipment a gallant might sit on a stool at the side of the stage and, "clowding the loathing ayr with foggie fume," as one observer put it, embarrass the actors with his audible criticism. Serving boys supplied lights which were passed from one gallant to another on the point of a sword. ... And so, while the Elizabethan dandies with their starched ruffs, gilthandled swords, and velvet breeches took boxes of silver pipes to the theater, clay pipes were passed from hand to hand in the so-called "tabagies"--meeting places resembling ordinary taverns. And the poor man had to content himself with a pipe made from a walnut shell and a straw stem. -Alfred Dunhill