AQA GCSE HISTORY (8145) Paper 2 Shaping the Nation Resource pack for the 2023 historic environment specified site

AQA GCSE HISTORY (8145) Paper 2 Shaping the Nation Resource pack for the 2023 historic environment specified site The London Coffee Houses of the Restoration period, Restoration England, 1660–1685. The purpose of this pack is to provide you with guidance and resources to support your teaching about The London Coffee Houses of the Restoration period, the 2023 specified site for the historic environment part of Restoration England, 1660–1685. It is intended as a guide only and you may wish to use other sources of information about The London Coffee Houses of the Restoration period. The resources are provided to help you develop your students’ knowledge and understanding of the specified site. They will not be tested in the examination, as the question targets AO1 (knowledge and understanding) and AO2 (explaining second order concepts). General guidance The study of the historic environment will focus on a particular site in its historical context and should examine the relationship between a specific site and the key events, features or developments of the period. As a result, when teaching a specified site for the historic environment element, it is useful to think about ways of linking the site to the specified content in Parts 1, 2 and/or 3 of the specification. There is no requirement to visit the specified site as this element of the course is designed to be classroom based. Students will be expected to answer a question that draws on second order concepts of change, continuity, causation and/or consequence, and to explore them in the context of the specified site and wider events and developments of the period studied. Students should be able to identify key features of the specified site and understand their connection to the wider historical context of the specific historical period. Sites will also illuminate how people lived at the time, how they were governed and their beliefs and values. The following aspects of the site should be considered: • location, function, and the structure • people connected with the site e.g. the designer, originator and occupants • the design and how the design reflects the culture, values, fashions of the people at the time • how important events/developments from the depth study are connected to the site. Students will be expected to understand the ways in which key features and other aspects of the site are representative of the period studied. In order to do this, students will also need to be aware of how the key features and other aspects of the site have changed from earlier periods. Students will also be expected to understand how key features and other aspects may have changed or stayed the same during the period. The London Coffee Houses of the Restoration period By the late fifteenth century European traders and merchants who travelled to the Middle East and Turkey had tried drinking coffee, which one described as, ‘black as soot, and tasting like it.’ However early European coffee drinkers recommended it for its medicinal benefits, believing that it stimulated the brain and could help cure illnesses such as headaches, gout, and skin complaints. Also, unlike wine and beer, large amounts could seemingly be drunk without any ill effects. A coffee serving jug common in the seventeenth century, and a silver coffee pot with a leather handle which was made in London and presented to the East India Company in 1681. The first coffee house in England was opened in Oxford in the 1650s. London soon followed when Pasqua Rosée opened a coffee house in St. Michael's Alley, Cornhill, in 1652 (Resource D). Rosée was the Greek servant of a merchant, Daniel Edwards of the Levant company,* who prepared coffee for his master whenever he was in this country after returning from the Middle East. Edwards and his friends enjoyed the taste, so he suggested that his servant open the city’s first coffee house. Edwards funded the new business and it was an instant success, with Pasqua selling over 600 cups or bowls of coffee a day, much to the despair of the ale houses and inn keepers of Cornhill. *A trading company set up by Queen Elizabeth I in 1592 to trade with Turkey and the eastern Mediterranean. It competed in the supply of coffee with the East India Company which had also been set up by Queen Elizabeth and given further rights and powers by Charles II. The popularity of coffee houses By 1663 there were 82 coffee houses in the City of London (Resource A) while by the 1720s there were probably over 500 of them in the capital, serving hot chocolate, alcohol and food as well as coffee. It was thought that coffee encouraged thoughtfulness, sophistication and witty talk. It was also seen as a remedy for drunkenness and violence. Coffee houses were very popular because they provided a relaxed, social atmosphere where it only cost a one penny for a cup of coffee (Resource B). Inside, customers could enjoy a cup of coffee, smoke a clay pipe, read the news sheets of the day, and enter into conversation with others. A 1661 pamphlet, ‘The Character of Coffee’ celebrated the fact that coffee houses were open to all comers and that there were no reserved seats, concluding that true equality was only to be found in the coffee house. Not all were in favour of this, however, as in 1670, the poet and Royalist Samuel Butler criticised coffee houses where ‘gentlemen, workmen, Lords and scoundrels mix as if they were all equal.’ Although some coffee houses had female staff or owners, many respectable women did not want to be seen inside them. The Women’s Petition Against Coffee (1674) criticised how the ‘new-fangled and disgusting foreign liquor called coffee ‘had turned their strong and hard-working men into weak and babbling layabouts who wasted their time in coffee houses (Resource E). While there is a debate Turn over ► among historians about who exactly was responsible for writing this petition, it nonetheless drew a swift response at the time in the form of the Men’s Answer to the Women’s Petition against Coffee, which claimed that ‘cheap inferior wine’ and ‘muddy ale’ made men weak, whereas coffee made men full of vigour. Coffee houses and society in Restoration London The atmosphere in coffee houses was different from that in noisy and rowdy public houses, or the Royal court and law courts where strict codes of behaviour had to be followed. As a result, the coffee house often attracted an educated, well-connected commercial and professional elite for whom visiting them became part of their routine. Samuel Pepys, for example, was a frequent visitor who would meet friends and colleagues there three or four times a week to pick up news and gossip. Friends and clients would know a person’s favourite coffee house and the time that they would usually be there, so even letters could be delivered there for them to collect. This is the earliest known image of an English coffee house which appeared in a 1674 news sheet advertising, ‘the excellent virtues of that sober and wholesome drink called coffee’. At a time when journalism was in its infancy and the postal system was unorganised and irregular, coffee houses played an important role in spreading of news and information about business, trade and politics in Restoration London (Resource I). Runners were sent round to the coffee houses to report on major events of the day, such as victories in battles or political upheavals, while news sheets were distributed mainly in the coffee houses, meaning that they became like the reading rooms of today’s public libraries. Coffee house owners supplied these news sheets free of charge to their customers, with each new edition being passed around or simply read aloud in order to encourage debate and discussion (Resource F & G). Businessmen working from a table at their favourite coffee house would also find that the walls provided valuable information, as they were covered with bulletins announcing sales, ship sailings and auctions (Resource A, H, J & K). Coffee houses also became centres for commercial information. Individual London coffee houses became meeting places for particular businesses, professions, and interest groups which usually depended on where in the capital a coffee house was situated. Coffee houses such as Lloyd's or Garraway's, which were close to the Royal Exchange were where City businessmen gathered (Resource J), while the Jamaica Coffee house was a centre for merchants trading with the Caribbean. Evidence exists that after the Restoration period, particularly in the 18th century, the Jamaica Coffee house was a place where merchants traded in cargoes of enslaved African peoples. They were captured from their homelands in West Africa, transported to Jamaica by British and other European slavers, and forced to work under brutal and dehumanising conditions on the sugar cane plantations there. Coffee houses such as the St. James, located in Westminster, was a meeting place for politicians, while in coffee houses near St. Paul's Cathedral, clergymen and intellectuals gathered to discuss theology and philosophy (Resource F). Tom’s Coffee House was the meeting place for insurers and bankers, and Jonathan’s Coffee House in Exchange Alley was well known for the buying and selling of shares (Resource C). Most famously, in 1686, Edward Lloyd opened a coffee house in Tower Street in the City of London. This became a popular place for sailors, merchants, and ship- owners to gain reliable news about shipping, cargoes, and disasters at sea. It was soon seen as an ideal place to obtain marine insurance and over the centuries has developed into the insurance market known around the world as, Lloyd’s of London. After the Restoration period, it also would go on to be heavily involved in the trade of enslaved peoples. Charles II and coffee houses As well as being centres for the exchange of commercial information, coffee houses were also hotbeds of gossip, news and political information. To begin with Charles II had benefited from Londoners’ liking for coffee because at his restoration in 1660 Parliament had granted him a tax on coffee, chocolate and tea. However, as the reign progressed, the government became concerned that anti-monarchist ideas and opposition was being encouraged in coffee houses.1675 was a particularly awkward year for Charles as Parliament, alarmed by and suspicious of the King’s policies, was unwilling to grant him money. In November of that year the King closed Parliament until 1677 and also tried to close down the London coffee houses (Resource L). Some coffee houses such as Jonathan's Coffee House (Resource C) were particularly suspect, with customers seemingly more interested in revolutionary politics than commerce. The Rainbow Coffee House which in 1657 had been the second coffee house to open in London, was also of concern to the government, having been involved with Titus Oates and the Popish plot of 1678. The King’s attempt to close down the coffee houses failed and they remained centres of debate and intrigue during the Exclusion Crisis and Rye House Plot. Coffee houses and intellectual life Some coffee houses became famous as meeting places for literary London and attracted authors, poets and journalists (Resource F). At Will’s Coffee House, for example, John Dryden read his poetry and this proved a magnet for other writers and satirists such as Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. In 1663 Samuel Pepys commented in his diary on the witty and pleasant conversations and debates that could be had at Will’s. Coffee houses were not only literary centres but also became places where leading scientists of the day regularly met to continue their discussions. The President of the Royal Society, Sir Isaac Newton, and the famous astronomer, Professor Halley, often visited the Grecian coffee house on The Strand. (Resource F) The scientist Robert Hooke was an enthusiastic visitor to several coffee houses, including Garraway’s in Exchange Alley, where in November 1679 he carried out a public dissection of a dolphin. In 1679 Hooke started exchanging letters with Sir Isaac Newton about the planetary movement and the nature of gravity. In January 1680, as part of their debate, Hooke chose Garraway’s Coffee House with its high hall, to carry out a successful experiment to prove the movement of the Earth. Coffee houses were also places to meet new people and it was in one that Hooke met Captain Robert Knox who had been a prisoner of the ruler of Ceylon (modern day Sri Lanka) for seventeen years. From him Hooke learnt about ebony, musk, palm trees and Indian mathematics, as well as an intoxicating herb known as ‘gange’, which took away a person’s understanding and memory. Turn over ► A modern painting of a seventeenth century coffee house, 2008. Robert Hooke is shown on the right, writing at a table with people waiting to talk to him. It has been argued that coffee houses encouraged social mixing due to their cheapness and layout. There were long communal tables where people from all walks of life and social rank sat side by side, sipping a cup of coffee and chatting with friends and strangers. Customers in a coffee house were less confined to the social conventions of class and deference, with politicians and scholars sometimes mixing with workmen and the less well-off. As a result, they became known as ‘Penny Universities’ where people, sometimes with little formal education could listen and learn from intellectuals who were showing off their wit and knowledge. This helped to change British social and political relations as the coffee house became a public arena for political debate in which criticism of the King, court and government could be freely expressed without fear of arrest or prosecution (Resource G & L). Debate could be fierce. In 1683 when Titus Oakes, was cornered and attacked during a heated debate in the Amsterdam Coffee House, he retaliated by throwing a cup of hot coffee in his assailant’s face (Resource G). Londoners continued to visit their favourite coffee houses during the Plague and the Great Fire that followed it. At this dreadful time the customers of coffee houses were more careful about talking to strangers and would only approach close friends after enquiring about their health and that of their family. However, the plague and fire only affected the coffee house trade for a short time and they soon regained their place as the major social institution of the time. It was in the eighteenth-century, that coffee houses changed. They remained civilised places where men escaped the hustle and bustle of London life, but from the 1750s they increasingly became exclusive private clubs for the wealthy, commercial middle class who used them to meet friends and make new contacts. This trend was helped by two further developments: firstly, the growth of cheap and popular daily newspapers which provided the latest news, gossip and commercial information which had previously only been easily found in the coffee house and, secondly, by the increasing popularity of tea, a drink which was cheaper and much simpler to prepare at home (Resource I). Turn over ► Resources Resource A page 9 A map showing the Coffee Houses in London’s commercial centre in the early eighteenth century. Resource B page 10 A painting of the inside of a coffee house in 1680. Resource C page 11 Photographs of the site of Jonathan’s Coffee House and (Ex)Change Alley as they are today Resource D page 12 A photograph of the site of Rosée’s Coffee House, the first in London, as it is today. Resource E page 13 An advertisement for the opening of Pasqua Rosée’s coffee house in London. Resource F page 14 A petition against Coffee Houses, 1674. Resource G page 15 A nineteenth century painting of the interior of Wills Coffee House, Covent Garden. Resource H page 16 A drawing of the inside of a Restoration Coffee House. Resource I page 17 An artist’s reconstruction of the first sale of furs at Garraway’s Coffee House in 1671 Resource J page 18 An extract adapted from ‘Surfing the Coffeehouse’, by C. John Sommerville, published in ‘History Today’, 1997. Resource K page 20 A painting of the Royal Exchange in the eighteenth century. Resource L page 21 An extract adapted from ‘The Coffee House – a Cultural History’ by Markman Ellis, 2004. Resource M page 23 An extract adapted from ‘Coffee Houses reconsidered’ by B Cowan, 2004. The London Coffee Houses of the Restoration period resources Resource A A map showing the Coffee Houses in London’s commercial centre in the early eighteenth century. Turn over ► Resource B A painting of the inside of a coffee house in 1680.