Sometimes coltsfoot was mixed with tobacco.  Ursula, the pig-woman and refreshment-booth keeper in Bartholomew Fair, in Ben Jonson’s play of that name, says to her assistant:  “Threepence a pipe-full I will have made, of all my whole half-pound of tobacco and a quarter of a pound of coltsfoot mixt with it too to eke it out.”

The fumes of dried coltsfoot leaves were used as a remedy in cases of difficulty of breathing, both in ancient Roman times and in Tudor England.  Lyte, in his translation, 1578, of Dodoens’ “Historie of Plants,” says of coltsfoot:  “The parfume of the dryed leaves layde upon quicke coles, taken into the mouth through the pipe of a funnell, or tunnell, helpeth suche as are troubled with the shortnesse of winde, and fetche their breath thicke or often, and do [sic] breake without daunger the impostems of the breast.”  The leaves of coltsfoot and of other plants have often been used as a substitute for tobacco in modern days.  A correspondent of Notes and Queries, in 1897, said that when he was a boy he knew an old Calvinist minister, who used to smoke a dried mixture of the leaves of horehound, yarrow and “foal’s foot” intermingled with a small quantity of tobacco.  He said it was a very good substitute for the genuine article.  Similar mixtures, or the leaves of coltsfoot alone, have often been smoked in bygone days by folk who could not afford to smoke tobacco only.

The number of shops where tobacco was sold in the early days of its triumph seems to have been extraordinary.  Barnaby Rich, one of the most prolific parents of pamphlets in an age of prolific writers, wrote a satire on “The Honestie of this Age,” which was printed in 1614.  In this production Rich declares that every fellow who came into an ale-house and called for his pot, must have his pipe also, for tobacco was then a commodity as much sold in every tavern, inn and ale-house as wine, ale, or beer.  He goes on to say that apothecaries’ shops, grocers’ shops, and chandlers’ shops were (almost) never without company who from morning to night were still taking tobacco; and what a number there are besides, he adds, “that doe keepe houses, set open shoppes, that have no other trade to live by but by the selling of tobacco.”  Rich says he had been told that a list had been recently made of all the houses that traded in tobacco in and near about London, and that if a man might believe what was confidently reported, there were found to be upwards of 7000 houses that lived by that trade; but he could not say whether the apothecaries’, grocers’ and chandlers’ shops, where tobacco was also sold, were included in that number.  He proceeds to calculate what the annual expenditure on smoke must be.  The number of 7000 seems very large and is perhaps exaggerated.  Round numbers are apt to be over rather than under the mark.

Another proof of the extraordinary popularity of the new habit is to be found in the fact that by the seventeenth year of the reign of James I—­the arch-enemy of tobacco—­that is, by 1620, the Society of Tobacco-pipe-makers had become so very numerous and considerable a body that they were incorporated by royal charter, and bore on their shield a tobacco plant in full blossom.  The Society’s motto was happily chosen—­“Let brotherly love continue.”