In England, the first coffee house was opened in Oxford in the year 1650. It was established by a Jewish entrepreneur named Jacob. As most of the population still had little idea of what coffee was, the beverage was consumed by those interested in novelties, and as a medicinal drink to relieve hangovers. To this day, there is a coffee shop (“The Grand Café”) which stands on the exact same piece of ground in Oxford as the very first coffee house in England.
Just two years later, a coffee house was opened in London by a Greek servant of the merchant Daniel Edwards, named Pasqua Rosée. While serving Edwards in Smyrna (Turkey), Pasqua learned to prepare coffee — and upon their return to England, he used his skills to open up a shop in St. Michael’s Alley, Cornhill. And to promote his shop he published a flyer on “The Vertue of the Coffee Drink”, which claimed that coffee was good for preventing gout, scurvy, oedema, miscarriages, spleen problems and “hypocondriack winds”! Aided by these claims (of dubious reliability) and puritan attacks on the sale of wine and beer, the coffee scene grew rapidly. By the early 18th century it is estimated that there were around 3,000 coffee houses in London alone!
