Why early London coffeehouses earned the nickname penny universities
For about a penny at the door, a seventeenth-century Londoner could sit among merchants and scholars, read the latest news and argue about anything. Coffeehouses ignored rank, so they gained a reputation for equality, and the nickname penny universities. An Oxford antiquary grumbled instead that they were ruining study, as students wasted whole days gossiping.
The word itself travelled a long road. Arabic qahwa once meant a kind of wine; once Islam banned alcohol, the name shifted to coffee, a drink believed to stir people in a comparable way. Italian took it as caffè, and from there came English coffee and French café. In Yemen, Sufi orders drank it to stay alert through night-time devotions, and beans shipped from the port of Mokha gave the world the word mocha.
By the early sixteenth century coffeehouses had spread through Mecca, Cairo and Damascus. They were noisy places for chess, backgammon, music, storytelling and talk of politics, sometimes called schools of wisdom. Imams in Mecca, uneasy about the gatherings, banned them between 1512 and 1524, but the habit was too ingrained to stamp out. An Ottoman chronicler credited two traders from Aleppo and Damascus with opening Constantinople's first around 1555, and a French traveller in Persia noted people criticising the government freely while preachers and poets competed for attention.
Europe's earliest coffeehouse opened in Belgrade in the early 1520s, under Ottoman rule. Vienna tells a popular tale about sacks of beans abandoned after the 1683 siege and a Polish officer who used them to open the city's first café, but historians generally credit an Armenian merchant, Johannes Diodato, in 1685. Viennese cafés grew into places where writers, musicians and financiers read free newspapers for hours, and the local Kapuziner drink evolved into the cappuccino.
England's first opened in Oxford around 1650, and London's in 1652, run by Pasqua Rosée, whose origins are variously given as Greek, Armenian or Turkish. The idea exploded: more than 3,000 had appeared across England by 1675, and London may have had 550 at its peak. Merchants used them as offices and even had mail delivered there. Centuries later, the same spirit fed Beat poetry readings and folk singers in the 1950s and 1960s.
Source: Coffeehouse
