Articles

Almost from the moment of his death in 1400, Chaucer came to be revered as the inventor of a new, poetic language. His earliest imitators, the poets John Lydgate and Thomas Hoccleve, saw him as "purifying" English from the "rudeness" of the Anglo-Saxon.

At the end of the 15th century, England's first printer, William Caxton, considered Chaucer the "first founder and embellisher of ornate eloquence in English," while at the end of the 16th century, the poet Edmund Spenser could praise his forebear as "the well of English undefiled." Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, poets, historians and critics found in Chaucer the first stirrings of a literary vernacular, and 19th-and 20th-century academics granted him nothing less than revolutionary status: "He decided to invent a literary English," writes one, while for another, Chaucer "began a revolution in poetic diction."

With English Tea being a very familiar term, English coffee may seem as contrary a term as Arctic bananas; however, England By 1700, however, coffee had become a very popular beverage and there were more than two thousand coffeehouses in London. Coffeehouses occupied more retail space and paid more rent than any other trade.

They came to be known as Penny Universities, because for the price of a cup of coffee, one penny, a person could sit for hours and engage in stimulating conversation with educated people. Each coffeehouse specialised in a different clientele. In one, physicians could be consulted.