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It Was Then When Charles Ii Interfered In Order To Control The High Demand ...

It was then when Charles II interfered in order to control the high demand for tea, with several acts prohibiting its sale at public houses. This measure to control the trade of tea was designed to counter sedition but it was extremely unpopular and it was hence impossible to enforce. Therefore a 1676 act taxed tea and required coffee house managers to apply for a licence.
This was just the beginning of governmental attempts to control or at least, to profit from the popularity of tea in Britain. This was also meant to compensate for the suffering in liquor trade suffered from the increase trade of porcelain and ceramic cups, saucers, and tableware into Britain over the centuries. By the mid eighteenth century the duty on tea had increased to 119% (UK Tea Council). This high taxation had the effect of creating a whole new industry which was tea smuggling. Ships from Holland and Scandinavia brought tea to the British coast and then stayed offshore while smugglers met them and unloaded their precious cargo into small vessels. The smugglers, often were local fishermen, moved the tea inland through underground passages and hidden paths to special hiding places and one of their typical hiding places was the local parish church (UK Tea Council).
Even smuggles tea was very expensive and therefore extremely profitable, so many smugglers began to dilute the tea with other substances, such as willow, licorice and sloe leaves. Used tea leaves were also dried again and added to fresh leaves and sold again. In 1784 William Pitt the Younger introduced the Commutation Act which dropped the tax on tea from 119% to 12.5% effectively killing smuggling. The alteration of tea by adding other substances remained a problem, however, until the Food and Drug Act of 1875 brought in expensive penalties against its practice.
According to the UK Tea Council, tea drinking is popular and important today to British national identity as it ever has been and that is so mainly because of research providing health facts about tea such as are the following:
Approximately 40% of the nation's fluid intake today will be tea;
Tea without milk has no calories. Using semi-skimmed milk adds around 13 calories per cup, but you also benefit from valuable minerals and calcium;
Tea with milk provides 16% of daily calcium requirement in 4 cups;
Tea contains some zinc and folic acid;
Tea with milk contains Vitamin B6, Riboflavin B2 and Thiamin B1;
Tea is a source of the minerals manganese, essential for bone growth and body development, and potassium, vital for maintaining body fluid levels;
The average cup of tea contains less than half the level of caffeine than coffee.

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