A charter in 1189, given orally for Hamburg's backing of Frederick's crusades, grants Hamburg the status of an Imperial Free City and tax-free access up the Lower Elbe into the North Sea, including the right to fish, to cut trees and the freedom of military service.

England’s so-called Saladin Tax compels Jews to raise sixty thousand pounds (equal to a quarter of their property) for the Third Crusade.

Tea had first appeared publicly in England, where it was introduced during the 1650s through coffee houses.

From here it has been introduced to British colonies in America and elsewhere.

The importing of tea into Britain begins in 1660 with the marriage of King Charles II to the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza, who has brought to the court the habit of drinking tea.

Samuel Pepys, having secured the position of Clerk of the Acts to the Navy Board on July 13, had begun his diary on January 1 of this year, and is thus known to posterity as the chronicler of the Restoration.

Pepys has his first cup of tea in September, an event recorded in his diary.

It is probable that early imports came via Amsterdam or through sailors on eastern boats.

The African mission had not been profitable for the Company of the Royal Adventurers, but Admiral Robert Holmes seems to have made a profit from it, since subsequently Samuel Pepys complains about Holmes's magnificent lifestyle (Diary, 22 December 1661), and wonders whether the large ape Holmes had brought back might be the offspring of a man and a she-baboon and susceptible to instruction (Diary, 24 August 1661).

Holmes, having shown himself equal to dealing with Africans, company factors, the Dutch and his own men and officers alike, had been appointed captain of the flagship, Royal Charles, which he lost quickly after having failed to force the Swedish ambassador to salute the flag, but swiftly had been granted eight hundred pounds from the Crown and the command of the newly launched Reserve.

The appointment of an inept master had led to a quarrel with Pepys, which subsided after a while, but the antagonism between the administrator and the aggressive fighter is never to be resolved.

Aboard Reserve, Holmes tests a pair of pendulum watches conceived by Christiaan Huygens in 1656.

Samuel Pepys witnesses a Punch and Judy show in London on May 9: it is the first such on record.

“On hearing ill rumour that Londoners may soon be urged into their lodgings by Her Majesty’s men, I looked upon the street to see a gaggle of striplings making fair merry, and no doubt spreading the plague well about.

Not a care had these rogues for the health of their elders!” Samuel Pepys Diaries - London, 1665

Plague is in the city of London itself by July.

King Charles II, his family and his court leave the city for Oxfordshire.

The aldermen and the majority of the other city authorities opt, however, to stay at their posts

The Lord Mayor of the city, Sir John Lawrence, also decides to stay in the city.

Businesses are closed when most wealthy merchants and professionals flee.

Only a small number of clergymen, physicians and apothecaries choose to remain, as the plague rages throughout the summer.

Among the people who choose to stay are Samuel Pepys, the diarist, and Henry Foe, a saddler who lives in East London.

While Pepys provides an account of the Plague through his diary, Henry Foe's nephew Daniel Defoe will later publish A Journal of the Plague Year, a fictional account of the plague in 1722, possibly based on Foe's journals.

William Penn the Younger had become a close friend of George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, whose movement started in the 1650s during the tumult of the Cromwellian revolution.

The times sprouted many new sects, besides Quakers, including Seekers, Ranters, Antinomians, Soul Sleepers, Adamites, Diggers, Levellers, Antibaptists, Behmenists, Muggletonians, and many others, as the Puritans were more tolerant than the monarchy had been.

Following Cromwell's death and the reestablishment of the Crown, the King had responded with harassment and persecution of all religions and sects other than Anglicanism.

Fox risks his life, wandering from town to town, and he attracts followers who likewise believed that the "God who made the world did not dwell in temples made with hands."

By abolishing the church’s authority over the congregation, Fox has not only extended the Protestant Reformation more radically, but he has helped extend the most important principle of modern political history – the rights of the individual – upon which modern democracies are later to be founded.

Penn has traveled frequently with Fox, through Europe and England.

He has also written a comprehensive, detailed explanation of Quakerism along with a testimony to the character of George Fox, in his introduction to the autobiographical Journal of George Fox.

In effect, Penn has become the first theologian, theorist, and legal defender of Quakerism, providing its written doctrine and helping to establish its public standing.

Penn’s first of many pamphlets, "Truth Exalted", was a "short but sure testimony" against all religions except Quakerism.

His strident attack on the Trinity and his branding the Catholic Church as "the Whore of Babylon" and Puritans as "hypocrites and revelers in God" brought him attention from the Anglican Church.

He also lambasted all "false prophets, tithemongers, and opposers of perfection".

Pepys, a neighbor of the Penns, thought it a "ridiculous nonsensical book" that he was "ashamed to read".

Penn is imprisoned in the Tower of London in 1668 after writing a follow up tract entitled The Sandy Foundation Shaken.

The Bishop of London orders that Penn be held indefinitely until he publicly recant his written statements.

The official charge is publication without a license but the real crime is blasphemy, as signed in a warrant by King Charles II.

Penn is placed in solitary confinement in an unheated cell and threatened with a life sentence.

He bravely responds, "My prison shall be my grave before I will budge a jot: for I owe my conscience to no mortal man."

Given writing materials in the hope that he would put on paper his retraction, Penn instead writes another inflammatory treatise, No Cross, No Crown, remarkable for its historical analysis and citation of sixty-eight authors whose quotations and commentary he had committed to memory and was able to summon without any reference material at hand.

Penn petitioned for an audience with the King, which is denied but which lead to negotiations on his behalf by one of the royal chaplains.

The twenty-four-year-old Penn is released after eight months of imprisonment.

The health of Pepys, whose influence and reforms at the Admiralty are been important factors in the early professionalization of the Royal Navy, as suffered from the long hours he worked.

Now thirty-six, he reluctantly concludes that, for the sake of his eyes, he should completely stop writing and, from now on, only dictate to his clerks which means he can no longer keep the detailed private diary he has kept during 1660.

First published in the nineteenth century, Pepys diary is one of the most important primary sources for the English Restoration period.

It provides a combination of personal revelation and eyewitness accounts of great events, such as the Great Plague of London, the Second Dutch War and the Great Fire of London.

Anglo-Irish physicist and chemist Robert Boyle, often referred to as the father of modern chemistry, around 1670, further studies Paracelsus's flammable gas, called phlogiston, or the flammable principle (now known to be hydrogen).

The severe frost in Britain, which had begun the previous December, ends in March, having caused great loss of beast and of wildlife, especially birds.

Similar reports come from across Northern Europe.

The importing of tea into Britain had begun in the 1660s with the marriage of King Charles II with the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza where she had introduced the court to the habit of drinking tea.

In the same year, Samuel Pepys recorded drinking "a china drink of which I had never drunk before".

Early imports had come from Canton via Amsterdam or through sailors on eastern boats.

Tea sells in Europe for less than a shilling a pound, but the import duty of five shillings makes it too expensive for most English people to afford.

Smuggled tea is drunk much more than legally imported tea.