Thanks to Tolkien, the image of the weary traveler in the candle lit medieval-like tavern lighting up a pipe with an ale has become common.
But would a farmer peasant deep in the heart of Europe been able to afford tobacco in the late 15-1600's? Or was it mostly reserved for the city folk?
I was watching the Crown and everyone smokes like a chimney and I was wondering if that was the result of cheap factory cigarettes and heavy marketing.
Smoking directly from a pipe (or, as the Mayans called it, a 'sikar,' whence we get the English word 'cigar') did not, of course, come to Europe until after the Columbian contact, so you are correct that it is an early modern phenomenon, not a medieval one. In fact, tobacco has particular significance to Columbian contact as it was one of the first gifts given to Columbus by the natives he encountered in the New World. This plant was quickly brought back to Europe after 1492 where specimens of this curious new herb were grown by naturalists, mostly for research.
Tobacco as something that Europeans smoked is largely thanks to the French diplomat Jean Nicot, who brought some plants back to the French court in 1559. As you can guess, Nicot lent his name to the term "nicotine," which became the name for the whole plant itself. Later, "nicotine" transitioned to being the name for the chemical within the plant, and a Taino word, "tabaco" (meaning "a roll of the dried leaves of this plant") migrated into Spanish and became the word for the plant itself, eventually becoming "tobah" and then "tobacco" in English. Nicot earns most of the credit for introducing smoking to the European continent, while English adventurer Walter Raleigh popularized smoking in England (although it was English naval commander Sir John Hawkins who had earlier brought the first tobacco seeds to England).
Although Europeans routinely inhaled burned substances (incense burning, censer-waving in church, etc.) before the introduction of tobacco and proper "smoking," Europeans did not smoke anything out of pipes before 1492. Water pipes, in which substances like cannabis or hashish was smoked, did make their way from China into the early modern Muslim world, but this never caught on in Europe.
Within the span of just the few decades of the latter half of the 1500s, we have the introduction of smoking tobacco from pipes as an activity in Europe, to tobacco pipe smoking being a common sight among common people by the end of the 1500s. By 1600, men smoking clay pipes in the theater were a common sight at Shakespeare's performances. By this time, medical experts were also touting all kinds of health benefits offered by tobacco: curing toothaches, cholera, balancing the humors, etc. This would, of course, soon be pushed back against by other thinkers who began to associate smoking with disorderly idleness and ill health--including by no less than King James I of England who wrote a treatise against it.
Historian David Courtwright has found a lot of evidence that, from the 16th century onward, tobacco smoking had indeed penetrated into the countryside, and that tobacco helped "peasants and workers cope with life" (Withington 634). There is even some art showing rustic folk enjoying a tobacco pipe--check out Mattheus van Helmont's 1650 painting, Smokers in an Inn: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Helmont_Smokers.jpg. In the 1600s, smoking tobacco became common among country peasants even as deep into Eurasia as the Ottoman Empire. However, historian Phil Withington finds evidence that still, the vast majority of tobacco users in the early modern era were still "rural and urban gentry; merchants, tradesmen, and artisans; prosperous husbandmen and commercial farmers" (Withington 641).
So, the answer is, yes, it was mostly the activity of upper class people and urbanites, but it was also still quite accessible to any common folk who wanted to partake, whether poorer laborers in cities or peasants deep in the countryside.
Sources:
James Grehan, "Smoking and Early Modern Sociability: The Great Tobacco Debate in the Ottoman Middle East (Seventeenth to Eighteenth Centuries," The American Historical Review, Vol 111, no. 5 (December 2006), 1352-1377.
Fabrizio Nevola, "Street Life in Early Modern Europe," Renaissance Quarterly, Vol 66, no. 4 (Winter 2013), 1332-1345.
Phil Withington, "Intoxicants and Society in Early Modern England," The Historical Journal, Vol. 54, no. 3 (September 2011), 631-657.
https://www.nps.gov/jame/learn/historyculture/tobacco-the-early-history-of-a-new-world-crop.htm
