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In this dangerous and largely rural world of feudalism and superstitions, the Church was vitally important. Ideas about manners grew out of religious teachings, in which manners were an expression of moral absolutes. As the subject began to be examined in greater detail, accounts of mannerly behaviour incorporated traditions that had developed in the monasteries. Treatises on self-discipline were no longer just for monks. Gradually manners took on a distinct identity, independent from religion. They were a terrestrial matter, not an ethereal one, and were touched by the particular demands of three different (but not easily separable) value systems: courtliness, courtesy and chivalry.2 Their powerful convergence was manifest in a practical concern with acceptable and unacceptable behaviours at court, a distaste for excess and a desire to maintain systems of social status.
In medieval England, works expounding this concern explicitly assumed a noble and male coterie of consumers. One example was the twelfth-century Latin poem Facetus (essentially meaning ‘polite man’), which presented a selection of maxims from which a youthful audience could learn basic courtesies. Also known as Urbanus, this didactic work is something of a hotchpotch, on the one hand rehashing the Ten Commandments and on the other warning about the dangers of accepting hospitality from someone who has red hair. A man should be careful about what he tells his wife, and yet should speak well of women, for speaking ill of them is a rustic habit. Mothers-in-law should be treated generously. If handling an object you are thinking about buying, you should do so gently. You should always choose a travelling companion with care and not cast him aside without a very good reason.
There was an English audience for the Latin text of Facetus, but there were also English translations of it, and soon there were derivative works setting out dicta about table manners, conversation, personal appearance and social life. In one form or another, Facetus was consumed in schools for more than 200 years, fading from use only in the early sixteenth century. Narrower in focus but similar in temper was the thirteenth-century Latin poem usually known by its opening words, ‘Stans puer ad mensam’ (loosely, ‘The child at the table’). This short work, sometimes attributed to the scholarly bishop Robert Grosseteste, was several times translated into English, most notably by John Lydgate, whose version became popular after being printed by William Caxton around 1476.
A businessman rather than a scholar, Caxton was keen on publishing what he knew would appeal to readers. ‘Stans puer ad mensam’ was hardly the latest thing, but it was enduringly useful, providing young boys with rigorous guidance about conduct at table: slouching and scratching were condemned, as were shuffling, finger-wagging and the slurping of soup. Caxton also translated a book by the Augustinian friar Jacques Le Grand; The Book of Good Manners was intended to help ‘the amendment of manners and the increase of virtuous living’. Lydgate for his part produced a widely disseminated poem, The Dietary, which presented moderation in the intake of food as desirable and as part of a more general personal moderation that was beneficial not just to the individual, but also to society at large.
The titles of these books are either prosaic or impenetrable, so it is interesting to come across The Babees Book, which sounds half twee, half provocative. Dating from about 1475, this was ‘a little report of how young people should behave’ addressed to young men of royal blood. It advises that they should stand ‘as still as a stone’ in the presence of their master, make eye contact with anyone who speaks to them, and avoid drinking while they have food in their mouths. Hand-washing matters. When eating, one’s face should register appreciation of the food.
Works of this kind were precursors of modern manuals of etiquette. The word etiquette was not introduced into English until the eighteenth century, but the essential idea of etiquette was present: a code of conduct existed, and with it came the idea of self-control as a virtue. In the mid-fifteenth century John Russell, an usher in the service of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, produced the Boke of Nurture, a guide to standard practices in Humphrey’s household. This gives general directions: a man shouldn’t claw at his back as if looking for a flea, pick his nose or allow droplets to fall from it, belch, exhale over his superiors, or fiddle with his codpiece (the flap that covers and accentuates his genitals). By implication, becoming cleaner and shielding from view the less attractive parts of yourself enhances your sense of the integrity of your body.
These guides established a sense of what constituted correct behaviour in the presence of the king or another potentate. They were concerned with what we would now think of as public conduct. Today we identify more clearly a difference between the public and the private, and between the manners of these two domains. What we do in public is more formal than what we do at home. Partly this is because we in public present an ideal version of ourselves that we’ve assembled at home. Partly it is because in our private lives we define the boundaries of what’s acceptable. In public, we often assume roles in which we are expected to show particular skills and behaviours; a certain poise is required. In intimate situations we feel able to give vent to a greater variety of behaviour – more emotion and more truth. Privacy allows us to test our ideas, share confidences, and lay aside the masks we wear the rest of the time (at our places of work, for instance). The contrast here is between the segmented and the diffuse, between expectation and exemption. We might assume that this is universal, but it isn’t: at the risk of oversimplification, one can say that in India, Russia and Japan, public behaviour is in many respects less formal than behaviour at home.
In the Middle Ages the distinction between public and private was less clear. Although it had been drawn in Roman law, in Britain it was largely meaningless. Philippe Ariès has claimed that ‘until the end of the seventeenth century, nobody was ever left alone’: isolation was nigh on impossible.3 Social life was certainly dense for medieval citizens; while they were capable of thinking in terms of trespass and nuisance, and sometimes spoke of them with a strong sense of grievance, what we would now think of as privacy – choosing to keep only the company we have selected – had negative connotations, if any. Solitude, which is in any case different from privacy, was associated with monks and hermits. Where we would speak of the private, it was usual to speak of the hidden or the secret. The word privacy itself would not gain currency until the seventeenth century, and even then was still sometimes muddled with the noun privity, a term for the genitals that had been used by Geoffrey Chaucer in the 1370s.
In medieval societies, the smooth running of what we would call public life was achieved to a large degree (perhaps surprising to us now) through the symbolic effects of gesture. Facial expressions were remarked upon less than they are today; instead it was mainly the body that was examined – for signs that supported words, undercut them, or took their place. Ritual gesture was crucial to expressions of homage, deference, loyalty, piety, petition, penance and kindness. We may think of gesture as inherently demonstrative, but in a more concertedly gestural society the work of gesture could be circumspect. For every vigorous breast-beating there were dozens of less showy acts. A hand held up while an oath was sworn was a means of symbolizing one’s submission. Going down on one knee, rather than both, was a way of holding back a certain amount of one’s honour. In general, kneeling was associated with receiving and acknowledging benefits. Placing one’s hands between the hands of one’s overlord – not an unnatural thing to do – could be a sign that one recognized one was completely at his command. Other gestures had deprecatory effects: crossing one’s legs was a mark of insouciance, while briefly closing the eyes could indicate contempt.4 Overdoing any of these gestures could be a form of usefully ambiguous insult. By convention, when walking with a person one recognized as one’s social superior one was expected to keep him on one’s right and stay a pace behind him. The powerful fourteenth-century landowner Roger Mortimer attracted comment when he breached convention by walking ahead of the king (Edward II).
We still understand that placing someone on our right
– which mainly happens at table – is an honour. This is merely one among the many polite behaviours that have antique explanations. Allowing one’s superior to ride on one’s right, for instance, made it easier for him to draw his sword, should the need arise; now one does it without any thought of swords and sheaths. Tipping one’s hat is either a reduced form of uncovering one’s head – an ancient mark of respect – or a relic of the practice of opening the visor of one’s helmet so that the face could be seen. Firing an artillery salute is an announcement of trust: you respect your visitor’s intentions and believe you can afford to discharge your weapons, showing both your own lack of hostility and your feeling that the visit is one for which you do not need to be armed.
Early guides to conduct specified ways in which one could, metaphorically speaking, disarm oneself. In due course, these principles of courtesy percolated down through society. But while writers on manners have tended to assume that good practices trickle down, often people seeking to climb the social ladder have reached up for them. The moment codes of behaviour are written down, they become accessible to people who have previously had only a limited, second-hand knowledge of them.
The process by which this has happened across Europe was the subject of groundbreaking research by Norbert Elias. A German sociologist of Jewish descent, Elias moved to Britain in 1935 to escape Nazi persecution. In 1939 he published his book Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation. It was not a good time to be making claims for the progress of civilized behaviour, and Elias’s reputation bloomed only after the publication of an English translation of its first volume, under the title The Civilizing Process, in 1969.
Elias identifies the spread of civilization as a growth of inhibition. Being civilized is a matter of constraining natural impulses. To use the language of Sigmund Freud, we reconcile the pleasure principle with the reality principle: our desires are tempered by the demands of the world at large. Manners can be interpreted as symptoms of repression; when one views society from above, as if watching time-lapse footage shot from a hot-air balloon, collective repression looks useful, but to the individual it may seem a frustrating denial of life’s zing and zest. It requires us to make sacrifices, conceal passions and hold back urges. In addition, it involves empathy. Self-control and empathy were not invented by Europeans of the early modern period (roughly 1500 to 1800); they existed already, but were now amplified. Self-discipline, exercised and toned a bit like a muscle, was a characteristic of the rising European bourgeoisie. Feelings of shame and repugnance became more common. As this happened, behaviour that had once seemed acceptable became problematic: for instance, you had to be much more scrupulous about disposing of your bodily waste, whether it was a question of blowing your nose discreetly or retreating to a special room to urinate.
The process Elias describes was not slick. But, with hindsight, its direction is clear. Aggression was dampened. The power of the monarch and his court increased. As London became more established as England’s social and political centre, and as it became more clear that the court was the centre of power, so there developed a society in which different groups’ functions and obligations were at once more sharply defined and more densely interwoven. Elias argues that the royal court stood at the heart of the social networks that initiated and maintained the civilizing process. The control of weapons was centralized, and so was the control of the people chosen to wield those weapons. Laws were stiffened: as a result, when people travelled, they no longer expected to have to fend off physical attack. Right across western Europe an upper class of knights was superseded by a more peaceable, literate upper class of courtiers.5
This transition – warriors to courtiers – was not absolutely decisive, as the categories were not mutually exclusive. Yet as the formal apparatus of government developed, the authoritarian state monopolized large-scale violence. Away from state-sanctioned wars, fatal acts of violence became much less common; crimes against the person diminished (outside the home, though perhaps not within it), and property became the main target for criminals. Increasingly, the authorities stigmatized violence and punished those who engaged in it.
As society became better regulated and safer, it seemed reasonable to think beyond the short term, to avoid doing now what would be likely to cause pain or displeasure in the future. More complex social relationships in any case made it more important to exercise foresight. Adolescents were recognized as a distinct group, in need of tutelage and supervision, and various means were found to control adolescent masculinity. Among these was popular entertainment, such as theatre, which allowed violent fantasies to be indulged – harmlessly, it was for the most part believed. As casual day-to-day violence receded, so sensitivity to threats and evidence of violence increased. By the middle of the seventeenth century there was a strong aversion to the sight of blood.6 In defence of even the most passionate convictions, courtiers were likely to spill not blood, but ink.
Many of the basic principles of mannerly behaviour have existed, in a pretty stable form, since before this transition from warriors to courtiers. What’s changed more has been the things we have to be mannerly about. Medieval courtesy books were preoccupied with table manners, almost to the exclusion of any other subject. In medieval England, the feast expressed an ideal image of society. The rituals that organized a feast were essential to the occasion’s rewards. The Bible established the value of feasting (the Last Supper being just one of many biblical feasts), and medieval ideas of social behaviour, no matter how secular in appearance, were coloured by religion. Feasts were occasions to display social cohesion; leftovers could be given to the poor, who could be expected to pray for the souls of their benefactors.
Petrus Alfonsi, a Jew from Andalusia who converted to Christianity and served at the court of Henry I, wrote in a little book of wisdom he called Disciplina Clericalis that one should not speak with one’s mouth full, allow crumbs to fall from one’s lips, or lunge for the bread before any other food has reached the table. Henry’s household propagated many ideas about good behaviour, and one young man who spent time there went on to be King David I of Scotland, whose innovations included a scheme to give tax rebates to those of his subjects who learned to consume their food more elegantly.
Daniel of Beccles, probably a member of the court of Henry II, was another who provided a wealth of advice for those attending feasts. In his Latin poem known as Urbanus Magnus or Liber Urbani, he wrote that while eating one should not put one’s elbows on the table or play with one’s cutlery, and one should never lick one’s greasy fingers or speak with one’s mouth full. He also emphasized the need for watchfulness and restraint as one sought to maintain peaceful relations with one’s fellow citizens. One shouldn’t attack an enemy while he is defecating, should avoid sharing secrets with one’s wife, and ought to look towards the ceiling when belching.
Table manners, central to these medieval guides, remain important, and are interpreted as representing in miniature a person’s whole repertoire of manners. They enable us to take a thin yet flavoursome slice of someone’s character. In the nineteenth century it was alleged that the surest test of English people’s table manners was to observe them in the act of eating asparagus, artichokes, oranges and grapes, while those of Americans could be assessed on the evidence of how a pie was consumed. The manner in which one eats peas has traditionally been subjected to similar scrutiny. It is sometimes alleged that candidates for fellowship at the exclusive Oxford college All Souls are served a fruit tart at dinner; those examining them watch to see what they do with the fruit’s inedible pits. To quote a Victorian proverb: ‘Every meal is a lesson learned.’
In the title of the Liber Urbani there is a clear sign of where Daniel of Beccles expected to find good manners. Urbs was the Latin for ‘city’, and in Latin culture it was usually understood to mean before all else Rome. Liber Urbani was literally a ‘book of the city’ – of city life and city ways. We now inevitably see a link here to the word urbane. This entered English i
n the sixteenth century; around 1600 urbane began to connote not just city manners but specifically an elegant form of manners. In 1623 Henry Cockeram published a dictionary in which he defines the adjective urbane as ‘civil’ or ‘courteous’. By contrast, rusticity has conventionally been identified with a lack of manners, and the use of rustic in that sense began at around the time that urbane was beginning to denote courtesy. To this day, accounts of manners and guides to the subject tend to concentrate on what happens in urban life. Rural manners get less coverage, either because they are assumed not to exist (once the standard view) or because it is harder to find them documented (now the more credible explanation).
Urbanity in medieval England did not reach far. Even in the places it did reach, it could not blot out the norms of a world full of physical dangers.7 War was an almost constant feature of life. England in the twentieth century was much less violent than England in the fourteenth century – about 95 per cent less so, according to the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. The medieval English were familiar with torture, cruel spectacles and capital punishment. Religious faith, often presented today as a great bulwark against chaos, did not make them safe.8 But deep religious feeling was the norm. Although not everyone was pious and the clergy were often an object of animosity, medieval Christians, living at a time when terrestrial life was hard and there were few diversions to entice their attention, were intent on doing whatever they could to achieve salvation.