One apparent path to salvation was the Crusades, a series of experiments in colonialism that were informed by penitence yet ended in butchery. When Pope Urban II delivered the sermon at Clermont that led to the First Crusade, he turned a request for mercenaries from the embattled Byzantine emperor into a vision of armed pilgrimage. The ensuing conflicts with pagans and heretics were understood not only as a religious mission, but also as an opportunity for what we might today call personal development.
When we think of manners in this context, we think of chivalry. The word chivalry has been cheapened; today it calls to mind either knights protecting damsels in distress – which is the stuff of fairy tales – or a man helping a woman off the train with her heavy bag – something quaint, banal, perhaps problematic, and the cue for a joke about how this kind of thing is dying out or a retort about its being patronizing. But we know that chivalry once meant something more than this. Originally it was a collective term for knights who were ready for battle, typically mounted on horseback.
If it is a twentieth-century cliché that ‘The age of chivalry is dead,’ it is to the nineteenth century that we can trace the notion that chivalry is all about little courtesies. Sir Walter Scott’s ballads and his novels with medieval settings fuelled an enthusiasm for reviving feasts and tournaments, as well as the (supposed) spirit of the Middle Ages. More remarkable was Kenelm Henry Digby’s The Broad Stone of Honour (published in 1822 and later expanded), which originally set out to provide ‘rules for the gentlemen of England’. Digby claimed that chivalry ‘disposes men to heroic and generous actions, and keeps them conversant with all that is beautiful and sublime in the intellectual and moral world’.9 Those inspired by Scott and Digby expended their efforts on acquiring the physical trappings of medieval Englishness, yet the business of reclaiming chivalry, even in this limited fashion, was seen as a means of recovering from the frivolity and moral laxity of the Regency period (1811–20). It was amid this rather fanciful rearmament that the adjective chivalrous became a term to denote what the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) calls being ‘disinterestedly devoted in the service of the female sex’. It was at this time, too, that chivalric caught on as an alternative to chivalrous: chivalric was more strongly associated with real knightly qualities, chivalrous with an ideal and polished image of the halcyon days of gallantry.
The image of chivalry as a veneer of ceremony trivializes what was in the Middle Ages a serious code and a vocation with its own visual language (the heraldic insignia that would later be displayed by families as blazons of their noble histories). The concept of chivalry was probably born at the court of Charlemagne in the eighth and ninth centuries, if not before, though the word itself is not attested in English until around 1300. It flourished from 1100 to 1500, peaking in the thirteenth century, and at its heart was what the historian Maurice Keen calls ‘the code and culture of a martial estate which regarded war as its hereditary profession’.10 Keen’s phrase does a good job of dispelling the romance summoned up by stories of heroic expeditions and derring-do.
In medieval society, chivalry was a means for a man to emphasize not just his bravery and valour, but his knightly bearing as well. It had a softening effect. While this is not to say that it made men actually seem soft, it moderated or channelled violent urges. Skill was prized above flamboyant attempts at heroism. Hunting, a favoured recreation and a good preparation for war, allowed a knight to perfect his handling of horses, the techniques for killing animals, and the dissection and distribution of each carcass. Tournaments, though another valuable means of preparing for warfare, were chiefly occasions for defining one’s reputation, not least for being well equipped; from the thirteenth century, most of the weapons used in tournaments were blunted, and the festivities were controlled and carefully documented. Even battle, for all its material rewards and bloody thrills, was aestheticized, and although violence and vigour were commended, portraits of the best knights made much of their watchfulness and mastery of reconnaissance.
The literature of chivalry promoted an ideal of princely behaviour and the obligations of government. This informed the ideal of a Christian prince that was later expounded by the Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus among others. But the main legacy of chivalry was an idea of honour – something that it had itself inherited from earlier warrior codes. Honour was achieved through a life of action rather than through genteel inertia: prowess in the handling of arms, loyalty, generosity, courtesy and a frankly confident manner. Writers on the subject presented military service as not only a discipline and a profession, but also the expression of a sophisticated ethos in which horsemanship, Christian purpose and aristocratic virtue were bound together. Rather than promoting sterile conformism, chivalry emphasized that within the collective ethos of military virtue there was a special place for the individual and his journey.
We get a sense here of a world in which ideas about manners were mainly to do with male experience. So what about women? The heroic acts of the chevalier had an erotic stimulus. The imagination of the medieval upper classes was gripped by fantasies of love, which were inspired by works of literature. The Roman de la Rose, a long poem written in the thirteenth century by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, exerted an especially strong influence, conceiving of love as a quest that develops in graduated steps. In England, Eleanor of Aquitaine in the twelfth century and Eleanor of Provence in the thirteenth played leading parts in propagating new ideas of love. These powerful women were, respectively, the wives of Henry II and Henry III. Their gift was the idea of ‘courtly’ love, an aristocratic sport in which the idealized mistress is an object of unstinting devotion for her adoring suitor, who hopes that his persistence will eventually be rewarded, though such an end seems almost unbearably remote. The modern Hollywood rom-com does not sound so very far away. While there was much more to courtly love than a mere code of procedures, the intricate behaviour it entailed often makes it look like an alternative to religion, and the idea of love as a surrogate for faith is a resonant one for us now, as is the idea that love, for all its supposedly organic qualities, is a ritual, a code of communication, a mechanism for establishing security and dependency.
In practice, courtly love made the woman an object. It exalted her, yet in a way that denied her individuality. Medieval women were classified according to their marital status; they were expected to be virgins, wives or widows. There was no link between employment and power, for only peasant women worked, perhaps brewing ale, mowing fields or laundering other people’s clothes. The doctrine of courtly love, rather than providing women with a useful vision of their potential or of how to behave, simply enlarged the vocabulary used (by men) to talk about women.
There is no more arresting (male) literary portrait of a woman at this time than Chaucer’s of the Prioress in The Canterbury Tales. When Chaucer introduces the Canterbury pilgrims, he gives a taste of their distinguishing characteristics. Instead of offering a lot of moralizing comment, he leaves it to his audience to form a view of precisely what is wrong with each pilgrim. Thus the open sore on the Cook’s shin, readily visible, seems to suggest a sloppy approach to kitchen hygiene, and the detail is all the more pungent for being followed by the information that he makes a good sweet poultry pudding. The Pardoner’s cache of spurious holy relics, besides allowing him to extract money from gullible folk, appears similarly insanitary. The Miller’s liking for crude jokes, while hardly at odds with his line of work, seems as tediously inconsiderate as his passion for playing the bagpipes while the pilgrims pass through the London streets. Chaucer constructs these characters and their stories in what are often bawdy terms; in his world, unlike for much of the period since, people’s particular forms of profanity were treated as evidence of their personalities and desires, rather than just as something to be blotted out and denounced.
By comparison with these figures the Prioress seems, on first view, delicate and highly civilized. She is described as demure and charitable, and we learn that sh
e would weep if she saw a mouse in a trap. Her table manners are fastidious; she repeatedly wipes her upper lip, and in the following centuries this was frequently reproduced in courtesy books as an example of polite behaviour. But instead of being a paragon, the Prioress is guilty of a crime we know well: she is a good deal more fashionable than she should be. It is ‘grease’ that she wipes from her lip, and there may be a medieval pun here (lost to us because of words’ changed sounds), for in so fussily removing every last trace of it, she is also eliminating all suggestion of ‘grace’. The manners of Chaucer’s Prioress suggest vanity, not morality. They are a shallow, worldly imitation of French aristocratic habits, as well as echoing – unbefittingly – some tips on seduction given in the Roman de la Rose.
The Prioress looked to French examples because at this time there was in English no sustained guide to conduct specifically aimed at women. There would be none until the seventeenth century: Richard Brathwait’s The English Gentlewoman (1631) has a claim to be the first work to fill the void. ‘Honour’ was a keyword for Brathwait. His idea of feminine ‘decency’ was narrow. A decent woman’s ‘propriety’ could be perceived in the way she walks (‘demurely’), her gaze (there should be no ‘lightness’ or ‘wantonness’), her speech (‘light’ subjects were to be avoided) and her attire (which should show no sign of ‘variety and inconstancy’). Brathwait stressed the need for women to concentrate on domestic matters, and claimed that a woman in mixed company should ‘tip her tongue with silence’. Among young women especially, ‘bashful silence is an ornament’. In short, a gentlewoman should be ‘fashionably neat’, ‘formally discreet’, ‘civilly complete’, ‘amiably decent’, ‘precious in repute’, ‘affectionately constant’, ‘generously accommodated’ (which is somewhat vaguely explained) and ‘honourably accomplished’.11
These terms suggest a difficult balancing act. The English Gentlewoman was the forerunner of all those guides to female excellence that expect women to achieve an impossible array of skills and qualities – as wives and mothers, rounded but retiring, and gemlike but unobtrusive. It also inherited a medieval tradition of picturing the ideal woman as self-effacing, chiefly concerned with others’ welfare rather than her own.
Before Brathwait, there were imported treatises providing similar instruction, but their focus was narrow: at their core was a concern with the preservation of honour through chastity. The fourteenth-century The Book of the Knight of the Tower, compiled by the Angevin nobleman Geoffroy de la Tour Landry for the instruction of his daughters, was twice translated into English in the century that followed, the second time by Caxton. It is mainly concerned with clarifying the difference between good and evil, to keep young women from surrendering their chastity to manipulative males. It is a paean to moderation, fixated on the need for women to dress in an unostentatious style. No woman should wear the sort of steepling headdress that obliges her to stoop like a stag entering a wood; hanging sleeves are out, and so are fancy caps. In literature of this kind, aimed at girls rather than grown women, examples were essential. Biblical stories were used to illustrate virtues. The story of the Virgin Mary – typically presented as an illiterate – was used to teach humility. The religious imagery notwithstanding, this kind of literature wasn’t going to percolate through much of society; the conduct book for women came of age as a genre only when it ceased to be coloured by aristocratic imagery and ideals – and when a lot more women could read.
3
Lubricants and filters
‘a kind of lesser morality’
It is hard to discuss manners for long without remembering certain sayings about them. The one that comes up most often is ‘Manners maketh man’. When I told people that I was writing a book about manners, no response was more common than those three words, pronounced in an elliptical style that wasn’t obviously either reverent or ironic. Spelled a little differently, they were the motto chosen in the fourteenth century by William of Wykeham, a rich bishop and artistic patron, when he founded Winchester College, a school for boys in Hampshire, and New College, part of the University of Oxford. I remember as a schoolchild being told that these words were inscribed above the entrances to both institutions, and on one occasion also being told that they should be inscribed outside every place of learning. Implicit in the motto was the idea that it was a man’s mental and moral endowments, not the advantages of background, that were the measure of his worth.
William’s motto may now strike us as archaic, in both its language and its content. Today the word manners is likely to make us think of qualities and behaviours different from those he had in mind. Some are visible: showing consideration for colleagues and neighbours, not leaving litter behind in public, driving considerately, helping an elderly person, offering one’s seat to a pregnant woman, and so on. Others are not so visible: tact, for instance. Then there are the behaviours we identify as a failure of manners, as rudeness: loudness, spitting, swearing and name-calling, crass sexual advances, not listening, not returning a greeting, pushing and shoving, blocking other people’s way, encroaching on their space. We arrive at a definition of manners as acts or gestures of avoidance and restraint.
Our glimpse of the medieval world has already suggested this: in the previous chapter we had John Russell pointing out the unsightliness of clawing at one’s back, Petrus Alfonsi advising against lunging for the bread, and Daniel of Beccles counselling that one should not attack an enemy while he is at stool. That chapter set up two key themes of this book. First, as new forms of sociability develop, new manners develop too. Second, manners tend to serve as protection. They shield us from aggression, insults, contact with other people’s bodily fluids (and those of their pets), exposure to others’ rubbish, unpleasant details of their lives, and also often the truth. In those societies we are likely to think of as ‘primitive’, the situation is reversed: manners exist mainly so that the individual can keep others away from his or her germs and filth and grossness.
In the absence of good manners, the rawness of our primal urges bursts forth. Even when we maintain good manners, some of those urges may leak out in sublimated form, but by minimizing leakage we ensure that those around us do not feel anxious. We identify good manners as an aid to tranquillity; they are represented as something habitual and settled, and at the same time as a lubricant, preventing friction. Arguing that manners are ‘a kind of lesser morality, calculated for the ease of company’, the eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume wrote that ‘every thing which promotes ease, without an indecent familiarity, is useful and laudable.’ Good manners exist ‘to facilitate the intercourse of minds, and an undisturbed commerce and conversation’. They are a ‘companionable virtue’.1
This makes manners sound colourless. But an act of good manners can be accompanied by a bright pulse of feeling. The reward for treating another person well may seem to be no more than the pleasant consciousness of having done so, yet there are forces at work here that we cannot track. When we form an intimate bond with another person, the brain’s reward centres are activated. Feelings of affiliation and attachment cause the hormone oxytocin to be released in the brain and secreted into the bloodstream, and oxytocin further promotes those feelings of affiliation and attachment. This happens when we look at a baby, when a mother breastfeeds her child, when we are shown a sign of trust, after taking MDMA, during sexual arousal, when we play a friendly game of table tennis (which I choose because it seems so much more plausible than a friendly game of squash or football) or when we deliberately extend a courtesy to someone who is not our kin. Stress blocks the release of oxytocin, and testosterone interferes with its reception. But when oxytocin is released and received, it causes dopamine to be released as well, heightening our sensitivity to pleasure. Affiliative or ‘pro-social’ behaviours start a virtuous circle in the chemical life of our brains.2
Hume’s companionable virtue, with its chemical accompaniments, seems to be a fact of all human societies. When in 1945 the American anthropo
logist George P. Murdock noted the characteristics recorded in all cultures known to ethnographers, the list included cleanliness training, etiquette, greetings, hospitality, mealtimes and status differentiation.3 The specific practices vary, but the basic principles appear to be universal.
What is more, the manners practised by humans echo some of the behaviours of other species. Chimpanzees selectively groom their intimates. They practise courtship. They innovate and use tools. When they develop a clever technique for doing something, they pass it on to others. After squabbling, they reconcile, kissing on the lips. This may not seem at all surprising. But consider ants, as the biologist Edward O. Wilson has done since the 1940s: their civilization contains practices equivalent to the human concern with cleanliness training, etiquette, greetings, hospitality and status differentiation, and it features caste laws, communal nurseries, courtship rituals, food taboos and rules of residence.
It is not the concept of manners that is unique to humans, but rather the ability to reason in a complex fashion about such behaviour, thinking and talking and indeed writing about it. The metaphors we use every day hint at submerged codes of manners. For instance, we often equate looking with touching: ‘Their eyes met’, ‘Your eyes were glued to her performance’, ‘He totally eye-fucked me.’ ‘He can’t take his eyes off me’ expresses a shudder – perhaps of revulsion, perhaps of delight, but either way suggesting another person’s projection of an interest that feels physically present though it is not. Being looked at can feel as invasive, intimate and even erotically charged as being touched.
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