From Courtesy To Civility

Title Pages
University Press Scholarship Online
Oxford Scholarship Online
From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of

Conduct in Early Modern England
Anna Bryson
Print publication date: 1998

Print ISBN-13: 9780198217657
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198217657.001.0001
Title Pages
Series Information
From Courtesy to Civility
(p.ii) (p.iii) From Courtesy to Civility
(p.i) Oxford Studies in Social History
General Editor: Keith Thomas
(p.iv)
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP
Oxford University Press is a department of the University

of Oxford.
It furthers the University's objective of excellence in
research, scholarship,
Page 1 of 3
PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2017. All
Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a
monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber:
University of Edinburgh; date: 14 April 2018
Title Pages
and education by publishing worldwide in
Oxford New York
Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai

Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi
Kolkata
Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City
Mumbai Nairobi
São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto
Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University

Press
in the UK and in certain other countries
Published in the United States

by Oxford University Press Inc., New York
© Anna Bryson 1998
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
Database right Oxford University Press (maker)
Reprinted 2004
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or
by any means,
without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University
Press,
or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed
with the appropriate
reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning
reproduction
outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights
Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above
You must not circulate this book in any other binding or

cover
And you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
ISBN 0-19-0-19-821765-X
Cover illustration: Detail from Card players in a sunlit room

by Pieter de Hooch (1629–1684).
The Royal Collection © Her Majesty the Queen
Page 2 of 3
Title Pages
Access brought to you by:
Page 3 of 3
(p.v) Acknowledgements

Anna Bryson

Print ISBN-13: 9780198217657
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198217657.001.0001
In the unconscionable length of time that it has taken me to produce
this book I have been given help, encouragement, and constructive
criticism by so many friends and colleagues that it is impossible to
name them all here. I offer my thanks to everyone, to Somerville
College and Wadham College, Oxford, where I held research
fellowships, and to Sussex University.
My greatest debt is to Sir Keith Thomas, who supervised my doctoral

research and subsequently provided unfailing support and inspiration
despite all the delays and interruptions in the preparation of this book.
His patience has been endless and his criticism essential.
I am also particularly indebted to two other historians. At Oxford I had

many discussions with Mervyn James, whose insights into the mentality
of the early modern English aristocracy much enlarged my view of the
subject. Later, at Sussex, I was fortunate enough to be working with
Professor John Burrow, whose encouragement and criticism were
invaluable, especially in the development of my ideas on the
relationship of manners to the intellectual history of ‘civil society’.
Dr Kate Bennett, of Christ Church College, kindly provided essential

help in the final stages of preparing the book.
My friend Dr Caroline Fraser was always ready with any kind of

practical assistance to ensure that my work on manners saw the light of
Page 1 of 2
day. Her death has deprived me of any adequate way of thanking her
for this, as for so much else. All I can do is dedicate this book to her.
Anna Bryson
Prague
September 1997
Page 2 of 2
Introduction

Anna Bryson

Print ISBN-13: 9780198217657
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198217657.001.0001
Introduction
Anna Bryson
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198217657.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords

This introductory chapter first sets out the purpose of the book, which
is to explore the nature and development of early modern conceptions
of good manners, and examine some of the particular forms of everyday
behaviour which these conceptions implied. The aim is to give some
account of the meaning of ‘courtesy’ and ‘civility’ in early modern
England. The chapter then discusses the sources used in the study;
theoretical perspectives on the history of manners; and social values,
cultural politics, and social order in early modern England. An overview
of the subsequent chapters is also presented.
Keywords: manners, social rules, courtesy, civility, early modern England
Page 1 of 50
Introduction
If ‘the past is another country’ then it is curious that historians have

rarely paid attention to a problem that almost always confronts and
fascinates the foreigner. Well before she can gain more than a few clues
about the political structure or situation in a strange society, or more
than a vague impression of the distribution of wealth, the foreigner is
struck by the unfamiliarity of the style and rules of social behaviour.
Not merely dress, but bodily demeanour and gesture seem exotic or, at
the least, subtly alien; standards of modesty and decency seem either
oppressively stringent or disturbingly relaxed; the rules of everyday
social encounter and exchange seem odd or downright enigmatic. The
perceptive traveller cannot help reflecting on these differences and
must indeed try to grapple with them. Much humour is generated by
the failure of foreigners to understand the basic standards and codes of
conduct which prevail in any society. Amusing, sometimes disastrous
mistakes are made as a stranger fails to distinguish between the merely
conventional and the sincere offer of friendship or aid, makes
unconscious solecisms, or ignores the social messages which are
expressed via variation in demeanour and address. Behind all the
unfamiliar and intriguing details of social form, physical and verbal
prohibitions and requirements, modes of salutation, and patterns of
hospitality she senses a set of values and discriminations which the
native takes for granted. To stay long in a foreign culture, to explore its
institutions and traditions, it is essential to gain some grasp of these
values and discriminations and try, as it were, to crack the society's
codes of manners.
Yet historians have written relatively little about the norms and forms
of manners in the societies that they study. It is possible to read lengthy
accounts of the politics, social structure, and institutions of a period
without finding even tentative answers to questions about bodily
decency and shame, ‘correct’ modes of deportment and address, and
the pattern of social ritual. If a modern reader does in fact have a
strong though impressionistic sense of the difference between the
manners of different periods, this is derived more from imaginative
writing than from history books. (p.2) However unreliably, the
literature of the past has transmitted a picture of social styles,
standards, and rules at various periods, and some authors and
playwrights have been credited with the conscious motive of depicting
the ‘manners’ of their times. Historical novelists and dramatists, usually
with a heavy debt to such classics, produce entertainments in which the
exotic formality or roughness of social conduct provides much of the
appeal. But the historian, unlike the historical novelist, is not obliged to
undertake a dramatic reconstruction of the past. He or she, in
searching for important areas of change and development, may well
Page 2 of 50
Introduction
succumb to the modern analytic habit of seeing manners as mere

‘form’, where ‘form’ is dismissively contrasted with the ‘substantial’
issues of political and economic power, organization, and intellectual
debate. Viewed in this way, rules of social behaviour appear as little
more than the fancy dress of the drama of history, and change in these
rules seems to be nothing but a superficial matter of fashion rather
than a significant case of social development.
This study of early modern social codes aims to show that, on the
contrary, manners should be taken seriously. Despite the fact that
modern liberal-democratic attitudes make a self-conscious concern with
social form seem frivolous or snobbish, and the medieval motto,
‘Manners maketh man’, now seems archaic in content as well as form, a
moment's reflection reveals that manners are important aspects of our
own social organization. Not only on particular formal occasions but
even in our most basic experiences of our bodies and in our most
commonplace social transactions with others, we are crucially
influenced by notions of the ‘polite’, the ‘decent’, the ‘rude’, and the
‘disgusting’. Social distinctions, whether of class, gender, age, or
professional status, and solidarities from the domestic to the national
are expressed, perhaps even enforced, by ‘manners’. Far from being a
peripheral or trivial area of individual behaviour, forms of polite social
conduct are all pervasive. It is perhaps for this very reason that many
rules of manners are all but invisible to their practitioners, while the
foreigner in any culture is often all too aware that manners help to
‘make’ a society.
Of course, psychologists and anthropologists do in fact study aspects of

‘good manners’, having translated that vague and colloquial phrase into
the ponderous language of ‘social norms’, ‘cultural forms’, or ‘rules of
social interaction’. But even when armed with some of the models and
jargon of the social sciences, historians have tended to keep to areas of
established historical interest, such as the development of religious
beliefs and political conflict. Manners, in the sense of norms of bodily
decency and decorum, and forms of dress, address, and demeanour,
have remained (p.3) until quite recently a neglected historical field.
Historians have in fact begun to make preliminary forays into the vast
area of manners1 but the subject has remained on the margins of social
history. This neglect has, I believe, seriously limited and even distorted
our understanding of early modern society, characterized as it was by a
striking preoccupation with manners. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century England the motto ‘Manners maketh man’ seemed neither
anachronistic nor ridiculous. Serious writers not only emphasized the
importance of appropriate manners for the individual but also believed
Page 3 of 50
Introduction
that manners could make or unmake their society. ‘Courtesy’ and

‘civility’ were among the values central to Tudor and Stuart
assumptions and fears about the social and political order. This book
explores the nature and development of early modern conceptions of
good manners, and examines some of the particular forms of everyday
behaviour which these conceptions implied. My aim is, at the least, to
give some account of the meaning of ‘courtesy’ and ‘civility’ in early
modern England. More ambitiously if more tentatively, I hope to
suggest the central importance of these codes of manners in early
modern society and to offer some overall interpretation of change and
development in conceptions of good manners over the period.
Page 4 of 50
Introduction
Sources: Possibilities and Limitations

Manners may be part of the fabric of everyday life, but how can they be
studied historically? At first sight the enterprise seems overwhelmingly
vast and the possibilities of evidence both unlimited and fragmentary.
An enormous range of records and artefacts could give us some idea of
everyday good manners in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England.
We could trace table manners by examining pictures, domestic
implements, and literary accounts of meals. Architectural as well as
anecdotal evidence could provide some information about the forms of
sociability, standards of cleanliness, and concepts of privacy. We could
comb literature, memoirs, letters, even legal documents for examples of
forms of polite address, and the pattern of social transactions between
and within ranks, sexes, and (p.4) age groups. Almost no record could
be excluded from investigation, from the menu to the medical textbook,
from the love letter to the proceedings of Parliament. But however
much interesting information emerged from the survey, the research
would remain unending and unfocused, producing simply a
miscellaneous compilation of custom. It might then be argued that the
subject of manners is best studied not as some amorphous whole but as
and when it arises in the course of specialized research on particular
social issues and institutions. This has already been happening, and for
some time studies of various topics, whether courts, households,
domestic life, or education, have involved some attention to the social
norms and forms of manners.2 Are manners, perhaps, too omnipresent
and diffuse a subject to be tackled as a topic in themselves?
This question is a valid one if what is attempted is indeed a total history

of manners ‘on the ground’ from all available evidence of practice. But
this is not my aim or method although, of course, my conclusions will
certainly invite challenge or modification from many areas of possible
research on social standards and practices. My approach is not to set
out with a vague and general definition of ‘manners’ and then to try to
find records which might, here and there, indicate prevailing patterns
of conduct falling within that definition. Instead, I try to explore the
contemporary definitions of good manners within which further
research on social practices might find more order and direction. This
book is therefore based mainly on literary texts which are self-
consciously concerned with the discussion or exposition of the values of
‘courtesy’ and ‘civility’, the codification of ‘correct’ social practices, and
the criticism of contemporary bad manners. It is these texts which
prescribe the limits and possibilities of this exercise in the history of
manners.
Page 5 of 50
Introduction
Among the ever-increasing number of books and pamphlets printed in

England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there were a
substantial number offering to teach the reader good manners. They
were very diverse in form and tone. Some were simple prescriptions for
schoolchildren, occasionally in verse for easy learning; some were
lengthy and sophisticated productions for fashion-conscious adults.
Some were stern and pedagogic in approach; others were entertaining
and satirical. They offered advice on dress, address and demeanour,
table manners, modes of conversation, and, sometimes, letter-writing.
Some claimed to be comprehensive (p.5) while others were highly
specialized. A number of other writings, including educational tracts or,
significantly, manuals on the proper conduct of the nobleman,
gentleman, or courtier, included lengthy passages on good manners
even where they did not focus exclusively on this subject. There is also
considerable if scattered comment on ideals and perversions of
‘courtesy’ and ‘civility’ in imaginative literature, political or religious
polemic, and political theory. This book starts from detailed analysis of
the material in didactic expositions of good manners and makes what is
inevitably more selective use of the wider literature in which there is
significant comment on ‘correct’ social behaviour. The last part of this
chapter gives a detailed description of the kinds of text that I have
used.
Given the diffuse and fragmentary nature of direct evidence of practice

in many areas of manners, written guides to courteous conduct provide
precise accounts of standards and rituals that it might well be
impossible to reconstruct from less self-conscious sources, but they
cannot, of course, be assumed to be reliable indications of actual
behaviour in a complex society. Which modern sociologist would claim
to be able to reconstruct modern English manners from reading
‘etiquette books’ such as Debrett's Guide to Correct Social Behaviour?
This kind of literature might be helpful and suggestive, but to what
extent does it really reflect the values and behaviour of society or even
of the small and exclusive ‘Society’ which it claims to address and
describe? Who reads such literature, and why? The sociologist has a
much better chance of answering these questions than the historian,
and early modern writings on manners pose particular problems of
reliability. Their potential, let alone actual readership was extremely
limited, despite the growth of literacy and the book market over the
period. They were frequently translations, usually from Italian or
French, and native productions were usually heavily derivative from
foreign models. They were reprinted, often without substantial
modification, over suspiciously long periods of time.
Page 6 of 50
Introduction
Careful analysis and a sufficiently wide trawl of literary accounts of

good manners can help to overcome some of these problems of
reliability. For any particular text, numbers of editions, discernible
influence in other sources, and the general consistency of its content
with that of other accounts can go some way towards giving an
impression of its relevance to contemporary values and practices. But
this can only be an impression. There remains a basic limitation in the
use of didactic codifications of manners as historical evidence: written
precept was not the principal means of transmission of forms of social
conduct, and codifications can easily be travesties or gross
simplifications. As John Locke remarked in his essay of 1693, ‘Some
Thoughts Concerning Education’, ‘Manners, as (p.6) they call it, about
which children are so often perplexed, and have so many goodly
exhortations made them…are rather to be learned by example than
rules.’3 The historian lacks the living example and the written rules can
only take him or her so far. In any case, expositions of manners are
concerned with ideals, and may themselves give little indication of the
distance between these ideals and real behaviour. To use didactic
writing on manners as a guide to practice is to be in the position of an
art historian trying to reconstruct a lost painting not from a
straightforward description of the picture but only from accounts of
how it ought to have looked.
Reliance on such writings means that this study is more an exploration

of ideals and norms than a history of practice, but there can be no
coherent approach to practice without an understanding of ideals and
norms. This point becomes clearer if we consider the ambiguity of the
term ‘manners’. All societies at all times have had ‘manners’ in its
broad and now rather old-fashioned sense of customs. It was using this
sense of the word that eighteenth-century writers undertook histories
of manners which were compendious attempts to define and trace what
we would now simply call the whole ‘cultures’ of peoples and periods.4
Yet only Western society, or part of it, has evolved ‘manners’ in the
more restricted sense of ‘good manners’. This is not to say that
European social conduct is better than that of other societies, although
this value judgement is in some ways inherent in our concepts of
manners. Nor is it to state the obvious truth that our rules of everyday
behaviour differ in many details from those of others. Rather, it is to say
that our organization and perception of bodily and social ‘realities’
through such concepts or values as ‘good manners’, ‘courtesy’, ‘civility’
and, more recently, ‘politeness’ and ‘civilized behaviour’, represent a
specific and characteristic cultural development. Other societies may
well have comparable values, but they are never identical in scope and
accumulated significance. For the foreigner in a strange culture, it is
Page 7 of 50
Introduction
never enough simply to observe what is or is not done in any situation.

He or she must learn how the rules are related to a framework of social
meanings. The same is true for the historian trying to understand the
social rules of a period, and why these change. To do so it is essential
(p.7) to explore the governing concepts and categories, including the
very notion of a category of rules called ‘manners’ which inform
particular practices. For this purpose, literature which teaches,
discusses, or criticizes contemporary good manners is more valuable
than fragmented records of instances of practice. The changing
terminology of such texts, the areas of conduct given most attention,
the grouping of rules under different headings, and the identification of
peculiarly problematic aspects of behaviour all allow some analysis of
the basic categorizations, associations, and hidden assumptions which
writers expected to share with their readership. Of course, there are
dangers in taking sometimes ponderous literary formulations for the
living pattern of values in society. Early modern writers were ferocious
systematizers and the mere act of codification always imposes an
artificial coherence on the complex language of social interaction from
which the codifier selects. Yet this language can be read back from the
partial, oversimplified, and idiosyncratic evidence of didactic texts,
especially where it can be checked and further traced in less self-
conscious literary sources. This reading back is not simply a matter of
analysing what is explicit in advice on manners, such as their
explanations of the way in which ‘courtesy’ or ‘civility’ is linked with
other social values in an idealized social order. It also involves
identifying what is merely implicit or even excluded from treatment,
and in this way some of the limitations of the texts can be as
illuminating as they are frustrating. For example, silence or euphemism
about some bodily functions may suggest areas of behaviour considered
too shameful to mention. One limitation and consequent silence of the
sources is so revealing that it provides the major theme of this study:
they were exclusively concerned with the conduct of a social élite. Most
authors were insistent that the codes of ‘courtesy’ and ‘civility’ which
they present were the prerogative, duty, and mark of the upper ranks of
society. They therefore tell us little about the manners of the majority.
Although the lower orders of society certainly had all kinds of manners
in the sense of norms and forms of everyday conduct, accounts of
manners give few hints of these. Indeed, plebeian behaviour, when
mentioned at all, was characterized as the absence or negation of ‘good
manners’. This will surprise neither the historian nor the reader of
modern etiquette books. It is, of course, quite obvious that the ideals
and codes of conduct denoted by such terms as ‘courtesy’, ‘civility’,
and, by the end of the seventeenth century, ‘good breeding’, were
intimately related to status. General social histories of the medieval and
Page 8 of 50
Introduction
early modern periods, and specialist works on educational history,

rarely fail to point out that the aristocracy and gentry were
distinguished by adherence to certain codes of manners as well as by
political and economic power (p.8) and privilege.5 Yet this aspect of
social stratification, so often noted, has remained unexplored, leaving
open the question of what exactly manners can tell us about the mental
and social world of the élite, and of how, precisely, status and authority
were conveyed in everyday social ritual. It is such questions that I wish
to address, using a literature which is suggestive even in its limitations
and blind spots. This study will be neither a survey of manners ‘on the
ground’ nor of manners ‘from below’. It will be in large measure an
interpretation of the values and principles of good manners as an
aspect of the changing culture and identity of the early modern English
élite.
I started this chapter by suggesting that the subject of codes of

manners in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England was a
neglected one. Of course, nearly all social historians like to claim credit
for opening up a new area of research, but it is not usually a random
individual choice which identifies neglected areas. The choice is more
often influenced by overall movements in the historiography of a
period. Sometimes cross-fertilization with other disciplines is already
suggesting new kinds of subject for historians. Sometimes existing
debates in history are beginning to beg questions that cannot be
addressed except by a shift away from established terms and areas of
discussion and investigation. This exploration of manners has been
inspired and influenced by both kinds of development. First, the
identification of ‘codes of conduct’, ‘social rules’, ‘social norms’, and so
on as objects of research relates this study to the continuing dialogue
between social history and social science which has already created
and enriched many new subjects for the social historian, from magic to
kinship structures. Second, some recent changes in the orthodoxies of
‘mainstream’ political history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
England have exposed, perhaps more by default than design, certain
problems which the study of everyday social values might help to
resolve. In the following pages I shall briefly discuss some of the
models for the study of social codes which are offered by psychology,
sociology, and anthropology, and the relationship of my subject to some
recent trends in the historiography of the early modern period.
Page 9 of 50
Introduction
The History of Manners: Some Theoretical Perspectives

While some aspects of what we call ‘manners’ seem to us to be simply
matters of technical knowledge, such as how to address a bishop or
dress (p.9) for particular formal occasions, other more basic ones seem
deeply inscribed in our affective responses to ourselves and others. We
experience much of what we might describe as ‘elementary decency’ as
a matter of ‘natural’ reaction or reaction to nature. Immediate and
apparently automatic feelings of embarrassment, disgust, and shame
are often evoked by transgressions of manners, particularly those
relating to the body and its functions. The polite person is supposed to
avoid public spitting, scratching, or noisy eating simply because those
activities are ‘rude’ in the sense of ‘disgusting’. Much of the elementary
good manners learned in early childhood is concerned with the control
of natural body functions and the suppression or containment of
appetite and aggression. Such manners are supposed to become
‘second nature’ in the adult; the polite child has not so much acquired a
knowledge of social rules as undergone an education of the senses
which transforms his or her natural feelings and tastes. Manners
therefore might be defined not just as a set of social rules, but as the
rules which define the end-product of socialization. In psychoanalytical
terms, the child ‘internalizes’ rules of decency and good behaviour as
the very basis of participation in the social world, and these rules come
to reflect the very structure of his or her nature.
Psychoanalytical terms might seem, then, the most obvious starting

point from which to approach the historical development of manners
conceived as basic aspects of socialization. It is, after all,
psychoanalytic theory that offers the best known models for
understanding the development of inhibition, shame, and disgust in the
progressive interaction of natural instinct with familial and social
experience. Such models have often been employed to define and to
offer solutions to problems of historical psychology, particularly in the
area of sexual mores or the more irrational aspects of political
behaviour.6 There seems no immediate reason why psycho-history
should not extend also to the analysis of the rules of behaviour
described in handbooks of good manners. Freud himself offered a
grand collective and historical perspective within which such analysis
might find a direction. In Civilization and its Discontents he argued that
the entire course of Western history revealed the biologically grounded
tendency of the human psyche to subject itself to ever more stringent
repression of appetite in the cause of social cohesion.7 Later
psychoanalytically-orientated historical theorists, such as Norman O.
Brown and Herbert Marcuse, have tended to abandon Freud's grim
biological (p.10) determinism and to concentrate on the social origins
Page 10 of 50
Introduction
and functions of psychic repression in different epochs.8 They have,

however, broadly retained Freud's notion that, so far at least, social
development has involved ever more sophisticated and intense forms of
repression of natural impulses in the individual members of society. As
far as manners are concerned, this Freudian approach tallies with our
general impression that educated modern men and women were more
inhibited, less direct and earthy in the expression of their desires, and
much more squeamish than their medieval or early modern equivalents.
The Freudian perspective creates a space for the analysis of historical
records of manners as guides to the level and process of psychic
inhibition in the groups for whom such records were originally written.
This space has, in fact, been definitively occupied and developed by the
German sociologist Norbert Elias, whose major work. The Civilising
Process,9 appeared in 1939, only a few years after the publication of
Civilization and its Discontents. There is much in common between the
two works since Elias follows Freud in attempting to understand what
he calls ‘the psychical process of civilization’10 and sees this as the
story of increasing inhibition of impulse. But while Freud presents
civilization as an essential aspect of human destiny, Elias deals with
‘civilization’ as a particular, historically relative value which emerged in
the specific social and political conditions of Europe between the
medieval and modern periods. Elias effectively inverts the Freudian
approach, for while Freud offers an account of history and society
based on the structure and dynamics of the psyche, Elias offers an
account of the psyche as it was moulded by history and society. For
Elias the ‘affective structure’ and pattern of inhibition typical of each
period in history are determined by the particular values and socio-
political structure of each period and reflected in its codes of manners.
Hence he bases his account on the evidence of codifications of manners
from the twelfth to the eighteenth century which, in his view, reflect
successive stages in the development of sensibility towards the modern
pattern of feeling and behaviour, self-defined as ‘civilized’. Each stage
is presented as characterized by a particular value, such as the
medieval ‘courtesy’ or the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century (p.11)
‘civility’ which is expressed in table manners, attitudes to bodily

functions, and control of sexuality and aggression. Each value, and its
corresponding ‘affective structure’, has its origin in the changing
organization and structure of dominant social groups. Feudal society,
the court society of the early modern period, and modern bourgeois
society all have, for Elias, a correlative psychic structure revealed in
codes of manners. In taking over and sociologizing the Freudian theory
of civilization, Elias offers no less than an overall interpretation of
Page 11 of 50
Introduction
Western social and political development pivoted around the study of

manners.11
Elias's work is such a landmark in proposing and exploring the ‘History

of Manners’ (as the first volume of The Civilising Process is subtitled in
English translation) that this more limited study could scarcely have
been written without reference to his many ideas and insights. His
influence will be apparent in my choice of sources, analyses of key
words and concepts, especially ‘civility’, and in my attempts to link
change in manners to change in the social and political order. But
despite the immense value of The Civilising Process as a jumping-off
point, Elias's theories invite criticism rather than simple application.
With his vast overview of European manners over six centuries, Elias
has little time to ask questions about the precise relationship of texts to
the societies in which they were written or read. Inevitably he skates
over such problems as why books on manners were written at all, why
they were written in particular forms, and how they relate to other
kinds of cultural production. He simply makes the working assumption
that codifications reflect or ‘express’ sensibility in a particular social
group, and then moves on to connect each stage of sensibility to large-
scale social and political change. Of course, faced with large
sociological overviews, historians always grumble about the cavalier
use of evidence, and they always try to introduce local qualifications.
These may, in fact, do little more than slightly modify the original
argument. But in Elias's case more is at issue than inevitable
oversimplification and a very high level of generalization from a limited
number of sources. The problem is less that he has no time to establish
the representative character of any one text in the time and group
which it addresses, and more that he fails to discuss the fundamental
question of what it is that any codification of manners, however widely
read and endorsed in its time, can actually represent.
Can the scrutiny of codifications of manners reveal the ‘sensibility’ or

‘affective structure’ typical of a social group? An obvious feature of
such (p.12) writings is that they tell us how we ought to feel and think,
rather than being a direct description of what we do, in fact, think and
feel. Of course, our sense of what we ought to feel is an integral part of
our affective life, but there is a gap between experience and articulable
norms which must seriously complicate any project of deducing
sensibility from prescription. When sixteenth-century writers
repeatedly condemn certain habits as ‘undecent’, ‘foul’, or ‘loathsome’,
it is natural to assume that we are learning something about their
feelings, and, as has been noted, some rules of modern manners are
very deeply embedded in our patterns of feeling and perception. But
Page 12 of 50
Introduction
the interplay between typical feelings in a society and the codes of

conduct which might find written expression is too complex to allow us
to see the latter simply as signs of the former. Some aspects of modern
manners do indeed seem to reflect my feelings, for example, the rule
that public nose-picking or scratching is to be avoided. But others seem
to require me to suppress my feelings, as when I have to shake the
hand of a person whom I find repellent. Others, more significantly,
involve fictitious appeals to feeling. When a mother punishes her child
for using ‘disgusting’ language, she may not, in fact, be personally
disgusted at words which she may even habitually use herself. She may
not be expressing what Elias calls an internalized ‘standard of
repugnance’ so much as making a statement about the duty of the child
to behave according to certain discriminations and categories.
Moreover, it is quite clear that our feelings as well as our behaviour
vary enormously with occasion, and that very few actions are perceived
as shameful or disgusting in some absolute sense. In my view, the very
notion of an ‘affective structure’ to be read back from codifications of
good manners is at best cumbersome and frustrating, and at worst
chimerical. Rather than seeing codifications as more or less accurate
representations of feelings, it is more fruitful to approach them as more
or less reliable representations of codes.
Although the phrase ‘code of manners’ is a common one, it is quite

diffficult to define the use of the term ‘code’ in a social context to the
satisfaction of a philosophically inclined social theorist. In a general
way, the word ‘code’ suggests a set of rules relating to, perhaps even
defining and constituting, a particular activity. But the very notion of
‘rule’ becomes problematic when we try to ascertain what there is in
common between, say, a ‘rule of language’, a ‘rule of algebra’, and a
‘rule of manners’.12 My use of the term ‘code’ will be loose and
provisional, justified simply by its virtue in emphasizing the meaning
and practical use of (p.13) manners in society, rather than simply the
restrictive and repressive character of norms of manners. This
emphasis is clear, for example, in the anthropologist Erving Goffman's
definition of ‘The Nature of Deference and Demeanour’. He
distinguishes between ‘substantive’ rules of conduct, such as those of
law or morality, and ‘ceremonial’ rules which are felt to have secondary
or even no significance in their own right, having primary significance
—officially anyway—as a conventionalized means of communication by
which the individual expresses his character or conveys his
appreciation of the other participants in the situation. Into this second
category he puts ‘etiquette…linguistic…gestural…spatial’.13
Page 13 of 50
Introduction
This approach avoids some of the formidable theoretical and empirical

problems involved in seeing manners, let alone codifications of
manners, as direct reflections of ‘sensibility’ or symptoms of repression.
Instead, manners can be seen as a ‘code’ in the same way as language
itself: a set of rules which is also a lexicon for certain kinds of message.
According to this model, historical records of rules of ‘courtesy’ and
‘civility’ can be studied precisely as codifications of codes, which
illuminate the range of social messages available to what Goffman
might call the ‘social actors’ of the period.
Goffman's model has much to recommend it, especially in the

interpretation of those aspects of manners, such as forms of polite
salutation or the protocol of formal occasions, in which ‘correct’
behaviour seems most obviously ‘conventional’ and ‘symbolic’. Yet
beyond the important insight that manners are forms of
communication, Goffman's definition tends to break down because,
both today and in the early modern period, it is hard to sustain a clear
distinction between the ‘substantive’ and the ‘ceremonial’ rule. Where
are we to place such undoubted aspects of good manners as the
matters of bodily decency and shame emphasized in Elias's approach,
which are neither formal in the sense of doffing one's hat, nor
substantive in the sense of the Ten Commandments? Categories such as
‘ceremonial’ or ‘substantive’ are not only too simple, they are also
unstable, culturally and historically relative. Although Goffman's
distinction is not exhaustive, it does rest on a very strong modern sense
of the difference between ‘mere form’ and actions important in
themselves. Yet this distinction is a historical product. Its evolution will,
in fact, be part of the subject-matter of this study. The point is that it is
not just the content of particular categories of social rule which varies
between cultures and periods; it is also the nature and meaning of the
categories themselves.
(p.14) Elias, with his sharp historical sense of the changing pattern of
values from ‘courtesy’ through ‘civility’ to ‘civilized behaviour’ is in fact
much more sensitive to the changing overall character of codes than
are social scientists in search of universal definitions.14 It is simply that
his concern to establish a linear process of inhibition in Western history
very much limits his concern with the meanings of rules and values in
any one period. Some more recent examples of historically-based social
theory have drawn much more attention to the way in which social
meanings are generated and enforced in changing codes of theory and
practice. The work of the French historian and theorist, Michel
Foucault, is in many ways the most provocative of such examples. Of his
many works, the History of Sexuality is the most relevant to this study
Page 14 of 50
Introduction
of manners. Foucault's aim was not to write the history of attitudes to

sex, nor an interpretation of changing sexual practices based on any
particular modern theory of sexual psychology. Instead, he was
concerned with the emergence and development of ‘sexuality’ as an
organizing category of experience, the focus of ramifying meanings in
terms of which sexual activity came to be scrutinized, interpreted, and
regulated. Foucault analysed the field of meanings surrounding and
defining ‘sexuality’ as a ‘discourse’, a pack of concepts and rules for the
production of sexual truths which, in a sense, creates the ‘reality’ that it
claims to designate and interpret. Hence Foucault can make the
apparently startling claim that ‘sexuality’ is a comparatively recent
Western invention. By this he does not mean that the West discovered
sex in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but that it was then that
European society became involved, even entrapped, in a net of
discourse which made ‘sexuality’ the obsessive object of interrogation,
classification, and regulation.15
The interest of Foucault's notion of ‘discourse’ for the history of

manners may already be apparent. By analogy with Foucault's
‘sexuality’, ‘courtesy’ and ‘civility’ can be seen as key concepts
governing and governed by discourses of social action and
interpretation. Foucault's approach also suggests the inadequacy of
pre-defining the ‘subjects’ about which codifications of manners might
yield information. Rather than looking for, say, ‘attitudes to the body’,
‘ceremonial rules’, or even ‘sensibility’, we should look first for the
ways in which concepts of ‘the body’, ‘ceremony’, or even ‘sensibility’
are generated within codes of manners (p.15) themselves. Of course,
there are obvious dangers in the historical interpretation of codes of
manners as ‘discourse’ in Foucault's sense. The most obvious is the
temptation to assume that there is no distance between literary
formulation and social reality, and to over-analyse texts which, after all,
have to present manners in discursive literary form. But while this is an
inevitable risk, the concept of ‘discourse’ does actually direct attention
to the significance of literary genre and the nature of the sources.
Literary discourses on manners may be more or less poor
representations of the working discourses in society, but cultural and
not just literary questions are raised by their form, authorship, and
relationship to other forms of literary discourse. If many early modern
texts on social conduct are cast in laboriously academic forms, it is
important not just to excavate them for the living social language which
may lie behind them, but to ask why academic discourse is being
employed. One of the themes of this study will be the way in which the
field of manners changes as a suitable case for discourse.
Page 15 of 50
Introduction
Foucault is right to direct historians’ attention to the shifting patterns

of meaning which underlie the historical development of bodies of
knowledge and codes of practice. In other respects, however, his work
is limited in value as a model for research on social codes such as
manners. One rather paradoxical reason for this is that such codes so
readily reveal the features which it has been Foucault's achievement to
uncover in less promising subject matter. Much of his work has been
concerned with excavating the history of disciplines, such as medicine
or criminology, with a view to undermining their claims to progressive
development and objectivity. Not only does he use the concept of
‘discourse’ to argue that knowledge in these areas is not so much
discovered as manufactured according to shifting ground rules, but he
also argues that this knowledge has been deployed and developed as a
set of power relations. Hence he has anatomized the ways in which the
very definition of the ‘mad’, the ‘sick’, or the ‘perverse’ creates
relations of domination and subordination which are made concrete in
institutional practices.16 This approach, adventurous and often
brilliantly provocative in the ‘unmasking’ of supposedly scientific ways
of interpreting the world, threatens to become a banality if applied to
more obviously normative codes, such as manners, which are also more
explicitly related to the expression of social and political inequalities. Of
course, the discourse of ‘courtesy’ and ‘civility’ is (p.16) normative
rather than scientific, but how and why do they change and develop?
Relations of dominance and submission, superiority and inferiority are
obviously implicit within the code of manners, but how do manners
reflect or affect the changing pattern of authority and hierarchy within
a society? Foucault's approach rather cancels such questions in
advance, since for him it seems to be discourses, rather than people or
institutions, which exercise power. Thus the ‘discourse’ of sexuality
creates sexologists and psychoanalysts rather than vice versa and the
power of the experts is simply an aspect of the concepts they use. But
if, as he suggests, power relationships are inherent in discourse, it
becomes meaningless to ask how far particular power relations affect
the development of discourse. More broadly, Foucault so stresses the
insight that systems of meaning create human motivations, purposes,
and problems that he neglects the reciprocal insight that codes are
developed in the context of human aims and conflicts. His histories are
stories of discourses which simply develop according to a kind of
autonomous logic, and which, at certain points, are subject to arbitrary
and sudden transformations.17 It is interesting that, although Elias's
history of manners as a history of internalized regulation of the psyche
can be usefully counterbalanced by a Foucaultian approach which
stresses manners as a system of meanings, both models suffer from a
similar defect. They both conceive of the development of values and
Page 16 of 50
Introduction
forms of behaviour in terms of processes to which individuals and

groups are subjected, rather than allowing that values and behaviour
are also a matter of active practice. Both do, in fact, use the word
‘practices’, but in Elias's work ‘practices’ appear as passive expressions
of the socially-conditioned ‘affective structure’, and for Foucault they
are simply ways in which a discourse deploys itself. It is a permissible
exaggeration to say that neither directs attention to the ways in which
values and practices work, or fail to work, for the people who practise
them.
One important critic of Foucault is Pierre Bourdieu, an anthropologist

whose best-known work has been on the relation between taste,
culture, and social hierarchy in modern France,18 and whose comments
are therefore particularly relevant to the historical interpretation of
values of courtesy and civility. Bourdieu argues that many structuralist
approaches to (p.17) values and practices, including by implication that
of Foucault, involve a confusion of the method with the subject of
investigation.19 By this he means that the structuralist abstracts a
framework of meanings from instances or records of practice and then
analyses instances as no more than expressions of the framework. In
contrast, Bourdieu analyses social rules and standards as forms of
social action, which individuals and groups use and develop
strategically. In his view it is certainly possible and necessary to grasp
the sets of meanings, assumptions, and discriminations that give some
unity to the experience of a society or social group. But these should be
seen less as a one-dimensional system which somehow dictates
practice, and more as a range of possible meanings which are
constantly invoked and developed through practice. One of his favourite
metaphors is that of social forms, discriminations, and tastes as a kind
of cultural ‘capital’ which groups possess, deploy, and develop to
sustain identity and position. Hence for Bourdieu a code of
‘gentlemanly’ behaviour would be less an assemblage of meanings and
forms of conduct exhibited by gentlemen than a set of ideological20
strategies for being a gentleman.
By speaking of social ‘strategies’ Bourdieu does not mean that the

individual is always freely choosing between rules and standards for
overtly manipulative purposes. In many ways Bourdieu is still a
structuralist himself, in that he studies symbolic systems and what he
calls the ‘habitus’—the basic habits, mental orientations, and tastes
which are ‘second nature’ to their possessors—as structures which
determine the range of individual choice.21 Nevertheless, his notion of
system and habitus does not abolish agency and action, and indeed, it
would be a most inadequate approach to manners which did not
Page 17 of 50
Introduction
recognize the ways in which notions (p.18) of the ‘polite’ and the ‘rude’
have been used and developed as conscious strategies and as active
ways by which individuals and groups position themselves and each
other in the social order. Perhaps it is strange how far social theorists
and historians have lagged behind novelists and dramatists in
recognizing the active, strategic, highly practical considerations
involved in the operation of social codes. A satirical unpicking of the
assertions of status, value and interest involved in particular styles of
behaviour has been a major theme of comedy from Jonson to
Ayckbourn. Restoration comedy in seventeenth-century England offers
a ruthlessly cynical view of social and sexual rules as forms of strategy
and one-upmanship. The historian cannot stylize and caricature social
values and forms of conduct in the manner of the satirist, but the
existence and power of satire must remind him or her that use and
abuse, as well as structure and meaning, are important considerations
in the study of social codes.
The question of satire brings up further questions which tend to be

missed by monolithic theories of social or discursive process. While
historians and theorists can undoubtedly try to identify and analyse
‘dominant’ or ‘basic’ codes of conduct or systems of meaning in any
society or group, it is doubtful whether these ever exist in pure and
uncontested forms. If they did so they would be most unlikely to
change. In fact, values and codes such as ‘courtesy’ and ‘civility’, while
in some ways taken for granted in early modern society, were also the
site of tension, conflict, and criticism. As this study will show, not only
could sixteenth- and seventeenth-century satirists and social critics
poke fun at ‘good manners’, but political dissidents could expose
aspects of ‘civility’ as no more than hypocritical trappings of status.
Moreover, the very writers who expounded the code of good manners
often showed themselves uneasily aware that their assumptions and
ideals, even in regard to basic modesty and shame, were in conflict
with other traditions of prestigious behaviour in society. In my view,
therefore, the history of manners in the early modern period cannot
simply be written as the history of an episode of a ‘civilizing process’ in
which social constraints are ever more deeply written into the
psychological structure of individuals. Nor, for all the importance of
analysing the basic framework of meanings behind codes of manners,
can it be written as the history of ‘discourse’ alone. Terms like ‘process’
and ‘discourse’ may be useful shorthand, but they should not obscure
the character of ideals and forms of ‘correct’ social behaviour as a
language of social action, adapted to the use of social groups and
subject to tension and criticism.
Page 18 of 50
Introduction
Social Values, Cultural Politics, and The Social Order in

(p.19)
Early Modern England

The interest and possibilities of studying ‘courtesy’ and ‘civility’ in early
modern England are partly suggested by the grand historical theories
of Elias and Foucault and by modern social research in areas
comparable to ‘manners’, but the aims and the direction of this study
are also based on developments within the field of sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century history. The first of these developments has been a
gradual move by many social historians away from concentration
simply on the ‘material’ aspects of everyday life—the demographic,
economic and institutional—and towards an equal concern with the
values, assumptions, and world-views characteristic of pre-industrial
societies, communities, and classes. A major factor in this move has
been the increasing, albeit belated, response of English historians to
the example set by the French Annales school of history, founded by
Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch before the Second World War. The
Annales historians rejected the traditional sequential history of events
in favour of the investigation of structures which characterized and
limited the development of societies over long periods of time. In
addition to ‘material’ structures of this type—geographic, climatic,
social, and economic—they conceived of mental structure or mentalité.
French studies of mentalité have involved both the comprehensive
description of the basic assumptions and worldviews characteristic of
particular pre-industrial communities, and more thematic studies of
attitudes to death or to childhood.22
The word mentalité is notoriously difficult to translate into English, in

which ‘mentality’ sounds somewhat flat and dry, but the approach
which it implies has been imported and has powerfully strengthened
the interest of English social historians in social values and attitudes
rather than simply in social conditions. It is now difficult to imagine a
general social history of early modern England which would not follow
the example of Keith Wrightson's excellent English Society 1580–1680
in integrating an account of demographic structure, economic change,
and social stratification with considerations of contemporary
perceptions of rank, domestic and communal order, social and familial
responsibility, and so forth.23 (p.20) This study of manners is certainly
one of many more specialized pieces of research which have been, at
least partially, inspired by this move to recover the world of values and
meanings in which sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English people
lived. In my view, ‘courtesy’ and ‘civility’ were key concepts in the
mentality of the educated élite of early modern England, and, as I have
already suggested, they implied not just ways of doing things, like
eating or washing, but ways of structuring and interpreting the social
Page 19 of 50
Introduction
world. Moreover, by showing how these concepts were related to other

significant Tudor and Stuart values, such as ‘nobility’ and ‘honour’, I
shall be considering ideals of prestigious behaviour not just in
themselves, but as points of entry into the worldview or mentality of a
portion of English society.
The notion of ‘mentality’ has not yet been used to the full in the study of
the upper ranks of society, particularly in England. It has, indeed, been
employed primarily as a tool of a ‘history from below’ and a model for
the study of popular culture24 while the comparatively well-tilled
terrain of élite history has remained dominated by the traditional
subject categories of the history of politics, religion, ideas, and high
culture. A rather curious disjunction has appeared between an élite to
whom are assigned ideas and ideologies, and the rest of the population
who are to be studied more anthropologically, as the possessors of less
self-conscious mentalities. Of course, it is probably a feature of ‘high
culture’ to appear more self-conscious than popular culture, but this
should not prevent us from exploring its basic and implicit assumptions
as well as its explicit content. With some notable exceptions, such as
Mervyn James in his brilliant studies of aristocratic political culture,25
historians have been slow to attempt this exploration. Literary
specialists have, however, been offering a challenge to historians by
showing much more concern with the cultural codes, value systems and
conflicts of value which underlie the productions of high culture,
whether in Shakespeare, Spenser, or court masques.26
(p.21) This kind of literary history, and there are similar trends in the
history of art and of ideas, has been moving between two definitions of
culture and attempting to trace their interrelationship. There is an
increasing consensus that the interpretation of ‘culture’ in the narrow
sense of the development of literature and the arts, requires and can
itself illuminate the exploration of ‘culture’ in the broader and more
anthropological sense of the ways in which a society or group orders
and perceives itself. This sense of a traffic between the two definitions
of culture is crucial in the study of the literature of manners. On the
one hand, handbooks of good manners and gentlemanly behaviour were
all productions of culture in the narrow sense, and some, such as
Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, have been recognized and analysed
in themselves, and in their impact in England, as major literary works.
On the other hand, didactic literature on manners was related to
culture in the broad sense—the ordering and experience of everyday
social life—in a more overt and direct sense than, say, a Shakespeare
play. In exploring manners, therefore, I hope that I shall be making
some significant contribution to the debates on the relationship
Page 20 of 50
Introduction
between literary ideals, social ideals, and social and political structures
which have already been opened up by work on humanism, court
culture, and the stage.
Given the rapid growth of a social history searching to reconstruct

popular mentalities in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, and
the increasing number of literary studies stressing the politics of
culture, it is ironic that the mainstream political history of the period
should actually have been turning away from cultural issues involving
the study of changing values. Ambitious social and cultural
interpretations of the English Reformation, the development of the
state, and the social and ideological causes and effects of the Civil War
have largely been abandoned in favour of emphasis on the mechanics
and accidents of day-to-day politics. Themes which once served as
bridges between political and social or cultural history, such as the
notion of an assault on aristocratic and then monarchic power by a
rising bourgeoisie, equipped with a Protestant work ethic and a radical
political ideology, have been swept away. Sixteenth-and, even more,
seventeenth-century politics are now presented as almost invariably a
politics ‘from above’, where ‘above’ means an enduring political élite
whose internal problems and disputes about the allocation of powers
and privileges occasionally got out of hand.27 Carried to extremes, (p.22)
this ‘revisionist’ political history is irritatingly narrow-minded, offering

only an impoverished definition of ‘politics’ which simply ignores,
rather than effectively disproving, the political impact of large-scale or
long-term social and cultural change. In its more moderate and
persuasive forms, however, it offers reinterpretations of early modern
politics which should invite rather than banish new social and cultural
approaches.
Put briefly, the new picture of politics rejects the notion of a ‘new
monarchy’ breaking free of the hold of the aristocracy during the
sixteenth century only to be challenged in and outside Parliament by
the advent of new social forces, such as the Puritans, gentry, or
bourgeoisie during the seventeenth century. What is stressed instead is
the continuing institutional weakness of the monarchic state
throughout the period, and its dependence on an essentially
conservative governing class consisting mainly of aristocratic and
gentry landowners who withstood all challenges to their social and
political authority. Political stability seems then to have depended on a
natural convergence of the interests of the monarchy and this
‘governing class’, who, through office-holding, helped to constitute the
state. Political instability resulted at various points from the disruption
or, in the 1640s, the breakdown of this mutual interest as a
Page 21 of 50
Introduction
consequence of institutional problems and political miscalculation

rather than of ideological conflict or social upheaval. ‘Revisionists’
emphasize the conservatism of Parliamentary or respectable Puritan
opposition to the Crown under the early Stuarts, soften and qualify the
very notion of opposition’, and suggest that the genuinely radical
religious and political movements which emerged in the crisis of the
1640s had no real chance of success. These latter served merely to
reconfirm the support of the ‘governing class’ or ‘political nation’ for a
quasi-monarchic (or as it turned out simply a monarchic) regime and an
aristocratic social order.
The political keynote of the whole period is now being presented as that
of conservatism and continuity, despite the instability, political and
religious conflicts, and major economic changes which have appeared
to make the period a dramatic one. Yet while this interpretation
certainly undercuts, or at least heavily qualifies, the teleological ‘Whig’
or Marxisant approaches which stressed changes in ideas, ideologies
and social hierarchy, it hardly cancels the need for cultural and social
analysis. To the extent that political historians are now emphasizing the
continuity of authority exercised by nobility and gentry, we now need a
much fuller and more sensitive exploration of the social and cultural
conditions and language (p.23) of that authority. Anatomization of
political manoeuvring only takes us part of the way. Tudor specialists,
noting the discrepancy between the autocratic and sometimes
absolutist claims of the dynasty and the real political, technological,
and financial limits to its power, have been devoting more attention to
the ways in which it sought cultural legitimation through appeals to
divine power, natural hierarchy, national identity, and ‘honour’.28 The
same approach can usefully be applied to the aristocracy and gentry
since, for all their collective near-monopoly of wealth and influence, it
seems inadequate to interpret their social and political dominance
simply in terms of ‘hard’ factors of economic power and access to
technologies of violence. In all societies such ‘hard’ factors are clothed
in cultural legitimation and the values of status, and their efficacy is
called in question if these values and legitimations disappear.
Therefore, we need to get to grips with the concepts, values, and codes
of conduct which underpinned the power and authority of the élite in
early modern England. In other words, we need to understand what an
aristocratic social order means, culturally and not only in some rather
narrow sense of the word, politically.
Social and cultural issues must also be addressed if a plausible picture

of political continuity is not to become an implausible vision of
immobility. The short-term analysis of politics in terms of faction and
Page 22 of 50
Introduction
patronage requires a longer term understanding of how and why,

despite continuity, the world of late seventeenth-century politics should
so clearly differ from that of Henry VII. Even if the basic distribution of
power in society and between the centre and the localities changed less
than some historians have supposed, political behaviour and rhetoric
undoubtedly changed a good deal, for example, in the decline of
physical violence as a means of settling everyday disputes. Moreover,
the ‘governing class’ while not abandoning its traditional basis in land-
ownership and inheritance, undoubtedly altered in composition and
character.29 An enduring aristocratic order was thus nevertheless a
changing aristocratic order, which managed to adapt to new problems
and conditions and, of course, to create new problems and conditions.
If, despite all the appearance of political instability, religious conflict,
and economic pressure which the early modern period in England
presents, the ‘governing class’ managed to survive with undiminished
authority, we should not simply use hindsight to take the forms of this
authority for granted. It was, perhaps, just (p.24) because ruling
groups changed and adapted the language of politics and the patterns
of political and social action which they inherited, that they were able
to ensure continuity. In this context, the close study of aristocratic
culture acquires a new importance, for it is a characteristic of
aristocratic societies that the social, cultural, and political claims of the
elite are scarcely divisible. We must look hard at the ways in which the
rulers of English society managed to find or forge new cultural forms,
self-images, and codes of conduct which preserved their identity and
upheld their legitimacy in a changing world.
Mervyn James's excellent articles on the changing concept of honour

from 1485 to 1640, and on the Essex rebellion, are outstanding
explorations of this area of ‘political culture’.30 He powerfully
reinterprets the history of Tudor rebellions to show the changing
mentality of aristocracy, gentry, and courtiers as they gradually
abandoned the assertiveness of an older ‘honour’ code, in favour of
values and practices which identified their interests more closely with
the universalizing claims of the state. David Starkey has also drawn on
culture to interpret politics, and has analysed the impact of the
structures and values of the noble household on Tudor policy, and the
strain produced by the concurrent emergence of new concepts of
politics and new political arenas at the Tudor court.31 This study of
‘courtesy’ and ‘civility’ will not refer as directly to political events as
James or Starkey, but it certainly addresses the same general theme of
the relationship between the changing values and the social and
political organization of the English élite. As I shall show, codes of
manners developed with the structures of household and court life and
Page 23 of 50
Introduction
were informed with meanings and purposes which were, in the

broadest sense of the term, political. They expressed and projected
particular visions of the authority and legitimacy of the élite and they
provided a basic language both of solidarity and competition within that
élite.
In studying this language, I hope, like James and Starkey, to suggest

that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed quite a major
shift in aristocratic values and patterns of behaviour. In the field of
manners, it was a shift from ideals and practices governed by the
concept of ‘courtesy’ to those which were expressed and moulded by a
new concept—that of ‘civility’. The structure of the book has arisen out
of this theme of transition. In the second chapter I start with an
account of the meanings and (p.25) resonances of the key word
‘civility’, which crystallized as a term for good manners, and much else
besides, during the sixteenth century. In the following chapter there is
an analysis of the particular rules, rather than the overall concepts, to
be found in literature on manners. This part of the book considers
Elias's theory that these rules show the increasing squeamishness and
inhibition of fashionable society over the period, and it anatomizes
these rules as a language of status and deference. The fourth chapter is
an extended attempt to interpret developments in the literature of good
manners in a social context, and to link changing codes of conduct to
changing educational practices, the growth of the court, and the
growth of London as a social and political centre. A fifth chapter deals
with the particular importance which was increasingly accorded to skill
in the use of language as a mark of gentlemanly ‘civility’ during the
early modern period, a development which highlights the intellectual
and political influences on change in the forms of sociability.
The final chapters of the book turn away from the straightforward
method of analysing the evidence of didactic writing on manners and
linking this to the social and political developments which seemed to
encourage the evolution or acceptance of the ideals in the literature. As
I have already suggested, didactic writing can provide only partial and
often very unreliable accounts of the working ideals, norms, and
standards of society. Moreover, it is implausible to suggest, despite the
monolithic theories of Elias or Foucault, that any one ‘sensibility’ or
‘discourse’ reigns supreme and uncontested at any period. One of the
most interesting features of sixteenth- and seventeeth-century codes of
manners, is in fact the tension and controversy which they provoked. In
their complaints and exhortations, authors of texts on manners
themselves reveal that their assumptions and recommendations were
not universally accepted. A wealth of satirical and anecdotal evidence
Page 24 of 50
Introduction
lends weight to their unease. Every schoolgirl knows that views of

manners, and not simply abstract political ideas and religious
differences, divided the Roundheads and Cavaliers. In the final part of
this study, therefore, I look at the cultural conflicts which surrounded
the development of codes of dress, address, and demeanour. The last
chapters are an examination of contemporary objections to ‘courtesy’
and ‘civility’, tensions of meaning and purpose within codes of conduct,
and the persistence of alternative traditions of gentlemanly social
behaviour at variance with the official values of good manners. It is my
aim to show that the regulation of the body personal, as much as that of
the body politic, was the site of tension, conflict, and negotiation during
the early modern period.
Page 25 of 50
Introduction
(p.26) Formulating Manners: A Sketch of The Sources

Surveys of sources are often best relegated to an appendix, but the
literature on which this study is based needs some introduction. This is
not because the literature is unknown or uncatalogued. Many of the
texts used have been analysed in other contexts and there exists more
than one comprehensive bibliography of what is termed ‘courtesy
literature’ of the later medieval and early modern periods.32 The
bibliographical category of ‘courtesy literature’, however, is so large
and miscellaneous, comprising almost any kind of writing on social
matters, that it does not adequately identify the sorts of text in which
there is substantial attention to ‘courtesy’ or ‘civility’ in the restricted
sense of ‘good manners’. These sorts of texts are themselves very
various in style, format, and overall aim, making it impossible to regard
them as a single genre. Some fall into identifiable groups and
traditions; others seem hybrid and difficult to classify. For the
bibliographer this must be a source of irritation, but for the cultural
historian the complex and overlapping pattern of writing on manners
provides clues as to the pattern of the values expressed. It is therefore
important in a study which will be organized thematically rather than
by a close study of each text in turn, to give a brief overview of some
key sources and types of source.
Didactic writing on manners can be traced well back into the medieval
period, and recent work on the significance of courtesy in medieval
society has uncovered a whole range of sources advocating graceful
social behaviour in both clerical and secular milieux.33 Social
prescriptions concerning cleanliness, sobriety of dress and demeanour,
ritual at table, and respectful conduct to superiors were written into
monastic Rules and customaries from at least the twelfth century. Latin-
trained clerics also produced collections of moral, prudential, and
social guidance for the layman. One very popular and enduring example
was the Distiches of Cato, a collection of fourth-century moral maxims
put together and supplemented (p.27) by John Garland in the twelfth
century and still in educational use up to the seventeenth century.
Another was the poem entitled the ‘Liber Urbanus’, thought to have
been written by another Englishman, Daniel of Beccles, in 1180.
Cleanliness, attention to rules of hospitality, and respect for superiors
and strangers were all routinely enjoined in such work. These texts had
a clearly pedagogic intention, but ideals of courteous social conduct
were also presented in more imaginative and entertaining literature.
Attention to values and practices of ‘courtesy’ was a striking feature of
the chivalric romances and chronicles available to medieval English
audiences. Thus precepts for table manners were given in Jean de
Meun's Roman de la Rose, translated into English by Chaucer and, as
Page 26 of 50
Introduction
Jonathan Nicholls has shown in his study of the ‘Gawain Poet’, concepts
of the purity and nobility of knighthood were presented in terms of
metaphors of physical cleanliness and the honour dramatized in ritual
hospitality.34
These varied sources show the immense importance attached to

courtesy in medieval culture. However, neither in the romances nor in
schoolbooks such as the Distiches was attention to manners systematic
or precise. In a predominantly aural culture, the concrete details of
social conduct were presumably transmitted aurally. It is from the
fifteenth century, at least in England, that a more substantial and
coherent group of codifications survive. These were written in the
vernacular and their simple and remarkably consistent form and
content suggest not only the influence of earlier Latin models but also
their roots in aural tradition.35 The Stans Puer ad Mensam, attributed
to the poet Lydgate, The Lytylle Childrenes Lytil Boke in a manuscript
of 1480, and The Babees Book in a manuscript of 1475,36 for example,
are all cast in a simple, easily memorizable verse form, running to a few
hundred lines and addressed to young pages within the noble
household. Although interspersed with moral exhortations to piety and
humility, the precepts given are largely practical and technical. The
overwhelming preoccupation of their authors is with table manners,
although this modern expression fails to convey the complexity and
importance of the formal dinner as the central ritual of the household,
one which dramatized both its internal hierarchy and its relation to the
outside world in the provision of hospitality.
(p.28) In one text, named the Urbanitatis,37 the reader (or listener) is
taken through the ritual of the table as a stranger and guest. In most
other texts, he is instructed as a member of the household in the rituals
of deference while serving his lord—salutation, the proffering of water
for washing, food and wine—and then in his own eating habits in the
presence of superiors and guests. Control of stance, physical urges to
belch, fart, or spit, and conversational principles are covered for the
meal, but precepts for behaviour outside this context are relatively
scanty. Whenever the household setting is forgotten the precepts are of
a general moral and prudential type, against impatience, extravagance,
arrogance, or indiscretion, and are similar to those in versions of the
Distiches and fragments of counsel such as The ABC of Aristotell38 in a
manuscript of c.1430. Apart from a light admixture of such advice,
fifteenth-century ‘books of courtesy’ treat good manners as a household
skill overlapping with, for example, the precise knowledge of carving or
of the duties of each official. This attitude is made clear by the format
of John Russell's Boke of Nurture of c.1450. Russell, steward to
Page 27 of 50
Introduction
Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, introduces the precepts on bodily and

verbal control and deference towards the lord which are to be found in
the other texts into a treatise describing the whole management of
household catering. The Boke of Curtasye, a late fifteenth-century work,
describes household offices as extensively as it does elementary
manners.39
Codifications of good manners during the sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries tend to be more varied, more ambitious, and more discursive.
The exponents of a new, more academic education for the secular élite
were anxious to clarify the elements of gentlemanly education,
including manners, and their approach differed from that of the mainly
anonymous fifteenth-century authors. There was, however, no sharp
chronological break in the type of literature produced. Hugh Rhodes,
for example, a Gentleman of the Chapel under Edward VI, wrote a Boke
of Nurture for Men, Servauntes and Chyldren, with Stans Puer ad
Mensam in three parts:40 a prose exhortation to godliness and
obedience, a description of ‘The Manner of Serving a Knyght, Squyre or
Gentleman’ and ‘How to order your Maister's Chamber at night to
Bedwarde’, and a rambling verse arrangement of proverbial wisdom
and moralizing advice. The second part is so reminiscent of Russell's
Boke of Nurture as to suggest derivation (p.29) from it and entirely
retains the late medieval stress on household rituals of service. The
most influential book on good manners printed in England during the
sixteenth century was, however, of a new type and authorship. It was a
minor work of the humanist Desiderius Erasmus, the De Civilitate
Morum Puerilium, translated by Robert Whytyngton as A Lytell Booke
of Good Maners for Chyldren in a dual language edition of 1532.41
Despite its authorship, it is scarcely intellectually ambitious, and
Erasmus concedes that its subject is ‘crassissima philosophiae pars’42
(the grossest part of philosophy), but the mere fact that he treats
manners as ‘philosophiae pars’ at all suggests a more theoretical,
systematic approach than that of earlier authors, who summarized
rather than systematized. The book is in prose and starts with a brief
explanation of the value of civility and its place in the overall scheme of
a child's literary and moral education. Then manners are treated by
general categories—control of the body, facial expression, cleanliness
and decency in bodily functions from nose-bleeding to urinating,
considerations of dress—followed by instructions for particular
occasions—at church, at table, at chance meetings, at play, and in the
bedchamber.
Page 28 of 50
Introduction
Erasmus's De Civilitate, like his Dialogues, was partly a vehicle for the
teaching of Latin and his first English translator was a grammarian.43
Although the text could be, and probably was, used in the training of
boys in noble households in the same way as The Babees Book, its form
and approach suggest the environment of the school. During the
sixteenth century, new codifications of elementary good manners
naturally went hand in hand with the increasing prestige and extensive
adoption of school education in the upper ranks of English society. Even
those pupils for whom private household education was continued were
affected by the values and methods of the school-room, since these
were imported into households with a newly academic curriculum and
an academic tutor. These values and methods had major implications
for the codification of good manners. First, there was an obvious need
to formulate rules appropriate to the closed world of the school and in
fact the foundation of many grammar schools during the sixteenth
century involved the prescription of good manners in their statutes. The
statutes of Heath (p.30) Grammar School, for example, established c.
1600, enjoin early rising, correct salutation, and due silence, and
prohibit loitering, laughter, and insolence towards the master.44 The
authorized Latin grammar, the Brevissima Institutio of William Lily,
reprinted numerous times in the later sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, was prefaced by eighty-six lines of Latin verse prescribing
early rising, cleanliness and neatness, and a humble and attentive
demeanour in class. Edmund Coote's The English Schoolmaster, an
English grammar for elementary schools popular from its first
publication in 1596, was prefaced by nine similar quatrains entitled
‘The Schoolmaster to his Scholar’.45 But academic education did not
simply meet its own needs in the prescription of disciplinary rules, as it
must always have done, however informally, before the early modern
period. As the claims of humanist educators to provide a complete
moral and intellectual preparation for life were elaborated and, within
limits, accepted by the lay élite, so too was the notion that social
technique for an ‘outside’ world, based on the controls required in the
school but extending beyond these, could be taught within the ‘closed’
educational world.
De Civilitate was therefore both school rule-book and training for the
world; its reading was actually enjoined in the 1586 statutes of a
grammar school at Bangor,46 but its content involves social situations
outside the range of school activity. Francis Seager's The Schoole of
Vertue, and Booke of good Nourture for chyldren, and youth to learne
theyr dutie by…, a courtesy book which went through at least nine
editions between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, was
of similar scope.47 Its verse couplet form and interpolation of pious and
Page 29 of 50
Introduction
moral advice keep it partially within the tradition of courtesy writing

established in the fifteenth century, but its categorization of manners
through the day, with service at table occupying only one of thirteen
short chapters, shows the Erasmian influence. Richard Weste's poem,
The Books of Demeanor and the Allowance or (p.31) Disallowance of
certaine Misdemeanours in Companie,48 in his early seventeenth-
century compilation of improving pieces, The Schoole of Vertue; the
second part, obviously draws on both Seager and Erasmus. Some forty
four-line stanzas describe avoidable faults of facial expression and
bodily control—grimaces, sneezing, belching, yawning, and so forth—
and the milieu envisaged is that of the classroom with some additional
instructions on service at table, cleanliness, and running errands.
Erasmus’ work remained overwhelmingly influential. Thomas Paynell's

The Civility of Childebode (1560) was little more than a copy of the De
Civilitate. William Fiston's The Schoole of Good Manners, originally
published in 1609 and reappearing, augmented, in 1619, is a modified
translation of a French version of Erasmus's original.49 The next child-
directed courtesy book to rival that of Erasmus in popularity and
influence was a translation from a late sixteenth-century composition
by the pensionaries of the Jesuit college at Pont-à-Mousson. The English
version, the work of a precocious ten-year-old called Francis Hawkins,
appeared as Youth's Behaviour; or Decencie in Conversation amongst
Men in the early 1640s, running through no less than eleven editions
before 1672 and acquiring an English companion volume for young
women.50 This entirely surpasses the De Civilitate in the detail of its
prescriptions. Seven lengthy chapters, in numbered points, cover
cleanliness, stance, gait, facial expression, spatial, gestural, and verbal
modes of deference, conversational form and matter, manners at
school, in the street, in company, and at table. The authors are entirely
confident of their capacity to teach manners by written precept, telling
the reader to go out and practise the rules ‘when [he has] imprinted
them in [his] mind’.51
Texts explicitly aimed at children and adolescents in a primarily

pedagogic context were not the only kind of writing on manners to be
(p.32) produced. Other handbooks of correct social behaviour
appeared during the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which,
while covering some of the same ground, address adults, albeit young
and inexperienced ones, and concentrate on adult social milieux. The
most important of these was undoubtedly Giovanni Della Casa's Il
Galateo, Ovvero de'Costumi (1558), translated in 1576 as Galateo: A
treatise of the Maners. It was reprinted several times in Latin as well as
in English; a translation of a Spanish version appeared in 1640, and in
Page 30 of 50
Introduction
1663 a new English translation from the original appeared as The

Refin'd Courtier, or a Correction of Several Indecencies crept into Civil
Conversation.52 The Galateo is considerably longer than the children's
courtesy books and is addressed to the aspirant ‘gallant’, to teach him
‘What manner of countenance and grace it behoveth a man to use, that
he may be able in communication and familiar acquaintance with men,
to shewe himself pleasant, courteous and gentle’.53 Della Casa presents
a long list of slovenly habits to be avoided. His rules governing
cleanliness, control of urges to spit, yawn, belch, or mishandle food,
and decent procedure in urinating and defecating are as ‘basic’ as
those of most child-centred texts and more detailed than most of these.
He devotes much more attention, however, to the niceties of
conversation, both manner and matter, and he discourses at length on
the general principles of good manners, their origins, and overall moral
and aesthetic criteria. He wishes to codify rules of social conduct on the
basis of a theoretical understanding of their character, and so to
persuade rather than simply inform. This approach, more
‘philosophical’ than that of Erasmus, is taken even further in the work
of Della Casa's fellow-Italian Stefano Guazzo, whose four-volume
treatise on Civile Conversation was translated in the 1580s.54 Guazzo,
whose approach is perhaps too academic (p.33) for his work to be
easily categorized as a manual of behaviour, discusses the rational and
moral basis of the rules of social conduct with a full battery of classical
references. However, his concentration on obviously morally
controversial areas of polite behaviour, for example, the problem of
flattery, means that the elementary physical level of good manners is all
but excluded from consideration.
S. R.'s A New Yeare's Gift. The Courte of Civill Courtesie:…assembled in

the behalf of all younge gentlemen, and others, to frame their
behaviour according to their estates, at all times and in all companies
(1577)55 claims an Italian source which is probably fictitious. It advises
its readers how to cope with good company but also gives directions on
the skilful negotiation of dangerous company in streets and taverns.
Elementary bodily decencies are on the whole taken for granted,
although there is a section on table manners and warnings against
coarse eating habits. The focus is on the maintenance and accumulation
of social credit through graceful address and compliments adjusted to
the status of the company, and the observation of correct deferential
form. It is much less extensive than either the Galateo or the major
handbook of good manners for the adult translated into English nearly
a century later: Antoine de Courtin's The Rules of Civility, or Certain
Ways of Deportment observed in France, amongst all Persons of Quality,
upon Several Occasions. This was translated in 1671 only a year after
Page 31 of 50
Introduction
its first publication in France, and was reissued again and again over
the next twenty years.56 Courtin's approach is both highly analytical
and immediately practical. He introduces his rules with a lengthy
section on the overall definition and justification of civility and
consistently attempts to align general principle with specific precept.
He covers all the areas described in the Galateo, although with more
emphasis on technical expressions of deference than on general
sociability. It would be misleading to contrast the more adult and the
child-centred courtesy manuals too strongly. It is clear, for example,
that Della Casa's work influenced the French manual translated as
Youth's Behaviour and that Courtin's formulations were influenced by
the (p.34) latter work. Their material overlapped, as it did with other
forms of didactic writing on conduct.
One such type of writing will receive independent treatment in this

study since it is, at least partially, a sub-category of the literature of
good manners, and this is advice on correct verbal and epistolary
technique. Correct modes of address and graceful forms and topics of
conversation were central to notions of courtesy and civility and, as has
been noted, were the subject of prescription in the more elaborate
manuals of manners described above. A substantial number of
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts were devoted entirely to the
achievement of verbal facility.57 Thomas Wilson's The Arte of
Rhetorique, first published in 1553, but reissued several times in the
next thirty years, expounded all the forms of elegant and persuasive
speech with much detailed illustration by example. Thomas Blount's
The Academie of Eloquence (1654), a similarly successful manual a
century later, also classified figures of speech and writing, ‘exemplified
with commonplaces and formes, digested into an easie and methodical
way to speake and write fluently, according to the mode of the present
time’.58 Angel Day's The English Secretarie of 1586 and William
Fulwood's The Enimie of Idlenesse, both later sixteenth-century works
reissued well into the next century, gave instruction and examples of
correct letter-writing.59 It must be remembered that considerations of
social convention were not the only criteria important to the authors of
such texts. Rhetoric was a major academic discipline in its own right
and early modern writers drew on the prestigious classical texts of
Cicero and Quintilian, for whom political and aesthetic ideals
overshadowed the purely social. Discussions of the literary capacity of
the language, as in Puttenham's celebrated Arte of English Poesie
(1589), illuminate canons of taste which have a clear relation to status
socially expressed in conversation and writing, but this does not make
them principally codifications of verbal politeness. Even the later
seventeenth-century ‘Academies of Compliments’, compilations of
Page 32 of 50
Introduction
flattering and entertaining formulae, emerge out of the literary

tradition of the ars amandi rather than directly as codifications of
manners. Nevertheless, notions of the civility of speech and writing
certainly inform these texts.
The intimate connection between ideas of good manners and

gentlemanly status is almost always evident in handbooks of manners
and, while it would be misleading to assume that polite behaviour was
defined as relating only to aristocratic life, codification of manners
cannot be isolated (p.35) from the tradition of writing on overall ideals
of nobility and gentility. However concrete and mundane the detail of
fifteenth-century English courtesy books, they were not only an aspect
of the practical organization of the aristocratic household but also an
expression of a self-conscious ideal of noble behaviour which invested
considerable moral and aesthetic value in graceful social conduct. A
training in courtesy was an almost obligatory attribute of the noble
hero of medieval secular literature.60 Courtesy was one of the defining
marks of chivalry and from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was an
allegorized figure in the romances in which knightly virtue was
elaborated. One of the earlier examples of detailed prescription of
manners is in the thirteenth-century Tessoretto of Brunetto Latini, who
puts the rules into the mouth of ‘Lady Courtesy’.61 In short, an idealized
‘courtesy’ was an essential aspect of the medieval vision of nobility.
The Renaissance saw an immense broadening out and intensification of

the debate already flourishing on the basis, character, education, and
duty of the ideal nobleman, a debate fed by reacquaintance with
classical models to such an extent that the Elizabethan educationalist
Mulcaster could note rather wearily that ‘one might talke beyond
enough, and write beyond measure, that would examine what such a
one saith of nobilitie in Greeke, such a one in Latine, such in severall
other tongues.’62 The flood of texts on gentility continued to increase in
the century after Mulcaster, swollen by a greater number of
contributions from Englishmen. As one might expect, this literature
included extensive comment on good manners.
Treatises on gentlemanly education persistently offer guidance on

courtesy and civility and some contain sections on social standards and
techniques which are as full as the shorter manuals of manners. James
Cleland, in his Hero-Paideia: or the Institution of a Young Nobleman of
1607 devotes one fifth of the work to ‘A Young Nobleman's Duty in Civil
Conversation’, including chapters on ‘common behaviour to all sorts of
men’, ‘The manner of reverence-making’, and ‘How a nobleman should
speak’. Further precepts are given in Cleland's section on the tutoring
(p.36) of the noble child under the heading ‘Of Fashioning his
Page 33 of 50
Introduction
Manners’.63 The formidable treatise Of Education, Especially of young

Gentlemen of 1673, attributed to Obadiah Walker, contains a lengthy
chapter ‘Of Civility’,64 giving directions on table manners, bodily
decency, verbal tact, and the rules of polite visiting. The author even
quotes extensively from an Italian source which he does not identify.
These two books are unusual in the differentiated character of their
treatment of manners. Jean Gailhard's The Compleat Gentleman of 1678
gives directions on personal habits and table manners in an extended
passage65 but, in general, the succession of major works offering
‘compleat’ views of gentility scatter comment on manners through a
range of topics: reputation, travel, hospitality, the selection of tutors,
and so forth. Advice on manners can be sifted from Sir Thomas Elyot's
Boke Named the Governour (1531), the anonymous Institucion of a
Gentleman (1555), Henry Peacham's The Compleat Gentleman (1622),
Robert Brathwayt's The English Gentleman, and The Gentleman's
Calling (1660) attributed to Richard Allestree.66
One preoccupation of writers of ‘compleat’ treatises of gentility was the

relationship of the noble or gentleman to the court, although widely
divergent views of the relationship were taken. There was a specialized
literature on prudent and correct behaviour at court which grew
rapidly with European courts themselves during the sixteenth century.
It usually combined consideration of the nature, mechanics, and
psychology of politics with the exposition of the social code of courtesy
as ‘courtliness’. Books of this kind rarely touched on the elementary
decencies with which Erasmus is wholly and Della Casa partially
concerned, but a common interest in the acquisition of prestige by
charming and deferential conversation and graceful physical and verbal
style blurs the distinction between the more sophisticated manual of
manners and the treatise of the court. So also does the fact that the
European courts were trend-setters in the elaboration of fashionable
good manners. The most outstanding and influential treatise of
courtliness was Baldassare Castiglione's Il (p.37) Cortegiano (1528),
translated into English by Sir Thomas Hoby in 1561 and constantly
reissued in English, Latin, and Italian in the later sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries.67 Castiglione delineated a comprehensive ideal
of the nobleman or gentleman as courtier, providing what seemed to
many the definitive exposition of courtly grace and ease expressed in
conversation and in a variety of aesthetic, intellectual, and physical
accomplishments. Castiglione's concern was with what might be called
‘manner’ as opposed to ‘manners’, but the second was at least partially
constituted by the first. Della Casa's detailed prescriptions are greatly
illuminated by Castiglione's more ambitious concepts of courtliness.
Page 34 of 50
Introduction
By contrast, Lorenzo Ducci's Ars Aulica, or the Courtier's Arte,

translated in 1607, and Eustache du Refuge's A Treatise of the Court,
which appeared in English in 1622, deal more systematically with the
political techniques helpful to the courtier, but they are still compelled
to consider good manners as a precondition for political success.68
Nicholas Faret's The Honest Man: or, the Art to Please in Court,
translated in 1632, contains more substantial guidance on manners
because Faret concentrates less on principles of political manipulation
and more on the personal qualities of the courtier—moral, mental, and
physical. He gives ‘Generall Maximes of Conversation’ and some rather
unfocused comments on ‘the Difference of Ages, Manners and
conditions which must be observed’ and ‘Of conversation with
women’.69 Faret's work shows a sevententh-century tendency for
ostensible manuals of the court to become a form in which to cast
general discussions of gentlemanly manuals and morals, and it is in this
light that English imitators of foreign court manuals seem to have
regarded the genre. The English did not, in fact, produce full-scale
treatises of the court similar to those of Castiglione or du Refuge in the
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, although anecdote and
reference in other literature testifies to the great impression made by
Castiglione.70 (p.38) In the later seventeenth century, however, there
are examples of English compilations of advice based on courtly texts
but clearly related to broader themes. The Accomplished Courtier
(1658) paraphrases du Refuge for an English audience at a time when
England under the Protectorate had no formal court. The Art of
Complaisance (1673) owes something to du Refuge but its anonymous
author builds on this courtly basis to provide what is, in effect, a
general manual of gentlemanly civility.71
Eagerness to offer moralizing and sententious advice on all areas of life

was a marked feature of early modern culture. As the development of
printing and the book market encouraged and reflected the growth of a
reading public, this eagerness found expression in a miscellaneous
range of essays, maxims, moral disquisitions of all kinds, and, of course,
pious manuals of Christian conduct.72 In many of these texts, the detail
of social ideals does not emerge clearly, for concrete examples and
directions are often overshadowed by abstract and repetitious
exhortation to virtue and godliness. It is also significant, if hardly
surprising, that where authors were concerned to define Christian
conduct without particular reference to the nobility or gentry, their
attention to issues of manners, as distinct from morals, was very slight.
The manuals of household government which were produced, often by
Puritans, in the early seventeenth century, tended to mention manners,
if at all, only where these were strictly related to the supposedly
Page 35 of 50
Introduction
scripturally enjoined responsibilities of parent and child, husband and

wife, and master and servant.73 It must also be admitted that advice on
the education and duties of women, whether predominantly secular,
such as Giovanni Bruto's The Necessarie, fit, and convenient Education
for a yong Gentlewoman (1598), or pious and scriptural, such as that
contained in Cleaver's Godlie Forme of Householde Government,
contains very little technical advice on manners.74 Even Codrington's
companion volume (p.39) to Youth's Behaviour, subtitled Decencie in
conversation amongst Women, gives none of the concrete detail of the
manual for young men. This scarcely implies that women were not
required to learn basic good manners, for example, at table or in
salutation, and it seems plausible that the code of elementary civility
formulated in works such as De Civilitate in many ways applied equally
to boys and girls. Conversely, it does not mean that women were not in
some circumstances the special object of courtesy, and in others the
subject of special restrictions. The problem is that beyond exhortation
to modesty and chaste demeanour, and warnings against feminine
vanity of dress and address, advisers for women focus on domestic or
purely ethical themes, and precepts for social behaviour are sparse.
This omission is highly significant, and aspects of the relation between
masculinity and manners will be considered in Chapters 6 and 7. It
means, however, that women's manners receive much less attention in
this study than its author would have wished.
From the point of view of good manners, a more promising genre of

conduct literature than those which focused on the household or the
place of women was the somewhat miscellaneous category of guidance
cast in the form of parental advice. The form could be purely
conventional and a development of the medieval tradition of anonymous
proverbial wisdom presented as ‘How a Wise Man Taught his Son’.
Parents with literary pretensions did, however, use the form to advise
their heirs, some with an eye to a wider audience.75 Their subject
matter was various, but often involved quite detailed prescription on
social behaviour. Significant political figures contributed to the genre:
Lord Burghley, for example, was probably the author of a set of
precepts concerning education, hospitality, and political prudence
which constantly reappeared under other names during the
seventeenth century.76 The most eminent writer of parental advice was,
of course, James I in his Basilikon Doron. The ninth Earl of
Northumberland, the seventh Earl of Derby, and the fifth Earl of
Bedford also wrote such advice, not to mention such casualties of the
Civil War period as Lord Strafford, Sir Henry Slingsby, and the eighth
(p.40) Earl of Argyll.77 Some much less exalted men made their
reputations by parental advice, notably Francis Osborne, whose two-
Page 36 of 50
Introduction
part Advice to a Son (1656–8) was, according to Pepys, one of the most
popular books in England.78 William Higford's Institutions, effectively a
small treatise on gentility, was succesfully published posthumously.79
Not all these works are of equal value for the study of manners: the
letters of the Lord Chief Justice, Matthew Hale, to his grandsons, for
example, or Sir Christopher Wandesford's Instructions to his son, have
more to say about polite behaviour than Slingsby's or Strafford's.80 Yet
they are all exceedingly interesting in reflecting English attitudes to the
rules of social conduct, and the degree to which these conformed with
the principles set out in what were largely imported specialist manuals
of manners.
Ideals of good conduct are present not only in the direct prescription of
social forms and standards but also, implicitly, in criticism of bad
behaviour and in satire. In fact, the writings on good manners and
advice on gentlemanly life already described are often full of warnings
against indecency, affectation, impudence, and impiety which are
catalogued with some relish. Other writings of the period depend
entirely on the device of presenting the ideals of good manners by
caricature of the ‘rude’ or ‘uncivil’. Thus while Erasmus, Weste, and
Della Casa list unpleasant habits to be avoided as well as positive
techniques to be learnt, a German text entitled Grobianus, translated in
1604 as The Schoole of Slovenrie: or Cato turn'd Wrong Side Outward,
and a similar English piece called Cacoëthes Leaden Legacy (1624) in
ironical reference to the parental advice genre, proceed entirely by
inversion in a series of crushingly unpleasant reversed rules (p.41)
81
which build up a picture of the perfect boor. The Grobianus inspired
Thomas Dekker to write The Gul's Horne-Book (1609), a sketch of an
alternately crude and affected London gallant, which was updated in a
version of 1675.82 The Anglican divine, Clement Ellis, constructed an
entire treatise on gentility, The Gentile Sinner (1660), by the contrast of
a figure of degeneration, constructed in Book I, with the ideal
gentleman described in Books II and III.83 Social argument and
comment by means of the delineation of ‘characters’—social
stereotypes—was a favourite device of seventeenth-century writers;
collections of such sketches including gallants, country gentlemen,
courtiers, students, tradesmen, and rustics, written as much for
entertainment as edification, were produced by writers such as Breton,
Brathwayt, Earle, and the courtier Thomas Overbury.84
‘Character literature’ is of only incidental use in the study of notions of

courtesy and civility, although it can supply vivid detail. More
important, the method of dramatized stereotypes was employed in
polemic forms which indicate the significance of manners in the conflict
Page 37 of 50
Introduction
of ideals of conduct. The anonymous Cyvile and Uncyvile Life (1579)

was a dialogue between a ‘courtier’ and a ‘country gentleman’ which
presented in uncommon detail a contemporary debate on the
contrasting nature and value of the modes of gentlemanly life
(including manners) characteristic of court and country.85 Nicholas
Breton's The Courtier and the Countryman of 1618 followed Robert
Greene's Quip for an Upstarte Courtier in dramatizing a vitriolic attack
on the courtly code of behaviour and demeanour.86 Criticism of the
courtly conduct advocated by Castiglione was already available in
England in translations of Guevara's Dispraise of the Life of a Courtier
and later in Philibert de Vienne's The Philosopher of the Court,87 but
the English (p.42) texts give colour and local context to a long-standing
and increasing anti-court trend in European culture. The political
conflict between court and country which erupted into civil war and
revolution in the reign of Charles I threw up a more violent polemic and
satirical literature in which, as is clear from titles such as A Gagge for
Long-hair'd Rattleheads who revile all Civill Roundheads (c. 1642),
stereotypes of manners were used as weapons.
This sketch of sources has moved outwards from the core of texts which
are explicitly and exclusively concerned with the teaching of codes of
manners to a varied educational and satirical literature which suggests
the intellectual and social context of those codes. This study will move
in the same direction, but it must be noted that the movement has no
obvious limits. Concern with the life and meaning of codes of manners
can be traced in a mass of writings; memoirs and anecdote, poetry,
courtly fiction, and above all drama, in which social values are often
drawn and debated with more subtlety and power than in strictly
didactic literature. My use of evidence drawn from this larger field of
writing is inevitably highly selective and impressionistic, yet it will
serve, I hope, to indicate the complexity and ambivalence of the
concepts of ‘courtesy’ and ‘civility’ to which didactic writers gave what
was often a very schematic and one-sided formulation.
Notes:
(1) An early example is the entertaining J. Wildeblood, The Polite World:
A Guide to the Deportment of the English in Former Times (rev. edn.,
London, 1973). The more recent Michael Curtin, ‘A Question of
Manners: Status and Gender in Etiquette and Courtesy’, Journal of
Modern History, 57 (Sept. 1985), 395–423 offers a more analytical
approach. Orest Ranum, ‘Courtesy, Absolutism, and the Rise of the
Modern French State, 1630–1660’, Journal of Modern History, 57 (Sept.
1985), 426–51, considers political aspects of mannets. M. B. Becker,
Civility and Society in Western Europe, 1300–1600 (Bloomington, Ind.,
Page 38 of 50
Introduction
1988) deals intermittently with social codes. A Cultural History of

Gesture, ed. Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg (Oxford, 1991)
brings together articles on the history of gait and gesture from ancient
Greece to early modern Poland.
(2) Significant comment on manners is included, for example, in the

following: M. Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and
Architectural History (New Haven and London, 1978); P. Borsay, The
English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town,
1660–1770 (Oxford, 1989), pt. IV; F. Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern
England (Oxford, 1990); W. Roosen, ‘Early Modern Diplomatic
Ceremonial: A Systems Approach’, Journal of Modern History, 57 (Sept.
1985), 395–423.
(3) John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, ed. J. W. and J. S.

Yolton (Oxford, 1989), p. 124.
(4) For example, Voltaire's history of France under the title Essai sur les
moeurs and Montesquieu's consideration of the contribution of moeurs
and manières to national character in De l'esprit des lois (see M.
Richter, The Political Theory of Montesquieu (Cambridge, 1976)). As
will be argued in Ch. 2, the extensive meaning of ‘manners’ in
eighteenth-century thought was not unrelated to the development of
more restricted concepts of ‘good manners’.
(5) Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580–1680 (London, 1982), ch. 1.

See also D. Palliser, The Age of Elizabeth. England under the Late
Tudors 1547–1603 (London, 1983).
(6) See F. Manuel, ‘The Use and Abuse of Psychology in History’,

Daedalus (Winter 1971), 187–213.
(7) Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, tr. J. Rivière, rev. J.
Strachey (London, 1963).
(8) Norman O. Brown, Life against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning

of History (London, 1959); Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A
Philosophical Enquiry into Freud (London, 1956).
(9) Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners, tr. E.
Jephcott (Oxford, 1978). This is the first volume of two, the second
being The Civilizing Process: State Formation and Civilization, tr. E.
Jephcott (Oxford, 1982). Both were originally published in 1939 as Uber
den Prozess der Zivilisation. Subsequent reference will be to The
Civilising Process, vol. 1 or 2.
Page 39 of 50
Introduction
(10) Ibid., preface, p. xii.
(11) Elias's work has been very much ‘rediscovered’ within the last two
decades. A lucid and detailed account is to be found in S. Mennell,
Norbert Elias: Civilization and the Human Self Image (Oxford, 1989).
(12) For a discussion of the concept of social rule, see P. Collett, ‘The
Rules of Social Conduct’ in Social Rules and Social Behaviour, ed. P.
Collett (Oxford, 1977), 1–27.
(13) Erving Goffman, ‘The Nature of Deference and Demeanor’,

American Anthropologist, 58 (1956), 476.
(14) Elias, Civilizing Process, vol. 1. The book opens with an extended
discussion of the different meanings of ‘civilization’ and ‘culture’ in
German usage.
(15) Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, tr.

R. Hurley (New York, 1978). A. Sheridan, Michel Foucault: The Will to
Truth (London, 1980) remains the most comprehensive (and
comprehensible) guide to Foucault in English.
(16) Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilisation: A history of Insanity in

the Age of Reason, tr. R. Howard (London, 1967) and Discipline and
Punish: The Birth of the Clinic, tr. A. Sheridan (Harmondsworth, 1979).
Foucault's conception of ‘power’ as something which is not ‘held’ or
‘possessed’ but which is manifest in all communication is discussed by
Sheridan, Michel Foucault (1980), 108–13.
(17) Jeffrey Weeks, ‘Foucault for Historians’, History Workshop Journal,

14 (1982) makes this criticism with greater length and precision. While
Foucault may be right in suggesting that human motives cannot be
disentangled from ‘discourse’ he still offers no guidelines for
considering the relationship between one discourse, e.g. of politics, and
another, e.g. of medicine or sexuality.
(18) Pierre Bourdicu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of

Taste, tr. Richard Nice (London, 1989).
(19) Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, tr. Richard Nice

(Cambridge, 1977), 72–3. Bourdicu calls himself a ‘generative
structuralist’ in opposition to ‘objectivist’ structuralists who
‘hypostasize’ systems of meaning rather than looking for the principles
through which they are developed and reproduce themselves.
Page 40 of 50
Introduction
(20) Bourdieu's not infrequent use of the term ‘ideological’ does not
mean that he takes a classic Marxist position in regarding culture as a
mere reflection of the material base of society. Rather he uses it to
suggest, first, the way in which matters such as taste, gesture, and
demeanour are acquired characteristics re-presented in the individual
as ‘natural’. Second, since such matters are clearly related to class and
status, he uses the term to suggest how these ‘natural’ characteristics
are deployed politically to identify ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ groups. I
shall use the term ‘ideology’ in a similar way, suggesting that ‘manners’
are aspects of a politically-loaded language which nevertheless
presents itself as ‘natural’ rather than political.
(21) For Bourdicu's concept of ‘habitus’ or ‘history turned into nature’

see Outline of a Theory of Practice, 78–9. For a useful account of
Bourdieu's thought see An Introduction to the Work of Pierre Bourdieu:
The Practice of Theory, ed. R. Harker, C. Mahar, and C. Wilkes
(Basingstoke, 1990).
(22) For the Annales school see L. Febvre, A New Kind of History, tr. P.
Burke; for quite recent French histories of mentalité see P. Ariès,
Centuries of Childhood, tr. R. Baldick (London, 1973) and The Hour of
Our Death, tr. H. Weaver (Harmondsworth, 1981). For an excellent
account of the concept of mentalité see M. Vovelle, Ideologies and
Mentalities, tr. E. O'Flaherty (Cambridge, 1990), title essay.
(23) French influence is by no means solely responsible for the growth

of interest in the ‘world-views’ of earlier periods in England. For an
overview of the use made of sociology in history see Peter Burke,
Sociology and History (London, 1980).
(24) See Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. B. Rcay

(London, 1985) and Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, ed. A.
J. Fletcher and J. Stevenson (Cambridge, 1985).
(25) M. E. James, Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern

England (Cambridge, 1986).
(26) See, for example, S. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From

More to Shakespeare (Chicago and London, 1980); D. Norbrook, Poetry
and Politics in the English Renaissance (London, 1984); S. Orgel, The
Illusion of Power: Political Theatre in the English Renaissance
(Berkeley, Calif., 1975); Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in
English Culture c.1540–1660, ed. Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn
(London, 1990). Aldo Scaglione, Knights at Court: Courtliness, Chivalry,
Page 41 of 50
Introduction
and Courtesy from Ottonian Germany to the Italian Renaissance

(Oxford, 1991), is an excellent examination of changing aristocratic
ideals based on Italian literary sources.
(27) ‘Revisionism’ is a term which can only be a misleading shorthand

for the work of a very diverse set of historians. Conrad Russell,
‘Parliamentary History in Perspective 1604–1629’, History, 61 (1976),
and Faction and Parliament, ed. Kevin Sharpe (London, 1978) were
opening sallies, and criticism and debate can be found in Past and
Present, 92 (1981). For the cultural historian the most interesting
approach, which stresses conservatism even while it cannot be termed
‘revisionist’ in the polemic sense, is Robert Ashton, The English Civil
War (London, 1978).
(28) See, for example, Penry Williams, The Tudor Regime (Oxford,
1979), 351–406, and John Guy, Tudor England, ch. 15 on ‘political
culture’.
(29) L. Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558–1641 (Oxford, 1965); L.

Stone and J. C. Fawtier Stone, An Open Aristocracy? England 1540–
1880 (Oxford, 1983).
(30) M. E. James, ‘English Politics and the Concept of Honour, 1485–

1642’, Past and Present, supplement no. 3 (1978), also reprinted in M.
E. James, Society, Politics and Culture (Cambridge, 1986).
(31) David Starkey, ‘The Age of the Household; politics, society and the
arts, c.1350–c.1550’ in The Context of English Literature: The Late
Middle Ages, ed. S. Medcalf (London, 1981).
(32) G. Noycs, A Bibliography of Courtesy and Conduct Books in

Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven, 1937); V. B. Heltzel, A
Checklist of Courtesy Books in the Newberry Library (Chicago, 1942); J.
E. Mason, Gentlefolk in the Making: English Courtesy Literature 1531–
1774 (Philadelphia, 1935); R. Kelso, The Doctrine of the English
Gentleman in the Sixteenth Century (Urbana, Ill., 1964).
(33) For the earliest examples of ‘courtesy literature’ used in English

education see N. Orme, From Childhood to Chivalry: The Education of
the English Kings and Aristocracy 1066–1530 (London, 1984), 136–41.
Jonathan Nicholls, The Matter of Courtesy: Medieval Courtesy Books
and the Gawain-Poet (London, 1983), appendix B, lists Latin courtesy
books and gives an excellent account of courtesy and the religious
orders (ch. 2, pp. 22–44) and of the texts, such as the Distiches, used in
education (ch. 4, pp. 57–74).
Page 42 of 50
Introduction
(34) See Nicholls, The Matter of Courtesy, ch. 6, pp. 85–102.
(35) For fifteenth-century courtesy books see The Babees Book etc., ed.
F. J. Furnivall (Early English Text Society, Original Series, 32, 1868);
Meals and Manners in Olden Time, ed. F. J. Furnivall (EETS, Original
Series, 1868 and 1894); A Booke of Precedence, ed. F. J. Furnivall
(EETS, Extra Series, 8, 1869); A Fifteenth Century Courtesy Book, ed.
R. W. Chambers (EETS, Extra Series, 47, 1904).
(36) All these texts are reprinted in Meals and Manners, ed. Furnivall.
(37) Meals and Manners, ed. Furnivall, 262–4.
(38) Ibid. 260–1.
(39) Ibid. 1–83 and 175–205.
(40) Hugh Rhodes, The Boke of Nurture for Men, Servauntes and
Chyldren, with Stans Puer ad Mensam (London, c.1555). Reference will
be from the edition of 1577, reprinted in The Babees Book etc., ed.
Furnivall, 61 ff.
(41) Desiderius Erasmus, De Civilitate Morum Puerilium (Antwerp,

1526). First translated into English as De Civilitate Morun (sic)
Puerilium: A Lytell booke of Good Maners for Chyldren: into the
Englysshe tonge by R. Whytyngton (London, 1532). Other editions of
1540 and 1554 survive. All subsequent quotation from De Civilitate will
be from the 1540 edition of Whytyngton's translation.
(42) Erasmus, De Civilitate, tr. Whytyngton, sig. A2r–v.
(43) Robert Whytyngton (fl.1520) wrote a well-known grammatical

treatise, and translated not only De Civilitate but also Cicero's Offices
and various works of Seneca.
(44) F. Watson, The English Grammar Schools to 1660 (Cambridge,

1908), 126–36.
(45) A similar ballad, entitled ‘A Table of Good Nurture’ (temp. Jac. I), is
reprinted in The Roxburghe Ballads, with short notes by W. M.
Chappell, 10 vols. (The Ballad Society, 1869–99), vol. 2, 570–2.
(46) Watson, The English Grammar Schools, 108. Watson notes the
difficulty of assessing the diffusion of Erasmus's text in schools,
especially since Latin texts were probably imported from abroad. Even
in 1660, De Civilitate was still being recommended for elementary
Page 43 of 50
Introduction
school use: see Charles Hoole, A Discovery of the Old Art of Teaching in
Four Small Treatises (London, 1660), ‘The Petty Schoole’, p. 22.
(47) F(rancis) S(cager), The Schoole of Vertue, and booke of good

Nourture for chyldren and youth to learn theyr dutie by (London, c.
1550). The edition quoted in this study will be that of 1557 ‘newly
perused, corrected and augmented by the fyrst auctor’, which is
reprinted in Meals and Manners, ed. Furnivall, 221–43. Anthony Wood,
over a century after the first publication of The Schoole of Vertue,
reported that it was still being sold in the stalls of the ballad-sellers;
see Anthony Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, ed. P. Bliss (3rd edn., London,
1813), vol. 1, 544.
(48) Richard Weste, The Booke of Demeanor and the Allowance and
Disallowance of certaine Misdemeanours in Companie, originally
included in Weste's book of short poems entitled The Schoole of Vertue
(London, 1619), and reprinted in Meals and Manners, ed. Furnivall,
207–14.
(49) William Fiston, The Schoole of Good Manners, or a New Schoole of

Vertue, Teaching children and youth, how to behave themselves, in all
companies: Also the manner of serving and taking up a table…Newly
Corrected and Augmented by W. F. (London, 1629). This later edition is
the only one available, although the text was licensed in 1595 and first
published in 1609. In his preface Fiston mentions a French source,
almost certainly Gilbert Calviac's La civile honestete pour les enfants
(Paris, 1559), but he does not seem to recognize that this was a version
of De Civilitate.
(50) Bienséance de la conversation entre les bommes (Rouen, 1618). For

a full account of this work see M. Magendic, La Politesse mondaine et
les théories de l'honnêteté en France, au XVIIe siècle, de 1600 à 1660
(Paris, 1925), vol. 1, 159–64. The earliest English edition I can trace is
Youth's Behaviour; or Decencie in Conversation amongst Men, tr.
Francis Hawkins (4th edn., London, 1646). All quotation in this study
will be from the edition of 1661, which contains additional material first
published in the edition of 1651.
(51) Youth's Behaviour, tr. Hawkins (London, 1661), 38.
Page 44 of 50
Introduction
(52) Giovanni Della Casa, Il Galateo, Ovvero de’ Costumi, in Opere

(Venice, 1558). For an account of Della Casa in his Italian context see T.
F. Crane, Italian Social Customs of the Sixteenth Century (New Haven,
1920) and A. Santosuosso, Vita di Giovanni Della Casa (Rome, 1979),
139–70. Translations and adaptations of the Galateo in English were as
follows: Della Casa, Galateo of Maister John Della Casa, Archebishop of
Beneventa. Or Rather, A Treatise of the Maners and behaviours, it
behoveth a man to use and eschewe, in his familar conversation, tr.
Robert Peterson (London, 1576). This translation was appended to T.
Darrell, A Short Discourse of the Life of Serving Men (London, 1578);
Latin editions of 1570, 1628, 1630, and 1665; in The Rich Cabinet
furnished with varietie of excellent descriptions. Whereunto is annexed
the Epitome of good manners, extracted from mr. I. de la Casa by
T[homas] G[ainsford] (London, 1616); Lucas Gracian Dantisco, Galateo
Espagnol, or the Spanish Gallant, tr. W. S[tyle] (London, 1640), a
Spanish adaptation of the 1590s; The Refin'd Courtier, or A Correction
of Several Indecencies crept into Civil Conversation, tr. N[athaniel]
W[aker] (London, 1663), a new and updated translation; Josiah Dare,
Counsellor Manners his Last Legacy to his Son (London, 1673), a loose
adaptation.
(53) Della Casa, Galateo, tr. Peterson (1576), 4.
(54) Stefano Guazzo, La Civil Conversatione del Sig. Stefano Guazzo

(Brescia, 1574). The first three books were translated from the French
version of Gabriel Chappuys by George Pettic, and appeared in 1581;
Book IV, translated by Bartholomew Young, was added in the complete
edition of 1586. All quotation in this study will be from the latter, The
Civile Conversation of M. Steeven Guazzo, tr. Pettic and Young (London,
1586). For Guazzo's carcer see Crane, Italian Social Customs, 386–7.
(55) S. R., A New Yeare's Gift. The Courte of Civill Courtesie (London,
1577). Other editions appeared in 1582 and 1591. The book claims to
be a translation from the Italian of Bengalassa del. Mont. Prisacchi
Retta. The identity of S. R. is disputed: see Mason, Gentlefolk in the
Making, 319n. Crane, Italian Social Customs, 35 on. is unable to trace
any Italian source.
(56) Antoine de Courtin, Nouveau Traité de la civilite qui se pratique en

France parmi les bonnetes bommes (Paris, 1670). It was enormously
successful in France where it went through eight editions before 1695.
Quotation in this study will be from the anonymous translation, The
Rules of Civility (London, 1671), although there were further editions of
Page 45 of 50
Introduction
1673 and 1675, and in 1678 a newly translated and amended version of
Courtin's augmented second edition.
(57) See Ch. 5 for a full discussion.
(58) Thomas Blount, The Academie of Eloquence (London, 1654),

subtitle.
(59) See J. Robertson, The Art of Letter Writing: An Essay on the

Handbooks Published in England during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries (Liverpool, 1942).
(60) See Nicholls, The Matter of Courtesy, ch. 3, pp. 51–3 and, for the
relation of courtesy to courtly love, A. J. Denomy, ‘Courtly Love and
Courtliness’, Speculum, 28 (1953). C. Stephen Jaeger, The Origins of
Courtliness: Civilizing Trends and the Formation of Courtly Ideals, 939–
1210 (Philadelphia, 1985), pt. 12, considers courtliness in the romance
at an earlier date.
(61) W. M. Rossetti, ‘Italian Courtesy Books’, in A Booke of Precedence,

ed. Furnivall, pt. 2, 10–14.
(62) Richard Mulcaster, Positions, Wherein those Primitive

Circumstances be Examined, which are Necessarie for the Training up
of Children (London, 1581), 145.
(63) James Cleland, Hero-Paideia: or the Institution of a Young

Nobleman (Oxford, 1607), books 5 and 2.
(64) Obadiah Walker (?), Of Education, Especially of Young Gentlemen

(Oxford, 1673), pt. 2, ch. 1.
(65) Jean Gailhard, The Compleat Gentleman: Or Direction for the

Education of Youth As to their Breeding at Home and Travelling Abroad
in Two Treatises (London, 1678), bk. 1.
(66) Sir Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named the Governour (London, 1531);
Anon., The Institucion of a Gentleman (London, 1555); Lawrence
Humphrey, The Nobles, or Of Nobilitye (London, 1562); Henry Peacham,
The Compleat Gentleman (London, 1622); Robert Brathwayt, The
English Gentleman (London, 1630); Richard Allestree(?), The
Gentleman's Calling (London, 1660). This kind of literature is well
surveyed in Mason, Gentlefolk in the Making. A rather pedestrian
account is to be found in W. L. Ustick, ‘Changing Ideals of Aristocratic
Character and Conduct in Seventeenth Century England’, Modern
Philology, 33 (Nov. 1932), 147–66.
Page 46 of 50
Introduction
(67) Baldassare Castiglione, Il Cortegiano (Venice, 1528). For a

specialist study see J. R. Woodhouse, Baldesar Castiglione: A
Reassessment of ‘The Courtier’ (Edinburgh, 1978). Castiglione's
treatise appeared in English as The Courtyer. Done into English by
T[bomas] H[oby] (London, 1561). There were further editions of the
Hoby translation in 1577, 1587, and 1603. Bartholomew Clerke's Latin
translation appeared in 1571, and in editions of 1577, 1585, 1593,
1603, and 1612.
(68) Lorenzo Ducci, Ars Aulica, or The Courtier's Arte, tr. Edward Blount
(London, 1607), originally published at Ferrara in 1601; Eustache du
Refuge, Le Traité de la Cour (Paris, 1616), published in England as A
Treatise of the Court, tr. John Reynold (London, 1622).
(69) Nicolas Faret, L'Honnete bomme ou l'art de plaire à la cour (Paris,

1630), translated as The Honest Man by E[dward] G[rimstone] (London,
1632).
(70) See, for example, Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster (London, 1570),
in Arber's English Reprints, ed. E. Arber (London, 1870), vol. 6, 66;
Anon., Of Cyvile and Uncyvile Life, in Inedited Tracts illustrating the
Manners of Englishmen during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries, ed. W. C. Hazlitt (Roxburghe Club, London, 1868), 68;
William Martyn, Youth's Instruction (London, 1612), 109.
(71) The Accomplished Courtier (London, 1658); The Art of

Complaisance or the Means to oblige in Conversation (London, 1673).
For the influence of Du Refuge see W. L. Ustick, ‘The Courtier and the
Bookseller’, Review of English Studies, 5 (1929), 143–54.
(72) These books are usefully listed in Hazel Mews, ‘Middle Class
Conduct Books in the Seventeenth Century’ (unpublished MA thesis,
University of London, 1934).
(73) Works such as William Perkins's Of The Right Manner of Ordering a

Family according to Scripture (1609), Robert Cawdrey's A Godly forme
of householde Government (1660), and Richard Baxter's A Christian
Directory (1673) contain little advice on good manners. William Gouge,
Of Domesticall Duties (London, 1622) gives some directions on basic
forms of deference; see note Ch. 6, p. 212.
Page 47 of 50
Introduction
(74) Ruth Kelso, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance (Urbana, Ill.,
1956) lists writings for women. See also S. W. Hull, Chaste, Silent and
Obedient: English Books for Women 1475–1640 (San Marino, Calif.,
1982). What has been termed ‘courtesy literature’ for women, for
example in D. Bornestein, The Lady in the Tower: Medieval Courtesy
Literature for Women (New Haven, 1983), is advice over matrimony,
household management, and care of sexual reputation, rather than
advice on manners as such. Michael Curtin, ‘A Question of Manners:
Status and Gender in Etiquette and Courtesy’, Journal of Modern
History, 57 (1985), 395–423 suggests a contrast between an early-
modern courtesy literature largely for men and a nineteenth-century
etiquette genre largely for women.
(75) A survey of this genre may be found in W. L. Ustick, ‘Advice to a

Son. A Type of Seventeenth Century Conduct Book’, Studies in
Philology, 29 (1932), 409–41.
(76) William Cecil (?), Certaine Precepts or Directions for the Well-
Ordering of a Mans Life (Edinburgh, 1618). Much of this advice
reappears in the precepts of James Stanley, seventh Earl of Derby,
addressed to his son, Lord Strange, printed as Lord Derby's Second
Letter to his Son (Chetham Soc., 70, 1867), 42–9.
(77) James I, Basilikon Doron. Or his majesties Instructions to his

dearest sonne (Edinburgh, 1603); Henry Percy, Advice to his Son, ed. G.
B. Harrison (London, 1930), written in 1609; for Derby see n. 76 above;
William, Earl of Bedford's ‘Advice to his Sons’ is reprinted in Practical
Wisdom; or the manual of Life. The Counsels of eminent men to their
Children (London, 1824) but date and attribution are both uncertain;
the advice of Strafford, and also of Sir Henry Sidney and Sir Walter
Raleigh, is reprinted in Practical Wisdom; Sir Henry Slingsby's ‘Father's
Legacy’ (c. 1568) is printed in The Diary of Sir Henry Slingsby, ed. D.
Parsons (London, 1836); Archibald Campbell, Instructions to a Son
(London, 1661).
(78) Francis Osborne, Advice to a Son, pt. I (Oxford, 1656), pt. II

(Oxford, 1658); Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. R.
Latham and W. Matthews (London, 1970–83), vol. 5, 27.
(79) William Higford, Institutions, or Advice to his Grandson (London,

1658). A new version of Higford's advice, ‘epitomised or contracted by
Clem. Barksdale’, appeared as The Institution of a Gentleman (London,
1660).
Page 48 of 50
Introduction
(80) Sir Matthew Hale, ‘Advice to his Grandchildren’ in Practical

Wisdom, 192 ff.; Sir Christopher Wandesford, Book of Instructions to his
Son and Heir (Cambridge, 1777), written in the 1630s. Caleb
Trenehfield, A Cap of Gray Hairs for a Green Head; or the Father's
Counsel to his Son, an apprentice in London (London, 1671) is the only
example of advice to those lower on the social scale which provides
some social as opposed to simple practical or domestic guidance.
(81) Frederik Dedekind, Grobianus (Frankfurt, 1555), translated and

adapted as The Schoole of Slovenrie by R. F. (London, 1604); Anon.,
Cacoethes Leaden Legacy, Or His Schoole of Ill Manners (London,
1624). For Dedekind's influence in England see F. Ruhl, ‘Grobianus in
England’, Palaestra, 38 (1908), whole volume.
(82) Thomas Dekker, The Gul's Horne-Book (London, 1872), repr. in Old
Book Collector's Miscellany, ed. C. Hindley (London, 1872), vol. 2, item
4; Anon., The Character of a Town Gallant (London, 1675), in ibid., vol.
6, item 6.
(83) Clement Ellis, The Gentile Sinner: or England's Brave Gentleman

Both as he is and should be (Oxford, 1660).
(84) See G. Murphy, A Bibliography of English Character Books 1608–

1700 (Oxford, 1923).
(85) Anon., Cyvile and Uncyvile Life (London, 1579). The dialogue was
reprinted in 1586 as The English Courtier and the Cuntrey-gentleman,
and this edition is included in Inedited Tracts illustrating the Manners
of Englishmen, ed. Hazlitt (Roxburghe Club, 1868).
(86) Robert Greene, A Quip for an Upstarte Courtier, or a Quaint

Dispute between elvet Breeches and Cloth Breeches (London, 1592);
Nicholas Breton, The Court and the Country; Dialogue-wise between a
Courtier and a Countryman (London, 1618), repr. in The Works…of
Nicholas Breton, ed. A. B. Grosart (New York, 1879 and 1966).
(87) Antonio de Guevara, Menosprecio (1539), first published in England

as A Dispraise of the Life of a Courtier and a Comendacion of the Life of
a Labouring Man, tr. from the French by Sir Francis Briant (London,
1548); Philibert de Vienne, Le Philosophe de Court (1547) tr. George
North as The Philosopher of the Court (London, 1575). For the anti-
court tradition see Claus Uhlig, Hofkritik im England des Mittelalters
und der Renaissance (Berlin, 1973) and P. M. Smith, The Anti-Courtier
Trend in Sixteenth Century French Literature (Geneva, 1966).
Page 49 of 50
Introduction
Page 50 of 50
Civility in Manners: The Emergence of a Concept

Anna Bryson

Print ISBN-13: 9780198217657
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198217657.001.0001
Civility in Manners: The Emergence of a

Concept
Anna Bryson
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198217657.003.0002

This chapter traces the emergence and development of the concept of
‘civility’ in manners. It explores the way in which the appearance of the
word ‘civility’ in manners seems to have imported into codes of
personal conduct values and constructions of social order associated
with the larger meanings of the term. Moreover, since words are not a
changing currency distributed among a fixed range of contexts, but
actually serve to establish and relate those contexts, the chapter
examines what seems to have been a concurrent shift in the perceived
relationship between good manners and social order.
Keywords: good manners, civility, social order, personal conduct
‘Manners’, wrote Edmund Burke in 1780, ‘are of more importance than

laws…they aid morals, they supply them, or they totally destroy them.’1
In recent years, historians of eighteenth-century political ideas have
identified ‘manners’, in the sense of social codes and standards distinct
from both laws and ethics, as a crucial concept in the political thought
of the Enlightenment. Indeed, it has been suggested that concern with
‘manners’ in political writing was a development peculiar to the
eighteenth century, and one which indicates a major reorientation of
Page 1 of 37
political discourse. According to this view, earlier thought on the forms,

aims, and origins of human association lacked a distinct category of the
‘social’. Its matrix was the polity, the commonwealth, the empire, or the
state, with the individual conceived as citizen, ruler, or subject. During
the eighteenth century, however, a new concern with ‘manners’ as
distinct from laws and ethics signals the emergence of a concept of
society, a sphere of social relationships related to but not identical with
forms of law and government. Moreover, the obvious character of
‘manners’ as historical products, in contrast to ethics and law which
could be discussed in abstract, universal terms, made the concept
crucial in the development of Enlightenment theories of ‘progress’.
Recent reinterpretation of the ‘Scottish Enlightenment’ has shown how
central was the notion of the ‘softening’ or ‘refinement’ of manners to
the reconstruction of society's progress from the primitive to the
modern which was undertaken by men like John Millar and Adam
Smith.2
(p.44) Debate among historians of ideas on the significance of

‘manners’ in eighteenth-century political discourse has been largely
orientated towards the nineteenth century; it is geared to explaining
the origins of political economy, modern social science, and the modern
liberalism which depends on a distinction between politics and society.
Yet the debate also raises questions about pre-Enlightenment concepts
of ‘manners’. On the one hand it underlines what has been suggested in
the previous chapter—the instability of the concept as well as the
content of manners, and its links with overall images of order in polity
and society. On the other hand, in identifying concern with ‘manners’ as
peculiar to eighteenth-century political discourse, it implies that such
concern was absent in the thought of the earlier period. This
implication stands out very clearly in J. G. A. Pocock's essay, ‘Virtues,
Rights and Manners’, in which he briefly rehearses the state of studies.
The emergence and the ‘ideological loading’ of ‘manners’ in the writing
of Scottish Enlightenment philosophers was, he argues, an aspect of
the controversy surrounding the new concept and increasing reality of
a ‘commercial’ society. Critics of this society and the oligarchic Whig
rule which fostered commercial development attacked it from within
the traditional paradigm of ‘civic humanism’. This was the established
political discourse in which ‘virtue’ was a function of active citizenship
and conscious pursuit of the common good by those whom birth and
property had fitted for rule. The pursuit of private gain and the
cultivation of relationships outside the sphere of civic activity were,
from this point of view, corrupt and destructive of the body politic. The
defenders of ‘commerce’, however, responded with analysis of the
‘natural’ development of commercial society and with a redefinition of
Page 2 of 37
‘virtue’ as the civilized social mores or ‘manners’ accompanying this

development. The concept of ‘manners’ in political debate thus seems
absolutely specific to a later eighteenth-century controversy
surrounding ‘commerce’.3
Pocock does, however, suggest that ‘manners’ had some antecedents in

an earlier tradition of thought. He argues that the ‘civic humanist’
paradigm of political thought had always been parallelled by an
alternative approach to political association based on jurisprudence.
This stressed ‘rights’ and ‘customs’ rather than the use of law to
establish political (p.45) ‘virtue’. For Pocock, the eighteenth-century
concept of ‘manners’ represented a fusion between the ethical concept
of ‘mores’ or ‘morals’ and a concept of ‘custom’ drawn from this
tradition.4 Yet while this may be a plausible interpretation as far as it
goes, it still leaves wide open the question of the political
understanding of ‘manners’ in the earlier period. The eighteenth-
century conception of ‘manners’ may well be lineally related to a
jurisprudential concept of ‘custom’, but is it not also likely to be
related, rather more directly, to antecedent conceptions of ‘manners’?
Neglect of this possibility arises, I think, from the tendency of
historians of political theory to pre-define a canon of sources as
‘political thought’ and then to search for the origins of emergent
concepts purely within the canon. This ignores the way in which social
and political concepts and values were articulated at different periods
in shifting literary forms and genres. As I shall show, sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century writing on social conduct gives ample evidence of
‘ideologically loaded’ conceptions of manners, conceptions which were
an integral part of larger visions of social and political order.
A much-discussed element in the vocabulary of eighteenth-century

political and social thought provides the most obvious signpost to the
exploration of earlier conceptions of manners, polity, and society.
Writers from David Hume to Adam Smith did not only speak of the
‘softening of manners’ or the passage from ‘rudeness to refinement’
which society had experienced in the long course of its development.
They also expressed the same process as a passage from the ‘savage’ to
the ‘civil’ condition of mankind, and used the term ‘civil society’ to
define human association in its social and economic, not merely
political aspects. Thus Adam Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil
Society dealt not with the origins of government but with the moral and
social relations which characterized first ‘barbarous’ and then ‘civil’ or
‘commercial’ society.5 For Pocock and others, the connotations of the
word ‘civil’, evoking ‘civilization’ of manners, taste, and material life,
make it almost shorthand for the newly sociological approach of the
Page 3 of 37
Scottish Enlightenment thinkers. In contrast, the older vision of

association had been ‘civic’, concerned simply with the definition and
defence of purely public, political values. Pocock writes that in late
eighteenth-century Scotland, where ‘manners seemed no unimportant
part of morality…(the) locus of virtue shifted decisively from the civic to
the civil, from the political and military to that (p.46) blend of the
economic, cultural and moral which we call the social for short.’6
From the point of view of the canon of political theory, the later
eighteenth-century concept of ‘civil society’ had been foreshadowed in
the writings of John Locke, for whom some form of ‘civil’ association
could exist in the absence of political authority. Yet Locke's notion of
‘civil society’ was thin and abstract, related more to the unhistorical
theory of the transformation of man from a ‘natural’ to a ‘civil’ state by
an ‘original’ contract than to the theory of a gradual civilization of
morals and manners.7 It might then seem plausible to regard the later
thinkers as solely responsible for attaching to the term ‘civil’ a
conception of society informed by the category of ‘manners’. Laurence
Klein, in his study of the concept of ‘politeness’ in the thought of the
third Earl of Shaftesbury, argues persuasively that Locke's great Whig
contemporary formulated a ‘politics of culture’ which used the concept
of manners to escape the straitjacket of ‘civic’ discourse. However, in
so far as he identifies Shaftesbury as the first to do so, he retains the
sense of an earlier neglect of ‘manners’ in social and political
discourse.8 Yet the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature which
deals directly with the codes of conduct which we would now define as
‘social’ presents a very different picture. More than two centuries
before the Scottish Enlightenment, the term ‘civil’ was increasingly
being used to define ‘good manners’. Moreover, far from being simply
borrowed at a later stage by political theorists seeking to enlarge the
terms of their debates, the term and its variants were from the outset
employed to link manners both to ethics and to overall conceptions of
the structure and identity of the community. This chapter will trace the
emergence and development of the concept of ‘civility’ in manners.
For Norbert Elias, the appearance of Erasmus's De Civilitate Morum

Puerilium, first published in Latin in 1530 and rapidly translated into
High German, English, Czech, Dutch, and French, was a crucial event
in the history of manners and, indeed, in European cultural history. It
represented, he writes, ‘the elevation of [a] title word to a central
expression (p.47) of the self-interpretation of European society.’9 The
French historian Roger Chartier accords the small manual of manners
no less significance, asserting that ‘it offered all of learned Europe a
unified code of conduct, the realization of which was to produce civilité
Page 4 of 37
in its new definition…[and], by means of its translations and

adaptations, it acclimated in vernacular languages a word and a notion
that from that moment on designated an essential component in the
upbringing of children.’10 Erasmus's work was indeed the first to
prescribe a code of manners under the heading of ‘civility’ and, in
England as elsewhere, it was highly influential. However, the historian
should not succumb to the tyranny of a word to a greater extent than
did the society that he or she studies. The vocabulary of English writing
on manners suggests that the adoption of the new term was gradual
and partial, if nevertheless an index of major conceptual change.
Writers and translators of didactic texts on manners used a variety of

‘title words’ to define the behaviour which they taught. During the
sixteenth century the word ‘civility’ appeared in their work with
increasing frequency but did not achieve the immediate pre-eminence
which it did, for example, in France, where a special typeface known as
civilité was invented for the printing of courtesy manuals.11 When
Erasmus's De Civilitate was first translated into English in the 1530s it
was entitled A Lytell Booke of Good Manners for Chyldren, the
translator perhaps deciding that a direct Anglicization of the Latin
would not adequately advertise the content to an English audience.
Twenty-five years later a version of Erasmus's text appeared as The
Civility of Childehode, but ‘Goode Manners’ returned as the preferred
title term in William Fiston's version of a French translation of Erasmus
in the 1590s.12 The older English terms which had been used in late
medieval courtesy books, mainly ‘courtesy’ itself, but also ‘nurture’ and,
in a specialized sense, ‘virtue’, persisted through the sixteenth century,
as in Seager's The Schoole of Vertue, and booke of good Nourture for
Chyldren. In fact, although ‘nurture’ and ‘virtue’ disappear in the sense
of good manners during the early seventeenth century,13 they occur
more frequently than ‘civility’ in texts written for children before that
time. In (p.48) sixteenth-century courtesy books for young adults,
‘civility’ is similarly far from the dominant term. The first translator of
Giovanni Della Casa's Il Galateo gives his prose as the description of
‘courteous behaviour and entertaynment with good manners and
words’. His often rather free translation of the Italian, in which words
such as piacevole, di bella maniera, and graziosa predominate over
civile, refers more often to ‘good manners and fashions’ than to
‘civility’. Despite its title, S. R.'s Court of Civill Courtesie of 1592
generally uses ‘courtesy’ rather than ‘civility’ in the text.
It was during the seventeenth century that ‘civil’ and ‘civility’ really
gained the edge over their rivals in the vocabulary of manners. In
James Cleland's Hero-Paideia; or the Institution of a Young Nobleman
Page 5 of 37
(1607), the chapter devoted to manners is entitled ‘civil conversation’

rather than ‘courtesy’, and the translation of the French manual Youth's
Behaviour in the mid-century starts with a chapter ‘touching Civility
among men’.14 The translation of Antoine de Courtin's The Rules of
Civility in 1671, in which the term is central and constantly repeated
indicates and no doubt encouraged its greater currency. This was not
an original English work, but Obadiah Walker's Of Education, published
in the same year, included a chapter entitled ‘On Civility’ which is a
miniature courtesy book. Walker admitted his debt to Della Casa as ‘the
great master of civility’15 when the original English translation of the
Galateo rarely employed the word. Even late in the seventeenth
century, however, ‘civility’ remained only one of several words defining
correct social behaviour, with new terms, particularly ‘politeness’ and
‘good breeding’, emerging beside it.16 It was possible, as is shown by
the seventeenth-century literature of parental advice, to write on
matters of social conduct without mentioning ‘civility’. William Higford
advises on social conduct only under the general heading of ‘Company
and Converse’; Francis Osborne does not use the word ‘civility’ at all
when discussing dress, facial expression, and demeanour; Sir Matthew
Hale offers advice on manners under the neutral heading of ‘Carriage
to your inferiors, superiors and equals.’17 ‘Civility’, then, entered the
vocabulary of manners during the sixteenth century and gradually
gained wide currency, but it was always only one of a shifting set of
key-words, constantly described and justified in terms of each other.
The loose and slippery inter-usage of these terms throughout the period
is very striking. Della Casa's translator, Peterson, associates ‘courtesy
and civility’ (p.49) as a man's ‘skill to put himselfe forth comely and
seemely in his fashions, gestures and manners’, and he flatters the
dedicatee of his translation, the Earl of Leicester, with the compliment
that he is ‘so civil, so courteous’.18 An earlier anonymous writer on
gentlemanly education talks of conduct to strangers whom men ‘ought
by all civilitie courteously to receive’.19 Thomas Gainsford, in a book of
moralistic ‘character’ sketches and advice on conduct of 1616, puts
together ‘civilitie, good manners and courtesie’. In John Reynolds's
translation of A Treatise of the Court by Eustache du Refuge (1622)
‘Civilitie’ is defined in terms of ‘a decency, or gracefulnesse’. The
anonymous author of The Art of Complaisance of 1673 equates
‘courtesie’, ‘civilitie’, ‘decent affability’, and ‘a certain decency or sweet
behaviour’. Even Courtin, whose Rules of Civility strives unusually hard
for a rigorous definition of subject matter, falls back on equivalent
terms. Civility is ‘politeness and concinnity of behaviour’ and
conformity to ‘rules of decency’.20 To assign precise definitions to each
term is clearly very difficult, but it does not follow that there was no
differentiation of meaning at all. Individually the words and phrases
Page 6 of 37
had differing resonances and they formed a set in which the meaning of
each penetrated the others. Hence the appearance of the term ‘civility’
in the vocabulary of manners signals not the sudden replacement of one
social value by another, but the gradual coloration of a set of words and
values by meanings peculiarly associated with the notion of the ‘civil’.
The word ‘civility’ was not originally or exclusively applied to manners;
indeed, the use of the term to define correct social behaviour developed
out of and alongside some larger and less specialized meanings of the
term. These larger meanings, which have as lineal descendants the
modern concepts of ‘civil society’ and ‘civilization’, are the key to
understanding the significance of ‘civility’ in the field of manners.
The word ‘civility’ had its origins in Roman discourse on political

organization and obligation. In classical Latin, civilitas was usually
understood as ‘the art of government’ or ‘politics’, civilis meaning
‘pertaining to citizens, to citizen rights and the law’; only in a very few
late Roman instances is civilis able to be translated as ‘courteous’ or
‘affable’.21 In medieval Latin civilitas retained primarily political
connotations, denoting ‘statesmanship’ or ‘citizenship’.22 During the
early sixteenth century it appeared in an Anglicized form with rather
more elaborate political (p.50) meanings influenced by the Italian
Renaissance concept of ‘civil life’ (vivere civile) which resuscitated and
developed classical definitions of civic ethics and culture.23 Some years
in advance of its penetration into the vocabulary of manners, it emerges
in English writing to define the principles of political order and the
ethical value of conformity to these. Thus in the same decade as the
first translation of Erasmus's De Civilitate under the title of a book of
‘goode maners’, Thomas Starkey was using the Anglicized ‘civility’ very
freely in his discussion of reform of the commonwealth, The Dialogue
between Pole and Lupset (1529–1532?). ‘Cyvyle Lyfe’ is defined as men
‘lyving togydder in gud and polytyke ordur’, and, according to Starkey,
the first legislators persuaded men into a perception of their real
human dignity and an abandonment of mere animal existence,
encouraging them ‘to forsake that rudnes and uncomly lyfe, and so to
folow some ordur and cyvylyte’.24 Now ‘man ys borne to commyn
cyvylyte’, lives in ‘cyvyle ordur’ guaranteed by ‘cyvylle law’.25 This state
is pictured as essentially a function of right political organization and at
one point Starkey suggests the rough equivalence of the phrases
‘pollycy’, ‘cyvyle order’, and ‘polytyke rule’.26 In a late sixteenth-
century translation of a French work on magistracy the same
equivalence is quite explicit: ‘Policie is derived from ΠOAITΣIA which in
our tongue we may tearme Civilitie, and that which the Grecians did
Page 7 of 37
name politicke government, the Latines called, the government of a

Commonwealth, or Civile Societie.’27
It should be noted that this definition of ‘civile societie’ seems to fall

squarely within the political discourse of ‘civic humanism’ which,
according to Pocock and others, was to be challenged during the
eighteenth century by a new sociopolitical conception of ‘civil society’.
This reveals, at the least, a certain linguistic oddity about the
opposition between the ‘civic’ and the ‘civil’ which is held to
characterize political debate in the later Enlightenment. Given that
‘civic’ is in fact a modern label retrospectively attached to a political
tradition while ‘civil’ was a word in extensive use within early modern
political thought, there is no necessary contradiction in seeing pre-
Enlightenment uses of the term ‘civil’ as essentially ‘civic’.28
Nevertheless, the emergence of the phrase ‘civil society’ (p.51) within
a humanist tradition that may justifiably be defined as ‘civic’ in its debt
to the values of the classical city state, should underline the possibility
that later definitions of ‘civil society’ emerged as much from within as
from outside that tradition.
This case for continuity can be made on conceptual rather than purely
linguistic grounds, for sixteenth-century use of the term ‘civility’ in
political discourse did not simply give a new lease of life to a classical
concept in vernacular form. While referring back to the values of the
classical polis, the concept was increasingly employed in a sense which
prefigures the more modern notion of ‘civilization’. If sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century writers only very rarely used the word
‘civilization’, the normative, historical, and anthropological
connotations of ‘civilization’ were to a large extent already present in
their use of the earlier word ‘civility’. It was increasingly deployed as
the discovery of non-European societies stimulated Europeans to define
a collective superiority in their culture over others and to establish a
historical perspective in which alien societies could be viewed as more
or less developed according to a Western European standard.29 An
English version of a French translation of Aristotle's Politics, published
in 1598, sharply illustrates the adaptation of classical discourse to
modern discovery by making the introductory comment that:
The people which inhabited in old time the countrie where we

dwell now, were as rude and uncivill three thousand years agoe,
as are Savages that have lately been discovered by the Spaniards
and Portingales towards the West and South parts of the world.
They dwelt scattered here and there in caves or mountaines and
Page 8 of 37
in forests under cabines, without magistrates, without Religion,

and without any forme of marriage.30
Not all the explorers or theorists took the view that the American
Indians were ‘savage’ according to this definition, and sometimes
Indians could be praised for the ‘civility’ of their customs and laws;31
but it is (p.52) important that the distinction between ‘civility’ and
‘savagery’ was well established and elaborated partly through the
discovery of the New World. In any case, particularly for the English, a
less controversial example of ‘savagery’ existed closer to home in
Ireland. Edmund Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland,
written in the 1590s, is a close examination of Irish government and
society which frequently uses the contrast between English civility and
Irish barbarity. While not entirely unsympathetic to the Irish, Spenser's
account starts from the premise that Ireland is ‘now accounted the
most barbarous nacion in Christendome’. The author describes the Irish
‘savage bruttishness and (loathlie) fylthynes’ in terms of endemic
violence, barbaric customs ranging from wild dress to sordid living
conditions, and a lawlessness curable only by compulsory education
and stronger government.32 By the end of the sixteenth century, the
opposition between the ‘civil’ and the ‘barbarous’ clearly involved not
only questions of political organization, but also a whole spectrum of
what we would call social and cultural issues, such as forms of
marriage, the level of arts and trade, and religious practice.
It is evident that well before the Enlightenment the notion of the ‘civil’
as against the ‘savage’ invoked a vision of society and not merely of
polity. Writers did not, however, discriminate systematically between
civil and political forms or levels of association. This was less because
they ignored social organization than because they applied the same
criteria of order to all areas of human activity, and for that very reason
the value ‘civility’ could come to be employed in a range of contexts
which to the modern mind resist conflation or even analogy. Hence the
concept could not only be applied promiscuously to polity and society,
but could rapidly cross over from the collective to the individual sphere
of human behaviour. The political discourse of sixteenth-century
England characteristically linked the macrocosm of the commonwealth
with the microcosm of the household or individual. As is clear from the
commonplace notion of the nation as a political ‘body’, the state was
conceived as a moral and physical entity comparable to the individual.
The government of a polity was thus analogous to the government of a
family and to the self-government of a man. This proximity of political
and personal values is emphasized in William Vaughan's moralistic
work of advice of 1600, The Golden-Grove…A worke very necessary for
Page 9 of 37
all such as would know how to governe themselves, their houses or

their countrey. The three spheres of conduct mentioned in the title are
dealt with separately in three books all suffused with the same
scriptural and Aristotelian influence. All spheres are subject to the
same notion of (p.53) ‘government’ and the rightful exercise of
authority along the lines of Christian piety and the classical virtues of
justice, prudence, fortitude, and temperance. In the third book, devoted
to ‘Civility’ in its political sense of ‘Policy’, Vaughan echoes a range of
commonplace assumptions about the inseparability of public and
private, individual and collective values. He gives an Aristotelian
classification of constitutions, defending monarchy as the superior
form, and comments on the duties of the prince; he describes the
estates of the realm with their ideal characteristics and present faults,
and he finally discusses the reform of the commonwealth by sumptuary
laws and the suppression of vice and extravagance.33
Vaughan himself did not use the term ‘civility’ to describe an ideal of
individual social behaviour, but his schema indicates the ease with
which political concepts could inform ideas of personal conduct. It was
clearly in the case of the political élite—the nobility and gentry—that
this connection was most elaborate since, while the politically
significant virtue of the lower orders was held to he mainly in
obedience and tranquillity, the élite had so to rule themselves that their
government of others remained prudent and legitimate.34 It is therefore
easy to see why the appearance of ‘civility’ as a personal rather than a
collective attribute should appear principally in literature devoted to
the education and personal qualities of the nobility and gentry. In the
very tide of the dialogue of 1579—The English Courtier, and the
Cuntrey Gentleman. Of Cyville and Uncyville Life: Wherein is
discoursed, what order of lyfe best beseemeth a gentleman (as well, for
education, as the course of his whole life) to make him a person fytte
for the publique service of his Prince and Countrey—it is evident that
what is being discussed is a personal way of life, albeit one justified by
public good arising from it. In fact, much of the matter of the dialogue
involves the question of the cultural superiority and prestige of the
courtier, stemming from his possession of learning and polish, and only
intermittently does the author return to the ‘public’ consideration of the
state's need for educated administrators.35
This ‘personalization’ of the concept of civility goes even further in the

work of Lodowick Bryskett, a poet, translator, and an official in the
Elizabethan administration in Ireland. His treatise, A Discourse of Civill
Life was written during the 1580s and published in 1606. It is
essentially a work of moral philosophy and, despite an initial discussion
Page 10 of 37
of the gentleman's duty to engage in public service, prompted by the

author's decision (p.54) to leave office, attention is devoted to
fortitude, temperance, liberality, and justice as individual virtues
expressed in a social, even a private setting. Bryskett's purpose is ‘to
discourse upon the morall vertues, yet not omitting the intellectual, to
the end to frame a gentleman fit for civill conversation, and to set him
in the direct way that leadeth him to his civill felicitie’.36 ‘Civill Life’
emerges from the book both as the setting for the pursuit of active
virtue and as a normative model of active virtue. Bryskett in fact uses
‘civility’ in other senses as well; for example, he gives it the meanings
familiar to Starkey when he inveighs against duelling as a custom
which ‘destroyeth all civill societie’ and breeds contempt for ‘civil
government’ and ‘country, parents, friends and kindred, to all which
men are bound by reason naturall and civill’.37 He also recognizes the
usage of the term for polite actions and forms, observing that ‘all sorts
of benevolence or mutuall offices of courtesie and civilitie, or every
shew of love maketh not up a friendship’.38 In few works is the
elasticity of the word so apparent.
Bryskett, who may have been half-Italian, admitted a heavy debt to the
then recent but untranslated Tre Dialoghi della Vita Civile by Giraldi,
and Piccolomini's De la Institutione di tutta la Vita de L'Homo nato
nobile in citta libera.39 Indeed, it was often plagiarized or directly
translated Italian texts on the nature of gentility and la vita civile which
transmitted new concepts of civility into English culture. Stefano
Guazzo's Civile Conversation,40 cited by Bryskett in the 1570s and
actually translated in 1586, was so influential in this respect that it
deserves special mention. Guazzo's treatise was in fact more
interesting than Bryskett's in encouraging and reflecting the
conceptual development which could make ‘civility’ a criterion of
individual social conduct as well as of political order. Guazzo's concept
of ‘conversation’ signifies far more than polite verbal exchange and
refers to all social as opposed to solitary human behaviour;
‘conversation,’ he writes, can be ‘of our tongue, and of our
behaviour’.41 As in Bryskett's work, ‘civil’ denotes a value more
extensive than that of correct attention to social form, and involves the
broad application of virtue and reason rather than simply the social
skills covered in the manuals of Erasmus and Della Casa; it is ‘an
honest, commendable and vertuous kind of living in the world’.42 The
first three books of the treatise are written in the form of an extended
dialogue between two well-read Italians who discuss, in (p.55) the first
book, the question of whether a solitary is preferable to a social life, in
the second, the principles of conduct which should govern life outside
the individual's household, and in the third, the right ordering of
Page 11 of 37
domestic and familial relations inside the household. The fourth book
takes the more elaborate form of an illustration of principles previously
discussed, in a dramatized social gathering of intimate friends.
Guazzo was original neither in using the phrase ‘civill conversation’ nor
in the form and tone of his work—a dialogue full of classical and
proverbial allusion, fable and anecdote.43 Much of his subject-matter—
the merits and demerits of solitude, the right basis of nobility, the
prudent choice of wife, the definition of wit—was already the staple of
Renaissance conduct literature and entertainment. Nevertheless, his
approach crystallized and popularized not only the sense of ‘civility’ as
a personal value, but the notion that ‘civility’ involved a particular level
or field of human experience to which neither a purely political nor a
purely ethical discourse was appropriate. While, as I have suggested,
the concept of ‘civility’ could unite the principles of political order with
those of the government of the household and the self, ‘civil
conversation’ in Guazzo's treatise involves a sense of a social world
separable from the world of civic responsibility and larger than the
sphere of the household, to which principles of civility particularly
apply. Between the vita contemplativa, the life of philosophic
retirement, and the vita activa, the life of virtuous citizenship, there
was emerging a more clearly defined intermediary ideal. In Guazzo's
work, the notion of the ‘civil’ as the ‘social’ seems to have been born
out of, rather than in spite of, the ‘civic humanism’ which dealt
primarily with ethics and politics.
In the first place, Guazzo's vision of his reader in Book II of The Civile
Conversation is of a man who has to navigate his way through a series
of different, essentially social encounters, each governed by different
social rules, in such a way as to gain popularity while retaining prestige
and selfesteem. His purpose in Book II is to determine
The manner of Conversation, meete for all persons, which shall

come in anie companie, out of their owne houses, and then of the
particular pointes, which ought to be observed in companic
between young men, and old, Gentlemen and Yomen, Princes, and
private persons, learned and unlearned, citizens and straungers,
religious and secular, men and women.44
Correct behaviour is not directly justified in terms of the necessity to

recognize and reinforce the political order inherent in this list of
(p.56) relationships. Instead, the political order is assumed and
attention directed to the individual ‘perfection’ which results from skill
and experience in obeying the social imperatives dictated by
differences of status. In the second place, Guazzo recognizes that this
Page 12 of 37
skill does not reside simply in the abstractions of moral philosophy. One
of his two disputants is described as casting ‘a golden net into the
Large Sea of Morall Philosophie’,45 but this exercise, unlike Bryskett's,
is not presented as the only one necessary for civil conversation.
Guazzo boldly asserts that the classical ideals of conduct are no longer
entirely appropriate and that ‘we must treade out of the ancient path,
and take the waye which is beaten at this daie’.46 In Guazzo's view,
modern custom may legitimately enjoin behaviour which while not
positively vicious, is yet not precisely virtuous; on this basis he defends
a degree of flattery and hypocrisy in ‘civil’ social intercourse.47 It will
by now be obvious that he identifies ‘civil conversation’ neither with the
political life of the community nor with the ethical life of the individual.
It might be thought that when Guazzo argues that ‘conversation is not
onelie profitable, but moreover necessarie to the perfection of man’48
he is doing no more than reiterating the Aristotelian commonplace that
man is a social animal. Yet Aristotle's original Greek adjective, often
and somewhat misleadingly translated into modern English as ‘social’,
was in fact politikos, a word asserting the classical indivisibility of
political and social life. This indivisibility persisted when Starkey, for
example, spoke of man as ‘borne to common cyvylyte’. But in Guazzo
there is apparent more than a hint of differentiation between what later
came to be regarded as the political and social aspects of human
association.
Guazzo's influence in Elizabethan and Stuart literature was extensive,

and J. L. Lievsay has discovered many allusions to and filchings from
The Civile Conversation after the appearance of the translation by
Pettie and Young during the 1580s. Robert Greene, in Mamilia; A
Mirour or Looking Glasse for the Ladies of England (1583), Daniel
Tuvill, in his treatise on conversation and negotiation of 1614, and
Barnaby Rich, both in his book of advice, The Frutes of Long
Experience, and his work on gentility, Roome for a Gentleman (1609),
had obviously borrowed from Guazzo.49 But more important than such
direct literary influence is the fact that the concept of ‘civil
conversation’ had become well established within the English
phraseology of conduct by the early seventeenth century. James
Cleland's (p.57) fifth and penultimate book in his treatise on noble
education discusses the young nobleman's duty in ‘Civill
Conversation’,50 and uses that term in Guazzo's sense, covering social
behaviour ‘toward all men’, social virtues of prudence, discretion,
gratitude and reverence, socially conspicuous aspects of noble
obligation such as hospitality and correct apparel, moderation and tact
in speech, and appropriate recreations and sports. William Martyn
defined his purpose in writing a book of prudential and moral advice for
Page 13 of 37
his son in 1612 as, ‘to enrich your understanding and behaviour with
selected virtues and…order your manners, generally towards all men,
and your civill behaviour more particularly towards those with whom
you do mutually converse.’51
He thus distinguishes between his concern with scriptural and moral

virtue as an end in itself and his interest in improving his son's social
behaviour within his immediate circle of acquaintance. Francis Bacon
sketched ‘Short Notes for Civill Conversation’ among his essays,
commenting in two pages on principles of tact, prudence, and
acceptable self-presentation in social intercourse.52 Sir Francis
Kynaston's Constitutions of the Musaeum Minervae (1636), one of
several blueprints for academies for young gentlemen, suggests that
every candidate ‘be approved by the Regent and the major part of the
Professors…for his civill conversation’,53 presumably to ascertain
whether his level of social skill and acceptability fits him for
participation in a community dedicated to gentlemanly perfection of
conduct and intellect. In 1663 a new translation of the Galateo was
subtitled, ‘A Correction of several Indecencies crept into Civil
Conversation’, although neither Della Casa nor his original English
translator had employed the phrase.54 The preceding examples in fact
suggest that the notion of ‘civil conversation’ was narrowed down in
English usage. Guazzo's conception of ‘an honest, commendable and
vertuous kind of living in the world’, involving a full range of prudential
and moral considerations, has become a conception of an area of life
governed principally by rules of social form and technique—the sphere
of ‘civility’ in its most restricted sense of ‘good manners’.
This short and by no means exhaustive survey of the larger meanings of

‘civility’ and the ‘civil’ in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writings
shows how the notion of ‘civility’ in manners emerged within a shifting
pattern of concepts which were established and invoked by the word. It
(p.58) must be emphasized that we are dealing here with a continuum
of meanings rather than a fixed hierarchy, for the keywords in the
vocabulary by which a society orders and evaluates itself tend to resist
encapsulation in dictionary definitions. Applied in any one context, they
retain the connotations and resonances which derive from their use in
others. In the remainder of this chapter I shall therefore explore the
way in which the appearance of the word ‘civility’ in manners seems to
have imported into codes of personal conduct values and constructions
of social order associated with the larger meanings of the term.
Moreover, since words are not a changing currency distributed among
a fixed range of contexts, but actually serve to establish and relate
those contexts, I shall explore what seems to have been a concurrent
Page 14 of 37
shift in the perceived relationship between good manners and social

order. In early modern England, order was overwhelmingly identified
with hierarchy and with the definition and maintenance of ‘rank’ and
‘degree’. How, then, was the value of ‘civility’ in manners related to the
hierarchic vision of society?
The ‘civic’ associations of the term ‘civility’, especially as it was

employed and popularized in the urban culture of Renaissance Italy,
have led some commentators to see the value which it denoted as
fundamentally anti-aristocratic. A modern French bibliographer of
sixteenth-century manuals of civility has asserted that: ‘Civilité est un
terme qui désigne l'urbanité des moeurs, l'exacte observation des
convenances sociales. C'est la politesse, succédant a la courtoisie. La
courtoisie avait un tour médiéval et chevaleresque, la civilité a un air
antique et bourgeois.’55 The implication is clear: the gradual
supersession of the term ‘courtesy’ by the term ‘civility’ in early
modern writing on manners indicates a ‘bourgeoisification’ of codes of
conduct. The same implication is present in L. B. Wright's Middle Class
Culture in Elizabethan England, in which Guazzo's Civile Conversation
is presented as a middle-class text, in contrast, for example, to
Castiglione's aristocratic Booke of the Courtyer.56 Even if we ignore the
enormous difficulties of establishing the existence of a peculiarly
‘middle-class’ mentality or culture in sixteenth-century England, the
notion of a radical shift from aristocratic to bourgeois manners
coincident with the appearance of the word ‘civility’ cannot easily be
sustained.
The aristocratic connotations of the word ‘courtesy’ are obvious

enough. The word ‘courtesy’ and its Latin equivalent curialis appeared
during the twelfth century, the very terms indicating patterns of
conduct evolving in the courts of kings or noble magnates. In so far as
it was an (p.59) integral part of the medieval ideal of chivalry, the code
could not easily be detached from the self-image of the European
aristocracy. Chaucer's Knight and Esquire in The Canterbury Tales are
both immediately identified as ‘curteis’, the Knight possessing
‘courtesy’ as an overall virtue of mind and conduct and the Esquire
being adept at service at table, the technical aspect of ‘courtesy’ most
emphasized by late medieval courtesy writers.57 It is interesting to see
that it is the Prioress who is most precise and even exaggeratedly
delicate in table manners, Chaucer humorously describing how:
She leet no morsel from her lippes falle

Ne wetter hir fingers in hir sauce deepe.58
Page 15 of 37
The well-educated and well-connected cleric could be satirized for a

particular refinement of manners. This is not surprising, since clerics
had played a major role in elaborating the less military aspects of
medieval aristocratic culture. Medieval monastic Rules, as has been
noted, sometimes contained a detailed prescription for good manners,
from table manners to general deportment and demeanour, and the
influence of clerics within medieval courts and royal administration
may well have helped to refine the manners of the lay aristocracy. It
should be noted, however, that the perceived relation of the church to
courtly manners was never unambiguous. Fifteenth-century courtesy
manuals associate courtesy precepts with Christian virtue, for example,
in referring to the ‘courtesy’ of the Angel at the Annunciation,59 but
they do not identify the church as the exclusive source of courtesy. Also,
while certain monastic rules enjoined a level of cleanliness above that
of much of society, extreme practitioners of Christian asceticism
regarded washing and other refinements as a worldly indulgence to be
avoided.60 The precise balance between religious and secular elements
in the formation of medieval courtesy is hard to gauge and lies outside
the scope of this study. What can be said is that in England the whole
vocabulary of manners before the introduction of the more directly
Latin-derived ‘civility’ was of French (p.60) origin, transmitted through
the aristocracy, both lay and clerical: hence ‘courtesy’, ‘nurture’,
‘dignity’, ‘gracious’, ‘gentilesse’, etc. Edith Rickert, in her introduction
to a collection of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century courtesy books, can
identify only three words of Saxon origin: ‘thew’, ‘churlish’, and
‘wanton’.61 The first signifies simply ‘custom’ and the others denote
lack of manners.
Nothing in the courtesy literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries supports the notion that ‘civility’ represents a bourgeois
standard of behaviour at odds with the previously established
aristocratic ideals of ‘courtesy’. From the outset, the word ‘civility’ was,
as I have shown, happily coupled with the older term in writing on
manners. Erasmus, although, as Elias has noted, he does not stress the
aristocratic associations of good manners as much as many later
authors, starts De Civilitate with a dedication to a royal child and a
comment on the particular necessity of good manners for the
nobleman.62 Della Casa's Galateo is always expressly concerned with
the behaviour of gentlemen; S.R.'s Courte of Civill Courtesie and
Courtin's Rules of Civility make outright appeals to snobbery in their
subtitles.63 Cleland's Hero-Paideia, obviously inspired by a mid-
sixteenth century treatise, The Institucion of a Gentleman, aims at the
even higher social level of the ‘young nobleman’ and finds no
incompatibility between his subject and the extended use of the phrase
Page 16 of 37
‘civil conversation’. One of Guazzo's disputants asks rhetorically, ‘If

[men] bee uncivile, how are they Gentlemen? And if they bee
Gentlemen, how are they uncivile?’64 and English authors clearly
agreed. ‘Gentility,’ asserted the English pedagogue Mulcaster, ‘argueth
a courteous, civill, well disposed, sociable constitution of minde in a
superior degree.’65 The misconception which sees in ‘civility’ a
peculiarly bourgeois value rests in part on the association between
‘civility’, the ‘citizen’, and ‘cities’. For Italian writers in the Renaissance
this association was wholly natural, since the classical model of social
and political organization which they inherited fitted easily enough with
the predominantly urban context of their own culture. Yet both ancient
and Renaissance Italian images of the polity scarcely pitted the ‘civic’
or the ‘citizen’ against the ‘aristocratic’ or the ‘nobleman’. From Plato
and Aristotle onward, the categories were integrated or even conflated,
and the highest degree of civic ‘virtue’ was attributed to the aristocrat
whose birth, courage, education, and leisure fitted him to rule over (p.61)
the tradesman or slave. If the medieval development of chivalry seems

to be based in feudal structures and to be at variance with civic and
classical traditions, it must nevertheless be pointed out that chivalric
and civic themes and values had long coexisted in Italian culture before
the sixteenth century.66 It is therefore no surprise that Della Casa
regarded his textbook of manners as a guide for those who lived in
cities, but it is also no surprise that he addresses his audience as
‘gentlemen’, and more often exhorts them to courtesy than to ‘civility’.
In contrast to Italy, England, like France, was a country dominated by a
rural aristocracy. In England, therefore, the use of classical and Italian
models of ‘civil’ organization and virtue was at first determined more
by the intellectual prestige of these models than by their relevance to
native conditions. Notions of the ‘civil’ were simply mapped onto a
social order which could not, in any concrete sense, be defined as
‘civic’, still less as ‘bourgeois’. Starkey associated urban life with
political development, writing that men had originally come ‘from rude
lyfe in feldys and wodys, to thys cyvylyte, whych you now se stablyshed
and set in al wel rulyd cytes and townys’,67 but when he wrote, the
majority of the governing class lived, not in those towns and cities, but
on country estates.
As I shall argue at a later stage, the development of the court and of

London as social centres increasingly provided the English gentry and
nobility with an urban experience which was crucial for the
development of codes of conduct. At this point, however, it is important
to note that the English upper classes took up ideals of ‘civility’ and
‘urbanity’ despite their relative inexperience of towns and cities, a point
reflected in the fact that even in modern English, the terms ‘civil’ and
Page 17 of 37
‘urbane’ defy their etymological origins by having few ‘city’

connotations. English writers in fact tended to be quite explicit in
excluding from their definitions of ‘civility’ those civic elements which
might identify the value as ‘civic’ in the sense of ‘bourgeois’—
pertaining to merchants and tradesmen. In the dialogue Of Cyvile and
Uncyvile Life, the courtier, who seems to have the author's sympathy,
suggests that civil life is only to be lived under urban conditions and
therefore the gentry, who cannot be ‘continually to court, nor London…
(should)…make cheefe abode in…shiretownes, as places to keep [them]
in that civilitie [which] is behooveful’.68 He clearly does not mean that
the gentry should take up the customs of the original citizens, but that
they should create their own civic culture. The shire towns (p.62) were
not to become significant centres of gentlemanly social life until at least
a century after the publication of the dialogue, but when they did so, it
was not in such a way as to assimilate gentlemanly to tradesmen's
customs. Rather, as had happened in the capital a considerable time
before, citizens were generally inspired to imitate gentlemanly urbanity.
In any case the idea of the city, in literature dealing with civility and
good manners, tends to be connected with that of the court and hence
detached from the merchant community. In late fifteenth- and
sixteenth-century Italy, the rise of princely government had largely
destroyed the republican traditions of the city states and had added the
court to the city as the centre and context of political and cultural life.
Della Casa identifies ‘courts and citties’69 as the milieux of
sophisticated manners. While the development of ideals of ‘courtliness’
in the Italian Renaissance has often been seen as the decadence or
perversion of the ‘civic humanist’ tradition, it certainly rendered Italian
texts more palatable in England, where the court had long been
regarded as the source and centre of aristocratic culture. English
writers happily related ‘civility’ to the ‘court’ as well as to the ‘city’,
thus underlining the continuity between the values of ‘courtesy’ and
those of ‘civility’. The puzzled country gentleman in the dialogue, Of
Cyvile and Uncyvile Life summarizes the courtier's argument thus:
‘then it seemeth that the Cittie, the Court, and other places of assembly,
(I mean of Nobility) doth occasion men to learne the customes of
curtesy and pointes of honour.’70 The parenthesis is highly significant,
excluding as it does citizens whose involvement in commerce clearly
contravenes the standard of ‘Cyvile Life’ put forward in the pamphlet.
Even an anti-court dialogue of 1618 allows that the court is, in theory,
the home of ‘civil behaviour’.71 In the 1671 translation of Courtin's
Rules of Civility we find the court characterized as the ‘proper school’
of the ‘rudiments of civility’72 and although the majority of its readers
were unlikely to have been habitués of the court, French or English, it is
Page 18 of 37
clear that the value of ‘civility’ in manners was loaded with the ‘allure’
of gentlemanly courtliness and positively detached from the explicitly
bourgeois. In the anonymous courtesy manual of 1673, The Art of
Complaisance, a work permeated with reference to ‘civility’, the author
deals with social relations at court, at the Inns of Court, with ‘Great
Men’ and with ‘Ladies’, but he states firmly, ‘I shall omit the
Conversation of the City, which consisting of Merchants, (p.63) and
Tradesmen, use no discourse but what tends to Traffick, and
accumulating Riches.’73
There is a certain ambiguity in the term ‘civility’ which allows

occasional shifts of meaning away from an exclusive connection with
gentility. Thomas Gainsford's catholic employment of the word in his
The Rich Cabinet of 1616 shows an elasticity of meaning to the point of
debasement. First, he uses it as an attribute of gentry, declaring that
‘we must fashion ourselves like Gentlemen, and professors of civilitie.’
Then he appears to reverse this definition by characterizing the ideal
‘citizen’ in the sense of merchant as a ‘professor of civilitie’. While at
this point he is apparently using a primarily political rather than social
meaning of ‘civility’, explaining that the citizen promotes good order
and prosperity through trade, he follows this with the comment that ‘a
Citizen is a master of Dellicacie and neatnesse, for what in other men
we sometimes call pride, in him is but a native handsomeness, and
profession of cleanlinesse…[he is] Delicate in apparell, dainty in diet.’74
Yet immediately he goes on to imply that this personal refinement is in
no way the standard by which to judge the manners of a ‘civil’
gentleman, since he observes that:
they are never so out of countenance as in the imitation of

Gentlemen, for eyther they must alter habite, maner of life,
conversation. and even the phrase of speech which will be but a
wrested compulsion; or intermingle their manners and attire in
part garish, and in other part comclic, which can be but a foppish
mockery.75
Last, Gainsford at one point assigns ‘civilitie’ to the educational

academic context in which Erasmus originally placed it. Taking a grand
sweeping view of social virtues appropriate to the various members of
society, Gainsford declares that: ‘Nurture teacheth a Nobleman
Affabilitie, a Gentleman Curtesie, an Officer Comeliness, a Judge
Uprightnesse, a Courtier Hansomnesse, a Citizen Cleanlinesse, a
Merchant Finenesse a Countreyman Sobernesse and a Scholler
Civilitie.’76
Page 19 of 37
Gainsford also makes use of the collective sociopolitical meaning of

‘civility’ as a concept of order informing a whole society rather than
characterizing one class alone. ‘Nurture,’ he says, ‘the Mistresse of
Civilitie…is such a jewell in the nation, that all others, where it is not,
are called barbarous, for lack of civilitie…and eate one another in
necessitie, or rather wantonly or wilfully.’77 Such usage indicates that
the concept of civility is not wholly locked into the notion of
gentlemanly status.
(p.64) Nevertheless, the participation of the common man in customs

perceived as differentiating his nation from the absolutely barbarous
and alien, the cannibal and the pagan, does not involve his full
participation in a code of manners established by his superiors, in
terms of which he is perceived as relatively barbarous. Guazzo voices
this tendency to exclude the lower classes from civil life in the same
way as alien societies are excluded when he suggests that it is a waste
of labour to try to instruct ‘the base people…by nature uncivil, rude,
untoward, discurteous, rough, savage, as it were barbarous’.78 The
‘middling sort’ of people in early modern England would not, of course,
have perceived themselves as ‘the base people’ of Guazzo's definition
and could attempt to associate themselves with the élite, distinguishing
themselves from the uncivil classes beneath them. Yet bourgeois
imitation of the codes associated with the gentleman could not make
‘civility’ an essentially middle-class value.
It is perhaps moving too fast to consider the values or ideology of status

expressed in the new term ‘civility’ before examining more closely the
social implications of the late medieval concepts of ‘courtesy’ or
‘nurture’. Even now, in a modern democratic climate where snobbery of
opinion or manners is officially disclaimed, dress, address, and
demeanour play a major part in strategies of social exclusion.
Conversely, even in the more stratified society of fifteenth-century
England, the rules of ‘courtesy’ were not, in all aspects, instruments of
social differentiation. In late medieval courtesy books, precepts
governing matters of social form—modes of eating, serving, salutation,
etc. which we might regard as purely technical—are embedded in
simple moral and prudential admonitions to obey parents, avoid
swearing, lying, and quarrelling, to be discreet and cheerful in company
and devout in religious observance. The tradition of simple proverbial
maxims for virtuous and profitable life expressed in The Distiches of
Cato, The ABC of Aristotell, and many fragments of anonymous
parental advice through the later medieval period informed courtesy
Page 20 of 37
texts as much as did the self-consciously aristocratic tradition of

chivalry, thus making sense of one author's comprehensive claim,
Quo so wylle of curtesy lere

In this boke he may hit here!
Yf thow be gentleman, yomon, or knave,
The nedis nurture for to have.79
Courtesy, through association with ‘vertue’ of a general kind, is not

always perceived as immediately specific to one rank or class of people.
(p.65) Even where the rules presented in late medieval courtesy books
are closely related to the rituals of the noble household, they
nevertheless retain a certain ambiguity in their relation to status. The
major social classification apparent in these texts is not that of adult
and child or host and guest but of ‘mayster and servaunt’. Rules
concerning correct salutation and demeanour are given in the context
of the presence of one's ‘lord’ and particular emphasis is placed upon
the ritual of service at table—in carving and in offering washing bowls
for example. Such techniques, together with an accurate knowledge
and application of the rules of precedence, constituted what are termed
in the Household Ordinances of Edward IV ‘the rules of goings and
sittings’80 and formed the core of the teachings of courtesy writers.
Within a household regulated by this ‘courtesy’, children were neither
excluded from social occasions nor given peculiar duties deemed
appropriate to their age. The sons of the family and those of other
aristocratic or gentry families were sent to a noble's court precisely to
learn such skills as ‘courtesy’ and were required to perform the same
acts of symbolic deference, and many of the same table duties, towards
their elders of the same rank as a gentleman-servitor was compelled to
perform before his social superior of the same age. Thus The Babees
Book, dedicated to pages of ‘Bloode Royalle’ at the court of Edward IV,
resembles that section of Russell's Boke of Nurture which is concerned
with good manners, even though the latter is explicitly directed at the
social aspirant—an ambitious but ‘unlearned’ young man who wishes to
become a steward in a great household.81 Excluding the genuinely
menial posts, all but the most junior positions in a noble household
conferred some degree of formal gentlemanly rank; and good service
could be rewarded with substantial gratuities. Thus, to the extent that
‘courtesy’ was part of the ‘science’ of the household, it could be as
much a means of advancement as a symbol of exclusion.82
This aspect of good manners as an aid to advancement was not,

however, such as to extend the code of ‘courtesy’ far down the social
hierarchy. It is interesting that Sylvia Thrupp, in her study of the
Page 21 of 37
medieval London merchant class, can find only one instance of the
word ‘courtesy’ in the records of the livery companies: the grocers’
apprentices are instructed to be ‘lowly and curteis’ whenever they meet
a liveryman of their company, a situation in which there is an obvious
analogy with (p.66) household master–servant relations.83 There
seems, therefore, to be a striking disjunction in late medieval courtesy
literature between the comprehensive claims made for ‘courtesy’, such
as ‘Alle vertue is closid in curtesye,’84 and the restricted aristocratic
environment with its technicalities of service, which are then presented
as the primary focus of the value. ‘Courtesy’ is in one sense the whole
body of Christian virtues orientated towards sociability rather than
directly towards salvation, but it is also a set of ‘courtesies’ appropriate
principally to the court or noble household. This disjunction becomes
intelligible if it is regarded as similar to the gap between courage or
valour as a quality almost universally approved in medieval society amd
military skill as the particular preserve of the nobility and gentry.
Courage was not despicable in a churl and a low-born man could win
credit, even advancement, by bravery in battle; lack of resources and
training, however, would usually cut him off from the skills and
paraphernalia of knighthood which could transform valour into a
cultural value expressing élite status. Similarly, the goodwill and social
sensitivity underpinning the notion of ‘courtesy’ were theoretically
admirable in any man but only became active as values of status in
milieux closed to the low-born. The late medieval aristocracy was not,
despite the mystique of blood, a closed caste with values utterly
divorced from those of other social orders, but it conveniently
maintained a monopoly of the techniques whereby moral values could
be clothed in social and cultural prestige. The techniques embodied
images of virtue, enhanced by the social allure of élite culture and
reinforcing the sense of moral superiority which was held to justify
aristocratic rule. Thus an aura of martial glory could cling to the image
of the armed knight and not to the image of the common soldier, and
similarly, in the field of manners, aristocratic appropriation and
development of the techniques of social virtue made the image of the
gentleman a model of moral social behaviour recognized at lower levels
of the hierarchy. The mid-sixteenth century Institucion of a Gentleman
points to a long-established usage (still current in modern English) in
the remark that ‘in our tongue, we use a word called gentlemanly, as if
a man do me a benefit or pleasure, we commonly say he dyd me a
gentlemanly turne.’85
The appearance of the word ‘civility’ in the vocabulary of manners does

not, as I have emphasized, directly undermine the connection between
the gentleman and good manners. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-
Page 22 of 37
century texts on courtesy and civility, there persists the old tension
between exhortation (p.67) to simple, universal social virtues, and the
particular assignment of good manners to the image and world of the
gentleman. One development tends to obscure and complicate this
duality, and this was the increasing division between the world of the
child and that of the adult. Phillipe Ariès has argued convincingly that it
was during the sixteenth century that a clear concept of childhood, as
an important stage in life with its own particular needs and
characteristics, emerged in both England and France.86 Educational
theorists of the later sixteenth century, like Ascham and Mulcaster,
displayed a new interest in child psychology and there was a new
sensitivity to the distinction between the adult world and the
segregated children's milieu of the school.87 Erasmus's De Civilitate,
Seager's Schoole of Vertue, Weste's Booke of Demeanour, and Fiston's
Schoole of Good Manners were all directed at schoolboys and even
used as school textbooks. Although late medieval courtesy books had
also been directed at children, these later texts show a much greater
preoccupation with the child qua child, rather than with the obligations
of the child who is, as it were, an ‘apprentice gentleman’ within the
noble household. This new emphasis means that immediate associations
between good manners and social status recede. The academic
conventions of equality between pupils and the authority of the master
who may, in fact, be the social inferior of his boys, abstract good
manners from the social hierarchy of the outside world. Moreover, the
‘natural’ relation of authority and deference existing between parent
and child and between adult and child, which is the relation stressed by
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century pedagogic authors when they move
beyond the schoolroom, is theoretically a universal one, unrelated to
social rank.
Pedagogic emphasis on the manners of the child does not really disolve
the linkage between courtesy, civility, and social rank. William Fiston's
Schoole of Good Manners certainly detaches courtesy from the noble
household and, as in De Civilitate, the master or parent replaces the
ambiguous ‘lord’ of fifteenth-century texts as the primary object of
reverence and the source of sanctions for breach of manners. Fiston
insists that the child's duty is first to God, then to his parents, and then
‘to thy Schoole-masters and Teachers, who are as spirituall parents’; he
amply illustrates the chain of authority in the child's world when he
advises,
In meeting with any person that is thy better (as thou art to
esteeme all thine Elders thy betters) see thou give him the way,
and putting off thy hat, use a reverent shew in countenance or
Page 23 of 37
manner of greeting to him. And if hee bee some man of Authority,

a Minister of God's word, any of thy Parents thine Uncle or (p.68)
Aunt, or thy Schoole master, look thou that thou bow also thy
right knee somewhat in thy saluting of them.88
However, his dedicatory poem indicates that the child he has in mind is
not a low-born one:
Small boote to be of gentle bloud

Or learned for to be
Unlesse good manners deck thy mind
And vertue shine in thee:
Good Manners maketh the man,
And gentle gentleth more.89
Clearly, many schoolboys encountering the precepts of Erasmus,

Seager, Weste, or Fiston would not have been of gentry families and
many of the simple maxims of prudence, piety, and elementary
expressions of respect presented by such authors would be appropriate
and current in the milieux of yeomen or tradesmen. Yet the pedagogic
tradition of writing on manners for schoolboys must be seen within the
context of an educational movement which associated all but the most
rudimentary book-learning with gentility. Ideas of moral and social
behaviour propounded within the grammar schools were made
accessible to many of the ‘middling sort’ but continued to appeal
through connotations of ‘gentle’ status; ‘the Scholler (howesoever
borne) deserves alwayes the name of gentleman,’ wrote one
Elizabethan author, somewhat optimistically.90
In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century handbooks of manners for the

young adult, the continuing identification of the ‘courteous’ and
increasingly the ‘civil’ with the gentleman is even more explicit than in
the child-centred texts. What occurs, however, is that the terms and
context of that identification undergo a shift. The newly comprehensive
range of social situations covered by sixteenth-century writers has
already been noted in the survey of sources; the medieval focus on the
meal or banquet disappears and gives place to ambitious claims to
define good behaviour ‘at all times and in all companies’.91 The marked
medieval preoccupation with the household and its relationships of
lordship and service diminishes and there are increasingly ambitious
attempts to present rules for conduct ‘towards all sorts of men’ and to
characterize good manners ‘to persons (p.69) of all humors, ages and
92
conditions’. The model practitioner of good manners is still envisaged
as a gentleman but he is viewed in the totality of his social relationships
or, to invoke Guazzo's term his ‘civil conversation’, and he is expected
to learne ‘how to treate and intertayne men of all degrees…and how he
Page 24 of 37
himselfe ought to be used of others’.93 As a mid-seventeenth century

work on the education of a gentleman puts it, a young man must ‘know
perfectly all the civilities, ceremonies, modes and customes, which men
have invented, and do practise, according to the places, birth and
dignities of everyone’.94 There is therefore a new stress on the
achievement of social versatility founded on an understanding of basic
principles of sociability; manners have become what Courtin calls ‘a
science in instructing how to dispose all our words and actions in their
proper and true places’.95 This development is very obviously related to
the importation of the term ‘civility’ into the vocabulary of manners, for
it is best understood as a translation of the larger political discourse of
‘civility’ into a social mode.
In the political writings of the Renaissance, the concept of civility

emerged as part and parcel of the broadly humanist vision of the polity
informed by the classical model of the city state. While the concept of
‘civility’ could be held to define the unity and character of the entire
community, thus being employed alongside other unifying notions such
as that of the social and political ‘body’ or ‘Christian commonwealth’,
no more than these did it democratize political thought or imply that
‘civil’ virtue was equally distributed throughout the nation. Rather, as
in its original Aristotelian formulation, ‘civil’ virtue of the highest and
most rational type was perceived as the prerogative of the élite, both as
obligation and as justification of its authority. The political and ethical
virtue which humanist writers like Erasmus, Vives, Starkey, and
Thomas Elyot demanded of the élite was to be based less on blood and
inheritance than on an education which would ensure that rulers
understood and applied the principles of moral and political order.96
‘Civil’ virtue was not simply a quality, but a discipline and a science. On
the superior ‘civil’ virtue and understanding of the élite, the ‘civil’ order
of the whole polity depended. ‘Nobility,’ asserted the Elizabethan
academic Laurence Humphrey, is that (p.70) institution ‘wherbye both
civile societyes are mayntayned and the common life of man
supported.’97 Refracted into the field of manners, these assumptions
retain their structure. Thus the practice of good manners is related less
to the particular setting of the household than to the social order as a
whole. One Jacobean adviser on personal conduct, for example,
moralizes that ‘By courtesie and humanitie, all societies among men are
maintained and preserved.’98 As others emphasize, gentlemen must
exemplify and direct the manners of society: they must ‘surpasse’
others ‘in civilitie of outward things’ and ‘should be masters of true
civilitie, good manners and courtesie’.99 Moreover, ‘civility’ in manners
becomes, as has been noted, less a set of rules for use in a limited
Page 25 of 37
range of situations, but an extensive practical ‘science’ of sociability,

analogous to (and overlapping with) the science of political behaviour
also required of the ‘civil’ gentleman.
The political resonances of the term ‘civility’ also help to explain a new
emphasis on values of social integration in sixteenth-century texts
concerned with manners. Clearly, fifteenth-century concepts of
‘courtesy’ and ‘nurture’ involved notions of good fellowship and the
obligation to avoid disruptive social occasions by aggressive or
otherwise objectionable behaviour. The Boke of Curtasye, for example,
forbids fighting at table and tale-bearing.100 Nor did medieval writers
fail to perceive a link between the right ordering of the self and the
overall order of society.101 But in the later period there is a much more
elaborate, self-conscious connection made between good manners,
‘courtesy’, ‘civility’, and other virtues perceived to promote social
harmony and the overall peace of the community. In Mulcaster's
educational treatise Positions, he defines ‘the chiefe signes of civilitie’,
in the general sense of fitness to hold authority, as ‘quietnesse,
concord, agreiment, fellowship and friendship’ and this association of
ideas is also apparent in Martyn's conduct book of 1612 in which he
groups ‘Courtesie/ Gentlenesse/ Affabilitie/ Clemencie/ Humanitie’.102 I.
B.'s Heroick Education of 1657 links ‘modesty, pleasingness,
complaisance, civility, discretion’ and, for Courtin, ‘civility’ is closely
bound to ‘humility’, ‘modesty and pudor’.103 Jean Gailhard makes the
(p.71) point very forcibly, and in a way which strikingly illustrates the
link between the discourse of manners and of politics, in his The

Compleat Gentleman of 1678. Writing of the early training of children
he asserts:
As children in their generation are to be members of a politick

body, and of a civil society: I wish they were fitted to keep the
bond of it, and therefore taught the practice of meekness,
humility, civility etc. which qualities breeding a mutual respect
and affection, do much contribute to keep peace in families,
amongst neighbours and through whole nations.104
In later chapters I shall examine in detail the demand for adaptability,

the avoidance of offence, and the accommodation of the self to the
needs of others which is a major feature of sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century prescriptions on manners. Here it is enough to point out how
the word ‘civility’, with its associations of citizenship and conduct
moulded by consciousness of membership of an extensive community,
underpins formulations of manners which relate individual contact to
Page 26 of 37
an awareness of a whole social world, larger that the household, which

is sustained by that conduct.
The new concern with overall sociability in sixteenth-century courtesy

literature was accompanied by the emergence of what we might term a
concept of ‘socialization’. Medieval courtesy writers did, of course,
make an implicit link between the acquisition of manners and the moral
education of the child, as is clear from the use of the term ‘nurture’,
with its connotations of growth and cultivation. But this implicit link is
not used as an organizing principle or theme in their precepts. These
were usually presented as equally appropriate for adults and children
alike and were not systematically related to a scheme of the
development of character or moulding of personality. In later literature
on manners, however, despite much continuity of prescription, what is
stressed is a discipline of the self which transforms the natural into the
social being and an experience of the world which refines the character.
These two elements—discipline and experience—are assigned to
childhood and adulthood respectively. Hence there is a necessary
division between manuals of manners for different age-groups and a
differentiation of treatment within single educational treatises.
Cleland's Hero-Paideia amply illustrates the change in conception. He
deals with good manners at two points in his treatise. One chapter in
the section devoted to the tutor's task in the education of the noble
child is entitled ‘of fashioning his Manners’ and exhorts the tutor to
instil in the boy the principle of accommodation of the self to others, to
keep him from evil influences, and to iron out affectations in basic
(p.72) deportment and speech. Later in the treatise several chapters
are grouped under the heading of ‘Civill Conversation’ and are
addressed directly to the young adult nobleman, who must acquire
courtly graces, make himself popular and maintain his prestige on the
basis of experience at court and in company in general, but with the aid
of some pedagogic guidelines.
This division of stages in the individual's acquisition of good manners

involves a view of the child informed by the opposition between the
‘civil’ and the ‘savage’ or ‘barbaric’ which has already been noted in
relation to definitions of the polity. Just as ‘civil’ society was
increasingly viewed as having developed out of an original, bestial, and
anarchic state still visible in the Americas or even Ireland, so the child
was seen as the embodiment of a lawless, ‘natural’ condition which had
to be transformed into the ‘civil’ by discipline and education. The
analogy is quite overt in a passage from Allestree's The Gentleman's
Calling of 1660. He advises that parents should put children ‘under
such discipline as may break their natural rudeness and stubbornness,
Page 27 of 37
mould them into some form of civility, and teach them the first
fundamental lessons of obedience, on which all future instructions must
be built’.105 The ‘infant passions’ are to be ‘checked and bridled’ so that
‘they become more tame and governable ever after’.106 Despite the
rarity of the word, it is clear that a concept of ‘civilization’ is being
employed. The same conceptual development, if less explicit, seems to
underlie the great concern in Erasmus's De Civilitate and Weste's Booke
of Demeanour with the consistent exercise of self-control over all
aspects of facial expression, carriage, and address.107 Late medieval
codifiers of manners, although advocating generally cheerful and
respectful behaviour, are much less interested in the notion of control
and ‘government’ of the self; they do not categorize lack of manners as
an absence of control over the passions. The ‘courteous’ child of
fifteenth-century prescription has had the benefit of ‘nurture’ and
understands the duties appropriate to his social and Christian role, but
he is not so explicitly perceived as subject to an educative process
which orders his mind and passions in accordance with the ‘civil’ order
of society.
In advice on social conduct for the young adult, the very repressive
tone of prescription for the moulding of the child gives place to
exhortations to self-development and refinement. Despite their desire
to systematize, rationalize, and draw up comprehensive rules of
conduct, writers addressing the young adult stress the role of his own
experience in developing his manners, not merely because experience
gives practice and facility in applying the rules, but because rules alone
cannot convey good (p.73) manners. Della Casa writes that ‘Reason
without custome and use, cannot make an uncivile bodie, well taught
and courtious.’108 Although many technical rules can be given, and
some aspects of courtesy are a matter of pure knowledge—for example,
the rules of precedence—much of manners is presented as a matter of
flexible, sensitive sociability perfected by observation, imitation and
even intuition. Thus Walker asserts that ‘civility…requires an early
initiation and continual practice to arrive at a perfect habit of it’ and
the young man himself, ought, as he grows in age, to observe the

actions of others, especially of his equals, and such as are most
reputed for Civility, and to note what becomes or misbecomes
them. Also, what is practised by most, by persons of higher
quality, and by persons of maturity and judgement. He must also
watch over himself severely.109
The developmental conception of initiation into manners which starts

with the basic disciplining of the child's passions is thus extended into
Page 28 of 37
the life of the adult who gradually refines his conduct, and his social
personality, by observation and practice in the world of ‘civil
conversation’.
This chapter started from the work of historians of political ideas who
have emphasized the novelty of the concern with ‘manners’ in the
political thought of the later Enlightenment and have connected this
with the emergence of a concept of ‘civil society’ larger than and
distinct from the polity. In one sense, a survey of the earlier meanings
of ‘civility’ in relation both to overall views of political and social order
and to conceptions of ‘manners’ provides some support for the
conclusions of Pocock and others. The systematic attempt to
reconstruct the development of custom, habit, taste and material life in
the passage from the ‘rude’ to the ‘civil’ condition of society which
characterizes the work of Adam Ferguson or Adam Smith is absent
from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writing on politics or manners.
So too is a discrimination between the ‘civil’ in the sense of the social
and the ‘political’ in the sense of the governmental, consistent enough
to allow the historical or ideal relationship between these spheres to
become a crucial matter of analysis and argument. The multiple uses of
the term ‘civil’ served to integrate rather than differentiate what we
might term the political and the social, the personal and the public
within a common framework of order. The notion of ‘government’, for
example, pervades all these areas. Nevertheless, the values and forms
of conduct denoted by ‘civility’ were far from purely ‘civic’ in the sense
of excluding any category of conduct other than those defined by
politics and ethics. If early modern writers were unlikely to ask, with
(p.74) Burke, whether ‘manners…are of more importance than laws’,
this was not because they regarded manners as unimportant. Indeed,
the ‘civic humanist’ traditions which took root in England during the
sixteenth century actually encouraged the definition of ‘civil’ manners
and a social world of ‘civil conversation’ to which they were applicable.
Furthermore, the term ‘civility’ linked conceptions of manners to a
historical vision of the development of society from the ‘savage’ to the
‘civil’ which, if it was only to be fully systematized in the later
Enlightenment, had been a commonplace of thought for some two
hundred years before. From the point of view of the historian of
political ideas, there is much that foreshadows the Enlightenment
development of concepts of ‘civil society’ in sixteenth-and seventeenth-
century writings on manners. From the point of view of the historian of
manners, however, the most important point is the way in which
changing conceptions of social and political order were encoded in
everyday rules of behaviour.
Page 29 of 37
Notes:
(1) Edmund Burke, Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796) in The Works of
the Right Honorable Edmund Burke (London, 1826), vol. 8, 172.
(2) See J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History (Cambridge

1985), pt. 1, ‘Virtues, Rights, and Manners’, for an overview of the
debate; for the Scottish Enlightenment, ‘civic humanism’, and
‘manners’, see Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in
the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. I. Hont and M. Ignatieff (Cambridge,
1983), especially J. Robertson, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment at the
Limits of the Civic Tradition’ (pp. 137–78) and J. G. A. Pocock,
‘Cambridge Paradigms and Scotch Philosophers’ (pp. 235–52). N. T.
Phillipson, ‘Culture and Society in the Eighteenth-century Province: The
case of Edinburgh and the Scottish Enlightenment’, in The University
and Society, ed. L. Stone (Princeton, 1974), vol. 2, 407–48, suggests the
social and political basis for Scottish development of concepts of
manners.
(3) The concept of ‘civic humanism’ in the Italian Renaissance was

developed by Hans Baron, in The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance
(2nd edn., Princeton, 1966) and by Quentin Skinner in The Foundations
of Modern Political Thought, vol. 1: The Renaissance (Cambridge,
1978). J. G. A. Pocock, in The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine
Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton,
1975) has explored the adaptation of ‘civic humanism’ in early modern
England. See also Markus Peltanen, Classical Humanism and
Republicanism in English Political Thought 1570–1640 (Cambridge,
1995).
(4) Pocock, ‘Virtues, Rights, and Manners’, in Virtue, Commerce and

History, 49–50.
(5) Adam Ferguson, Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. D. Forbes
(Edinburgh, 1967). See also John Millar, The Origin of the Distinction of
Ranks in John Millar of Glasgow 1735–1801, ed. W. C. Lehmann
(Cambridge, 1960).
(6) Pocock, ‘Cambridge Paradigms and Scotch Philosophers’, in Wealth

and Virtue, ed. Hont and Ignatieff, 240.
(7) See J. W. Burrow, Whigs and Liberals: Continuity and Change in

English Political Thought, (Oxford, 1988), ch. 2, for discussion of the
origins of ‘civil society’ in political thought.
Page 30 of 37
(8) Lawrence Klein, ‘Liberty, Manners, and Politeness in Early

Eighteenth-century England’, Historical Journal, 32 (1987), 583–605.
Klein's arguments have been expanded in his subsequent book,
Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness; Moral Discourse and
Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge,
1994).
(9) Elias, Civilizing Process, vol. 1, 55.
(10) Roger Chartier, ‘From Texts to Manners. A Concept and Its Books:
Civilité between Aristocratic Distinction and Popular Appropriation’, in
The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, tr. L. Cochrane
(Princeton, 1987), 77.
(11) See A. Franklin, La Civilité, l'etiquette, la mode, le bon ton du XIIIe

au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1908), vol. 1 preface, p. xxi n.
(12) See above Ch. 1, p. 31.
(13) Thomas Gainsford, The Rich Cabinet (1616) is the latest work I
have found to use ‘nurture’ extensively as a synonym for ‘good
manners’ (pp. 91–101)
(14) See above Ch. 1, p. 31.
(15) Obadiah Walker, Of Education (1673), pt. 2, ch. 1, 228.
(16) For the use of ‘politeness’ in a modern sense see The Art of
Complaisance (1673), 121; for an early use of ‘well-bred’ see Faret, The
Honest Man, tr. Grimstone (1632), 256.
(17) Higford, Institutions (1658), pt. 2, 22; Osborne, Advice to a Son

(1656); Hale, ‘Advice to his Grandchildren’, in Practical Wisdom (1824),
205.
(18) Della Casa, Galateo, tr. Peterson, 4 and prefatory epistle.
(19) The Institucion of a Gentleman (1555), sig. (A7)v.
(20) Gainsford, The Rich Cabinet, ‘the Epitome of good manners’, sig.
A23v.; Du Refuge, Treatise of the Court, tr. Reynolds, 6; Art of
Complaisance, 31; Courtin, Rules of Civility (1671), 1.
(21) C. T. Lewis and C. Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford, 1879), s.v.

civilitas and civilis.
Page 31 of 37
(22) R. E. Latham, Revised Medieval Latin Word List (London, 1965), s.v.
civilitas.
(23) J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, ch. 3, discusses the

Italian concept of vivere civile as a translation of the classical vita
activa.
(24) Thomas Starkey, The Dialogue between Reginald Pole and Thomas
Lupset, ed. J. M. Cowper (Early English Text Society, Extra Series, 12,
1871), 10, 52.
(25) Ibid. 9.
(26) Ibid. 53.
(27) Guillaume de La Perriere, The Mirrour of Policie, tr. Anon. (London,

1598), sig. Ar.
(28) The use made of the concept of ‘civie humanism’ by Quentin

Skinner in The Foundations of Modern Political Thought and by J. G. A.
Pocock, in The Machiavellian Moment is illuminating. The problem is
simply that ‘civic humanism’ is often identified too narrowly with one
particular political tradition—that of ‘classical republicanism’—and
hence its larger cultural and social associations tend to be ignored.
(29) See P. Bénéton, Histoire des mots: Culture et civilisation (Paris,

1979) and Lucien Febvre, ‘Civilisation: evolution of a word and a group
of ideas’ in A New Kind of History, ed. P. Burke (London, 1973), 219–57.
(30) Aristotle's Politiques or Discourses of Government, tr. John

Dickenson from the French of Loys Le Roy (London, 1598), sig. B2v–
B3r. For a full treatment of sixteenth-century views on the historical
development of societies see A. B. Ferguson, Clio Unbound; Perceptions
of the Social and Cultural Past in Renaissance England (Durham, North
Carolina, 1979), especially chs. x and xi.
(31) For the diversity of value judgements made on Indian society see K.
O. Kupperman, Settling with the Indians: The Meeting of English and
Indian Cultures in America, 1500–1640 (London, 1980). Bernard
Sheehan, Savagism and Civility: Indians and Englishmen in Colonial
Virginia (Cambridge, 1980), chs. 2–3, discusses the English perception
of Indians as ‘savage’, ‘brutish’, and ‘bestial’.
(32) Edmund Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, ed. W. L.

Renwick (London, 1934), 56, 70, and 204–5.
Page 32 of 37
(33) William Vaughan, The Golden-Grove, Moralised in three parts

(London, 1600), bk. 2.
(34) See Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought

(Cambridge, 1978), vol. 2, 228–36, for the Northern humanist emphasis
on moral qualities of leadership.
(35) See Ch. 4 for a full discussion of this dialogue.
(36) Lodowick Bryskett, A Discourse of Civill Life containing the Ethike

part of Morall Philosophie (London, 1606), 5.
(37) Ibid. 77.
(38) Ibid. 230.
(39) Ibid. 24.
(40) See above Ch. 1, pp. 32–3.
(41) Guazzo, The Civile Conversation, tr. Pettie and Young (1586), bk. 2.
(42) Ibid., bk. 1, 10.
(43) See J. L. Lievsay, Stephano Guazzo and the English Renaissance

1525–1675 (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1961), ch. 1.
(44) Guazzo, The Civile Conversation, tr. Pettie and Young (1586), bk. 2,
fol. 49r.
(45) Guazzo, The Civile Conversation, tr. Pettie and Young (1586), bk. 2,
fol. 49r.
(46) Ibid., bk. 2, fol. 49v.
(47) Ibid., bk. 1, fol. 32v–34r; and see below Ch. 6 p. 221.
(48) Ibid., bk. 1, fol. 12r.
(49) See Lievsay, Stephano Guazzo, chs. 1–3 for a full account of the
English writings which exhibit Guazzo's influence.
(50) James Cleland, Hero-Paideia (1607), bk. 5.
(51) William Martyn, Youth's Instruction (London 1612), prefatory

epistle.
(52) Lord Bacon's Works, ed. J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis and D. D. Heath

(London, 1857–9), vol. 7, 105–10.
Page 33 of 37
(53) Sir Francis Kynaston, Constitutions of the Museum Minervae

(London, 1636), 1.
(54) N[athaniel] W[aker], The Refined Courtier (1663), subtitle.
(55) Dictionaire des lettres françaises, XVIe siècle, ed. C. Grante (Paris,
1951), 182.
(56) L. B. Wright, Middle Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Chapel

Hill, North Carolina, 1935), ch. 5.
(57) Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, prologue, 45–6 and 99–
100, in The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. W. W. Skeat (Oxford, 1923),
420.
(58) Ibid., prologue, 127–30 in Works, ed. Skeat, 240. For an excellent
account of class distinctions in Chaucer's prologue see J. Mann,
Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (Cambridge, 1973).
(59) ‘The Young Children's Book’ in Meals and Manners, ed. Furnivall,
226.
(60) Nicholls, The Matter of Courtesy, 22–44 considers courtesy and the
religious orders; Franklin, La Civilité, l'etiquette etc., vol. 1, 1–5,
describes medieval monastic suspicion of cleanliness. Orme, From
Childhood to Chivalry, 136 stresses clerical influence on medieval
courtesy literature, but Georges Duby, ‘The Diffusion of Cultural
Patterns in Feudal Society’, Past and Present, 39 (1968) sees courtesy
as essentially a knightly rather than a clerical virtue.
(61) Rickert, The Babees Book: Medieval Manners for the Young,
introduction, p. xiv.
(62) Erasmus, De Civilitate, tr. Whytyngton (1540), sig. A2v.
(63) See above, Ch. 1, p. 33.
(64) Guazzo, Civile Conversation, tr. Pettie and Young, bk. 2, fol. 82, and
similar sentiments on fol. 56. See also The Institucion of a Gentleman
(2nd edn., 1568), sig. (F5)v.
(65) Mulcaster, Positions (1581), 200.
(66) Crane, Italian Social Customs, ch. 5, discusses the city–court milieu
of Italian polite culture.
(67) Starkey, Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, ed. Cowper, 53.
Page 34 of 37
(68) Cyvile and Uncyvile Life, in Inedited Tracts, ed. Hazlitt (1868), 53.
(69) Della Casa, Galateo, tr. Peterson, 4.
(70) Cyvile and Uncyvile Life, in Inedited Tracts, ed. Hazlitt (1868), 84.
(71) Breton, The Court and the Country (1618), in Works of Breton, ed.
Grosart, 1.
(72) Courtin, The Rules of Civility (1671), the advertisement, sig. (A4)r.
(73) The Art of Complaisance (1673), 73–4.
(74) Gainsford, Rich Cabinet, ‘Epitome of good manners’, sig. A23v.;

Gainsford, Rich Cabinet, 27 and 28.
(75) Ibid. 28–9.
(76) Ibid. 99.
(77) Ibid.
(78) Guazzo, Civile Conversation, bk. 2, 81–2.
(79) The Boke of Curtasye, 1–4, in Meals and Manners, ed. Furnivall,
177.
(80) The Household of Edward IV: The Black Book and the Ordinances of
1498, ed. A. R. Myers (Manchester, 1959), 126–7.
(81) John Russell's Boke of Nurture in Meals and Manners, ed. Furnivall,
1–4.
(82) For a description of rank carried by houschold office see S. Thrupp,

The Merchant Class of Medieval London (Chicago, 1948), ch. 6.
(83) Thrupp, The Merchant Class of Medieval London (Chicago, 1948),

ch. 6, 240–1.
(84) The Lytylle Childre's Lytil Boke in Meals and Manners, ed.
Furnivall, 265.
(85) The Institucion of a Gentleman (1568), sig. A IV.
(86) Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, tr. R. Baldick (London,

1973).
(87) R. O'Day, Education and Society 1500–1800 (London, 1982), ch. 1.
Page 35 of 37
(88) Fiston, Schoole of Good Manners, ch. 1, sig. Br and sig. (A8)r.
Seager in the Schoole of Vertue usually identifies parents as the most
significant objects of deference.
(89) Fiston, Schoole of Good Manners, preface.
(90) Anon., A Health to the Gentlemanly Profession of Serving Men in

Inedited Tracts, ed. Hazlitt (1868).
(91) S. R., The Court of Civill Courtesie (1577), subtitle.
(92) Cleland, Hero-Paideia (1607), bk. 5, ch. 3, chapter heading; The Art
of Complaisance (1673), ch. 14, 146.
(93) The Institucion of a Gentleman (1568), sig. (A8)v.
(94) I. B., Heroick Education, or Choice Maxims and Instructions for the
most sure and facile training up of Youth (London, 1657), sig. (F6)v.
(95) Courtin, Rules of Civility, ch. 2, 6.
(96) See Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought,

vol. 1, 241–3, for a discussion of educational theory in the context of
humanist political thought.
(97) Humphrey, The Nobles (1562), sig. A7v.
(98) Martyn, Youth's Instruction, 80.
(99) Institucion of a Gentleman, sig. (F5)r; Gainsford, Rich Cabinet,

‘Epitome of Good Manners’, sig. A23r.
(100) The Boke of Curtasye in Meals and Manners, ed. Furnivall, 178, ll.
53–4 and 180, ll. 101–2.
(101) See Nicholls, The Matter of Courtesy, 1, or Jean-Claude Schmitt,

‘The Rationale of Gestures in the West’, in A Cultural History of
Gesture, ed. Bremmer and Roodenburg, 59–70 on the relation of bodily
gesture to society conceived as a body.
(102) Mulcaster, Positions, 138; Martyn, Youth's Instruction, 79.
(103) I. B., Heroick Education, sig. D7r.; Courtin, Rules of Civility, 5.
(104) Jean Gailhard, The Compleat Gentleman, bk. 1, 57.
(105) Richard Allestree (?), The Gentleman's Calling, 21.
(106) Ibid.
Page 36 of 37
(107) See below, Ch. 3, pp. 82–5.
(109) Walker, Of Education, pt. 2, ch.1, 214.
Page 37 of 37
The Rules of Civility: Decency and Deference

Anna Bryson

Print ISBN-13: 9780198217657
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198217657.001.0001
The Rules of Civility: Decency and

Deference
Anna Bryson
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198217657.003.0003

The previous chapter was concerned with the emergence of the concept
of civility and its effects on the context and emphasis of didactic writing
about good manners. This chapter examines the precise content of that
writing, and explores continuity and development in particular areas of
good manners. It argues that the formulations of good manners in 16th-
and 17th-century writing show both a characteristic image or standard
of the civil versus the bestial, and in addition the range of social
relationships considered to require regulation by rules of civility.
Keywords: good manners, civility, didactic writing, social relationships
The previous chapter was concerned with the emergence of the concept
of civility and its effects on the context and emphasis of didactic writing
about good manners. This chapter will examine the precise content of
that writing, and explore continuity and development in particular
areas of good manners. As is clear from the description of source
material in Chapter 1, only a handful of books giving extensive detailed
prescription for civil behaviour were published in England in the later
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and these were mainly
translations or were heavily based on foreign work. Conclusions about
Page 1 of 39
English social norms based on this evidence can therefore be at best

only tentative. The problem is well illustrated by the appearance in
1663 of a new translation of Della Casa's Galateo, a work more than a
century old. Its reissue was justified by the translator on the grounds
that ‘other countries abound with treatises of good manners; and ours,
perhaps, has as much need as any.’1 The absence of substantial
courtesy books written by Englishmen, and the readiness of English
authors who interested themselves in social behaviour to rely on
foreign texts, often produced decades before, requires some
explanation before the relevance of the material in these sources to
contemporary English ideals can be assessed.
The English fascination with what was perceived as more sophisticated

in European culture clearly extended to manners as well as to literature
and art. In fact, the imitation and importation of Italian, Spanish and
French dress, address, and demeanour was the most conspicuous
symptom of the English sense of cultural inferiority and therefore the
most obvious target for satirists and moralists, who saw such
dependency as at best frivolous and ‘apish’ and at worst morally
degenerate. The foreign influences on behaviour particularly noted
were extravagant fashions in dress, elaborately ‘complimental’ forms of
speech, and affected gesture, expression, and gait.2 The indignant
Elizabethan Puritan William Rankins (p.76) lamented that ‘our English
men blinded (with an Italian disguise) and disfiguring themselves (with
every French fashion) corrupt their natural manners (by their climate
created perfect) with the peevish pelfe of every peacokes plume!’3
On a lighter note, Ben Jonson satirized English gallants for ‘Spanish

shrugs, French faces, smirkes, irpes…and affected humours’.4 James
Howell, in his Instructions for Forreine Travell of 1642, described those
who indicate that they have just returned from abroad by ‘their gait and
strutting, their bending in the hams and shoulders, and looking upon
their legs, with frisking and singing.’5 A pamphleteer of 1673 bewailed
the tyranny of the French ‘mode’ in London society and asserted, ‘as
much as we have studied to Ape the French, we have yet only reach'd
that perfection as to be ridiculous.’6
It is clear that the prestige of Italian, Spanish, and French culture,

extending as it did to details of gait and expression, inspired the
translation of some courtesy books and ensured their readership. S.R.'s
possible invention of an Italian source for his Courte of Civill Courtesie
might suggest (if true) that he felt that a straightforward English
account of rules of gallant behaviour would be lacking in appeal.7 A
century later, the translation of Courtin's Rules of Civility was carefully
subtitled ‘Certain Ways of Deportment observed in France, amongst all
Page 2 of 39
Persons of Quality’, the indication of glamorous French origin being

emphasized as much as the alluring connotation of ‘Quality’. But the
fashion for the foreign which gave impetus to the translation of
courtesy books does not necessarily mean that their relation to English
norms of behaviour was ephemeral and superficial—a matter of slavish
imitation by a few and disapproval from others.
The exotic appeal of a translation in the first instance may be separable

from the long-term impact and general acceptability of a text. Thus in
satirizing the Earl of Oxford as ‘Speculum Tuscanismi’, the Elizabethan
Gabriel Harvey declared that
(p.77) Since Galatco came in, and Tuscanisme gan usurpe,

Vanitie above all: Villanie next her.8
He associated Oxford's ‘cringing side necke…forefinger kisse, and

brave embrace to the footwards’ with Della Casa's precepts.9 But this
association was simply a piece of local irritation with the craze for
Italian courtliness which was the occasion, rather than the limit, of the
popularity of the Galateo in England. Della Casa himself condemned the
kinds of affectation and display regarded by English critics as the prime
symptoms of foreign influence,10 and the ease with which his work
could be naturalized shows that the Galateo was not merely the
handbook of ‘L'lnglese Italianato’. Two years after its original
publication in 1576 the Peterson translation appeared appended to
Thomas Darell's Short Discourse of the Life of Servingmen without any
indication of foreign authorship.11 Its establishment as a literary
touchstone of good manners even for those who disapproved of
imported mannerisms is illustrated by the interpolation, in the new
translation of 1663, of a comment on the absurdity of the Frenchified
English gallants of Restoration society.12
By the end of the sixteenth century, Englishmen had so far absorbed

the cultural values encouraged in prestigious foreign formulations that
they could claim a positive superiority in such values. George Pettie, in
the preface to his translation of Guazzo's Civile Conversation,
disconsolately complained that ‘they reporte abroade, that our Countrie
is barbarous, our manners rude, and our people uncivile’13 and Sir
Thomas Palmer saw the Italians as the greatest exponents of ‘civilitie
and humanitie’.14 Yet a contemporary, Sir Edwin Sandys, could
comment condescendingly that the Italians, while ‘respective and
courteous’ were tainted with ‘beastlinesse of manners’, the very
opposite of civility.15 Rankins thought English manners ‘perfect’ and, in
an interesting example of the appropriation of an imported concept and
Page 3 of 39
its use to attack importations, claimed that foreign influence caused

men to ‘practise uncivill conversation’.16
(p.78) The implication of this nationally competitive attitude to civility

is less that major gulfs, bridged only by fashion, separated codes of
behaviour of nationally defined European élites and more that there
was sufficient common ground for judgements and counter-judgements
on the civility of other nations to be made everywhere in remarkably
similar terms. Thus one should not take too seriously, for example, the
kind of comparison made by Richard Lingard in 1670 when he stated
that he was sorry
for the poor returns many make, that import hither the aire and
carriage, and assurance of the French, therewith quitting their
own staple native commodities of much greater value, the
sincerity and generosity of the English disposition. None is more
melted with a civilitie than an Englishman, but he loves not that
you should be verbose and ceremonious in it, take heed therefore
of over-acting your civilities to men unconcern'd in you, that may
conclude you impertinent or designing.17
The contrast had previously been made by other Europeans speaking of

their own nations. Earlier French authors had made the same point
about French simplicity being threatened by adopted Italian
ingratiation and formality, and the Italian Della Casa had claimed that
idle social ‘ceremonies’ had crept into Italy from other nations.18
Contemporary national comparisons are not entirely valueless, but they
are obviously distorted by the fact that some unfamiliarity in what may
still be broadly similar social habits always makes foreigners appear
more ‘mannered’ than the observer himself. Also, any English gallant
adopting obvious Italian or French mannerisms on the basis of
prestigious unfamiliarity made them artificially conspicuous. Thus
Harvey, despite his righteous criticism of Oxford, was the subject of a
vicious anecdote told by his enemy, Thomas Nashe, who retails that on
Harvey's presentation to Elizabeth I, the Queen remarked that he
looked like an Italian. Harvey apparently, ‘quite renounst his naturall
English accents and gestures, and wrested himselfe wholy to the Italian
punctilios, speaking our homely Iland tongue strangely, as if he were
but a raw practitioner.’19
There is therefore no reason to suppose that the acceptability of so

durable a courtesy manual as the Galateo in sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century (p.79) England was merely or lastingly conditioned by
fascination with alien but prestigious manners; still less can this be said
of Erasmus's De Civilitate and the later texts, such as Weste's and
Page 4 of 39
Fiston's, which were strongly influenced by it. Aimed at children and

devoid of obvious references to courtly fashion—Erasmus makes one
disparaging reference to courtiers’ table manners20—these have no
distinctively national overtones. In fact, by commenting once on
national differences in bowing, Erasmus suggests that his other
precepts are of general, international application.21 Fiston notes that
the Italians and Germans use ‘little Forkes of Silver’22 to avoid touching
meat with their fingers and it is true that this refinement only became
general in England and France during the seventeenth century. But
otherwise basic rules are presented as if universal and, as will be
discussed later, Erasmian precepts of civility do not represent so radical
a break with those of late medieval English courtesy books as to
suggest the importation of an unfamiliar code of conduct. Much later, in
the mid-seventeenth century, Hawkins's translation of Youth's
Behaviour from the French presented to an English audience a courtesy
manual which combined much Erasmian advice to the schoolchild with
more comprehensive ‘Galatean’ guidance on general social technique
for the young adult. This highly successful translation went through at
least eleven editions from the 1640s, in the course of which it
accumulated thirty or so additional precepts added by Robert
Codrington.23
Some of these additions involve ferocious attacks on salacious or

exhibitionistic foreign fashions in dress, but none actually alters or
significantly augments the principles of good manners in the French
original. Nothing, for example, is added to the extensive section on
table manners. This absence of substantial change in a textbook which
received much enthusiastic augmentation at least suggests that no
great difference existed between elementary English and French
civility. Norbert Elias has stressed that the concept of ‘civility’ as
opposed to that of ‘courtesy’ involves a sense of the cultural identity of
Christian Europe set against the barbarism of other societies.24 In so
far as this notion is articulated in seventeenth-century courtesy
manuals, it is clearly another indication of the relative homogeneity of
the social codes of the educated classes of (p.80) Western Europe. In a
very striking passage inserted into the mainstream of Della Casa's
argument by his English translator of 1663, cultural differences in
symbolic gestures are discussed. The manners of the English, who
‘uncover the Head…in sign of honour…bow the body in testimony of
submission…embrace one another in token of union and friendship, and
shake hands to intimate a league and contract’ are contrasted not with
the peculiarities of the French, Spanish, or Italians but with the low
reverences of the Muscovites, the sitting reverences of the Ethiopians,
the negroes’ habit of covering their eyes in respect, and the custom of
Page 5 of 39
the Japanese in putting off their shoes before superiors. Whereas the
English ‘clap one another upon the Shoulder…in token of familiar
acquaintance’, the Turks reckon it ‘one of the greatest indignities that
can be offered, I suppose, because they brand their slaves on that
part’.25 This anthropological speculation significantly leaves out other
Europeans. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the habits of Western
Europeans were regarded as approximately the same as those of the
English.
The assumption of a basic compatibility between English and

Continental manners does not entirely resolve problems in interpreting
translated courtesy books published in England. The durability and
European diffusion of the Galateo may have been an effect of a
genuinely slow rate of change in manners and a reasonably unified
European aristocratic culture,26 but the natural tendency of later
seventeenth-century writers to fall back on the authority or
convenience of an established translated text obscures change. Josiah
Dare, for example, in his Counsellor Manners his Last Legacy to his Son
of 1673, begins his advice with a brisk summary of Della Casa's advice
on basic bodily propriety and table manners. Seventeenth-century
developments in the handling of food, such as the use of the fork and
the decline of communal cups and dishes, are not mentioned and it is
difficult to tell whether this is because they are not yet general in
English society or because Dare is unthinkingly following Della Casa.
Jean Gailhard, in 1678, gave some indication of differences between

English and French manners:
In England the manner is for the Master of the house to go in

before a Stranger; This would pass for a very great incivility in
France: so here the Lady or Mistress of the House uses to sit at
the upper end of the Table, which in France is given to Strangers:
so if we be many in a company, we make no scruple to drink all
out (p.81) of a Glass, or Tankard, which they are not used to do:
and if a servant would offer to give them a glass before it was
washed every time they drink, they would be angry at it.27
Walker, interestingly suggests the same difference when he writes, ‘In

England, strangers, and justly, tax us for drinking before we eat…
drinking many in the same cup’ and he adds that the English use ‘not
forks but fingers’.28 But we must be cautious, for polite innovation
proceeded unevenly in both England and France. The Princess Palatine
reported how Louis XIV despised the innovation of forks when his
grandson adopted it.29 Only one mid-seventeenth-century courtesy book
Page 6 of 39
made an explicit claim to modernity. Antoine de Courtin, although he

asserted that there is an eternal moral and rational basis to civility,
reassured the reader about his up-to-date approach:
Not that I have made use of any book of the like subject, in the
Composition of mine; I knew well that old obsolete Treatises of
civil precepts, which depend wholly upon custom, are rather a
trouble then advantage to him that uses them; and therefore I
thought it much better to consult present practice then add worm-
eaten instructions.30
Courtin's treatise was translated only one year after its publication in
France and by 1685 had gone through at least five editions. Evidently it
aroused some English enthusiasm, and Courtin's claim to be
particularly up-to-date strengthens the significance of his precepts as
evidence of change. Yet in the assessment of the detailed account of
social ritual and refinement given by Courtin, the problem of the
absence of a comparably detailed adult English work becomes acute.
Although the idea of English informality and plainness opposed to
Italian, French, or Spanish ceremony may be a conventional
exaggeration, much of The Rules of Civility involves a punctilious and
stringent code of courtly deference criticized in France itself as
affectation. It is more self-consciously ‘advanced’ than the Galateo had
been and therefore, given its isolation, its fashionable quality must
make us cautious about its immediate relation to contemporary English
codes of good manners. Nevertheless, despite the need for caution in
arguing for changes in standards on the basis of one or two translated
courtesy manuals, the overall picture of social rules presented by late
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century handbooks is remarkably
consistent.
(p.82) Bodily propriety—the care and control of the body and its
processes—was a major preoccupation of early modern courtesy
writers. Erasmus's civility is indeed a code systematically referred to
parts of the body from the eyes to the privy members before being
presented in terms of behaviour on specific occasions. Starting with the
head and moving on to overall stance and the lower parts, Erasmus
condemns both the distorting and the disgusting. The expression must
be composed, eyes and brows steady, and mouth not disfigured by
gawping or immoderate laughter.31 Nose and mouth must be kept clear
of natural effluents and snot and spit must be dealt with discreetly.32
The handkerchief, not the sleeve, must be used for the nose and, when
one spits, one must turn one's face aside and tread the phlegm into the
ground with one's foot.33 One must not cough loudly or in any man's
face and one must not use a knife or one's nails to pull anything out of
Page 7 of 39
one's teeth.34 One must not blush or puff out one's cheeks.35 It is
important to clean the teeth, wash the face in the morning, keep hair
combed, and avoid scratching head or body.36 The trunk, legs, and arms
should be carried straight and steadily, without crouching or puffing
out the chest.37 The privy members should never be uncovered in
public and one should relieve oneself in private with due modesty.38
Modes of bowing and sitting may vary with time and place, but one
should sit still and in a manner which does not expose the upper
thighs.39 Dress should be modest and neat.40
Discussing behaviour at table, Erasmus advocates washing the hands

and nails before starting to eat, sitting straight without putting elbows
on the table or wriggling the buttocks ‘lyke a man that letteth a blast or
is about it’.41 Contact between food and fingers must be minimized; two
fingers of the left hand must suffice if this is necessary and the knife or
an innovation in sixteenth-century Europe, the fork, must be used
where possible.42 One should not lick one's fingers or wipe them on
one's clothes, but should use a napkin or table-cloth.43 Noisy eating—
slobbering, slurping or snuffling—is to be avoided, and one must not
gnaw bones or lick dishes.44 One should wipe the lips before drinking.45
The issue of bodily propriety also emerges in De Civilitate in the section
on behaviour in church, where Erasmus requires composure of the
body to indicate a special reverence,46 and in a section on the chamber
where the reader is (p.83) advised, ‘If thou lye with a bedfelowe, lye
still and make not bare thyselfe with fumbling.’47
Della Casa gives a very similar view of what is physically distorting or

disgusting. He opens his account of what is ‘fawle, filthy, lothsome and
nasty’ by condemning those who ‘openly…thrust their hands in what
part of their bodys they like’ and asserting that a gentleman should not
make public preparation to relieve himself or retruss before others
after doing so.48 He shares Erasmus's concentration on the disgusting
potential of the effluents of nose and mouth. Nobody should inspect his
handkerchief after using it, nor put his nose too near another's food.49
Spitting is to be controlled as far as possible and Della Casa notes with
approval the story of a people who never spit at all.50 Not only effluent
but even ‘the ayer of another man's brethe’ may be offensive and
therefore close physical proximity is to be avoided.51 Grinding the
teeth, whistling, and yawning are bad habits and a gentleman must not
sleep in company, shuffle his feet, fidget, or turn his buttocks towards
another when he is seated.52 Della Casa gives more detailed table
manners than Erasmus but at no point contradicts him. A man should
not claw or scratch himself, should not fart, should not grease his
fingers or rub his teeth with a napkin.53 He should not wipe sweat from
Page 8 of 39
his face with the tablecloth.54 He should not rinse out his mouth with
wine and spit it out, lean over the table or overfill his mouth.55 He
should not ‘by any maner of meanes, give another man to know what
pleasure [he] take[s] in the meate or the wine’.56
Richard Weste's Booke of Demeanour, unlike the longer works of

Erasmus and Della Casa, is almost exclusively concerned with rules of
bodily propriety and control. The child is told to stand up straight with
feet close together, to compose his face and avoid raised eyebrows,
downcast or wandering eyes, frowning or scowling.57 Socrates is cited
as a bad example of a man who wiped his nose on his cap or clothes,
and the use of a handkerchief is enjoined.58 If the child needs to sneeze,
he must turn away from the company, and he must keep his mouth
closed so as not to cause offence by breathing on a companion.59
Puffing the cheeks, pushing out the lips, gaping, persistent laughing,
biting the lip, putting out the tongue and belching or vomiting are listed
as faults.60 Spitting must be discreet.61 Cleanliness of teeth and mouth
is recommended and hair (p.84) must be combed and trimmed. The
private parts must never be publicly exposed and urination or farting
must be done ‘with secresie’.62 ‘Straddling’, ‘tottering’, or ‘dangling
like a bell’ are faults of gait, and, in bowing ‘Bend not thy body too far
foorth nor backe thy leg behind’. Apparel is to be ‘neat and cleane’.63
A pervasive theme of these sixteenth-century precepts is the opposition

between the ‘civil’ and the bestial. The predominant imagery of
courtesy writers in the description of unacceptable bodily habits is that
of animal greed and gracelessness.64 Erasmus calls the practice of
gnawing bones ‘the property of dogges’ and that of licking dishes ‘the
property of cattes’.65 He conjures up a repulsive picture of those who
‘in eatynge slubber up theyr meet lyke swine’.66 Della Casa likewise
invokes pigs when condemning men who ‘(like swyne with their snouts
in the washe, all begroyned) never lyft up their heads nor looke up, and
much less keepe their hands from the meate, and with both their
cheeks blowne…not eate but raven.’67 Weste versifies:
Blow not alowd as thou shalt stand,

For that is most absurd,
Just like a broken winded horse.
It is to be abhord.
Nor practize snufflingly to speake,
For that doth imitate
The brutish Storke and Elephant
Yea and the wralling Cat.68
Page 9 of 39
Weste even refers to the facial expression of the hedgehog when

exhorting the child not to wrinkle up his nose.69 It seems probable that
the terms ‘beastly’ and ‘brutish’, constantly used in these texts to
describe offensive manners, had for contemporary readers more vivid
and immediate connotations of animality than they do today.
In the later seventeenth-century courtesy books, direct allusion to the

supposed behaviour of animals became comparatively rare, but the
implicit notion of bodily civility as a subjugation of the animal in man
was still present. Courtin made this very plain in his introductory
analysis of rules of civility; having distinguished between conventional
modes of behaviour, such as head-baring on salutation, ‘formed…of the
general consent and practice of all well-bred men’ and ‘certain peculiar
Rules of (p.85) Decency, which Nature has likewise inscribed’,70 he
characterized the second category as a code written into human nature
in order to maintain the distance between man and beast. Thus
‘Nature’ absolutely prohibits the public exposure of ‘some parts of our
Bodies’ and ‘some kind of actions’ and
For other actions where Nature has not been so precise, but left
us the same liberty with other creatures, as in spitting, coffing,
sneezing, eating, drinking…we may follow our own fancies,
because every man is naturally convinced the more remote and
contrary his actions are to the example of Brutes, the nearer does
he approach to that perfection to which man tends by natural
propensity…For as there are some actions naturally
indispensable, and must be done, how undecent soever they be in
themselves, it is required they be performed with as much
modesty and remoteness from the practice of the beasts as is
possible.71
This view indicates how bodily civility not only defines man against the
animal kingdom, but represents a scale of human emancipation from
the animal impulses which man shares with the beasts. The man who
performs his natural functions with as much discretion and ‘distancing’
as possible, drawing as little attention as he can to his bodily sensations
and needs, is part of a society which values itself on a scale of distance
from a primitive condition supposedly characterized by the tyranny of
animal passion.
The maintenance of a distinction between the civil and the brute beast
or savage was scarcely an everyday practical function of the rules of
bodily control. Yet composure and control of bodily processes served
within the human social order not only to define the sane against the
mad, as when Hawkins advises, ‘Move not too and fro in walking, go
Page 10 of 39
not like a Ninny,’72 but the superior against the inferior. The overall
association of ‘civility’ with the gentleman is thus given a very specific
illustration in precepts which condemn the ‘rustic Lowne’73 or artisan
for lack of control and delicacy. Erasmus regards wiping the nose on
the sleeve as the habit of fishmongers,74 and thrusting the fingers into
‘a dysh of potage’ as ‘the maners of carters’.75 Della Casa condemns
verbal crudity as an aspect of ‘ye dregges and ye fylth of ye common
people76 and Dekker tells his masterpiece of bad manners in The Gul's
Horn-Booke to ‘gape wider than any oyster-wife.’77 It is on the whole
the supposed brutishness of the (p.86) common people in regard to
bodily needs, rather than any dirtiness associated with the specific
manual occupation of the lower classes which makes them uncivil in the
eyes of the courtesy writers.
So far we have examined the rules of bodily propriety as if they formed

a simple single standard of behaviour to which the civil gentleman was
required to conform in order to express participation in an ideal of self-
control, superior humanity and respect for the sensitivity of others. Yet
although the method of courtesy writers consisted largely in depicting
an ideal of comportment and modesty formed mainly of prohibitions,
they could not help indicating that the rules of civility do not only
construct an opposition between a ‘civil’ and an ‘uncivil’ condition.
Good manners is not only a code in the sense of constituting a coherent
series of standards, but it is a code in the sense of providing a symbolic
language whose elements may be symbolically varied according to
place, time and the social message which the individual wishes to
communicate. In fact, these two aspects of good manners may conflict.
At the level of bodily proprieties in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
courtesy books, this is clear in the coexistence of the standard of self-
control described above with a notion of a scale of self-control in which
relaxation indicates superiority and inhibition respect.
S. R., in The Courte of Civill Courtesie of 1582, exhorts his reader: ‘if he
be constrained to yawne, reache, belche, cough, cleanse the nose or
spit either at the bourde, or in the presence of his betters or strangers,
he must suppresse the sound, and shadow the sight, as much as he may
conveniantly.’78 The qualification ‘in the presence of his betters or
strangers’ is very significant. Here, precepts which we have been
examining primarily as rules for the control of natural impulses
regarded as intrinsically disgusting suggest instead that shame and
disgust are experienced as indices and signs of social differentials
varying with time and place. Thus Della Casa, although giving a general
list of things ‘fawle, fithy, lothsome and nasty’, gives a set of
particularly stringent rules of propriety for servants, who must be
Page 11 of 39
‘washt and cleane without any spot of dirt on them’ and ‘must not (in
any wise) scratche and rubbe their heades, nor any part els in the sight
of their lorde and masters. Nor thrust their hands in any of those parts
of their body that be covered.’79 Since there is no suggestion in the
Galateo of a concept of hygiene in matters of food, these rules appear
to be primarily matters of respect. A century later, despite his appeal to
a natural law of decency binding on all civil men, Courtin (p.87)
nevertheless regarded inferiors as ‘more particularly obliged to the

rules of modesty’80 and tended to set such rules in the context of
symbolic deference. For example, he gives a most interesting account
of proper behaviour when ‘by reason of the scarcity of quarters, it falls
out that we must lye in the same chamber with the qualified (superior)
person’:
we are in civility obliged to let him go first to bed, and afterwards

undress ourselves as privately as we can by our own bed, and go
to bed too, with care to lye quiet and still, and make no noise in
the night that may give him disturbance. And as we go to bed last,
so civility requires we be up first in the morning, that the person
of honour may find us drest when he rises; it being very indecent
for us, to suffer our selves to be seen naked, or undrest by a
person of quality.81
Bodily shame is thus peculiarly the prerogative of the inferior on any

occasion, while the superior may indulge bodily ease and enforce
tolerance of his needs, impulses, and idiosyncrasies.
Social status may therefore be asserted by a deliberate ostentatious

reversal of modesty, for, as Courtin put it, ‘To the [superior] all things
are lawful, because they command the others; and having no right of
censure, the inferiour must be contented to suffer.’82 This kind of
behaviour in its most extravagant and controversial forms emerges
more clearly from comments in satirical material than in
straightforward didactic texts, yet courtesy manuals do hint at the ways
in which a sliding scale of modesty is used to establish social
relationships at the appropriate level. Della Casa, for example, advises
that a man should never turn his buttocks towards the person sitting
next to him or expose the thighs by crossing the legs too high because,
‘such people be never playde, but amongst those to whom a man needs
use no reverence.’83 It is therefore possible to insult rather than merely
disgust an equal by indecency. He goes on to say that, ‘It is very true,
that if a gentleman should use these fashions before his servants, or in
the presence of some friend of meaner condition than him-selfe, it
would betoken no pride, but a love and familiarity.’84 A relaxation of
Page 12 of 39
some standards of bodily propriety may then indicate condescension,

insult, or friendship according to the difference in social status and the
degree of acquaintanceship between the persons involved.
The operation of the code of civility as a language of social orientation

was much more obvious and unambiguous in those areas of courtesy
writing concerned with what might be called ‘social form’ rather than
in the area of bodily propriety. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
didactic writers recognized a category of good manners they often
termed (p.88) ‘ceremonies’ and we might call ‘etiquette’, which they
understood to be symbolic and culturally variable. These are social
signs which may be linguistic (such as forms of address), gestural (such
as bowing), or spatial (such as seating in order of precedence).85 There
was considerable debate in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
over the morality and necessity of many of these ‘ceremonies’ and this
controversy will be examined in a later chapter. Nevertheless, the
volume and precision of the advice on these matters offered by courtesy
writers suggests what we might reasonably expect: in a society acutely
conscious of hierarchy and degree, ‘ceremony’ was extremely
important and could be enormously complex.
The principal ritual of salutation was to doff the hat and, as an

additional mark of respect, to bow more or less deeply as the superior
status of the person greeted demanded. Erasmus indicates some
differences in national modes of bowing:
in making of curtesy, one maner becometh in one place and in

some place it is not comely. Some make curtesys w[ith] both
knees bowed (as Yrisshmen), and on contrary wise some do it with
upryght bodye, some with body stouping…Some lykewyse with
upryghte body make curtesy, fyrst bowe the right kne, after the
left, which among Englishmen is laudable in youth.The Fre[n]ch
men do bowe the ryght knee with a lyttle pleasant returne of the
bodye.86
Modes of bowing in England seem to have changed between the later

sixteenth century, when it was fashionable to step backwards and bend
the knee, and the seventeenth century, when it became correct to step
forwards, thus necessitating caution ‘lest the person saluted, bowing at
the same time you, might have his teeth beaten out by throwing up your
head’.87 Kissing one's hand while bowing was an additional courtly
flourish, and the degree of athletic grace to be exhibited in the bow was
more the concern of dancing masters than courtesy writers.88 The basic
principles of the ritual, however, are apparent even in elementary texts
Page 13 of 39
for children, and do not change over the period or indeed for a long
time afterwards.
The timing of salutation is all-important for it is the duty of the inferior

to uncover first, and it is up to the superior to give him permission to
cover his head again. Equals must attempt to proceed simultaneously.
The complexities of these manoeuvres are apparent in the following
passage from Youth's Behaviour:
(p.89) It is ill said, Sir, be covered, or put on your hat, to one of

more eminencie than thy self, as also not to say as much, to whom
it is due. Likewise he who maketh too much haste to put on his
hat, and hee who at the first putteth not on, or after some few
intreaties, do not well: and therefore one ought to be covered
after the first, or for the most part after the second time; if so that
in some Countries the Countrey custome be not received, and
amongst equals, or superiours, who are of the self-same house,
the inferiour may cover himself at the first request. True it is, that
equals at the instant, or immediately after, are wont to
interchange a signe of covering themselves joyntly.89
Although such signs of deference and condescension do not necessarily

mean that, as Cleland put it, the inferior ‘wil obey [the superior's]
commandements, and yeeld him al authority,’90 we are dealing with a
straightforward symbolism of power. The superior is formally in control
of the demeanour of the inferior. The inferior must adopt, during
conversation, an attitude of respectful attention, and Fiston, Hawkins,
and Courtin suggest that doffing and bowing be repeated at any point
where the superior pays particular attention to the inferior. Thus
Fiston, after describing a correct bow with first the right and then the
left knee, states ‘alwaies when he [the honourable person] speaketh to
thee, or thou art about to answer him, bow thy right knee once
modestly.’91 Hawkins advises that, ‘with persons of more quality than
thou art…speak not until thou art asked, and then stand upright, put off
thine hat, and answer in a few words, if so be they give thee not leave
to sit or to put on thine hat.’92 The superior is envisaged as possessing
a comparatively inviolable personal space. This is expressed in the
simple precept that, as Seager puts it, a child should give adults ‘the
way’,93 i.e. stand aside in the street to let them pass, and in later more
sophisticated advice such as Walker's: ‘if you meet a superior in a
narrow way, stop, and press to make him more room.’94 The same
theme is also clear in the admonition that ‘Speaking to men of qualitie,
lean not, and look them not wishly in the face, approach not too near
them, and at least keep thyself a pace from them, or there-about.’95
Courtin is shocked by such behaviour as sitting on a superior's bed-rails
Page 14 of 39
or leaning on the arms of a great person's chair.96 The superior's right

to inviolable personal space extends to his control over eye contact with
a (p.90) lesser individual for, as Thomas Wright says in his manual of
practical psychology, The Passions of the Minde (1601),
Neither doe wee holds it for good manners, that the inferiour
should fixe his eies upon his superiour's countenance, and the
reason is, because it were presumption for him to attempt the
entrance or privie passage into his superiour's minde, as
contrariwise it is lawfull for the superiour to attempt the
knowledge of his inferiour.97
The superior is also acknowledged in a series of spatial conventions

which map social distinctions onto right- and left-hand position. Where
two people are standing or sitting, the right hand is the more
honourable, and in the case of three walking together, the middle place
is most honourable.98 If we are walking in the street, the convention is
modified to place the superior nearest the wall, presumably, as Walker
guesses, so that he runs least risk of being spattered with mud.99
Within a chamber, Courtin explains, ‘where the bed stands, is the upper
end,’ and if there is no state bed, space is socially valued according to
distance from the door.100 Inside a house, the conventions of right and
left and of upper and lower are used at the same time, except when
there is a complicating factor such as that of the comfort of sitting close
to the fire. The importance of the fire is well illustrated in Hawkin's
advice:
In the presence of well bred company, it is uncomely to turn one's

back to the fire, or to approach nigher than others, for the one
and the other savoureth of preheminence. It is not permitted but
to the chief in quality, or to him that hath charge of the fire-fork,
or to kindle it, take it away, or put fuel on it.101
The distinction of persons was also to be reflected in the allocation of

comfortable seating, which presumably became more of an issue with
the development of interior furnishing during the seventeenth century.
Courtin takes note of the ‘great difference to be observed, betwixt a
chair with arms, a back chair and a folding stool’.102 The last two types
of chair were seventeenth-century French developments quickly
diffused through Western Europe, but even before, when the choice of
seating was more limited, the principle of seating in accordance with
degree was important.103
Page 15 of 39
(p.91) Seating at table in order of precedence was clearly of the first

importance, since courtesy writers feel the need to warn their readers
against contentious argument about correct placing.104 Table manners
in general, which have been examined above purely with a view to
standards of bodily control, were also very much matters of form and
precedence. As has been noted, late medieval courtesy-books were
largely concerned with table manners, and in particular with the rituals
of table service required of the page or other gentleman-servitor. Hugh
Rhodes, whose Book of Nurture follows closely the precepts of fifteenth-
century authors, describes ‘The maner of serving a knight Squyre or
Gentleman’: a trencher, napkin, and spoon should be set forth for each
diner, the dishes should be solemnly carried in and set down with an
obeisance to the master of the house.105 Trenchers rather than plates
were often used and it was the servitors’ job to clean the trenchers
between courses, cutting away fragments of food and the soiled surface
of the bread before setting the trencher before the diner again.106
Rhodes indicates that there might be individual cups but that often a
communal cup was brought round with ceremony varying according to
the status of the guest; thus ‘at the degree of knight ye may set down
your cup covered, and lifte of the cover, take the cover in thy hand and
set it on agayne.’107 The servitor ritually offered water for the master to
wash his hands, ‘the towell on the left hand of him and the water before
your sovereign’.108 It is clear from Seager's Schoole of Vertue that
children were supposed to perform these functions in the parental
home and had to set the table, serve food, and furnish water for
washing at the end of the meal, finishing off with a ‘lowe cursie’.109
Service at table was thus a major expression of deference; and even
when the main business of serving and waiting was regularly consigned
to menial servants, as is evident in Courtin's Rules of Civility, many
symbolic acts of service and deference were retained between fellow-
diners. The master of the house must initiate proceedings since, as
Hawkins put it, ‘It is peculiar to the chefest of the company, to be the
first to unfold his napkin, and fall to the meat: and therefore it is the
duty of others to attend patiently, without setting hand on anything
before him.’110 It was the duty of the guest not to assert priority in his
appetites by calling for drink;111 Hawkins mentions a convention that
one should not drink while ‘thy next (p.92) companion drinketh, or he
who sitteth at the upper end of the table’.112 Courtin advised that it was
rude to wash hands at table with the host, unless invited to do so.113
The most striking ceremonies of the table relate to carving and the
drinking of healths. Carving was clearly an important gentlemanly skill
and an expression of gentlemanly service in the later Middle Ages;
Chaucer described his squire as
Page 16 of 39
Curteis…lowely, and servysable,

And carf biforn his fader at the table.114
Carving demanded considerable technical knowledge, as the complex

terminology and precepts of Wynkyn de Worde's Boke of Kervynge
(1514) illustrate.115 Yet although carving meat for another was an act of
service between servant and lord or child and father, courtesy manuals
suggest that in other circumstances it may be assertive of status. Thus
S.R. advises that for a guest ‘to carve to a man's better is a
presumption,’116 perhaps because it implies a particular relation of
service which has not been established, and to carve ‘to ones equall,
except by asking first the question, you know it wil be welcome to him,
wil be taken for too much fawning’;117 the implication that one is in a
relation of service to one's equal is ingratiation. The relationship
between guest and host, which tends to supersede that of servitor and
lord as the focus of attention in seventeenth-century writing on table
manners, is ambiguous, and this is reflected in precepts on carving. The
presentation of food to the guest by the host or his servants is in some
sense a mode of honouring, but for the guest to usurp this function is
for him to usurp the formal power and status which belongs to the host.
In Youth's Behaviour, the emphasis is not on carving as service, but on
carving as the prerogative of the master of the house or, by extension,
his servants:
Entertaining any one, it is decent to serve him at the table, and

present him with meats, yea, even those which are nigh him; but
if one be invited by another, it is better to attend until that the
Master or other do carve him meat, than that he take it himself,
were it not that the Master intrcat him to take it freely, or that
one were in the house of a familiar friend. Also one ought scarce
offer ones self, as undesired to serve others out of ones house,
where one might have little power, be not that the number of the
guests were great and that the Master of the house could not
have an eye to all the company, then one may carve to them who
are neer ones self.118
(p.93) The practice of drinking to another man at table, and thereby

requiring a counter-pledge, which John Evelyn lamented was all too
common in midseventeenth-century England,119 was not merely a
means to ensure a rising level of drunkenness at a social gathering. It
had a precise symbolic meaning. S.R. regards this ‘kind of cup greeting’
as appropriate in only two circumstances:
Page 17 of 39
either to make our inferiour (to whom we meane not to use

speeche of familiaritie) to thinke we will doo them a curtesie: or
els to our verie freende by way of congratulation. And therefore a
man must never drinke to his better, except he be sure that by
way of freendship or familiaritie he be content to become his
equal.120
Courtin, a century later, repeats much the same advice, stating that
‘'Tis gross incivility to begin any person of honour's health and to
address it to himself.’ He suggests that any enforced reciprocal pledge
be directed to the superior's health and not to the person himself, thus
neutralizing the incivility of directly putting oneself on the same level
as the superior. Pledging is clearly a symbolic equalization of status and
therefore, where there is a real difference of status, it has a fictive
quality which turns it into a compliment or an insult. Thus Courtin
insists that a pledge from a superior be received with a particular
demonstration of deference: ‘you must be uncovered, inclining forward
til he has drank, and not pledge him without precise order’—so that the
compliment may be seen to be acknowledged.121
The degree to which courtesy writers make explicit the function of good
manners as a symbolic language of deference and assertion varies
considerably. It is much easier to perceive this theme in the work of
Robson or Courtin, who are addressing themselves to young adults
living in a complicated urban milieu, than in the work of Erasmus or
Weste, who are concentrating on a school world in which the structure
of authority is simple and static. Also, different authors give views of
ceremonial behaviour which are not identically elaborate. Hawkins
suggests that the ritual of head-baring on salutation may become
troublesome if it results in a tussle between the inferior, who tries to
maintain deference by refusing to re-cover his head, and the superior
who attempts to persuade him to do so.122 Courtin, however, has few
such qualms and indeed suggests the further elaboration of doffing the
hat every time a superior is (p.94) mentioned in conversation.123 He
recounts humorously, but without disapproval, that he has known men
‘so cultivated and refined in Foreign parts, they would not for a world
have put on their Hats, or sate with their back towards the picture of
any Eminent person’.124 All authors agree that there should be limits to
ceremony, but they do not agree where these should be set.
The question of who, in what circumstances, is to be defined as a

superior is obviously central to the social ceremonies discussed above.
Courtesy writers tend to take for granted a knowledge of the hierarchy
of rank in their readers and do not digress at length into the legalistic
clarification of precedence of birth or office which is the main
Page 18 of 39
preoccupation of writers like the heralds. Sir John Ferne and Sir
Francis Markham.125 Courtesy manuals do, however, make clear that a
number of different and potentially conflicting criteria contribute to the
definition of social status and that civil behaviour involves a graceful
manipulation of form in order to accommodate conflict rather than
simply a reliance on principles of protocol to resolve it. S.R. states that
the eldest son of a knight, while his father lives, may socially approach
‘the best squire’, but he must do so with ‘reverent respectes in his
speeche’ especially if the formal equality is qualified by the squire's
‘gravitie’ or ‘reputation, either for his wisdome or office’.126 Cleland
asserts that seniority in age is overridden by antiquity of lineage, but
that the noble young man should politely waive his right to precedence
over the senior as a mark of respect.127 A man in public office takes
precedence over a private individual, according to Cleland, although
Markham makes birth more important than office.128 Obviously there
was often scope for interpretation and contention.
The claims of women to social deference are dealt with surprisingly

little in straightforward courtesy manuals, as opposed to courtly
literature. The Erasmian tradition of courtesy writing for schoolchildren
involves no special mention of women, except as parents to whom
obedience is due, and despite its length, Youth's Behaviour is explicitly
limited to ‘conversation amongst men’. S.R. says no more than that
women, like the physically and mentally afflicted, should not be the
subject of mockery.129 (p.95) Courtin is more informative, indicating
that rules of physical modesty must be particularly strictly observed
when ladies are present, and that ‘it is unhandsome among ladies, or
other serious company, to throw off ones cloak, to pull off ones
Peruque, or Doublet, to cut ones nails, to tye ones garter, to change
shoes if they pinch; to call for ones night Gown and slippers to be at
ones ease.’130 A great lady should not be saluted until she presents
herself. A woman visitor must always be seen back to her home by her
host or his substitute.131 In a general comment on precedence, Courtin
includes women among the list of those—ecclesiastics, magistrates,
‘persons of any publick character’, ‘persons of extraordinary
extraction’, ‘ancient persons’, and ‘such as have rendered themselves
egregious by any faculty of their own’—to whom place must be
given.132
As has been noted in connection with table manners, the distinction

between host and guest might cut right across other relations of rank,
although the way a host should receive a guest varied with the latter's
relative status. Walker suggests, for example, that a man receive his
superior at the bottom of the stairs (at the main entrance), his equal at
Page 19 of 39
the top of the stairs, and his inferior in an inside room.133 The distance
to be traversed by the host in receiving or taking leave of a guest was
thus a measure of his respect.134 Nevertheless the exercise of
hospitality gave the host some prerogative over all but the most
important guest. A further complication of a straightforward language
of precedence lay in the ‘honorary’ superior status to be accorded to
reasonably gentlemanly strangers, and indeed to any man of equal
status with whom one was only slightly acquainted. As Seager implied
when he advised that the child doff his cap and give way to strangers in
the street, civil ceremonies of respect asserted goodwill even in
anonymous social relations.135 They also established relative degrees of
unfamiliarity as a preliminary to further acquaintance, since the marks
of familiarity which were a compliment to an equal could only develop
on the basis of an initial formality.136 S.R., who catalogued table
manners to be practised ‘at the house of strangers’, was very anxious
that ‘though a man either at home or among his friends may use what
manner he list’, his reader should maintain some of these table
(p.96) ‘ceremonies’ even when they were unnecessary, in order not to
fall into bad habits and risk a social mistake with strangers.137
To summarize: the precepts of early modern courtesy manuals

described in this chapter reveal two major aspects of the rules of
civility. On the one hand, civil behaviour represented a standard of
conduct, and particularly of self-control, which distinguished the civil
man from the beast, the savage, or, in practice within society, the non-
gentleman. On the other, civil behaviour was a flexible code by which
the civil man could define and redefine his relationships within civil
society. Although rules of physical modesty presented in manuals more
obviously suggest the character of civility as a standard, and rules
explicitly defined as ‘ceremony’ more obviously indicate the symbolic,
variable aspect of good manners as a code, we cannot neatly
distinguish two categories of precept. As has been noted, certain bodily
controls, even if presented as absolute and ‘natural’ by rationalizing
authors, turn out to be variable according to principles of social
deference and assertion. Conversely, the ability to understand and use
correct modes of self-presentation vis-à-vis superiors, equals, inferiors,
strangers, and familiars is viewed overall as a mark of conformity to a
standard of civility. The two aspects of civility are both more or less
present in all precepts. This analysis of particular precepts is
thoroughly consistent with the overall character of the value of civility
discussed in the previous chapter. ‘Civility’ is both a static model of
well-ordered humanity and a technique of self-orientation in a complex
social world.
Page 20 of 39
This perception is crucial to any coherent analysis of historical change

in the rules of good manners. It sets manners firmly within the context
both of the overall self-image of a group and of the characteristic social
relationships and problems within it. It therefore gives us some basis
for assessing what is or is not significant change in the rules of correct
behaviour and means that we do not have to look at good manners as
simply a miscellaneous collection of customs and fashions. Norbert
Elias has attempted to do so with a theory, based on the evidence of
written courtesy precepts, of a rising level of psychological inhibition,
an increasing sense of invisible social barriers between individuals, a
rising ‘standard of repugnance’ in Western European élites since the
medieval period.138 This he terms the ‘civilizing process’ and relates in
various ways to change in the structure of human relations on a broad
social and political front. It is worthwhile to start from Elias's theory
when examining change over the relatively short time-scale of this
study. I shall argue, however, that (p.97) although his ideas are
stimulating, Elias's notion of a civilizing process is somewhat
misleading, raises some unanswerable questions and rests on a
simplistic approach to the evidence of courtesy literature.
Elias relates change in the precepts of good manners to a Freudian

model of the psyche in which natural impulse is subject to more or less
inhibition, although he is interested in explaining inhibition in
sociological rather than psychoanalytical terms. He therefore
concentrates heavily on those aspects of civility—bodily decency and
modesty—which can be most easily viewed as a matter of the
suppression of biological impulse and he is much less concerned with
what appears as pure social ‘ceremony’.139 He seeks to show that from
the later medieval period an increasingly large number of actions were
experienced as increasingly disgusting. To do so he argues not only
from a chronological comparison of the content of courtesy precepts,
such as advice on the degree of control to be exercised over coughing
or spitting, but also from the extent of euphemism or even silence over
certain bodily processes and effluents which is evident in courtesy
writing at different times. Euphemism and silence, he implies, suggest
that constraints have become automatic and internalized; courtesy
writers do not need to prohibit actions which they cannot even
name.140 Social indecencies that Erasmus could freely discuss have, by
the eighteenth century, become unmentionable and so, one might
suppose, very much less common among the potential readers of
courtesy literature.
Page 21 of 39
It is certainly not impossible to interpret the limited evidence of

sixteenth- and seventeenth-century courtesy manuals published in
England in such a way as to give tentative support to Elias's theory.
Erasmus frankly and explicitly prohibits the public exposure of the
genitals and public defecation, as does Della Casa,141 but this precept
has been dropped from the late sixteenth-century Galateo Espagnol and
Courtin cannot bring himself to do more than hint at the proper shame
surrounding ‘some parts of our Bodies’ and ‘some kind of actions’142
when he clearly means the genitalia and defecation. Walker too omits to
mention exposure of genitals in his list of disgusting habits. Courtin
goes much further than Erasmus or Della Casa over physical modesty
in associating embarrassment not only with the genitals and upper
thighs but with the exposure of the chest or stomach: ‘It is altogether
unhansome to appear, (p.98) especially before women, with a waistcoat
and shirt open, as that our skin may be seen.’143 The same enhanced
awareness of shame may underlie the precept that sick people should
not be visited until they are well enough to sit up and put on their
‘upper garments’.144 An element of embarrassment at physical
improprieties involved in sleep also seems to have grown stronger
between De Civilitate, which simply suggests the need for modesty in
the circumstances of sharing a bed,145 and Youth's Behaviour, which
declares that ‘It is a thing unseemly to leave ones bed out of order, and
one ought not to put off on clothes in the presence of other, nor go out
of ones chamber half-unready, or with a night cap.’146 Courtin himself
comments upon a supposed advance in sensitivity to disgust when he
states that
heretofore…one might, without incivility, have hawkt and spit

upon the ground before a person of quality; provided he put his
foot upon it when he had done; now it is perfect clownishness and
intollerable…formerly one might gape and yawn, and it is well
enough if he did not talk while he was yawning; now it is
intollerable.147
His direction that one must be sure ‘never to spit anything out upon the
floor’ while at table is stringent compared with those of previous
authors who regard the floor as preferable to the table.148 A
squeamishness about other men's breath might be supposed to have
increased, to judge by the rising tone of indignation in writers’
condemnations of standing too close to others. Della Casa, in Peterson's
original translation, advocates that we keep our distance in
conversation, ‘for there be many that can not abyde to feele the ayer of
another man's breathe.’149 In Gracian's later version of the Galateo a
more disapproving passage is inserted; the author declares that ‘I have
Page 22 of 39
seen some who wilst they are talking with one, they cling so close unto
him, that they breath in his face, and it is certain all doe loath to be
breathed upon by others, though they find noe ill savour come from
them.’150 Youth's Behaviour says that a man should always stay at least
‘a span’, i.e. nine inches, from his companion,151 a surprisingly short
distance by modern English standards.
In the formulation of table manners it is likewise possible to detect an

apparent increase in sensitivity to disgust. Norbert Elias quotes a
French (p.99) mid-seventeenth-century comment that whereas ‘in
times past, people ate from the common dish and dipped their bread
and fingers in the sauce, today everyone eats with spoon and fork from
his own plate, and a valet washes the cutlery from time to time at the
buffet.’152 This development by which contact between an individual's
hands and his food is generally avoided through the use of the fork,
making the sixteenth-century two-finger rule over touching food
redundant, is reflected in courtesy precepts. Change is relatively slow:
Erasmus mentions the fork in passing and a century after De Civilitate
use of the fork is defined in Youth's Behaviour as ‘the custome of the
best bred’, suggesting that its use is still not fully established.153 The
practice evident in late medieval courtesy books, whereby diners had
individual trenchers but bread and meat were frequently dipped into
communal sauce dishes, and drinking from a communal cup was usual,
also diminished only gradually: it had not disappeared in England even
by the later seventeenth century. Walker in 1673 stated that foreigners
criticized the English for ‘drinking many in the same cup’ and ‘not
using forks but fingers’.154 Nevertheless, the direction of change in this
period seems to be away from the acceptance of contact between
fingers and food whether destined for oneself or others.
What is particularly striking in Courtin's Rules of Civility and is

occasionally evident in Youth's Behaviour is a new insistence that it is
disgusting to touch or eat anything which has been in contact with the
saliva of another. Sixteenth-century authors do not go further than
asserting that one should not offer another a half-eaten piece of food,
and one should not plunge fingers, presumably already licked, too far
into the common sauce dish.155 Later authors reiterate the first piece of
advice, but go further: Youth's Behaviour states that, ‘if thou soakest
thy bread or meat in the sauce, soak it not again, after that thou hast
bitten it,’ and Walker repeats this prohibition with an added censure on
dipping the fingers ‘or anything you have tasted in the sauce’.156
Courtin presents easily the most ‘refined’ sensibility yet implied by
courtesy manuals when he writes:
Page 23 of 39
We are to wipe our spoon every time we put it into the dish; some
people being so delicate, they will not cat after a man has cat with
his spoon and not wiped it. If we be at table with persons of more
than ordinary neatness, it is not sufficient to wipe our Spoon but
we must lay it by, and call for another when we have done; it
being the mode at present to give clean spoons with every plate,
and spoons on purpose for sauce.157
(p.100) A fortiori, Courtin forbids the use of one's own soiled spoon
when one is serving food onto the plate of a fellow-diner. One must then
call for another spoon and ‘whatever you carve, is to be presented upon
a clean plate, and by no means upon your fork, your knive's point or
your spoon.’158 Courtin's rules imply an even greater level of
squeamishness when he even prohibits the dipping of clean bread in
communal sauce; presumably this action suggests pollution of the
common food by what has been defined as the food of an individual
even before he has put it in his mouth.
Yet this evidence for a rising ‘standard of repugnance’ must be viewed

with great caution. Courtin's manual is isolated in presenting a
radically new level of refinement and, for example, the acceptance of
spitting as long as it is away from a man's face which Courtin regards
as old-fashioned is still evident in the work of Walker in 1673.159
Courtin's coyness on the subject of genitalia, micturition, and
defecation must be set against the continuing frankness of other
authors. Youth's Behaviour, still being reissued at the time of Courtin's
publication, states ‘Untruss not thyselfe, nor make thy self ready for the
close stool in the presence of others; afterwards if thou be to touch any
meat, first, wash thine hands, but if it may be, not in the sight of any
whosoever.’160 This is the same as the advice to be found in the Galateo,
and Josiah Dare, who obviously relied on Della Casa's precepts when
formulating his own manual of 1673, felt no need to approach the same
subject with much greater coyness. He writes that a man should not
unbutton or unhasp his breeches ‘as if thou wert in hast to ease Nature;
nor return to the company, from the necessary Home in the Garden,
with thy hose untied, for this carries with it a shew of immodesty in thy
self, and of disrespect for others’.161 His description of clothes and
reference to an outside privy indicate his effort to update Della Casa,
and the mention of the garden may suggest a new sense of the need for
privacy,162 but the euphemism ‘to ease Nature’ is not markedly new.
In fact, Erasmus's comments on the ‘Prevy Membres’ show a more

advanced awareness of shame and embarrassment, for he advises
modesty even when the boy is relieving himself in private:
Page 24 of 39
To disclose or shewe the membres that nature hath gyve to be

covered wythout necessitye, ought to be utterlye avoyded from
gentyl nature. Also when nede compelleth (p.101) to do it yet it
muste be done with convenyent honestye, ye though no persone
be presente, for aungels be ever present, to whome in chyldren
bashfulnesse is a tutier and a follower of chastetie.163
We cannot ascertain from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century courtesy

literature any conclusive evidence of a rising level of inhibition over
exposure of the privy parts. We cannot even assert with Elias that the
level of inhibition suggested by Erasmus's comments represents a
major advance on that of late medieval society.164 Admittedly, late
medieval courtesy books do not usually mention the need for constraint
in defecation and urination, but they do not deny it either. There is
external evidence that such constraint was likely since the euphemisms
‘privy parts’, ‘privy members’, ‘easing of nature’, etc. were well-
established by the fifteenth century.165 A general sense of shame about
the upper thighs and genitals is also clear in John Russell's mid-
fifteenth-century comment on the indecency of short tunics.166 The
reason for the omission of prohibitions in this area from courtesy books
prior to De Civilitate is likely to have been the restricted focus of such
books on the ritual of the table, rather than a general tolerance.
This issue illustrates the weakness of Elias's attempt to argue from the
briskness or silence of pre-Erasmian sources. A rather similar example
of omission in courtesy books not necessarily indicating a general
absence of concern in society is that of bodily cleanliness. Almost all
the sixteenthand seventeenth-century manuals surveyed in this study
advocate the washing of face and hands on rising, the cleaning of teeth,
and the combing of hair.167 In addition they advocate washing before
and after meals.168 This may seem to show an absence of concern with
overall bodily cleanliness. Yet courtesy writers may well be omitting
precepts on bathing because their concern is with the immediate
socially visible aspects of cleanliness. Other sources, for example those
concerned with health, may give a different picture: thus in Sir John
Harrington's The Preservation of Health (1624) the reader is instructed
that in the morning ‘when you arise…Avoid…from the nostrils and the
lungs all filthy matter, as wel by clensing, as by spittle, and clense the
face, head, and whole body.’169 One can scarcely deduce from this that
everyday bathing (p.102) was commonplace in Jacobean England, but
medical texts and writings on the practicalities of service, which stress
the need for the provision of bathing water and clean linen, suggest
that it was not regarded as eccentric to value overall cleanliness.170
Page 25 of 39
There are further serious problems in the analysis of courtesy literature

with a view to the discovery of a ‘standard of repugnance’. The first is
the difficulty of deducing lack of inhibition from the frankness with
which social faults are described. Sixteenth- and early seventeenth-
century writers give vivid and repulsive pictures of unacceptable
behaviour. Fiston, for example, warns that
There are some Children so slovenly, that they wette and perfume
the lower part of their Shirts and Cloathes with Urine, some
others that bespot, and all to dowbe their Brests and Sleeves
filthly with dropping of drinke and Pottage. Nay, which is most
lothsom, with snivelling of their nose, and driveling of their
Mouth: but in any wise beware thou of this beastlinesse.171
Gracian's version of the Galateo includes a graphic description of men

who ‘wipe [their nostrils] with their hands, and then rub one hand
against the other…thrust their fingers into their nostrils, and make
pellets of that they picke out, even before everybody…[and] make cakes
of the waxe, which they picke out of their ears.’172 The entire tradition
of courtesy writing by inversion of precepts, from Dedekind's Grobianus
to the anonymous English Cacoethes Leaden Legacy, relies on a kind of
titillation of sensitivity to disgust. The uncivil anti-hero of this tradition
is pictured spitting out ‘raw crude phlegm’, urinating on candles,
walking about soiled after relieving himself, keeping his hand in his
codpiece ‘as a Curricombe to tame the itching of [his] flesh’, and
covering his face with food.173
Yet it is difficult to argue from this technique of caricature that the

behaviour described is commonplace and even more difficult to equate
a fascination with the repulsive aspects of social behaviour with a
relative absence of inhibition. A full-scale psychoanalytical theory of
inhibition might well locate such fascination in the existence of
psychological constraints. The most that can safely be said is that these
vivid descriptions suggest a society greatly preoccupied with the role of
bodily proprieties in defining an individual's conformity or
nonconformity, humility or arrogance. Indeed, such evidence is
interesting less in relation to supposed levels of constraint than for
what it suggests about the social meanings inscribed in the body and its
processes. One possibility is to link a (p.103) zestful representation of
grossness to the tradition of carnival in early modern Europe, with its
mock inversions of social order and its celebration of appetites.174
Viewed within the context of courtesy writing, however, such
representation primarily underlines a sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century concern with the body as the ‘natural’ object common to both
man and beast, and therefore the principal site of tension between
Page 26 of 39
original ‘brutishness’ and ‘civility’. As has been noted, ‘brutishness’

could be mapped onto both the alien ‘savage’ and the social inferior,
and this was no peculiarity of writers on manners. It is interesting that
Shakespeare characterizes Caliban, whose savagery is inscribed on his
deformed body and implicit in his subjection to gross passion, as a
‘savage and deformed slave’, the last word being a frequent derogatory
term for servant.175
A second problem in assessing levels of inhibition from courtesy

manuals arises with the reverse case: the deduction of internalized
constraint from the stringency, euphemism, or absence of precepts on
bodily functions and their mention in company. New levels of stringency
in polite self-control can certainly be suggested by changes in courtesy
precepts, and it is reasonable to assume that areas of conduct in which
courtesy advice was once explicit may drop out of courtesy writing
because control in these areas is now taken for granted. But our
experience of our own and others’ bodies is only partly subject to
considerations of politeness, however ingrained. In domestic, medical,
or theatrical contexts, for example, we may act, speak, and feel in a
way recognizably different from that prescribed for situations in which
politeness is the prime consideration in bodily control and
technique.176 It is to beg an enormous question to assume that the
constraints on behaviour required by the code of good manners, either
now or in the early modern period, reflect some overall level of
inhibition in the ‘affective structure’ characteristic of the time. The
most that can be said is that the constraints are those which come into
play wherever and whenever the individual needs to define himself as
‘civil’; if these times and occasions are very numerous, then some
constraints may appear to be and even feel like ‘built-in’ aspects of the
psyche, but for purposes of analysis it is important to realize that they
are not intrinsically so.
(p.104) If one abandons the attempt to find a single characteristic

‘affective structure’ informing courtesy books at different times, and
ceases to analyse precepts on a single scale of inhibition and relaxation,
it becomes possible to interpret change in good manners without
neglecting those aspects of civility which seem irrelevant to the
suppression of biological impulses. These are the principles of form and
ceremony. I have already argued that bodily proprieties are not entirely
separable from matters of form and that both define the individual's
membership of, and shifting place within, civil society. Elias has in fact
made similar comments, but his interest in establishing a linear process
by which natural impulse is ever more inhibited has prevented him
Page 27 of 39
from setting civility in a context which allows thorough historical

treatment.
Elias's theory has in many ways backed up the commonplace notion

that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century society was much earthier and
more tolerant of the human body, with its animal functions and
effluents, than modern society, at least in areas other than sex. Yet if
one abandons an attempt to ascertain general levels of tolerance, this
comparison emerges as grossly oversimplified. Given that, as I have
argued, many bodily proprieties are not absolute rules but are variable
according to social context, a society such as Elizabethan or Stuart
England, which was highly aware of hierarchy and degree, might be
characterized by a capacity for frequent major adjustments in self-
presentation in its members. In modern society, where social contact is
relatively confined within broad separate classes and status groups,
and manners expressing differentials in social status are regarded with
ideological unease, our obligation to physical propriety seems to vary
less, although not negligibly. The number of people in front of whom a
modern middle-class adult would spit, belch, fart, etc. freely is very
limited, perhaps to his close family, intimate male friends, fellow rugby
players. But it is not particularly useful to regard him as therefore more
inhibited than an educated Elizabethan who would employ stringent
self-control before an important superior, but would be comparatively
uninhibited before a range of social inferiors. We are slightly shocked
by Courtin's precept that if a man cannot swallow a piece of gristle, he
should take it out of his mouth and hand it to a servant.177 Since the
purpose here is to save fellow-diners the disgust of seeing chewed
gristle on a plate, something which we might consider preferable, what
is important is not a contrast of levels of disgust, but a contrast of
social assumptions.
If manners are regarded as parts of a system of meaning, or in

Foucaultian terms a ‘discourse’, rather than as collective psychological
(p.105) symptoms, then Elias's approach appears in a new and slightly
ironical light. This is because the very notion that the code of manners
is primarily a code of affective constraint, exhibiting what Elias might
call the sociogenetic structure of psychological inhibition characteristic
of a society, seems to have its roots in the early modern discourse of
‘civility’ and ‘civil’ manners. As I have argued, the emergence of the
term ‘civility’ in the vocabulary of good manners encouraged and
reflected a sense that good behaviour was not just a matter of
knowledge and practice but the outcome of the civilizing of a child's
original savage or animal passions; thus Courtin could see bodily
decency as the result of each individual's urge to distance himself from
Page 28 of 39
brute nature, just as Starkey saw the overall civility of society as the
outcome of a collective movement away from an original animal
lawlessness.178 Elias seems to regard this analogy as the basis for an
‘objective’ model of social development. He writes, ‘The socio-historical
process of centuries, in the course of which the standard of what is felt
to be shameful and offensive is slowly raised, is reenacted in
abbreviated form in the life of the individual human being.’179 But in
fact the opposition of animal and civil, and the associated analogy of
social and personal development, is a historically relative, ideologically
loaded concept, newly encoded in rules of everyday manners during the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was during this period that the
upper classes of Western Europe sought to define both the superiority
of European societies to others, and their own superiority within their
own social order, in terms of their possession of a superior sensibility.
The marks of this sensibility were refinement, sensitivity, and control of
what were pictured as unruly animal instincts. Care and control of the
body, viewed as the most ‘natural’ and animal aspect of humanity,
became the sign of superior humanity. Once the concept of a refined
sensibility had been established within the self-image of the European
élites, it is easy to see how the pressure on individuals to demonstrate
it, even to compete in displaying it, might lead to an increase in the
number and stringency of rules of decency.
It is therefore best to approach the problem of explaining change in

good manners unencumbered by the pseudo-scientific terminology of
‘affective structure’ and levels of constraint. This terminology begs
more questions than it can solve since, first, we have no sound
theoretical model of ‘sensibility’ as an object of historical research and,
second, the evidence of courtesy literature is simply insufficient as a
basis for generalization about inhibitions. What it tells us a great deal
about, however, is (p.106) the structure of values and social categories
in terms of which people liked to interpret their identity and behaviour
as well-mannered individuals, whether or not they always were so. In
this chapter I have argued that the formulations of good manners in
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writing show both a characteristic
image or standard of the civil versus the bestial, and in addition the
range of social relationships considered to require regulation by rules
of civility. The next chapter will examine further what seem to be new
developments in both aspects of good manners: the ‘image’ of
superiority and the range and principles of the ‘civil’ language of
deference. I then wish to set these developments in the context of some
of the more striking changes in the self-image and social milieu of the
early modern English élite.
Page 29 of 39
Notes:
(1) The Refin'd Courtier, tr. N[athaniel] W[aker], dedicatory epistle, sig.
A4r.
(2) Hostility to Italian fashions is discussed in L. Einstein, The Italian

Renaissance in England (New York, 1902), 164–8; French fashion in
dress and manners is considered in S. Lee, The French Renaissance in
England (Oxford, 1910), 47–54. Conduct writers in the sixteen and
seventeenth century constantly warn against the adoption of foreign
manners as a result of travel; see, for example, Cleland, Hero-Paideia,
bk. 5, ch. 6.
(3) W[illiam] R[ankins], The English Ape, the Italian imitation, the
footesteppes of Fraunce (London, 1588), 3.
(4) Ben Jonson, Cynthia's Revels, Palinode, in Works of Ben Jonson, ed.
C. H. Herford and P. Simpson (Oxford, 1932), vol. 6, 181.
(5) James Howell, Instructions for Forreine Travell (1642), collated with
the edition of 1650 in Arber's English Reprints, ed. E. Arber (1868), vol.
2, 65.
(6) Remarques on the Humours and Conversations of the Town (London,

1673), 97.
(7) See above, Ch. 1, p. 33.
(8) Gabriel Harvey, in a letter to Edmund Spenser, printed in Works…of

Gabriel Harvey, ed. A. B. Grosart (London, 1884), vol. 1, 84–5.
(9) Ibid.
(11) See above, Ch. 1, p. 32n.
(12) The Refin'd Courtier, 148–9.
(13) Guazzo, The Civile Conversation, tr. Pettie and Young, preface, sig.
(A7)r.
(14) Thomas Palmer, An Essay on the Meanes How to Make our

Travails…the More Profitable and Honourable (London, 1606), 42.
(15) Edwin Sandys, A Relation of the state of Religion…in…these

Westerne Parts of the World (London, 1605), 22–3.
Page 30 of 39
(16) Rankins, The English Ape, 6. For an account of the waning of the
sense of English inferiority to the Italians see G. B. Parks, ‘The Decline
and Fall of the English Renaissance Admiration of Italy’, Huntington
Library Quarterly, 31 (1967–8), 341–57.
(17) Lingard, A Letter of Advice, 30–1; Cleland, Hero-Paideia, bk. 5, ch.

6, 270, urges the reader not to bring the ‘Italian huffe’ or ‘French
apishnesse’ back from his travels; Walker, Of Education, pt. 2, ch. 1,
216, suggests that the English are particularly informal in their
manners.
(18) Della Casa, Galateo, tr. Peterson, 41–2. See P. M. Smith, The Anti-
Courtier Trend in Sixteenth-Century French Literature, chs. 3–4, for
many examples of late sixteenth-century satire of ‘Italianisms’ in
France.
(19) Nashe's anecdote is quoted in Gabriel Harvey's Marginalia, ed. G.

C. Moore Smith (Stratford, 1913), introduction.
(20) Erasmus, De Civilitate, sig. (B7)r.
(21) Ibid., sig. Bv–B2r.
(22) Fiston, The Schoole of Good Manners, sig. D2v.
(23) The new precepts added by Robert Codrington first appeared in the
edition of 1651 and are scattered through the text with asterisks for
identification. There is also an addition in the shape of ‘A Discourse of
Some Innovations of Habits and Dressings’, which criticizes French
fashions of female décolletage and beauty spots and alludes to the
earlier fashion for yellow bands and ruffs.
(25) The Refin'd Courtier, 161–2.
(26) For the influence of the Galateo outside Italy see Crane, Italian
Social Customs, 381n.
(27) Gailhard, The Compleat Gentleman, bk. 2, 66.
(28) Walker, Of Education, pt. 2, ch. 1, 218–19.
(29) Quoted in G. Ziegler, The Court of Versailles (London, 1966), 149–

50.
Page 31 of 39
(31) Erasmus, De Civilitate, tr. Whytington, sig. A3r–A4r.
(32) Ibid., sig. A4v.
(33) Ibid., sig. A4r–v.
(34) Ibid., sig. (A7)r–v.
(35) Ibid., sig. A5r–v.
(36) Ibid., sig. (A7)v–(A8)r.
(37) Ibid., sig. (A8)r–v
(38) Ibid., sig. Br.
(39) Ibid., sig. Bv.
(40) Ibid., sig. B2v–B4v.
(41) Ibid., sig. B5v–(B6)v.
(42) Ibid., sig. (B8)v.
(43) Ibid., sig. Cv.
(44) Ibid., sig. C3r and sig. C2r.
(45) Ibid., sig. (B8)r.
(46) Ibid., sig. B4r–B5v.
(47) Ibid., sig. D2v.
(49) Ibid. 8–9.
(50) Ibid. 113.
(51) Ibid. 14–15.
(52) Ibid. 6–7 and 16–17.
(53) Ibid. 113–14.
(54) Ibid. 13.
(55) Ibid. 114.
(56) Ibid. 114.
Page 32 of 39
(57) Weste, Booke of Demeanor, in Meals and Manners, 207–14.
(58) Ibid. 209–10.
(59) Ibid. 210.
(60) Ibid. 211–14.
(61) Ibid. 212.
(62) Weste, Booke of Demeanor, in Meals and Manners, 213–14.
(63) Ibid 214.
(64) See Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes
in England 1500–1800 (London, 1983), ch. 1, for this theme in a wider
context.
(65) Erasmus, De Civilitate, sig. C2v.
(66) Ibid., sig. C3r.
(67) Della Casa, Galateo, 12.
(68) Weste, Booke of Demeanor, 210–11.
(69) Ibid. 210.
(70) Courtin, Rules of Civility, ch. 3, 13–14.
(71) Ibid. ch. 3, 16.
(72) Youth's Behaviour, tr. Hawkins (1661), ch. 5, 18.
(73) Weste, Booke of Demeanor, 209.
(74) Erasmus, De Civilitate, sig. A4v.
(75) Ibid., sig. (B8)v.
(77) Dekker, Gul's Horn-Booke, in Old Book Collector's Miscellany, ed.

Hindley, vol. 2, ch. 3, 22. Robert Muchembled, ‘The Order of Gestures;
A Social History of Sensibilities under the Ancien Regime in France’, in
A Cultural History of Gesture, ed. Bremmer and Roodenburg, 129–51,
discusses the perceived animality of the peasant, for example, in the
works of Breughel.
Page 33 of 39
(78) S. R., Courte of Civill Courtesie, ch. 9, 37.
(79) Della Casa, Galateo, 13–14.
(81) Ibid., ch. 15, 134.
(82) Ibid., ch. 3, 19–20.
(84) Ibid.
(85) See Goffman, ‘The Nature of Deference and Demeanor’, American

Anthropologist, 58 (1956).
(86) Erasmus, De Civilitate, sig. Bv–B2r.
(88) For those technicalities of posture that concerned dancing masters,

see J. Wildeblood, The Polite World; A Guide to the Deportment of the
English in Former Times (rev. edn., London, 1973), chs. 3–4.
(89) Youth's Behaviour, ch. 2, 9. The inferior must never bid the superior
be covered; see also Courtin, Rules of Civility, ch. 4, 24.
(90) Cleland, Hero-Paideia, bk. 5, ch. 5, 177.
(91) Fiston, Schoole of Good Manners, sig. 8v. See also Courtin, Rules of
Civility, ch. 6, 62.
(92) Youth's Behaviour, ch. 6, 27.
(93) Seager, Schoole of Vertue, in Meals and Manners, 227, ll. 135–40.
See also Fiston, Schoole of Good Manners, sig. (A8)r.
(94) Walker, Of Education, pt. 2, ch. 1, 225.
(95) Youth's Behaviour, ch. 2, 12–13.
(97) Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde (London, 1601), 54.
(98) Cleland, Hero-Paideia, bk. 5, ch. 6, 180; Youth's Behaviour, ch. 2,

10.
Page 34 of 39
(99) Walker, Of Education, bk. 2, ch. 1, 220.
(101) Youth's Behaviour, ch. 1, 4. Cleland, Hero-Paideia, bk. 5, ch. 6,

180, gives the highest place as the place nearest the fire in winter and
nearest the ‘aire’ in summer.
(103) For the development of chairs see P. Thornton, Interior Decoration

(New Haven and London, 1978), pp. 185–210. For an argument over
Jacobean court protocol in the use of stools and chairs see Sir John
Finett, Finetti Philoxenis (London, 1656), 17: the French ambassador
demanded a chair rather than a stool at a wedding in 1613.
(104) S. R., Courte of Civill Courtesie, 3; Youth's Behaviour, ch. 7, 37.
(105) Hugh Rhodes, The Boke of Nurture, in The Babees Book etc., ed.
Furnivall, 66–7.
(106) Ibid. 67.
(107) Ibid.
(108) Ibid. 68.
(109) Scager, Schoole of Vertue, in Meals and Manners, 229–31; see also
Erasmus's description of the child's service at table in De Civilitate, sig.
(C6)r.
(110) Youth's Behaviour, ch. 7, 36. See also S. R., Courte of Civill
Courtesie, 34.
(114) Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, prologue, ll. 99–100, in Works of

Chaucer, ed. Skeat, 420.
(115) Wynkyn de Worde's Boke of Kervynge in Meals and Manners, 147–

74.
(117) Ibid.
Page 35 of 39
(118) Youth's Behaviour, ch. 7, 31. See also Della Casa, Galateo, 114–15.
(119) John Evelyn, A Character of England: as it was lately presented in

a Letter, in Harleian Miscellany, ed. T. Park (London, 1808–13), vol. 10,
189–98, at p. 194.
(121) Courtin, Rules of Civility, ch. 10, 108–9 and 110–11.
(124) Ibid., ch. 4, 23–4.
(125) Sir John Ferne, The Blazon of Gentrie (London, 1586) and Sir
Francis Markham, The Booke of Honour (London, 1622) are
representative handbooks of formal honour hierarchies. James Salter,
Calliope's Cabinet opened, Wherein Gentlemen may be informed how to
adorn themselves for funerals, feastings and other heroic meetings
(London, 1665), is a more limited and practical guide to social
precedence.
(128) Ibid.; Markham, The Booke of Honour, epist. 3, 130.
(129) S. R., Courte of Civill Courtesie, 10–11; The Art of Complaisance,

ch. 12, advocates particular politeness with ladies.
(131) Ibid., ch. 8, 78 and ch. 11, 117; see also Walker, Of Education, pt.
2, ch. 1, 216.
(135) Seager, Schoole of Vertue in Meals and Manners, 227, ll. 135–6.
(136) Courtin, Rules of Civility, ch. 3, 18, asserts that ‘familiarity’ arises
from mutual agreement to relax the rules symbolically.
Page 36 of 39
(138) Civilizing Process, 83.
(139) In another work, The Court Society, tr. E. Jephcott (Oxford, 1983),
Elias analyses French court ‘ceremony’ of the Ancien Régime, but this
analysis is not clearly integrated with his earlier work on bodily
decency.
(140) Elias, Civilizing Process, vol. 1, 134–43.
(141) Erasmus, De Civilitate, sig. 8r; Della Casa, Galateo, 5.
(145) Erasmus, De Civilitate, sig. D2v.
(147) Courtin, Rules of Civility, ch. 19, p. 153.
(148) Ibid., ch. 10, 106. Cf. Della Casa, Galateo, 113.
(150) Gracian, Galateo Espagnol, tr. Style (1640), 7. For an interesting

discussion of odour and social status in France, and the use of
perfumes and breath-sweeteners, see Alain Corbin, The Foul and the
Fragrant; Odor and the French Social Image (New York, 1986).
(154) Of Education, pt. 2, ch. 1, 218–19.
(155) E.g. Erasmus, De Civilitate, sig. (B8)v and S. R., Courte of Civill
Courtesie, ch. 9, 37.
(156) Youth's Behaviour, ch. 7, 32–3; Walker, Of Education, pt. 2, ch. 1,

218.
Page 37 of 39
(161) Josiah Dare, Counsellor Manners his Last Legacy (1673), 8.
(162) Thornton, Interior Decoration, ch. 11, 321–6, describes

seventeenth-century close-stools and their discreet placing in houses.
(163) Erasmus, De Civilitate, sig. Br.
(165) Oxford English Dictionary, S.V. privy etc.
(166) John Russell, Boke of Nurture, l. 305, in Meals and Manners, 20.
(167) Erasmus, De Civilitate, sig. (A7)v; Scager, Schoole of Vertue in

Meals and Manners, 226; Youth's Behaviour, ch. 4, 14.
(168) Della Casa, Galateo, 113; Youth's Behaviour, ch. 7, 35–6. For the
child's duties when bringing water to table see Seager, Schoole of
Vertue in Meals and Manners, 231.
(169) Sir John Harrington, The Preservation of Health (1624), in Meals

and Manners, 140–3, at p. 140.
(170) John Russell, Boke of Nurture, in Meals and Manners, 60–4. This
emphasis on cleanliness is reiterated in Rhodes, Bake of Nurture, in
The Babees Book etc., 66, and 73.
(171) Fiston, School of Good Manners, sig. C2v–C3r.
(172) Gracian, Galateo Espagnol, 10.
(173) Cacoethes Leaden Legacy, sig. A5v, sig. (A7)r and sig. A4v.
(174) The relation of ‘carnival’ to the body is discussed by M. Bakhtin, in

Rabelais and his World, tr. H. Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass., 1968).
(175) For a variety of recent studies of the ‘body’ in Renaissance

England see Renaissance Bodies; The Human Figure in English Culture
c. 1540–1660, ed. L. Gent and N. Llewellyn (London, 1990).
(176) For a view of social psychology that explores the many social
selves and therefore different standards adopted at different times by
Page 38 of 39
the same individual, see E. Goffman, The Presentation of Self in

Everyday Life (Harmondsworth, 1971).
(177) Courtin, Rules of Civility, 103.
(178) See above, p. 85, and Ch. 2, p. 50.
Page 39 of 39
Civility and Social Change

Anna Bryson

Print ISBN-13: 9780198217657
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198217657.001.0001

Anna Bryson
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198217657.003.0004

This chapter examines further what seem to be new developments in
good manners: the ‘image’ of superiority and the range and principles
of the ‘civil’ language of deference. It sets these developments in the
context of some of the more striking changes in the self-image and
social milieu of the early modern English elite. It examines reasons for
the adoption of manners consistent with modes of urbanity even in non-
urban conditions, and returns to the central importance of the word
‘civility’ in this process.
Keywords: good manners, superiority, civility, defence
Page 1 of 52
The preceding chapter has, I hope, indicated the value of considering

the codes of behaviour presented in didactic literature as complete
codes, rather than as compilations of rules of conduct appropriate on
various occasions. If the medieval ‘books of courtesy’ and the early
modern manuals of civility are regarded simply as compilations of rules,
then comparison between them reveals only a fragmentary and often
obscure picture of change in manners. The contrast lies less in the
content of particular rules than in the assumptions and preoccupations
which seem to govern the range and form of codification. What stands
out in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century manuals of politeness is a
tendency to classify and describe precepts in new ways, and to organize
advice around new principles of social behaviour. These new principles
were not simply literary devices or rationalizations extrinsic to the
rules. They evince what Elias has called a ‘new way of seeing’, in terms
of which some of the older rules were often not so much discarded as
reinterpreted and integrated within a new social language, one which,
as has been suggested, has much to do with the developing concept and
value of civility. But why should the language of manners and the ‘way
of seeing’ change? Cultural historians can never, perhaps, offer
exhaustive answers to this kind of question, but they can offer
interpretations of change by linking the development of a code to its
changing ideological and social context. As I have argued in Chapter 1,
this means looking at manners not just as a system of meanings, but as
a practical code informed by purposes and uses. Of course, in any social
code, meaning, purpose, and practice cannot easily be divorced, but
this hardly warrants retreat into the position that meanings develop
autonomously and mysteriously. On the contrary, the fact that in early
modern courtesy literature a new conception of what manners were
was indissolubly linked with a new conception of what manners were
for gives us the starting-point for exploring some of the social and
ideological reasons and conditions for the development of the code of
civility.
One very striking principle evident in the tradition of child-centred

courtesy writing, starting with De Civilitate, is that of describing
manners (p.108) as dramatic ‘representations’ of personal qualities. As
has been seen, the norms of bodily propriety in sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century manuals are related to an image of ‘civility’ as
opposed to bestiality. In contrast, medieval writers on manners only
rarely invoked animal imagery to describe grossness or lack of control.1
The insistence with which sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century
writers related individual faults of behaviour to specific qualities of
bestiality was novel, and one aspect of the way in which they developed
and extended the notion of manners as external symbols of internal,
Page 2 of 52
ethically loaded characteristics. Manners are, of course, always socially

expressive, and for all societies it is possible to use Goffman's definition
of ‘demeanour’ as ‘that element of an individual's ceremonial behaviour
typically conveyed through deportment, dress and bearing, which
serves to express to those in his immediate presence that he is a person
of certain desirable or undesirable qualities’.2 Yet while late medieval
writers do see courteous behaviour as a sign of gentlemanly status, and
a morally desirable attribute that should reflect virtue, the technical
code which they describe is mainly a matter of the dramatization of
established relations of service and hospitality. For Erasmus and his
successors this dramatization of social relationships scarcely ceases to
be important, but there is a marked additional preoccupation with the
full-scale dramatization of social identity—a systematic attempt to
relate rules of behaviour to questions of individual personality and a
stress on what may be termed self-presentation or ‘self-fashioning’.3
Civility, in De Civilitate, is defined as the ‘Outwarde honestie’ which

mirrors and projects the virtue of the soul, and Erasmus warns of the
pedagogic negligence that deprives noble and virtuous men of the
ability to make their good qualities visible. The body and its adornment
is the ‘habyte and apparayle of the inwarde mynde’4 and so facial
expression and gait are to be minutely controlled to avoid giving the
impression of character faults. Erasmus's concern with faults of a
bestial nature has already been described. He is also concerned with a
range of physically expressed moral faults. Thus a facial expression
must be maintained ‘representyng a mynde wel establysshed and
aimyable with honestye’. A precise catalogue (p.109) of facial symbols
of vice or folly is given: ‘Let the eyen be stable, honest, well set, not
frownyng which is syne of crueltye, not wanton: which is token of
malapertnes, nor wanderynge and rollinge, which is a signe of
madnes.’5 Sniffing shows malice, and puffing the cheeks pride.6 Weste's
verse adaptation of Erasmus, The Booke of Demeanor, emphasizes the
bodily symbolism of virtue and vice even more strikingly than the
original in such simple stanzas as,
Let not thy brows be backward drawn,

It is a sign of pride,
Exalt them not, it shows a hart
Most arrogant beside…
Nor let thine eyes be gloting downe,
Cast with a hanging looke:
For that to dreamers doth belong,
That goodnesse cannot brooke.7
Page 3 of 52
Walker, nearly a century later, compressed this kind of advice into a

single paragraph:
[Do not] fix your eyes constantly on any one object: for that
betokens impudency, or at best, amazedness, or contemplation, as
staring doth folly. Wondring and inconstant looks express
madness, or unsetled thoughts; winking (if not a natural infirmity)
is the action of light-headed persons, as winking with one eye
(like Shooters) is of maliciousness and evil nature. A sharp fierce
look, is as one that is angry. To bite your lip is used in threatening;
to thrust out the tongue, is scurrilous. To sink the head into the
shoulders, is laziness etc.8
William Fiston puts the assumption of early modern courtesy writers

plainly when he states that ‘the manners…are lively representations of
the dispositions of the mind.’9
This notion of manners as a technique of self-presentation is also put

forward, although less moralistically, in manuals for adults. Della Casa
stresses the projective aspect of manners, which enable a man ‘to put
him-selfe forth comely and seemely’ and allow him ‘to shewe himself
plesant, courteous, and gentle’.10 Courtesy writers evince a continual
concern with the precise impression which various kinds of behaviour
will make on any observer. Thus Cleland, in his chapter on ‘civil
conversation’, comments in his advice to the reader on gait,
Many men seeing you passe by them, wil conceive presently a

good or bad opinion of you. Wherefore yee must take very good
heed unto your feete, and (p.110) consider with what grace and
countenance yee walke, that yee go not softly, tripping like a
wanton maide, nor yet striding with great long paces, like those
Rhodomonts and Kings in Stage Plaies.11
Courtin, discussing apparel, declares that ‘the neatness and property of

our cloathes may be said to show a great part of our breeding, there
being no greater discovery of the vertue and discretion of the persons
than by them.’12 The author of the Art of Complaisance sees good
manners as a means to ‘expose…great vertues without ostentation’.13
Josiah Dare advises his son ‘to let the beauty of thy mind, which
consists in chusing Vertue, and avoiding Vice, set forth that of thy
whole body, which consists in Favour, Colour, and in decent gestures
and motions.’ He follows this comment with the observation that ‘thou
mayst know much of a man's disposition by his Countenance or Meen,
as also by his gate.’14 The body was thus presented as a text from
Page 4 of 52
which good or bad character could be read, rather than, as in the

medieval texts, a vehicle for honourable actions.
A second newly articulated principle of good manners which appears in

sixteenth- and seventeenth-century courtesy manuals, particularly of
the adult ‘courtly’ type, is a general obligation to ‘accommodate’ or
‘frame’ the self to the sensitivities and sensibilities of others. Although,
as has been described, the language of deference was one which, by its
nature, varied with the social situation and the rank of the people
involved, there is a new tendency to assert a general rule of
consideration towards one's fellows. It is a tendency which has already
been noted in the discussion, in Chapter 2, of the connotations of social
integration and harmony associated with the term ‘civility’.15 The
possibility of causing offence becomes a matter presented as a prime
and immediate concern of the well-mannered man, and his entire
orientation towards others, rather than the fulfilment of a few ‘symple
conditions’ of ritual, must express this concern. Della Casa asserts as a
comprehensive guideline the necessity not to ‘offend…their senses,
their mynds, and conceits with whom we live’; Courtin equates ‘civility’
with ‘modesty’ in ‘preferring the satisfaction and commodity of other
people before our own, and that so ingeniously that we cannot provoke
or disoblige any one without great trouble and horrour’.16 Walker gives,
as a first definition of ‘civility’, behaviour which does not express ‘by
actions, or speeches, any injury, disesteem, offence (p.111) or
undervaluing any other’.17 Josiah Dare advises the reader to ‘be
acquainted with good carriage [and] let thy behaviour be civil and
inoffensive, unto those in whose company thou art, to that end do
nothing which may be unpleasant, and offensive to their senses.’18
To place this principle at the centre of expositions of good manners is to

put a much greater premium on psychological sympathy and response
in the formation of ‘correct’ behaviour than appears in earlier texts.
The gentleman must be constantly aware of the reactions of others and
must anticipate their view of himself. He must scrutinize himself in the
constant awareness of a social audience whom he may offend. Thus
Della Casa begins the Galateo with the general psychological principle:
We say then, that every act that offendeth any the common
senses, or over-thwarteth a man's will and desire, or els
presenteth to the Imagination and conceite, matters unplcasaunt,
and that likewyse which the minde doth abhore, such things I say
bee naught and must not be used.19
Page 5 of 52
Whether or not sixteenth-century society was characterized by a

greater squeamishness than medieval society, it saw the obligation to
avoid provoking disgust brought to the forefront of notions of good
behaviour, and this is surely to be linked with the newly extensive
listing of ‘annoyances’ and a newly vivid way of describing these. Thus
the graphic and revolting pictures of faults noted in Chapter 3 show
authors anxious to drive home to their readers the exact unpleasant
impression which will be made on others by ‘bestial’ behaviour.
Similarly the new coverage of a range of questions of tact in sixteenth-
century courtesy manuals—most clear in The Courte of Civil Courtesie
where specimen answers in various tricky social situations are held up
to the reader—show preoccupation with possibilities of offence.
Taken together, the principles of ‘representation’ and ‘accommodation’

are aspects of a concept of good manners as a mode of pleasing self-
presentation. Courtesy had long been seen in terms of grace and
allurement in relation to the arts of love, but in sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century manuals the presentation even of basic rules of
civility as a means to achieve not merely acceptability but also ‘worthy
praise…estimation and credite’ is strikingly frequent and elaborate.20
The culminating point of this development was the definition of good
manners as an Art of Complaisance, characterized by the author of the
book of that title (1673) as ‘an Art to regulate our words and behaviour,
in such a manner as may engage the love and respect of those with
whom we converse’.21 Yet these (p.112) sentiments were evident long
before in Della Casa's comment that good manners should bring a
‘delight’ to the minds of others and in Guazzo's opinion that ‘gentle and
courteous speech is the Adamant stone which draweth unto it the
hearts and goodwills of all men.’22 Politeness, according to Courtin,
‘has powers to conciliate the applause and affections of all people, in
spight of any natural and accidental deformity’.23 The Gentleman's
Calling recommends courtesy as a practice which ‘does not only cast a
glorious lustre round about, attract the eyes and hearts of others, but it
also reflects with cheerful and comfortable gleams upon ourselves.’24
At this point we have, perhaps, moved beyond the elementary norms
described by Seager or Weste into the realm of sophisticated grace of
manner, but it is important to recognize the self-conscious concern with
social ‘image’ and the psychological impact of behaviour which
pervades early modern courtesy manuals.
What may be defined as a ‘psychological’ approach to human behaviour

—an assumption that expressions, gestures, words are all signs to be
deciphered so as to reveal the true character and intentions of an
individual, and that the principles of decipherment can be the subject of
Page 6 of 52
intellectual enquiry—is a striking feature of later sixteenth- and early

seventeenth-century literature on aspects of conduct other than good
manners alone. There is also an associated preoccupation with
techniques of political suasion based on a precise understanding of
human passions and their outward manifestations. Thomas Wright's
The Passions of the Minde (1601), a treatise on ‘how to discover other
men's passions, and how to behave ourselves when such affections
extraordinarily possess us, the which is the chiefest point of prudence,
and fittest meane to attain unto religious, civill and gentlemanlike
conversation,’25 is an unusually comprehensive example of this
psychological approach and rigorously classifies passions and their
external signs on the basis of rhetorical convention and contemporary
perception. Sir Christopher Wandesford told his son that ‘greater
Knowledge there cannot be, than by Observation of the Dispositions
and Manners of many Men, to be able to Compare Man with Man.’26
It is, however, insufficient and question-begging to relate the new

organizing principles of good manners evident in sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century courtesy manuals simply to a new climate of
intellectual fascination with human psychology. Erasmus, Della Casa,
and their successors are doing more than simply adding a level of
psychological (p.113) sophistication to older traditions of courtesy
writing accessible to English society; they are writing about good
manners in a way which, despite individual variation, consistently
exhibits a basis in modes of self-evaluation and social organization
unfamiliar to the later medieval English landed élite. These models I
shall term conceptual and organizational modes of ‘urbanity’, in
contrast with the modes of ‘lordship’. Very abstractly, the modes of
urbanity are those of an élite whose members tend to vest their sense
of social identity in their possession of a shared culture principally
expressed and elaborated in the conduct of social relations with each
other; the city is the obvious and pre-eminent, but not the only milieu in
which such modes can be developed. The modes of lordship are, by
contrast, those of an élite whose individuals vest social identity in the
separate, if structurally similar, hierarchies of service and networks of
allegiance in which they enjoy commanding positions; a society of
scattered aristocratic households, cut off from one another as much by
geographical as ideological considerations, is the natural but not
invariable milieu of modes of lordship.
Erasmus's background and career place him firmly within the context
of urban culture as it existed in late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-
century northern Europe; his frequent use of the term urbanus in the
De Civilitate carries the connotations not only of his commitment to the
Page 7 of 52
language and secular ideals of an ancient civilization based upon the

city, but also his experience of the urban communities of scholars with
whom he spent much of his time. Della Casa not only wrote as a
patrician ecclesiastic and diplomat of the urban culture of Florence,
Rome, and Venice but made it quite clear that he envisaged the same
culture as the environment in which his advice on good manners was
pertinent, writing:
Who so disposeth himselfe to live, not in solitarie and deserte

places, as Heremites, but in fellowship with men, and in populous
Cities, will think it a very necessarie thing, to have skill to put
himselfe forth, comely and seemely in his fashions, gestures and
manners.27
The urban background of the principles of good behaviour advanced by

Erasmus and Della Casa is crucial to their analysis, and their
transplantation to early modern England can be usefully explored in
terms of a marked but never total development of English aristocratic
culture away from modes of lordship and towards modes of urbanity.
Two preliminary points must, however, be made about the use of this
abstract contrast of systems. First, the two kinds of social mode which I
have indicated are (p.114) in practice by no means mutually exclusive;
institutions and social forms expressing aristocratic cultural solidarity
were not absent in late medieval English society, and the derivation of
prestige and status from vertical links of service and clientage was
obviously a feature of European urban élites. City élites could differ
very widely.28 The distinction is simply one of emphasis, and the degree
of ideological investment in and practical elaboration of certain aspects
of social identity at the expense of others. Second, the usefulness of the
contrast between modes of urbanity and modes of lordship in the
analysis of the development of the norms of gentlemanly conduct in
early modern England does not reside in its dubious status as a
universal sociological model to be imposed on the evidence. Rather, it is
illuminating because it is a contrast perceived and discussed by
contemporary English writers. Often the perception is muddied by
moralizing passion, but in one very striking Elizabethan source it is
made the basis for a debate on élite values which displays a great deal
of sociological acumen. In the anonymous dialogue Cyvile and Uncyvile
Life (1579) lordship and urbanity are opposed and related to alternative
gentlemanly milieux and ideals in a way which sheds much light on the
assimilation in England of principles of good manners associated with
urbanity.
Page 8 of 52
In the anonymous dialogue two dramatized stereotypes—a rather

inaccurately designated ‘courtier’ and a ‘cuntrey Gentleman’—discuss
the question ‘whyther it were better for the Gentlemen of Englande to
make most abode in their countrey houses (as our English manner is),
or els ordinaryly to inhabite the Citties and cheefe Townes, as in some
forraine Nations is the custome.’29 Some of the terms of the argument
are purely moral, for example, the country gentleman, Vincent, regards
‘Godliness’ as an attribute of country life, and the courtier, Vallentine,
accuses his friend of ‘avarice’ in concentrating on the profits of
landholding,30 but the main interest of the dialogue is in social
arrangements and assumptions rather than in moral polemic. Similarly,
despite the significant fact that the author is interested in ‘what order
of lyfe’ best makes a gentleman ‘a personn fytte for the publique
service of his Prince and Countrey’ and the courtier makes important
reference to the ideal of gentleman as soldier and counsellor, the
emphasis of the dispute is on the social rather than immediately
political persona of the gentleman.
(p.115) Vincent explains his country code of conduct in terms of

maintenance of a proper entourage and hierarchy of service within his
household, and in the right ordering of the household towards the
provision of hospitality to neighbours, stating that, ‘the Countrey
custome is, to bid everyman welcome, and the more resort he hath, the
more is the Maister of the house honoured, and the more authority a
Gentleman hath in the shier, the more is the resort unto him.’31 He
responds with bewilderment to what he takes to be the absence of
these symbols of prestige in the city: ‘I am sure, be a man never so
vertuous, unless hee be a housekeeper no man will in ye country resort
unto him, or if hee walke in the cittie without servants attending on
him, no man will put off his cap or do him reverence; how can such a
man bee honourable…?’32 Vallentine criticizes this conception of social
prestige on the grounds that it is mechanical and inflexible, and has
little to do with the cultivation or recognition of ‘vertue of the minde’;33
the personal qualities requisite in a gentleman—he argues—such as
valour, learning, and virtue, demand to be learned, sustained, and
validated in the company of those who share them, and the respect
shown to a man by inferiors outside such company is comparatively
valueless. Thus he asserts scornfully that ‘[he] had rather bee
worshipped or respected of one civil or wise man (such as live in Courts
or towns) then of one hundred Countrey Loutes, that either doo salute
you for flattery, or honour you ignorantly.’34 The conflation of court and
city values which characterizes the dialogue is due to the simple stress
on numbers of gentlemen enjoying each others’ company which arises
from this idea, and non-gentlemanly elements of city life are rigidly
Page 9 of 52
excluded from consideration; hence one conclusion of the dialogue is

that ‘it seemeth that the Cittie, the Court, and other places of assembly
(I mean of Nobility) doth occasion men to learne the customes of
curtesy and pointes of honour.’35 It is ‘assembly’ of gentlemen on the
basis of shared and exclusive culture demanding a shared and exclusive
world which is the keynote of the ‘courtier's’ approach.
The different concepts of gentlemanly sociability and prestige

represented by the two interlocutors of the dialogue are further
illustrated in the conflict of their attitudes towards hospitality and
companionship. At one point Vallentine mocks Vincent's notion of
friendship, which relates primarily to his household obligations.
Vinc.
I my selfe, in my poore house, have diverse times beene so haunted

with guests, as I was driven out of mine own bed, to lie at some
Tenant's house of (p.116) mine, for a night or two: Notwithstanding, I
take it for no great trouble so long as my friends found themselves
welcome and content.
Vall.
But Sir, are you sure they were all your freendes?
Vinc.
Yea, surely, I so thinke, though some of them I had never seene before
that day.36
By contrast, Vallentine offers the ideal of small-scale parties of familiar

friends who will converse ‘merrily and liberally’, but it is important to
realize that the conflict is not simply one of personal intimacy versus
the technical ‘friendship’ of clientage or the acceptance of
entertainment which confers honour on the host. The ‘courtier’ is
interested not only in the enjoyment of personal friendship for its own
sake but in the contribution made by friends of equivalent status and
culture to a man's social identity.37 This is made clear by his attack on
Vincent for consorting with the two most significant groups in the
country gentleman's social world: his non-menial household servitors,
and his immediate neighbours who, while men of economic substance,
are not necessarily gentlemen. Vincent defends servitors of yeoman
origin at length; they may be
Page 10 of 52
well brought up and expert in sundry seemly and necessary

knowledges without which they cannot (as they do) serve a
nobleman, or gentleman. They can well and decently weare their
garments, and cheerely thier lyvery coats, their swords and
bucklers…some of them can also wrestle, leape well, run and
daunce…Yea, there wanteth not some that are both so wise, and
of so good audacitie, as they can, and dooe (for lack of better
company) entertaine their maister with table talke, bee it his
pleasure to speake either of hounds, or hawkes, fishing or
fowling, sowing or grassing and ditching or hedging, dearth or
cheapnesse of graine or any such matters, whereof Gentlemen
commonly speake in the countrcy.38
Vincent also praises as neighbours the ‘yeomen of the Countrey, and

good honest fellowes there about; as Graziers, Butchers, Farmers.’39
Vallentine's attitude to social reliance on these groups is, however, that
it is derogatory to the gentleman since it cannot express and refine
gentlemanly culture; thus he tells the countryman that ‘your
conversinge with [such men] will make you taste of their bluntnes and
rusticitie, which will very evill become a man of your calling.’40
(p.117) This dialogue, then, is very much an exposition and

dramatization of the contrast of élite values and social organization
which I defined earlier as those of lordship and those of urbanity. It also
provides an excellent basis for the clarification of the suggested
relationship between the mode of urbanity and the new principles of
good manners evident in the kind of courtesy writing established in
England by De Civilitate and the Galateo. The general consonance of the
form and content of late medieval books of courtesy with the
conceptual and organizational patterns of lordship as exemplified by
Vincent is obvious: the proximity of the rules of courtesy presented in
these books to household regulations, the centrality of the master–
servant relationship, and the referral of many imperatives of
demeanour to the presence of the ‘lord’, together with an overall focus
on the ritual of the banquet, all seem natural corollaries of Vincent's
pre-occupations. In contrast, it makes sense to relate the stress on good
manners as ‘representations’ of personal gentlemanly qualities, and as
means of graceful ‘accommodation’ to the common tastes and
sensitivities of ‘company’, previously identified as themes of later
manuals of politeness, to Vallentine's vision of gentlemanly life: a life
lived in the ‘assembly’ of gentlemen, who recognize and cultivate in
each other outward signs of the ‘vertue of the minde’. Where the
gentleman vests identity in the personal qualities and social skills
which make him an acceptable participant in a society of gentlemen,
Page 11 of 52
rather than in the maintenance and display of the patronage which is

the basis of his rank in the local community, the removal of the set-
piece banquet from the centre of manuals of courtesy becomes
intelligible.
But of course the connection between the alternative stereotypes of

gentlemanly life set up by the author of the dialogue and the
complicated living ideals and realities of Elizabethan society was at
best indirect. Obviously the author simplifies and polarizes ideals to
suit his purpose (which is to propagate the views voiced by the
courtier), and he overstresses, for example, the ‘plebeyall’ character of
the officers of any major household and the country gentleman's likely
indifference to social distinctions among his neighbours. In any case,
the dialogue admits the ideals of the courtier to be derived from foreign
influence and to be far from rooted in English experience. The final
hope expressed is that, as Vincent is brought to agree, the gentry will
not be bound ‘continually to Court, nor London. But that wee may both
visit our owne countrey houses, and yet make cheefe abode in our shier
townes, as places to keepe us in that Civilitie [which] is behoovefull.’41
This was a hope which achieved little (p.118) fulfilment during the
following century. Yet the modes of urbanity were already gaining
ground in English society at the time the dialogue was written, both in
conceptual change encouraged by the reception of foreign ideas, and in
the structures of social organization. In the next part of this chapter I
shall look at the key institutions in this development—the court and
London as a growing centre of gentry social life—and examine their
impact on the assimilation and specific character of originally largely
imported notions of good manners. In the final part I shall examine
reasons for the adoption of manners consistent with modes of urbanity
even in non-urban conditions, and return to the central importance of
the word ‘civility’ in this process.
In 1616 Gainsford sketched an entirely conventional character of a

‘courtier’ whose defining attributes are to be ‘serviceable to Ladies and
Women of Honour, dutifull to high officers, graceful amongst
counsellors, pleasant amongst equalls, affable to inferiors, and curteous
to all.’42 The notion of the courtier as the epitome of gentlemanly good
manners, and the court as the ‘fountain’ and ideal milieu of good
manners, survived the entry into the language of the words ‘civil’ and
‘civile conversation’ as rivals to ‘courtesy’. In fact, such was the
cultural pre-eminence of the later Tudor court that the new terminology
was simply appropriated into courtly ideals, as when Spenser connects
‘courtesie’ and ‘civile conversation’:
Page 12 of 52
Of court, it seemes, men courtesie do call,
For that it there most useth to abound:
And well beseemeth that in prince's hall
That vertue should be plentifully found,
Which of all goodly manners is the ground
And root of civile conversation.43
The continuing connotations of courtliness attaching to the word

‘civility’ have been noted in Chapter 2.44 At this point, however, I wish
to focus not on the clichés of social comment which persistently
associated courts with good manners, but on the changing character of
the English court as it affected court manners.
The sixteenth-century English court was a paradoxical institution. On

the one hand, it was the greatest exemplar of conservative aristocratic
household organization in the land, with an elaborate hierarchy of
officers, (p.119) geared towards the display of aristocratic
‘magnificence’ in the provision of entertainment and the maintenance
of rituals of service to the monarch.45 In other words, this was Vincent's
world writ large, and it is significant that the last ‘boke of nurture’ to
echo the provisions of late medieval ‘household’ courtesy-writers like
Russell was written by Hugh Rhodes, a gentleman of the Chapel Royal
under Edward VI.46 On the other hand, the increasing scale and
ideological pretensions of the English court during the sixteenth
century made it ever more a unique social and political world, which
encouraged new forms of sociability and social self-valuation among the
increasing numbers of nobles and gentlemen drawn to it. The rapid
growth and magnetism of the court was noted by the Elizabethan John
Stow, who commented that
The Court, which is now a dayes much greater and more gallant
than in former times, and which was wonte to bee contented to
remaine with a small companie, sometimes at an Abbey or Priorie,
sometimes at a Bishops house, and sometimes at some meane
mannor of the Kings own, is now for the most part either abiding
at London, or else so neare unto it, that…the Gentlemen of all
shires do flic and flock to this Citty.47
From the point of view of manners the expansion of the court had two
significant effects. First, it encouraged a kind of politicization of areas
of social behaviour which, for the aristocrat or gentleman in his locality,
Page 13 of 52
would be governed largely by personal taste. Second, there was a

growth, despite the continuing interest of crown and courtiers in ritual
displays of hierarchy, of what may best be described as a salon
mentality. This I shall define as an interest in deriving status from
membership of social groups unified by the elaboration of common
tastes and depending on a kind of informal equality among participants
which allows all to participate fully in the common ethos. This unifying
ethos can be better developed and experienced in the small and relaxed
rather than the large and ritually differentiated social gathering.
Antonio de Guevara, in the fourth book of The Diall of Princes, gave a

description of the purpose of going to court which was as appropriate
to England as to Spain or France; he writes that the sons of nobles,
knights, and gentlemen go to court,
(p.120) To winne them new frends, and obtayne the acquaintance

of noble men, whose credit and estimation with the prince may
honor and countenance them, and by theyr vertues and meanes
may after a tyme bee brought into the prince's favor also, and
dayly to ryse in credit and reputation among others.48
The political historian may wish to analyse the ‘hard’ political and
economic incentives which brought the aristocracy and gentry to the
sixteenth-century monarchic court, but the aristocratic obsession with
‘credit and estimation’ was an essential element in this process. It has
often been pointed out that the Tudor monarchy, in particular, never
ceased to rely upon the cooperation of landowners in the provinces, and
that it was not crown policy (let alone crown achievement) to transform
the landed élite into a servile court bureaucracy; the early Stuarts in
fact made efforts to keep landowners on their land.49 The Tudors did,
however, shift the terms of cooperation with ‘the political nation’
markedly in the crown's favour, by making the role of court influence in
local affairs more crucial and effective, and capitalizing on social
developments which reduced independent aristocratic networks of
lordship. Above all, their achievement was ideological, for they
succeeded (markedly, if not comprehensively) in staking out a monopoly
in the supply of that most important of aristocratic social commodities:
‘credit and estimation’.50 The ‘credit’, ‘honour’, ‘worship’ to be derived
from lordship and lineage was less to be valued than, or at least to be
derived from, the ‘credit’ of the gentleman's privileged relation of
service to the crown. In the favour of the crown and the exercise of its
delegated authority lay the guarantee of gentility, and resistance, far
from being a gentlemanly prerogative, cut at the root of noble identity.
In so far as this ideology was accepted by English landowners, it often
led not to attendance at court but a reinterpretation of political
Page 14 of 52
authority in the provinces as the ‘inferior magistracy’ lauded by Sir

Thomas Elyot.51 Yet by 1560 about half the peerage had acquired a
London residence52 and had been joined by many more gentlemen
anxious for experience at court. Some had specific political ambitions
and interests, and all wished for patronage, but in order to understand
their experience of court life in relation to manners, it is (p.121)
important to see them as drawn by the image of the sheer status to be

enacted in social relations near the ‘fount of honour’. Office and favour
were as much signs of ‘credit’ from which more ‘credit’ could be
derived as profitable ends in themselves, as the sometimes ruinous
expense of accepting military and diplomatic missions amply illustrates.
Sometimes the pressure upon courtiers to compete for court

‘estimation’ led to a frenetic elaboration of the symbols of lordship
divorced from their function of integrating power networks in and
around the provincial noble household. The Jacobean prodigy house,
like Hatfield House, was built to dramatize court status in the provision
of hospitality to the monarch and retinue and bore little useful relation
to the social life of the locality.53 The dinner as a competitive exercise in
conspicuous consumption was taken to bizarre lengths by the earl of
Carlisle at the beginning of the sixteenth century. He instituted the
‘ante-supper’ at which an initial display of fine food would be removed
and replaced after the guests had arrived.54 Participation in
tournaments and pageantry, most elaborate under Elizabeth, involved
an inflated theatrical use of the paraphernalia of medieval knighthood
little known in England before Henry VII and VIII had made particular
efforts to import such practices from the Burgundian and French
courts.55 Alongside this manipulation of the symbols of lordship,
however, techniques of personal sociability were given increasing
emphasis as part of the currency of credit. The whole social persona of
the courtier was made the subject of scrutiny in what one French
author called the ‘emminent and conspicuous Theatre’56 of the court.
Ability to make a charming and memorable social impression, an
optional ability for a gentleman-householder in the counties, was a
major preoccupation for gentlemen in the court. Of course, this ability
must always have been of importance in the courts of kings or
magnates, but during the later sixteenth century it became enshrined in
literature as a major element in the self-image of the aristocracy.
The definition and dissection of pleasing, courtly, social technique is

unfortunately evident only obliquely in purely English sources. The
cultural prestige of Italy as the source of standards of polite sociability
was such that Italian literary formulations of the ideals of courtly social
conduct were taken up, as has been noted in the case of manuals of
Page 15 of 52
good (p.122) manners, without efforts being made to create specifically

English equivalents. Castiglione's The Booke of the Courtyer (translated
1561) was overwhelmingly the most influential, and indeed the
definitive formulation of courtly behaviour in England and the rest of
Europe.57 Many Henrician and later Tudor courtiers would have been
acquainted with it in the original, and therefore the English and
multilingual editions brought out under Elizabeth merely enhanced
rather than initiated its popularity. Du Refuge's A Treatise of the Courte
(translated 1622) did little more than vary the themes established by
Castiglione, and Nicholas Faret's The Honest Man; or the Arte to Please
in Court (translated 1632) was even more obviously derivative.58
Castiglione was praised and recommended in England even by the
pedagogue Roger Ascham, who expressly condemned Italian fashions,59
and it is clear that Castiglionean principles survived in France and
England long after the wane of enthusiasm for Italian culture.
Castiglione's principles of courtly social behaviour read like highly

refined and aesthetically loaded versions of the principles of
‘representation’ and ‘accommodation’ which we have found in the
courtesy manuals of Erasmus and Della Casa. The simple
representational view of expression and gesture implicit in De Civilitate
here appears in more highly wrought form as the ideal courtier is
invested with the capacity to exhibit his virtues, talents, and knowledge
as if he were his own work of art. As will be shown in the next chapter,
his notion of self-presentation is given an un-Erasmian twist of artifice
in the recommendation of art and even deceit to suggest effortless
natural superiority. But at this point it will suffice to point out the
psychological presentational view of social technique which links
Castiglionean manners to Erasmian civility. Castiglione writes, for
example, that ‘all the behaviours, gestures and maners, beeside wordes
and deedes are in a judgement of inclination of him in whom they are
seene.’60 The purpose of the courtier's social behaviour is ‘to set forth
his good qualities generally in company with all men without
purchasing himselfe envy’,61 and therefore self-presentation is
intimately linked with accommodation: the courtier must be ‘pliable’
and able ‘every day [to] alter facion and maner accordyng to the
disposition of them he is conversant withall’.62 Later ‘courtly’ writers
echo this point of view. Faret states that the court is, of all milieux, the
place where ‘it is not sufficient (p.123) to have merit, [one] must know
63
how to expose it to view,’ while Guevara dwells on the need to avoid
all sorts of offensive social habits, from dirty linen to bad breath,64 if
one is to retain and gain credit at court. Without social graces—the ‘art
to please’ which is also an art to impress—the courtier is doomed to
Page 16 of 52
ridicule and obscurity; with them, he will achieve the credit of

popularity and admiration, and, if he achieves the final aim for which
Castiglione supposedly designs his ideal, the ear of the prince.
A further interesting aspect of court manners suggested by courtly

manuals is an emphasis on the dynamic, transactional character of
courtesy. ‘Courtesies’ in the sense of small favours, invitations,
waivings of rights of precedence, etc., then as now are means of
creating and reinforcing social relationships, expressing desire for
friendship or support for others in professional or social conflict.
Conversely, exchange of ‘courtesies’ may act to sustain social relations
at a certain distance, and a reciprocation of courtesy which is very
clearly a mere matter of reciprocation, which does not therefore invite
further ‘courtesies’, may be a signal of lack of interest. Before the
sixteenth century there had undoubtedly been a strong transactional
language of courtesy in, for example, reciprocal hospitality and present-
giving. But the shifting, populous character of the court, where credit
in establishing prestigious social ties was an important aim, and the
instability of factional and patronage links was notorious, greatly
increased the awareness of ‘courtesies’ as a means of creating and
manipulating social relationships. Du Refuge writes,
As for the meanes we must use in requiting a received Courtesie,

we must if possible we can exceed, at least equall them, withall
demonstration, that we are bound to more: and that this is not to
satisfic the debt, but rather only to acknowledge the obligation…
Now having obtain'd the meanes to requite a former received
Courtesic, we must then seeke all occasions to come out of their
debt, yet with these precautions, that we doe it not either too
soone or too curiously, to the end that wee seeme not impatient to
be obliged to our friend.65
The use of the word ‘obliged’ is interesting, for it looks forward to later
definitions of good manners as ‘a means to oblige’ in which ‘oblige’
signifies both to please and to impose an obligation by pleasing
behaviour.66
(p.124) This sense of courtesy as a language of social transaction and

exchange might be regarded as prefiguring what has been identified, in
the eighteenth century, as an association between ‘manners’ and
‘commerce’. Those historians who have argued that the vision of ‘civil
society’ in the later Enlightenment arose out of the debate on the social
effects of ‘commerce’ in the sense of trade have also noted that the
term ‘commerce’ had concurrent and earlier meanings denoting simply
‘conversation’ and ‘intercourse’, sexual and social.67 In so far as
Page 17 of 52
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century manuals of courtly behaviour seem

to present manners as a currency of social ‘credit’ and ‘debt’, it seems
that notions of ‘commerce’ were encoded in manners well before
economic ‘commerce’ found its defence in the Enlightenment theory of
the refinement of manners by trade. It must be remembered, however,
that the language of patronage and alliance in the Tudor and Stuart
court displayed characteristics which appear bizarre according to later
standards of civility. David Starkey has shown the importance of
proximity to the monarch's person as a source of ‘credit’ and influence
in the Tudor court, such that Henry VIII's ‘Groom of the Stool’, who
carried the King's ‘close stool’ and probably even wiped his bottom,
was a very high-ranking courtier.68 The sharing of a bed was also a
significant mark of favour from a superior to an inferior, and
Archbishop Laud's celebrated dream of sleeping with the royal
favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, probably owed more to his political
ambitions than to suppressed homosexual desire.69 In both cases, and
particularly where the ‘sacred’ body of the monarch was concerned,
aspects of the life of the body which were later to be banished from the
public realm were part of the language of politics.
It is, of course, very difficult to gauge the degree of importance which

English courtiers really invested in graceful self-presentation and the
manipulation of courtesies, despite, for example, the somewhat
Castiglionean anecdote of Christopher Hatton's preferment by
Elizabeth on the grounds of his graceful carriage and dancing ability.70
Direct evidence (p.125) is lacking. The most vivid is that of satire—Ben
Jonson being particularly fond of the character of the punctilious, self-
consciously fashionable actual or would-be courtier, obsessed with his
social image and foreign mannerisms. Thus one character exclaims of
‘Fastidious Briske’, the courtier in Every Man out of His Humour, who
practises
salutations in front of a mirror: O, fine courtier! how comely he

bowes him in his court'sie! how full hee hits a woman betweene
the lips when hee kisses! how upright hee sits at the table! how
daintily he carves! how sweetly he talkes, and tels news of this
lord, and of that lady! how cleanely he wipes his spoone, at every
spoonfull of any whit-meat he cates, and what a neat case of pick-
tooths he carries about him.71
Delicacy and effeminacy had been satirized in courtiers for centuries,72

and so it is in some ways more important to look for newly legitimated
positive views of courtly good manners in English society. Gabriel
Harvey dedicated his verse adaptation of Castiglione's The Courtyer to
Sir Philip Sidney,73 whom he regarded as an exemplar of Castiglione's
Page 18 of 52
courtly virtue, and the universality of admiration for Sidney before and
after his death argues some positive acceptance of aesthetic principles
of personal behaviour of a Castiglionean type. Sidney's bravery, piety,
and learning were, of course, separable from his manners, but his
development of ‘courtly’ poetry (soon required reading for the
gentleman) implied and encouraged more than mere literary hobbies in
the courtier. The aesthetic principles of courtly poetry—an elegant
rhetoric of personal display—were justified as arising from and
enhancing the principles of courtly behaviour.74 Sidney's ‘heir’—Essex
—was not himself much of a poet, but he was a major patron and was
conspicuous, in Naunton's words, for ‘urbanity and a kind of innate
courtesy’.75 Significantly, the later heirs of Sidney in the tradition of
courtly poetry, particularly the Caroline poet Sir John Suckling, were
often the most self-consciously fashionable and ‘gallant’ courtiers.
(p.126) The writing of courtly poetry was, then, in some ways, a

specialized aspect of the principle of acquiring credit by ‘exposing
merit to view’ which dominated the social life of the court. It was also
an aspect of the elaboration of standards of taste characteristic of the
‘salon’ mentality then growing up in the Tudor and Stuart courts
alongside the older court commitment to household ceremony and
magnificence. As the Tudor court grew in size, and by the end of the
sixteenth century acquired a considerable social hinterland in the
capital, it was natural that small-scale social occasions unrelated to
major court functions should have proliferated; in the 1520s, Wolsey
had deplored the growing tendency of groups of courtiers to dine
privately in lodgings, rather than at the common table,76 but his
attempted prohibition of this practice would have seemed ludicrous a
few decades later, when the court had swollen and courtiers were
acquiring private residential facilities in London. Certainly the English
aristocracy and gentry were already familiar with small-scale social
gatherings for conversation and recreation in their country houses, but
the significance of the new concentration of opportunities for varied,
selective socialization at court was to endow the small gathering with a
peculiar social value. One catalyst in this conceptual change was
undoubtedly Italian conduct literature and in particular Castiglione's
Booke of the Courtyer.
The inspiration and setting of Castiglione's discussion of the perfect

courtier was the small court of Urbino in the early years of the
sixteenth century. Unlike the English court, it was scarcely an ancient
and elaborate institution, having been established only a generation
before by Federico di Montefeltro, and its cultural roots were,
significantly, in the sophisticated urban societies of late medieval Italy.
Page 19 of 52
In the first book of The Courtyer, Castiglione makes clear that the
character of Urbino social life was one of sophisticated intimacy and
informality, and although he refers to jousting and military exercises as
part of the routine of the court, he is clearly uninterested in the
symbols of prestige which meant so much in contemporary northern
European courts: splendidly attired crowds of servants, large-scale
spectacle, and magnificence in entertainment. Castiglione presents the
theme of the perfect courtier through a series of after-dinner
discussions between a group of courtiers under the auspices of the
Duchess. In the search for the definition of the courtier an enormous
range of Renaissance topoi are wittily debated, including the value of
lineage, arms versus learning, oratory, recreation, policy, and the
nature of love.
(p.127) The dramatized form of the book is no mere literary device.

Castiglione presents what is less a didactic account or an academic
exploration of questions of courtly conduct, more a demonstration of
courtliness in action. To search in the debates for authorial or ‘official’
opinions matters less than to see each character's views and mode of
self-presentation as an allowable variation on the themes of common
taste which bind the courtiers together. Castiglione depicts and
idealizes what is above all a ‘mutual admiration society’ in which
courtiers are constantly drawing from one another demonstrations of
their shared culture.77 In music-making, dancing, the recital of
apparently off-the-cuff poetry, and allusive, anecdotal, witty
conversation the courtiers compete, but also continually seek and find
recognition of their acceptance within courtly society. In his
introductory description of the court of Urbino, Castiglione stresses the
mutual sympathy of the courtiers who are ‘an amyable and lovynge
companye’;78 the presence of the Duchess ensures sympathy and unity
between courtiers since respect for her was ‘a chaine that kept all
linked together in love, in suche wise that there was never agrement of
wyll or hearty love greater betweene brethren, then there was
beetweene us all’.79 We have here a social group in which a figure of
authority presides over and guarantees a unity which allows for
‘wonderous greate libertye’80 in social relations between members who
can then develop their common identity in sophisticated modes of
informality. This kind of social organization differs markedly from that
of a court in which the monarch or major aristocrat enforces the
maintenance of official hierarchies of service which, rightly ordered,
are symbols of his prestige.
Page 20 of 52
Castiglione's vision of courtly social life clearly had some roots in the
traditions of courtly love and the associated notion of the power of
women to tame and subdue the rough and aggressive male; thus he
asserts that love and respect for the Duchess were the ‘chain’ and
‘bridle’ of the company and, despite an admitted preponderance of
men, the presence and articulacy of the women at court are
emphasized throughout the book. The development of gallantry in its
amatory sense in later sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century England
was certainly one aspect of the development of more selective, small-
scale, recreational social forms in the court. The French elaborated the
forms of gallantry to a greater degree than the Italians, and the early
seventeenth-century cult of preciosity, a (p.128) highly ‘spiritualized’
code of complimentary courtly love, strongly influenced the court of
Charles I.81 In the reign of James I, highly educated and cultivated
aristocratic women such as Mary, Countess of Pembroke, and
particularly Lucy, Countess of Bedford, had been at the centre of self-
consciously literary social circles.82 No aristocratic woman in England,
however, was quite as important in setting the pattern of ‘salon’
sociability as Madame de Rambouillet under Louis XIII,83 and the social
and intellectual life to be enjoyed at the early Stuart court, or at Wilton,
where Philip, fourth earl of Pembroke, tried to carry on the idealistic
courtly tradition established by Sidney, was not notably dominated by
women, despite important female figures. The influence of women on
social forms (important and unexplored as the subject is) seems
therefore for the purposes of the present analysis to be only one aspect
of a broader development in the conduct of social life which is idealized
and encouraged in the work of Castiglione: the elaboration of courtly,
gentlemanly social identity in the conditions of the coterie or informal
social grouping. It is this development, at court and elsewhere, that
makes sense of the acceptance of Della Casa's Galateo in England, for
his stress on pleasing self-adjustment to the sensibility of the company,
and his general provision that a man should do nothing to destroy the
impression that he wishes to be on terms of ‘familiar equalitie’84 with
his companions, suits the intimate and flexible social gathering rather
than the great set-piece ritual occasion.
Della Casa was writing from and for gentiluomini of Italian cities, and
Castiglione's court of Urbino, like other small and brilliant Italian
courts, and unlike the English one, grew out of an urban culture. It is
perhaps significant that Castiglione, seeking words to praise
Montefeltro's achievement, writes that his court ‘appeared not a
palaice, but a Citye in fourme of a Palaice’.85 The Italian courts of the
late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries developed values of conduct
which simply specialized, while perhaps emasculating, an image of
Page 21 of 52
gentility already based on modes of urbanity: la vita civile, as the

Florentine Giraldi had called it,86 the learned, cultivated, politically
responsible life of a patrician in the community of patricians. The
growth of the court in Tudor and Jacobean England, however, (p.129)
was the precondition of the growth of an urban social life for

aristocracy and gentry. In the early sixteenth century the values of city
life were generally despised by the landed élite, and, as the word
‘civility’ was taken up into English usage, its immediate urban
connotations, strong in the Italian civiltà, tended to be shorn away.
Lodowick Bryskett noted in the 1580s that there was no English
equivalent to the Latin urbanitas, writing of ‘Urbanitie, a Latine name,
which in English we cannot better, and therefore must give it passe to
be denizened among us.’87 ‘Urbanity’ of course became English
currency, although it is interesting that even today it has none of the
immediate connotations of the city community in English that it had in
the original Latin. But from the later sixteenth century, partly and
initially with the pull of the court, but increasingly with its own
momentum, London developed as a magnet and social world for nobles
and gentlemen. This change meant first that the manners of the court,
which remained the apex of gentlemanly society except during the
period of civil war and interregnum, were now more rapidly
transmitted to a greater number of imitators than was possible before.
The evolving conditions of gentlemanly social life in the capital,
however, also influenced manners directly in creating an English
version of ‘modes of urbanity’.
In 1632 the satirist Lupton wrote:
[The Country] doth now of late begin to complain, that the city
offers her wrong, in harbouring her chief members of nobility and
gentry. Her gentry, for the most part, of late are grown
wondrously undutiful…[only] a public proclamation, or a violent
plague, or to gather up their rack-rents, move them from the city,
or else the pleasure of hunting and hawking, or perhaps it is, to
show his new madam, some pretty London bird, the credit of his
father's house.88
In the same year the Venetian ambassador reported that ‘the greater
part of the gentry’ wintered in London.89 Satirical and impressionistic
evidence exaggerates greatly and it has been argued that it was only
after the Restoration that building and transport developments allowed
more than a small fraction of the provincial gentry to enjoy London
visits.90 Yet there was clearly a great upsurge in the numbers of gentry
who came to (p.130) London for extended periods well before the
Restoration. At least as much as the lure of the court, the obsessive
Page 22 of 52
litigiousness of English gentry families brought many to consult

professional lawyers and use the central legal facilities. The growing
interest of the gentry in giving sons a smattering of legal education led
to a rapid expansion of the Inns of Court as educational institutions;
admission figures for Gray's Inn, for example, show well over 1000
entries between 1611 and 1620, as against a mere 200 in the third
decade of the sixteenth century.91 But it was the purely social
fascination of the capital which struck contemporaries as the major
cause of gentry travel to London. James I, who issued several
proclamations ordering the gentry out of London, attributed the
phenomenon to the nagging of bored wives.92
Quantitative estimates of what F. J. Fisher has called ‘the growth of

London as a centre of conspicuous consumption’ are impossible to
make, although, for example, there are such figures as the 14 peers and
250 other gentry prosecuted in Star Chamber in 1632 for their defiance
of a proclamation commanding that they return home.93 Peter Clark, in
his study of Kent, a county naturally gravitating towards London, has
found that by the 1630s ‘almost every status-proud gentleman’ went to
the capital for at least part of the year. Even the relatively remote
Yorkshire gentry commonly travelled to London in the reign of James I,
despite the length and discomfort of the journey.94 Club dinners for the
gentlemen of each county were being held in London by the 1620s.95
Yet despite the patchiness of quantitative evidence, what is striking is
that from the 1590s an urban stereotype of gentlemanly behaviour,
albeit a controversial one, had crystallized in the image of the ‘gallant’
as satirized by Jonson, Dekker, and others, and most of the
characteristic features of London ‘Society’ were becoming discernible.
Coincident with the presence of the court and the legal terms, there
was developing a ‘season’ for gentry residence in the capital, starting in
the autumn, reaching a climax at Christmas, and over by June.96 The
development of the West End and the desertion of the City by nobles
and gentry under the early Stuarts meant that a predominantly upper-
class social zone became established, the houses erected in Covent
Garden under the supervision of Inigo Jones and those of William
(p.131) Newton in Queen Street setting new standards in town
accommodation for the grander gentry.97 In addition to the social
attractions and places of meeting and entertainment well-established
before the end of the sixteenth century—taverns, ordinaries, and
playhouses—the first part of the seventeenth century saw the
appearance of places of promenade and rendezvous serving little
purpose other than that of allowing social intercourse and mutual
display for fashionable gentlemen and women. In Jacobean London, St
Paul's Cathedral was used as a promenade where gentlemen would
Page 23 of 52
assemble to gossip and exchange invitations.98 Hyde Park (popular for

showing off coaches),99 the ‘Mulberry Garden’, and ‘Spring Garden’
had become popular places of gallant assembly by the mid-seventeenth
century, and Charles II improved St James's Park to the extent that it
became the fashionable meeting-place of London. Despite the
campaigns of the early Stuarts to send the gentry home, and the
disruption of the Civil War, the rapid expansion of London gentlemanly
society after the Restoration was simply an intensification of trends
well established by the 1620s and 1630s.
It would probably be hard to overestimate the admiration, anxiety, and

bewilderment produced in a newcomer from the country, whatever his
social class, on a first visit to London. As Lupton wrote, ‘She [London]
is grown so great, I am almost afraid to meddle with her; she is
certainly a great world, there are so many little worlds in her…I am
sure I may call her a gallimaufry of all sciences, arts and trades.’100 The
naive astonishment and ineptitude of the country gentleman visiting the
capital became, throughout the seventeenth century, a stock subject of
comedy. Thus Thomas Overbury's ‘Country Gentleman’ in a ‘Character’
collection of 1614, ‘when he is [in London]…sticks fast upon every
object, casts his eyes away upon gazing, and becomes the prey of every
cutpurse. When he comes home, those wonders serve him for his
Holyday talk.’101 In his Art of Living in London (1642) Henry Peacham
remarked that ‘It is a greater piece of skill to live in a populous place,
where multitudes of people reside, than in a solitary place among a
few.’102 Peacham's main interest (p.132) here is to instruct the reader
how to survive the temptations, and above all, the mass of crooks
waiting to ensnare him in the city, but his words so closely echo the
introductory words of the Galateo in Peterson's translation103 that one
might suspect that Peacham was actually aware of the peculiar
relevance of Della Casa's principles of manners to city life. In the city
(as in the court) some of the obvious symbols of status based on
lordship had to be either transformed or abandoned. As Vallentine in
the dialogue Cyvile and Uncyvile Life argued, retinues of ‘tall men’ and
large-scale household hospitality were expensive and impractical,
although wealthier nobles under Elizabeth and James I tried to
maintain these in a limited form.104 The demonstration of status had
therefore to be concentrated in personal ornamentation and personal
behaviour. As a character in Jonson's Every Man Out of His Humour
(1600) satirically puts it:
First (to be an accomplisht gentleman, that is, a gentleman of the

time) you must give o'rc house-keeping in the countrcy, and live
altogether amongst gallants; where, at your first apparancc,
Page 24 of 52
'twere good you turn'd foure or five hundred acres of your best
land into two or three trunks of apparel (you may doc it without
going to a conjuror) and be sure, you mixe your self stil, with such
as flourish in the spring of fashion, and are least popular; studie
their carriage, and behaviour in all.105
The persistent, urgent need to ‘place’ acquaintances made in London is

probably behind the behaviour ascribed to the ‘gallant’ by John
Stephens (1615), who mocks the ‘character’ because, ‘so much…doth
hee hang uppon the pillars of his gentrie, as it shall therefore be the
first preparative of his acquaintance to salute, and aske what countrey-
man your father is, of what house.’106 ‘Placing’ oneself and others,
however, requires much more than direct enquiry; the relative
anonymity of city life demands from the gentleman that he maintain a
social persona which constantly, and in many varied situations,
‘represents’ his gentlemanly ‘quality’. The popularity of Della Casa's
Galateo and Castiglione's Courtyer in later sixteenth-century English
educated society, itself already concentrated in the capital, is partly to
be attributed to the hunger of young gentlemen for dramatic, projective
models of prestigious behaviour applicable to city life.
(p.133) The dialogue Cyvile and Uncyvile Life shows an acute

contemporary perception of the relation between the notion of civility
as a demonstration of personal gentlemanly ‘virtue’ and the conditions
of court and urban life. Yet it also hints that such civility is not purely
personal, but is a matter of a man's contact with other ‘civil’ gentlemen,
and his membership of a communal world of equals in which he can
learn, improve, and see reflected his social identity (as in the courtly
‘salon’ world of Castiglione). This conception involves a snobbery far
more radical, and more anxious, than the straightforward sense of rank
and degree characteristic of the rural society of lordship. Vallentine
tells Vincent that his social life must be exclusive, for social contact
with his servitors and yeoman neighbours will make him taste ‘of their
bluntnes and rusticitie’.107 For Vallentine, the lower classes are not a
source of valid honour and deference, but a source of pollution of the
gentleman's ‘civil’ qualities.
Vallentine's view prefigures the modern experience of class

distinctions, according to which social contacts between members of
different classes tend to be the focus of unease, and everyday social
relationships are very much confined within classes. The development
of London during the seventeenth century certainly reflected
Vallentine's conception of social identity, for there was a marked
tendency towards social zoning, the West End being developed as a
prestige residential area for the gentry, which towards the end of the
Page 25 of 52
century was repeated in provincial capitals.108 In conduct literature,

keeping company with inferiors is constantly condemned. It had long
been an article of proverbial wisdom that a man is known by the
company he keeps, and this principle acquired a sharper social point in
urban conditions where a man's status might not be otherwise known
than by immediate appearances. Thus in Youth's Behaviour, a passage
which deals with ‘walking…in the streets’ condemns laughing to
oneself, shows of inner emotion, and fooling with ‘pebble stones’, and
adds the precept, ‘Above all things, if thou esteemest of thy reputation,
associate thyself with men of good quality; but if it cannot be, because
thou knowest none, or for some other reason, it were better as one
saith, to be alone, than ill accompanied.’109
A man's status is vulnerable not merely to misunderstanding, but also

to corruption, by contact with inferiors. Cleland cites the scriptural
adage that a man cannot touch pitch and remain undefiled, and gives
this a social rather than purely ethical edge when he writes, ‘To
converse with (p.134) inferiours, as your conversation breedeth
contempt, so it argueth a base minde, as though your conceites, were
no better than such people deserve to be acquainted withal.’110 Sir
Walter Raleigh advised his son to ‘associate [him]self with [his] betters,
or at least with [his] peers.’111 Wandesford advised his son always to
choose the best company, which he defined as that of ‘breeding and
quality’, and the predominantly urban context of his guidance is made
obvious by his further comment that ‘As your conversants should not be
many, so should they be select and principall, who either by their Power
or Parts have means to better you, not such as the streets, the
ordinaries, the gaming-houses present unto you.’112 Obadiah Walker
states firmly that ‘servants’ whose ‘thoughts and speeches’ are
appropriate to their ‘low condition’, ‘cannot be fit companions to a
gentleman’, and he insists that ‘a master ought not to divertise himself
with his inferiors.’113 Richard Allestree, in The Gentleman's Calling
(1660), expounds this principle the more strikingly because he is
otherwise so keen to discourage arrogance and pride. He attacks
gentlemen who think that they are ‘not like other men’, but continues,
I am not so for the confounding of qualities, as to exact they

should choose their Intimates and Companions out of the Lowest
rank; I know prudence as well as pride has drawn a Partition-wall
between them (though perhaps the later has raised it to an
unnecessary height) but I wish it might be remembred, that…that
just distance which order recommends between the Noble and the
Page 26 of 52
Mean, is valuable only as a fence against base and ignoble

practices.114
Despite the moralizing tone, what emerges from this passage is that the
notion of social distance as a means whereby the superior is honoured
has been reinforced by the notion that social distance protects the
superior from pollution. The ninth Earl of Northumberland, advising his
son on the upbringing of children, strongly expresses this notion of
pollution. The noble child's ‘playfellows and companions’ are
ever to be elected of the best and the civilest, the society of the
baser sort are to be banished in all their sports and exercises; for
where careless education hath had liberty, rude fashions cannot
chose but follow, and uncivil manners carrieth everywhere with it
the regard of scorn and disgrace.115
(p.135) This notion could and did inform some aspects of country social
life, but in the city, where the gentleman was largely cut off from the
qualifying ties of neighbourliness and household service, it could
achieve more comprehensive expression in the organization of a self-
contained gentlemanly ‘civil’ social world.
There was, in fact, no complete separation of social groups in the

capital. Social contacts between courtiers, gentlemen, and the upper
echelons of merchant society were scarcely to be avoided when
intermarriage, common political, religious and even financial concerns,
and a similar education were not unusual. The growing legal profession
also represented an intermediate group, bringing together sons of
gentry and merchants in Inns of Court regarded as within the pale of
gentlemanly society. By the reign of Charles II, the anti-country
snobbery of some ‘town’ gentlemen was such that one could write, in
1673, ‘Merchants are (at this day) become men of such outward
Parade, and inward accomplishments that the better sort of them are
received by the best Gentry, and an ordinary London Mechanick
outdoes Justice Clodpate and his 200l. per annum.’116 It is noteworthy,
however, that these merchants are accepted because they successfully
take up the standards of gentlemanly culture, and it is also significant
that attempts by London citizens to imitate gentry manners and mores
usually bred counter-attempts by gallants to maintain exclusivity. In
1629 Edmund Bolton complained in his pamphlet, The Cities Advocate,
that young men of ‘honour’ and ‘fashion’ were being denied status on
the grounds of their own or their father's original apprenticeship.117
The ‘great world’ of the city was one in which men of all classes were
thrown together, but one in which, for that very reason, boundaries
between social groups had to be constantly maintained. One could
Page 27 of 52
probably overestimate the extent to which the ‘middling sort’ of citizen

desired or tried to gatecrash the social world of the gentry denizen; the
downward diffusion of gentlemanly fashions and manners into the
middling ranks is likely to have occurred more because of the desire of
citizens to gain prestige as against those of yet lower status. In Caleb
Trenchfield's advice to his son, ‘an apprentice in London’, written in the
early 1670s, he uses terms very similar to those employed by writers of
higher status in warning his son against consorting with those of lesser
rank, telling him to avoid ‘such persons as are below you, for as their
Reputations will not bear an equal (p.136) ballance with yours, so must
yours be as much deprest as may make it even with theirs’.118
In urban conditions, then, it was important for a man to be able to

identify himself by his manners with an image of behaviour associated
with a particular kind of company. It is for this reason that Courtin, for
example, writing for an urban court audience, is interested in manners
which are qualifications for the individual to be ‘admitted into the
conversation of gentlemen’.119 In the work of Courtin and Walker
manners are presented very much as if they were the membership card
and standing rules of the club of ‘persons of quality’ or ‘well-bred
persons’. This sense of civility as a matter of identification with a status
group in the relatively shifting and populous world of court or city,
rather than simply as a matter of the ritual of household hierarchy and
hospitality, also makes sense of the stress on general conformity and
adjustment to the expectations of ‘company’ which we have noted as a
new theme of early modern courtesy literature. Courtin and Walker
both show great interest in the regulation of relationships between
superiors and inferiors in gentlemanly society, and in both England and
France during the seventeenth century ‘persons of quality’ scarcely
abandoned their obsession with relative rank. Yet in the crowded and
fluid world of court and city, with its many varied social occasions and
encounters, a man's precise status vis-à-vis his companions constantly
shifted and was not always easy to determine. Speed of adjustment to
different kinds of ‘conversation’, and a basic capacity to accommodate
and avoid offence are therefore the qualities emphasized by courtesy
writers. Josiah Dare in 1673 echoed what was by now a commonplace
of manners influenced by ‘modes of urbanity’ in writing, ‘it is better in
many things to swim with the stream, than crossly and perversely with
the Sturgeon, always swim against it. Do thou therefore accommodate,
or fashion thyself unto them [the company] in a certain Mediocrity.’120
As has already been suggested in the discussion of the court ‘salon’
mentality, it is here a gentleman's relationship with ‘company’, rather
than his relationships of lordship and service, which are loaded with
implications of status. In so far as this experience of status took root in
Page 28 of 52
early modern England, principally in the growth of London gentlemanly

society, it helps explain why many bodily controls, previously employed
as modes of deference to superiors, became so generalized in
application as to appear (misleadingly) as absolute standards of
behaviour. (p.137) In the company of his fellow gentlemen, conceived as
a social world in itself, a man had to defer to everyone.
Urban life also had other important effects on manners as a language of

deference. Relative uncertainty about status in the city, where it must
have been increasingly commonplace to meet individuals whose precise
rank and estate were not apparent, but who were not obviously menial,
led to a bias in favour of ‘playing safe’ and attributing to a stranger an
equal or superior status in the first instance. Thus Fiston, for example,
advises the child to ‘use to any man which seemeth to be of any good
account, this title, Sir.’121 This type of calculation is probably also
behind Walker's principle that ‘it is better to give too much honour to
any person then too little; therefore better to carry himself as inferior
to his equals, and equall to such as are not much inferiors.’122 The
author of The Art of Complaisance argues against too strict an
application of rules of precedence on the grounds that,
amongst those who pretend to be no more than being Gentlemen,

there appears no difference of quality, for every one is not
presumed so much a Herald, as to know how antient every man's
family is with whom he converses, and indeed there are few who
will not take it as an affront, that any should presume to be better
Gentlemen than themselves…and…men's estates are oft conccal'd
and those of lesser fortunes desire their hopes should be thought
to ballance the possessions of the others.123
Courtesy and conduct writers are, however, less concerned with

situations of total uncertainty than with the graduated scale of
acquaintanceship which, in a court or urban context, assumes
enormous importance in modifying scales of rank. In the later medieval
courtesy books it is clear that the stranger as guest is an object of
deference, and it would be unreasonable to imagine, despite the silence
of prescriptive texts on this point, that degrees of friendship did not
dissolve some of the formalities of late medieval society. But in the later
texts, concerned with urbanity rather than lordship, the level of
familiarity has become a major, subtle determinant of good manners. In
the Elizabethan Court of Civill Courtesie, the older courtesy-defining
categories of ‘lord’, ‘servant’, and ‘guest’ have been replaced by
‘better’, ‘equal’, ‘stranger’, and ‘friend’. There is, for example, a
chapter on ‘How a Man shall Pacifie his Freeind, his better, or his
equall: if he have given him unwillinglye any cause of offense’.124
Page 29 of 52
Courtin devotes an entire passage to the theory of ‘familiarity’, a mode

of (p.138) behaviour which does not simply reflect friendship but which
may be manipulated in the exchange of courtesies according to rank:
between equals familiarity is polite, from superior to inferior it is
‘graceful’ and obliges.125 Youth's Behaviour indicates clearly how lack
of acquaintance produces an obligation to defer even towards a man
slightly inferior. Thus, ‘if any one come to speak with thee whilst thou
sittest; stand up, especially if the person do merit it, be it that he be
greater than thyself: or for that hee is not thy familiar, or though for the
rest he were thy equal, or thy inferiour.’126 Sir Matthew Hale, advising
his grandchildren about social conduct, considers not only distinctions
of age and rank, but also the categories, ‘acquaintance’, ‘companion’,
and ‘intimate friend’.127
What is interesting here is not that these categories might possibly

have been new; it is rather that changing conditions have made their
perception and expression a more urgent matter of concern in the
conduct of social life. Within court and city the creation, maintenance,
and manipulation of social relationships was a more complex and tricky
business than in the local community. The stress placed by advisers on
the importance of civility in making friends is itself a symptom of the
demands of a more populous social world, and in the city there was a
much larger and more confusing range of opportunities for making
acquaintance than in the court. Places of public assembly therefore
emerged almost spontaneously to give structure to the London social
scene. Thus Francis Osborne describes the middle aisle of St Paul's as
the place for ‘the principall gentry, Lords, Courtiers, and men of all
professions not meerely mechanick, to meet…by eleven, and walk til
twelve, and after dinner from three to six; during which time, some
discoursed of business, others of news.’128 Thomas Dekker describes
his gallant ‘gul’ taking a promenade in St Paul's, showing off his
elegant dress, familiarly saluting prestigious acquaintances, and
staving for just the right length of time to make an impression.129
Subsequently other public places of promenade emerged, and in Hyde
Park, St James's Park, ordinaries and, after 1660, coffee houses,
introductions, invitations, the game of asserting or rejecting degrees of
familiarity could be carried on.
Inigo Jones failed to popularize the idea of the piazza in London,

possibly because of the English weather, but the development of public
social facilities for the gentry in the capital still encouraged and
reflected the influence of the ‘urban’ modes of sociability implicit in the
work of the (p.139) Italian Della Casa and in that of Stephano Guazzo,
Page 30 of 52
whose second book of ‘civile conversation’ advises the reader how to

behave in ‘anie company, out of [his] owne house’.
Mutual entertainment within each others’ houses and lodgings was,

none the less, just as important as public socializing in the gentlemanly
society of seventeenth century London. Henry Peacham complained in
1642 that one disadvantage of London life was the temptation of
‘perpetual visits of vain and useless acquaintance’.130 Richard Allestree
in 1660 attacked gallants who idled their time away in visits which they
used merely to gain material for gossip.131 These visits were not simply
the expression of gregariousness in a place full of social opportunity,
but in later seventeenth-century texts appear as conventionalized
means of forming and cementing relationships on the basis of a well-
established set of ground rules. ‘Visits’ in this sense did not necessarily
involve the provision of a meal and might be made throughout the day.
The degree of formality attendant on ‘visits’ was probably very variable.
Obadiah Walker, who devotes several pages to the subject, suggests
that many of the rules which he describes (taken from an Italian
source) are not as appropriate in England as abroad. These include the
rule that women are not to be visited in the morning, rules governing
the distance from his chamber that a host must move to greet or send
off a guest and how he must be clothed, rules governing the arrival of a
newcomer when guests are already being entertained, and so forth.132
What is clear is that visits were essentially reciprocal between equals,
and a means of proffering respect to superiors. This was in line with
long-standing traditions of country hospitality, since household
entertainment between nobles and gentlemen had a reciprocal
character and, as presented in the dialogue Cyvile and Uncyvile Life,
‘resort’ to a landowner's table was a recognition of his ‘worship’. Yet
the growth of these principles in ‘official’ but proliferating small-scale
social occasions in the city is an important aspect of the development of
the straightforward medieval language of deference and alliance into a
more flexible and pervasive means of binding together and structuring
the ‘civil’ society of gentlemen. Courtin indicates the potentially
obsessive and trivial but basically necessary function of visits when he
writes
For the visits we are to return, if we follow the extravagance of

certain people, who consume the greatest part of their lives in
visiting others, to oblige them in return; our best way (as was
wittily said) will be to go from door to door. But for (p.140) a
person who knows how to employ his time, and yet is willing to
retain a civil correspondence with all people, we must inform him
there are some indispensable occasions in which he cannot
Page 31 of 52
without reflection omit, making his visits to persons for whom he

bears any amity or respect. For example, he is to wait upon a
Notable Person at a convenient time, to inform himself of his
health, and to continue the good opinion he has of him, and in
general, when ever any good or ill accident has given him subject
for either sorrow or joy, we are to make our visit in the same
dialect, unless we be particularly convinc'd it will not be
welcome.133
Courtin's advice might be discounted on the grounds that it is

translated from the French, but Matthew Hale, in his advice to his
grandchildren, suggests that such visiting is commonplace in English
society by warning against excess in this practice. He writes that visits
to superiors should be rare, and in the afternoon rather than for a meal,
since reciprocal hospitality will prove too expensive. Visits to equals
should likewise be moderate ‘for one entertainment invites another,
which if it should fall out often, will not only be a perpetual trouble but
an occasion of excessive expense.’134 John Evelyn in 1657, after a sour
portrait of London public social life, similarly implies the prevalence of
reciprocal visiting by criticism, complaining that in comparison with
French visits, English visits are long and tedious.135
The development of court and city social life for the élite during the
later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries therefore explains much
about why and how imported conceptions of good manners came to be
acceptable in the upper echelons of English society. Yet it must be
remembered that only a minority of the English gentry during the
period acquired more than a fleeting experience of London, let alone
court life. It remained true, as Thomas Wright lamented in 1601, that
‘sundry of our rurall Gentlemen are as wel acquainted with the civil
dealing, conversing and practice of citties, as many Kockneys, with the
manuring of lands and affayres of the countrey.’136 The values and
practices of country lordship, centred upon the maintenance of
household hierarchies of service and the provision of hospitality,
retained their importance as expressions of status for the major
landowner much longer than was suggested by many Elizabethan and
Jacobean critics of the ‘decay of hospitality’.137 As late as 1660, the
(p.141) Earl of Argyll could still comment favourably on the efforts
made by English nobility and gentry to maintain elaborate households

geared to large-scale entertainment:
Page 32 of 52
The English are so careful of their Honour in this point that they
do abridge themselves of other grandezzas which their estates
would afford them in coming to Court, Masquing etc. to sacrifice
with the due rites to their Penates their Household-gods, to whom
their ancestors had devoted their prime substance, and which the
genius of their neighbouring people as by religious custome
expected from them.138
The advice to his son written by the seventh Earl of Derby in the 1640s,
and heavily based on Lord Burghley's Precepts, is principally concerned
with household arrangements. Like Burghley, he sees the provision of
entertainment as a means of cementing relations of patronage and
alliance, and thus writes ‘let your kindred and friends be welcome at
your house and table and oblige them by your countenance, which will
double the bond of nature.’ It is also clear, from Derby's warnings about
giving gifts to servants or having near kin as servants, that he is still
thinking in terms of a household involving non-menial service relations.
For example, he warns that the first sign of a servant who is self-
seeking and unreliable is that he has ‘followers attending him bare-
headed, which puffs him up to slight your service’.139 The language of
prestige rooted in ritually expressed service is still very much alive. A
criticism of city life published in 1673 praises country life for the
gentleman as ‘well attended’,140 as against city life in which the
gentleman lacks appropriate service.
This might lead us to assume that the English aristocracy and gentry
either lived a double life, changing mores entirely when they travelled
between the capital and their estates, or were in many cases almost
completely unaffected by court or city culture. There was clearly a
difference between court/city and country manners, and this provided
opportunities for satire, as when Overbury described a ‘Country
Gentleman’ in the city struggling in the city to learn to ‘kisse his hand,
and make a Leg both together’, and retreating with relief to the
conversation of his tenants.141 In The Art of Complaisance the reader is
instructed to observe the difference in country manners:
that Courtier is but over punctual, who in a Country Gentleman's

house will strictly practise all his forms of new breeding, and will
not be content to express (p.142) his thanks, and esteem to
others, in the same manner, and with the same ceremony that he
receives the respects of others.142
Yet the reality was more subtle than the stock polarity of ‘court’ and
‘country’ in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writings would suggest.
Even in rural localities, there was some shift during the period from
Page 33 of 52
‘modes of lordship’, expressed in the ritual ‘courtesy’ of the household,

to ‘modes of urbanity’ expressed in a ‘civility’ suited to the notion of
exclusive ‘civil society’. This shift did not mean any radical discontinuity
in country mores, but it was sufficiently marked to enable us to see
court and city, and country gentry life, not as utterly separate worlds,
but as strongly culturally linked. First of all, an account of the survival
of practices of lordship in the counties must be counterbalanced by the
evidence for their decline in several important aspects. The Earl of
Derby described above was, in many ways, a special case, a leading
example of a very small number of nobles whose families’ long-standing
pre-eminence in a locality encouraged them to maintain households of a
kind which newcomers to the peerage no longer tried to re-create on
such a scale. Also, far from being a noble backwoodsman, Derby was an
exponent of courtly culture of the cosmopolitan ‘salon’ kind, which he
combined, as did the monarch, with archaic practices of lordship, such
as an enormous train of gentleman-servants and the now unusual
taking-in of youths for education in chivalry. He was married to the
daughter of Madame La Tremouille, imported into his household
French modes of serving at table, and showed the influence of ‘salon’
modes of sociability in his view that the best banquets have no more
than nine guests.143 By contrast, the prevailing trend among the late
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century aristocracy and major gentry was to
stress the new at the expense of the old element in this combination.
Since the fifteenth century the size of retinues and ‘riding households’
had been diminishing, and even before there had begun that
architecturally expressed retreat of the family and high-ranking
household officers from commensality with servants and guests of
lower rank.144 By the end of the sixteenth century there was a chorus of
pamphlets complaining that old-style gentleman-servants were being
squeezed out by laws against retainers, the influx of unsuitable lower-
rank menials, and the growth of puritanism.145 Architectural change in
the (p.143) seventeenth century saw even menial servants vanishing in
the sense of being removed from view; the design of Coleshill in
Berkshire (c.1650) enforced and symbolized this removal by the
creation of a separate servants’ hall and backstairs, and such
arrangements rapidly became commonplace.146 Service was thus being
gradually transformed from a highly visible hierarchy of honour, itself
conferring honour upon the householder, into an invisible machinery
sustaining the visible and exclusive social world of the householder.
This development was partly a function of intangible changes in taste

and an increasing desire for familial privacy, but it was also an aspect
of broader social changes which were weakening the older status-
bearing bonds of local lordship and therefore encouraging new forms of
Page 34 of 52
social organization and prestige. The policy of Tudor monarchs was one
factor in reducing the political and social centrality of the great noble
household. Perhaps more significant were the economic and
demographic changes which resulted in a major expansion of the
gentry population between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. In
Shropshire, for example, there were 470 families claiming gentility in
1640 as against a mere 48 in 1423, and Lawrence Stone has estimated
that, nationwide, the numbers of armigerous gentry rose from
approximately 5000 in 1540 to roughly 15,000 in 1660.147 The effect of
this change was not always to reduce the power of major aristocratic
families, nor even to provoke a radical challenge to existing aristocratic
values. ‘New’ gentry were anxious to forge links of patronage and
alliance with older families and, far from repudiating values of lineage,
were keen to fake genealogies and to buy arms from the College of
Heralds. Nevertheless, the expansion of the gentry did entail a
transformation of the language and mechanisms of power in the
counties. As Mervyn James has vividly described, in the case of the
comparatively conservative Durham area the emergence of a
‘numerous, varied, and many-tiered gentry group’ not easily absorbed
into existing structures of clientage and alliance disrupted old forms of
social organization.148 The late medieval social tissue of protection and
loyalty, emotionally expressed in the cult of lordship and institutionally
manifest in the life of the ‘gregarious’ and ‘ceremonious’ noble
household, gradually dissolved.149 In its place there developed an
association of gentry families whose power and status, despite
enormous variation, was conceived in (p.144) terms of common
membership of a loose ruling group within which office and influence
were divided.
What was happening, in other words, was that the county élite was
envisaging itself more and more as a unified governing class with a
common relation to the crown and commonwealth, and less as men
whose honour and status were wholly bound up in a highly personal
and particularized network of affinity and allegiance. This was, of
course, only a shift of emphasis, and special relationships between
families certainly persisted, but it was marked enough to involve a
withering of interest in household ritual and open hospitality. This
decline found expression even in bodily symbolism: the kiss on the
mouth exchanged by lord and vassal as a sign of mutual fidelity—a key
part in the enactment of homage in the fifteenth century—had been all
but forgotten by the early seventeenth century. The homage, which was
often still legally required in the inheritance of property and other
rights, came to be expressed in the less immediate and physical form of
oaths and contracts.150 The early modern gentry were elaborating a
Page 35 of 52
new language of status and association, and different symbols were

employed. These were the symbols of personal culture and political
competence which reinforced a man's title to be considered part of
what some local historians have termed the ‘county community’ and
what James, significantly, has called ‘civil society’.
Writing in the 1640s, a Dorsetshire gentleman, Sir William Higford,

shows all the signs of this change. He devotes one of three subsections
of his work of advice to the question of the maintenance of his landed
estate—the enduring preoccupation of the English gentry.151 Yet
neither in this nor in the second section, ‘concerning…company and
converse’ do the notions of ‘resort’ to his table or ‘tall men’ attendants
figure. He advocates that his heirs cultivate the favour of important
‘neighbours’152 (members of the peerage), but significantly does not
refer to the deference required in dealing with these men as a matter of
service to lordship. As far as his heirs’ own servants are concerned, he
counsels against ‘familiarity’ for, following the trend of conduct writing
mentioned earlier, he thinks these ‘ill companions’ who may ‘prove
insolent’.153 Higford advises a protective attitude towards tenants, but
does not mention any particular social duties arising from that
protection. In much of the book, he is interested in defining the piety,
literary taste, and courtly accomplishments (p.145) appropriate to his
heirs, and their capacity to put up a good showing in the company of
other educated men.154 The author of the Elizabethan dialogue, Cyvile
and Uncyvile Life, would not have been able to fault him, as he does his
fictional country gentleman, for lack of personal culture or a degrading
interest in the conversation of inferiors.
Higford might, however, be regarded as exceptionally committed to

ideals of virtuous, learned, ‘civil’ gentility by the mere fact of his
writing a full-scale book of advice. There is certainly a problem in
analysing the diffusion of new models of gentlemanly behaviour from
literary texts which may be unrepresentative. Many literary
formulations of new models of gentility which were published in
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England have already been
mentioned. Sir Thomas Elyot's The Boke Named the Governour (1531)
was one of the earliest and most influential English statements of the
ideal of the gentleman as ‘inferiour magistrate’, qualified for the
exercise of authority within the commonwealth not only by lineage and
military prowess, but by liberal knowledge and political skill. Elyot
drew on a vast range of classical sources, including Aristotle's Ethics
and Politics, and Cicero's Orator and Offices, which over the sixteenth
century became available in translation even for those with no Latin or
Greek.155 Renaissance Italian accounts of personal nobiltà, less
Page 36 of 52
narrowly courtly than Castiglione's Courtyer, such as Nennio's Treatise

of Nobility (translated 1595) also presented to an English readership an
ideal of virtuous, learned, civic governorship.156 Under the early
Tudors, originally Italian ideas were probably more acceptable when
channelled through French and Burgundian sources, which connected
ideas of service to the commonwealth with familiar images of north
European chivalry.157 Another current in the same tide was the
pedagogic work of Erasmus and Vives, who constructed educational
schemes specifically for the prince and aristocrat and greatly
influenced English educationalists.158 Piety in the exercise of the
gentleman's Christian calling was the keynote of the treatises of
Lawrence Humphrey (1563), Richard Brathwayt (1630), and Richard
Allestree (1660),159 but these works are (p.146) still in line with an
intellectual tradition defining gentility in terms of governorship which
had taken root in England before the Reformation. It is, however, still
difficult to judge, despite the volume of literature only lightly sketched
here, how far we are dealing with an intellectual tradition which
genuinely affected the self-image and therefore the everyday self-
presentation of more than an academically inclined minority of
gentlemen.
In relation to ‘manners’, the impact of humanist models of gentility

need not be assessed in terms of the full-scale intellectual commitment
which they no doubt attracted only from the minority of gentlemen with
genuine academic and literary ambitions. If we search for evidence that
the English élite consciously and fully grasped and adopted the detailed
recommendations of humanist theorists, many of whose schemes for
improving the culture of the gentry never came near realization, we are
using too simplistic a model of the relation between literary statements
of values and the social forms and uses of such values. What is
important is that, even in the counties, changes in the educational and
social practices of the English aristocracy and gentry showed that
aspects of the humanist image of the gentleman as a personally
cultivated governor and member of ‘civil society’ were being absorbed
by many as commonplaces. As such, they did not require any great
demonstrable commitment to or sophisticated understanding of the
systematic theories of society and noble virtue propounded by theorists.
Indeed, their effectiveness as part of the language of social
differentiation depended on the fact that they did not. The notion that
some literary education somehow benefited a gentleman, that the
gentleman had an exemplary ‘civil’ role within the commonwealth, and
that the gentleman must enjoy the ‘civil conversation’ of other
Page 37 of 52
gentlemen to perfect and express his merits became part of the mental
furniture of the gentry.
The diffusion of humanist models of gentility as cliché rather than as

theory, a process by which, with a familiar irony, what had been social
criticism was appropriated as social legitimation, admits no simple
explanation. It has been suggested that the scramble for advancement
through office-holding during the later sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries encouraged the adoption of the image of the gentleman as
educated governor by those anxious to attract crown patronage, and
that the already established nobility and gentry had to follow suit to
safeguard their position. The expanded opportunities for secular office
holders probably did have some such effect, but the number of offices
was not large enough, not the policy of the crown in choosing talent
consistent enough, to provide an adequate explanation for educational
and ideological change on a (p.147) very large scale.160 The ‘hard’
factors of financial and political incentive seem to take second place to
the less tangible requirements of an expanding élite for new elements
in social self-definition. These requirements in large part determined
the use made of the educational institutions in which, in theory,
gentlemen could be fitted for learned governorship. They meant that
these institutions, supposedly the purveyors of genuine academic skills
and knowledge, became as much the purveyors of ‘manners’ which
simply ‘represented’ such skills and knowledge.
By the later sixteenth century most English gentlemen experienced

some elementary and secondary education, whether in school or by a
private tutor, and therefore must in many cases have absorbed a part of
the Erasmian notion of good manners which was associated with this
scriptural, classical, schoolroom training, quite possibly with the actual
use of De Civilitate.161 At the level of higher education, experienced by
an ever-rising proportion of county gentry, the connection between
learning and manners was more complex and sophisticated. Sir Thomas
Smith, listing gentlemanly attributes in the mid-Elizabethan period,
adds the obligation to show ‘tokens of a better education’ to the longer
established signs of status, ‘manly courage…liberality…idle
servants’,162 and appropriately rich attire. When Smith wrote in the
1550s, the gentry's practice of sending their sons to the universities
and the Inns of Court was becoming very common.163 As the young
gentleman seldom stayed more than a year or two, and rarely took a
degree, he was unlikely to come away with more than a few tokens of
higher education, but the academics who lamented the superficiality of
gentry education missed the point in fearing that ideals of virtuous,
learned gentility were therefore being ignored by the English élite.164
Page 38 of 52
As social currency, transformed into phrases and mannerisms which

conjured potent values of learning and authority, these ideals were
certainly taking hold. In humanist depictions of the ideal noble or
gentleman, civil ‘manners’ sometimes seem a minor and contingent
aspect of gentlemanly virtue; appropriated into the culture of real and
(p.148) aspirant gentlemen, however, these ideals often took second
place to the manners which expressed them.
The function of the universities in purveying the tokens of gentility was

not limited to the provision of a prestigious smattering of learning.
They also acquired the informal function of providing a social
experience more comprehensively relevant to the individual's
acquisition of a gentlemanly image. It is very significant that in the
1570s, when Harvey wrote a letter complaining of the neglect of
classical learning by Cambridge undergraduates in favour of modern
European books, the translated titles that he mentions are all those of
courtesy books. The craze, he says, is for ‘Philibertes Philosopher of the
Courte, the Italian Archebysshoperies brave Galateo, Castiglioes fine
Cortegiano, Bengalassoes Civil Instructions to his Nephewe, Guatzoes
new Discourses of Curteous Behaviour’.165 Clearly, then as now, the
universities were not simply places where the young gentleman or
aspirant gentleman was peculiarly vulnerable to the appeal of literary
fads; they were also places where, among a shifting population of near
equals as well as despised inferiors, polite modes of behaviour could be
learned and practised. They were ‘places of assembly’; many who did
not later in life plunge into the urban worlds of court and city learned
in the universities the manners which I have associated with ‘modes of
urbanity’.
The Inns of Court in London likewise served more and less than a
technical educational function. Their growth as finishing schools for the
gentry bolstered a sense of shared gentlemanly experience and culture
whatever the limits of the legal knowledge acquired by each individual.
Thus Gerard Legh in 1576, echoing a passage written by Sir John
Fortescue a century before, but elaborating considerably on the
original, lauded the social function of the Inns. Young gentlemen, he
writes, attend the Inns ‘to learne to rule and obey by law’, and also,
to use all other exercises of body and mind whereunto nature

most aptly serveth, to adorn, by speaking, countenance, gesture
and use of apparell, the person of a gentlemen; whereby amity is
obtained, and continued, that gentlemen of all countries, in their
young years, nourished together in one place, with such comely
Page 39 of 52
order, and daily conference, are knit by continual acquaintance in

such unity of mindes and manners as lightly never after is
severed, than which nothing is more profitable to the
Commonweale.166
(p.149) Clement Ellis, in 1660, took a hostile view of the same process,
writing,
The Hopefull Youth must be a Gentleman, and in all hast he must

be sent to the University of Innes of Court; and that before he well
knowes what it is to goe to Schoole. Whither he comes, not to get
Learning and Religion but for breeding, that is, to enable himselfe
hereafter to talke of the Customes and fashions of the Place.167
A smattering of legal education thus took second place to the

sharpened sense of social identity derived from the acquisition of
gentlemanly manners and fashions developed in the urban world of the
Inns, close to the Court and other centres of London ‘gallant’ life.
In 1632 Donald Lupton praised the Inns and Chancery as places where
‘nobility, learning, law, gentry have their residence’, and institutions
which ‘moralize’ and ‘civilize the younger’.168 This phrase returns us to
the many functions of the words ‘civil’ and ‘civility’ in the evolution of
new modes of social self-definition among the English élite. The early
seventeenth-century Inns of Court are indeed almost paradigmatic in
showing the interrelation of the different levels of the concept of
civility. First, the Inns are the centre of legal knowledge, and the notion
of law was central to the overall idea of a civil nation and society;
second, in training gentry in the law, the Inns embodied the notion of
the gentleman as civil magistrate and master of the civil structure of
society; last, the Inns provided a milieu for the acquisition of ‘civility’ as
gentlemanly good manners. In fact, during the later seventeenth
century the Inns declined as finishing schools for ‘civilizing’ the
gentry,169 but the schools, universities, academies, and foreign travel
continued to perform a role perceived as ‘civilizing’ within the same
pattern of ideas. London as a centre of arts, sciences, conversation, and
proliferating fencing, dancing, and music schools, could itself be viewed
as a great educational institution, as it was by Sir George Buck, who in
1612 called the capital the ‘Third University of England’.170
The effect of these ‘civilizing’ agencies was certainly to diffuse the

kinds of manners which we have analysed as originally courtly and
urban in character into the counties. By the end of the seventeenth
century the (p.150) appeal of urban modes of sociability in the counties
was such that provincial towns were being developed by local gentry as
Page 40 of 52
social centres in which the entertainments, fashions, and social

occasions of London life could be reproduced. Although the manners of
court and city were often perceived as entirely alien to those of the
country, and the literary court-country division expressed real tensions
which will be explored in Chapter 6, the concept and the practices of
civility still served to unify the governing class. Late medieval codes of
aristocratic behaviour had certainly embodied an ethos common to
most nobles and gentlemen, and in the cult of chivalry there had been
occasions and associations designed to express their corporate,
exclusive culture. But by the mid-seventeenth century the corporate
and exclusive character of gentlemanly social life had become more
marked and institutionally elaborate. Good manners had become less a
matter of household ritual and more a sign of a gentleman's
membership of ‘civil society’, an ‘imagined community’ continually
reproduced through the very substantial institutions of court, ‘Town’,
and educational establishments reaching out to the upper ranks of the
whole nation.
Notes:
(1) Medieval courtesy books very occasionally use bestial imagery to
describe faults, e.g. in the Boke of Curtasye, II. 57–9, in Meals and
Manners, 179, stuffing the mouth is defined as apelike. Medieval
allegory in literature and art is full of the notion of vices and virtues
personified, but the important issue here is how far such ideas were
technically incorporated into practical writing on manners.
(2) Goffman, ‘The Nature of Deference and Demeanor’, American

Anthropologist, 58 (1956), 489.
(3) Concern with ‘self-fashioning’ in literature and art is explored on a

wide front in S. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago and
London, 1980).
(4) Erasmus, De Civilitate, sig. A2v; ibid., sig. B2v.
(5) Ibid., sig. A3r.
(6) Ibid., sig. A4v; sig. A5v.
(7) Weste, Booke of Demeanor, in Meals and Manners, 210.
(9) Fiston, Schoole of Good Manners, sig. (B5)r.
(10) Della Casa, Galateo, 2, 4.
Page 41 of 52
(13) Art of Complaisance, 1.
(14) Dare, Counsellor Manners his Last Legacy, 53–4.
(15) See above Ch. 2, pp. 70–1.
(16) Della Casa, Galateo, 101–2; Courtin, Rules of Civility, ch. 2, 10.
(18) Dalle, Counsellor Manners, 6–7.
(20) S. R., Courte of Civill Courtesie, subtitle.
(21) Art of Complaisance, 2.
(22) Guazzo, Civile Conversation, bk. 2, 73.
(24) Allestree, Gentleman's Calling, 48.
(25) Wright, Passions of the Minde, sig (A5)v.
(26) Sir Christopher Wandesforde, Book of Instruction to his Son and

heir, 27.
(27) Della Casa, Galateo, 4; for Della Casa's career see Crane, Italian
Social Customs, ch. 7, 380.
(28) The contrasting values and organization of two urban élites are
analysed in Peter Burke, Venice and Amsterdam: A Study of
Seventeenth-century Elites (London, 1974). G. Duby, ‘The Diffusion of
Cultural Patterns in Feudal Society’, Past and Present, 39 (1968), 3–10
suggests how a certain homogencity of culture was created among the
medieval nobility and gentry.
(29) Cyvile and Uncyvile Life, in Inedited Tracts, ed. Hazlitt, 8.
(30) Ibid. 31.
(31) Ibid. 33.
Page 42 of 52
(32) Ibid. 43.
(33) Ibid. 44.
(34) Ibid. 49–50.
(35) Ibid. 84.
(36) Cyvile and Uneyvile Life, in Inedited Tracts, 32–3.
(37) Felicity Heal, in her Hospitality in Early Modern England (Oxford,

1990), ch. 3, 99–101, makes considerable use of the dialogue and
argues that the courtier's emphasis on the virtue of the mind is a mark
of Senecan influence in Elizabethan England. Seneca, however, was
markedly hostile to the enjoyment of sociability and the influence of
Stoic, Senecan ideals cannot explain Vallentine's interest in social
refinement. Castiglione's Booke of the Courtyer seems a more
immediate influence here.
(38) Ibid. 38.
(39) Ibid. 57.
(40) Ibid. 57.
(41) Ibid. 53.
(42) Gainsford, Rich Cabinet, 19.
(43) Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, bk. 6; ant. 1, ll. 1–6, in
Poetical Works of Spenser, ed. Smith and Selincourt, 337.
(44) See above Ch. 2, pp. 60–2.
(45) David Starkey, ‘The Age of the Household: Politics, Society and the
Arts c.1350–c.1550’, in The Context of English Literature: The Later
Middle Ages, ed. S. Medcalf (London, 1981), 225–90; see also P.
Williams, ‘Court and Polity under Elizabeth I’, Bulletin of the John
Rylands University Library, 65 (1983), 259–86.
(46) See The Babees Book etc., ed. Furnivall, ‘preface to Rhodes’, pp.
lxxv–lxxxv.
(47) John Stow, A Survey of London, ed. C. Lethbridge Kingsford

(Oxford, 1908), vol. 2, 211–12.
(48) Antonio de Guevara, The Diall of Princes…Englished out of the

French by T[homas] North (2nd rev. edn., 1568), bk. 4, ch. 8, sig. Y1r.
Page 43 of 52
(49) See R. R. Steele, Proclamations of Tudor and Stuart Sovereigns,

1485–1714 (Oxford, 1910), nos. 1152, 1177, 1342, 1344, 1388, 1487,
1523, and 1647. James issued nine proclamations against noble and
gentry residence in London during legal-term holidays.
(50) For an account of this process see M. E. James, ‘The Concept of

Honour’, Past and Present, suppl. no. 3 (1979).
(51) Elyot, The Governour (1531), bk. 1, ch. 4.
(52) Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558–1641 (Oxford,

1965), ch. 8, 395.
(53) Ibid. 451–2; Girouard, Life in the English Country House, ch. 4,
111–14.
(54) Francis Osborne, Traditional Memoirs, in Secret History of the

Court of James I, ed. W. Scott (Edinburgh, 1811), vol. 1, 270–1.
(55) See G. Kipling, The Triumph of Honour: Burgundian Origins of the

Elizabethan Renaissance (Leiden, 1977), ch. 6. For a broader discussion
of the sixteenth century transformation of chivalric ideals, see A. B.
Ferguson, The Indian Summer of English Chivalry (Durham, NC, 1960).
(56) Du Refuge, Treatise of the Court, tr. Reynold (1622), bk. 1, ch. 1, 3.
(57) See S. Anglo, ‘The Courtier: The Renaissance and Changing Ideals’,
in The Courts of Europe, ed. A. G. Dickens (London, 1977), 33–54.
(58) See above Ch. 1, pp. 36–7.
(59) Ascham, The Scholemaster, in Arber's English Reprints, vol. 2, bk.

1, 77–86 (for condemnation of Italian fashion), 66 (for recommendation
of Castiglione).
(60) Castiglione, The Courtyer, bk. 2, sig. P1v.
(61) Ibid., sig. L4r.
(62) Ibid., sig. N2v.
(63) Faret, The Honest Man, 208.
(64) Guevara, The Diall of Princes, bk. 4, ch. 8.
(65) Du Refuge, Treatise of the Court, bk. 1, ch. 3, 25–6.
Page 44 of 52
(66) By the mid-seventeenth century, the word ‘oblige’ can be used with
greater or lesser connotations of conferring ‘obligation’. Thus the Earl
of Strafford advises his nephew to ‘oblige men by…respective
courteous usage’ because Strafford's coming execution will leave his
nephew bereft of political allies (Strafford's Advice in Practical Wisdom,
72) but the Earl of Bedford uses the term intransitively for a pleasing
social technique and contractual connotations are scarcely present
(Bedford's Advice in Practical Wisdom, 243).
(67) See Pocock, ‘Cambridge Paradigms and Scotch Philosophers’, in

Wealth and Virtue, ed. Hont and Ignatieff (1983), 241 and A.
Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for
Capitalism before its Triumph (Princeton, 1977), 59–63.
(68) David Starkey, ‘Representations through Intimacy’, in Symbols and

Sentiments, ed. Ioan Lewis (London, 1977), 187–224. Starkey traces the
way in which this courtly office lost importance, largely as a result of a
changing sense of decorum.
(69) See Alan Bray, ‘Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in
Elizabethan England’, History Workshop, 29 (Spring 1990), 1–20.
(70) Sir Robert Naunton, Fragmenta Regalia: Or, Observations on the

late Queen Elizabeth, her times and Favourites, in Harleian Miscellany,
ed. T. Park (1808–13), vol. 2, 81–108, at p. 98. Naunton's view of Hatton
is hostile, but an approving reference to his advancement through
courtly accomplishment is to be found in William Higford, Institutions
(1658), pt. 3, 80–1.
(71) Ben Jonson, Every Man out of His Humour, Act IV, Scene 1, in
Works of Jonson, ed. Herford and Simpson, 530.
(72) For a twelfth-century attack on courtly effeminacy see John of

Salisbury, Frivolities of Courtiers and Footprints of Philosophers, tr. and
selected from Policratus by J. B. Pike (Minneapolis, 1938).
(73) See G.L. Barnett, ‘Gabriel Harvey's “Castilio, Sive Aulicus” and “De
Aulica”: A Study of their Place in the Literature of Courtesy’, Studies in
Philology, 42 (1945), 146–64; for another explicit association of Sidney
with Castiglione see Thomas Nashe, The Anatomie of Absurditie (1589)
in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow (London, 1966),
vol. 1, 7.
(74) See D. Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England

(Princeton, 1978) especially 50–69 for a full discussion of the
Page 45 of 52
relationship between the aesthetics of courtly poetry and courtly

conduct.
(75) Naunton, Fragmenta Regalia, in Harleian Miscellany, vol. 2, 107.
(76) N. J. Williams, Henry VIII and his Court (London, 1971), 92.
(77) For a penctrating account of the construction of shared social

identity in Castiglione's Courtyer and In Guazzo's Civile Conversation
see F. F. Whigham, ‘ “Fayned Showes and Forgeric”: Courtesy and
Political Suasion in English Renaissance Literature’ (unpublished PhD.
thesis, University of California, San Diego, 1976), ch. 1.
(78) Castiglione, The Courtyer, bk. 1, sig. A3v.
(79) Ibid., bk. 1, sig. A4r.
(80) Ibid.
(81) See, for example, G. Parry, The Golden Age Restor'd: The Culture of
the Stuart Court, 1603–42 (Manchester, 1981), ch. 9, 184–213.
(82) For the literary patronage and influence of these women see J.
Buxton, Sir Philip Sidney and the English Renaissance (London, 1966),
chs. 6–7.
(83) For Mme de Rambouillet's influence see M. Magendic, La Politesse

mondaine et les théories de l'bonnêteté, en France, au XVIIe siècle, de
1600 à 1660, (Paris, 1925), vol. 1, 120–48.
(85) Castiglione, Courtyer, bk. 1, sig. A2v.
(86) See above, Ch. 2, p. 54.
(87) Bryskett, Discourse of Civill Life (1606), 245.
(88) Donald Lupton, London and the Countrey Carbonadoed and

Quartered into Severall Characters (London, 1632), in Harleian
Miscellany, ed. Park (1808–13), vol. 9, 310ff., 325.
(89) Quoted by F. J. Fisher, ‘The Development of London as a Centre of

Conspicuous Consumption in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’,
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th ser., 30 (1948), 45.
Page 46 of 52
(90) L. Stone, ‘The Residential Development of the West End of London

in the Seventeenth Century’, in After the Reformation: Essays in Honor
of J. H. Hexter, ed. B. C. Malament (Manchester, 1980), 167–212.
(91) Fisher, ‘Development of London’, Transactions of the Royal

Historical Society (1948), 43.
(92) V. A. Wilson, Society Women of Shakespeare's Time (London, 1924),

ch. 16, 210.
(93) Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, ch. 8, 398.
(94) P. Clark, English Provincial Society from the Reformation to the

Revolution: Religion, Politics and Society in Kent 1500–1640 (Hassocks,
1977), ch. 6, 207; J. T. Cliffe, The Yorkshire Gentry from the Reformation
to the Civil War (London, 1969), ch. 1, 20–4.
(95) Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, ch. 8, 387.
(96) Fisher, ‘Development of London’, 43.
(97) See J. Summerson, Georgian London (London, 1945), for the early
development of town houses.
(98) See below, p. 138.
(99) Anthony Hamilton, Memoirs of the Comte de Gramont, translated

by P. Quennell, and with an introduction by C. H. Hartmann (London,
1930), 145, calls Hyde Park ‘the promenade of London’.
(100) Lupton, London and the Countrey Carbonadoed, in Harleian

Miscellany, vol. 9, 312.
(101) Sir Thomas Overbury, Sir Thomas Overburie his wife, with new
Elegies upon his…death, whereunto are annexed, New Newes and
Characters (London, 1616), sig. (D5)v.
(102) Henry Pcacham, The Art of Living in London; or a Caution how

Gentlemen, Countreymen and Strangers, drawne by occasion of
Businesse, should dispose of Themselves in the Thriftiest Way; not
onely in the Citie, but in all other Populous Places (London, 1642), in
Harleian Miscellany, ed. Park, vol. 9, 84ff., 86.
(103) Della Casa, Galateo, 4 and see above, Ch. 4, p. 113.
(104) Cyvile and Uncyvile Life, 34–41; Elizabeth I discouraged noble

retinues at court (see Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, ch. 5, 208) but
Page 47 of 52
after a journey to England in 1610, the Duke of Wurtemberg noted

many noble retainers at court (W. Brenchley Rye, England as Seen by
Foreigners in the days of Elizabeth I and James I (London, 1865), 13).
(105) B. Jonson, Every Man out of His Humour, Act 1, Scene 2, in Works
of Jonson, ed. Herford and Simpson, 445.
(106) John Stephens, Satyrical Essayes, Characters and Others (London,

1615), Char. X, 171.
(107) Cyvile and Uncyvile Life, 57.
(108) P. Borsay, ‘The English Urban Renaissance…c.1680–c.1760’, Social

History, 1–2 (1976–7); P. Clark and P. Slack, English Towns in Transition
1500–1700 (Oxford, 1976), ch. 5, 69; ch. 8, 114.
(110) Clcland, Hero-Paideia, bk. 5, ch. 9, 192.
(111) Sir Walter Raleigh, Instructions to his Son in Practical Wisdom, 8.
(112) Wandesford, Book of Instructions, 36–7.
(113) Walker, Of Education, pt. 1, ch. 5, 22; pt. 2, ch. 5, 267.
(114) Allestree, The Gentleman's Calling, 81.
(115) Henry Percy, Advice to his Son, ed. Harrison, 62. The same
development of fear of social pollution is discussed in Mark Motley,
Becoming a French Aristocrat: The Education of the Court Nobility,
1580–1719 (Princeton, 1990), 62–3 and 71–2.
(116) Remarques Upon Remarques. or, A Vindication of the

Conversations of the Town (London, 1673), 118.
(117) Edmund Bolton, The Cities Advocate: Whether Apprenticeship

extinguisheth Gentry (London, 1629).
(118) Caleb Trenchfield, A Cap of Gray Hairs for a Green Head (4th edn.,
1688).
(120) Dare, Counsellor Manners his Last Legacy, 14.
(121) Fiston, School of Good Manners, sig. B3r.
Page 48 of 52
(123) Art of Complaisance, ch. 14, 146–7.
(124) S. R., Court of Civill Courtesie, ch. 10, 37.
(127) Matthew Hale, Advice to his Grandchildren, in Practical Wisdom,

203.
(128) Francis Osborne, Traditional Memoirs, in Secret History, ed. Scott,

vol. 1, 209.
(129) Dekker, Gul's Horn-Booke, in Inedited Tracts, ed. Hazlitt, ch. 4, 35–
8.
(130) Peacham, The Art of Living in London, in Harleian Miscellany, vol.

9, 86–7.
(134) Hale, Advice to his Grandchildren, in Practical Wisdom, 217.
(135) John Evelyn, A Character of England, in Harleian Miscellany, vol.

10, 198.
(136) Wright, Passions of the Minde, sig. A4v.
(137) For a thorough treatment of the decline of hospitality see F. Heal,

‘The Idea of Hospitality in Early Modern England’, Past and Present,
102 (1984), 66–93 and the much fuller survey in Heal, Hospitality in
Early Modern England (1990), chs. 2–3.
(138) Archibald Campbell, Instructions to a Son (London, 1661), ch. 6,

80.
(139) James Stanley, Lord Derby's Second Letter to his Son (Chetham
Soc., 70, 1867), 44 and 46. Cp. Cecil, Certaine Precepts, precepts III
and IV, 11–12.
(140) Anon., Remarques on the Humours and Conversations of the Town

(London, 1673), 130.
(141) Thomas Overbury, Sir Thomas Overburie his Wife etc., sig. (D5)v.
Page 49 of 52
(142) Art of Complaisance, ch. 5, 33.
(143) The Stanley Papers, Pt. III (Chetham Soc., 66, 1867), p. xx; for the
splendour of Derby's household, see ibid., p. xxiii.
(144) Girouard, Life in the English Country House, 30.
(145) See, for example, Thomas Darrell, A Short Discourse of the Life of
Serving Men (London, 1578); Anon., A Health to the Gentlemanly
Profession of Serving Men (London, 1598); William Bas, Sword and
Buckler; a Serving Man's Defence (London, 1602).
(146) Girouard, Life in the English Country House, ch. 5.
(147) Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, ch. 3, 67; Stone, The Causes of the
English Revolution (London, 1972), pt. 2, 72.
(148) M. E. James, Family, Lineage and Civil Society: A Study of Society,

Politics, and Mentality in the Durham Region 1500–1640 (Oxford,
1974), ch. 4 and conclusion.
(149) Ibid. 183–94.
(150) See J. Russell Major, ‘ “Bastard Feudalism” and the Kiss: Changing
Social Mores in Late Medieval and Early Modern France’, Journal of
Interdisciplinary History, 17 (1986–7), 510–35, csp. 525–6.
(151) Higford, Institutions, pt. 1.
(152) Ibid., pt. 2, 29.
(153) Ibid., pt. 2, 30.
(154) Ibid., pt. 2, 43–8 and pt. 3.
(155) For a full list of classical texts translated into English at this
period see H. B. Lathrop, Translations from the Classics into English
from Caxton to Chapman 1477–1620 (New York, 1967), 310–24.
(156) See R. Mitchell, ‘Italian Nobiltà and the English Idea of the
Gentleman’, English Miscellany, 9 (1958); the Spanish humanist
Osorio's treatise, Of Civill and Christian Nobility was translated in
1576.
(157) See Kipling, Triumph of Honour, chs. 1–2.
Page 50 of 52
(158) For the educational philosophy of Erasmus, Vives, and others see J.
Simon, Education and Society in Tudor England (Cambridge, 1966), ch.
3.
(159) See above Ch. 1, p. 36n.
(160) For a calculation of the numbers of offices in the crown's gift, as

compared with the number of potential aspirants, see W. T. MacCaffrey,
‘Place and Patronage in Elizabethan Politics’, in Elizabethan
Government and Society: Essays Presented to Sir John Neale, ed. S. T.
Bindoff, J. Hurstfield, and C. H. Williams (London, 1961), 95–126.
(161) E. Rickert, The Babees Book, introduction, suggests that De

Civilitate was used in the household education of one of Henry VIII's
wards of court.
(162) Sir Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum (1583), ed. L. Alston

(Cambridge, 1906), 30.
(163) The quantitative evidence for this development is summarised by

M. H. Curtis, Oxford and Cambridge in Transition 1558–1642 (Oxford,
1959), ch. 3.
(164) See, for example, the complaints of Henry Peacham in The

Compleat Gentleman, where he compares the educational attainments
of the English gentry unfavourably with those of the French (sig. Br–
B2r).
(165) Letter to Spenser in Works of Harvey, ed. Grosart, vol. 1, 137.

These works are respectively Vienne, Philosopher of the Court; Della
Casa, Galateo; Castiglione, The Courtyer, S. R., The Courte of Civill
Courtesie; and Guazzo, The Civile Conversation.
(166) Gerard Legh, The Accidence of Armory (1576), quoted in J.

Nichols, The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth
(London, 1823), vol. 1, 131. Cp. Sir John Fortescue, De Laudibus Legum
Anglie, ed. and translated by S. B. Chrimes (Cambridge, 1942), 117–21.
(167) Ellis, The Gentile Sinner, 256.
(168) Lupton, London and the Countrie, in Harleian Miscellany, vol. 9,

316–17.
(169) For the literary and recreational aspects of education in the Inns
see W. R. Prest, The Inns of Court under Elizabeth and the early Stuarts
Page 51 of 52
(London, 1973), ch. 7, 153–6. For the decline of the gentry attendance
at the Inns see ibid., ch. 2, 40–6.
(170) Sir George Buck, The Third Universitie of England. or A Treatise of

all the colledges, auncient schooles of priviledge, and of houses of
learning, and liberall Arts within and about the most famous cittie of
London, appended to John Stow, The Annales or General Chronicle of
England (London, 1605). The same kind of development in Paris, and
noble use of Academies, is discussed in Motley, Becoming a French
Aristocrat, ch. 3.
Page 52 of 52
The Civility of Speech and Writing

Anna Bryson

Print ISBN-13: 9780198217657
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198217657.001.0001

Anna Bryson
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198217657.003.0005

The civility of language in no sense constitutes a separate code. Basic
rules of voice control and vocabulary are part and parcel of elementary
bodily controls and techniques, forms and formulae of verbal salutation
and deference are inseparable from their gestural and spatial
accompaniments, and, in the most sophisticated courtly images of
graceful conduct, speech and demeanour are combined expressions of
grace. Yet the extent of special prescription about speech in 16th- and
17th-century conduct literature, and what seems to be a new
preoccupation in this period with the social implications of language,
justify some separate treatment of verbal and epistolary civility. This
chapter deals with the particular importance which was increasingly
accorded to skill in the use of language as a mark of gentlemanly
‘civility’ during the early modern period, a development which
highlights the intellectual and political influences on change in the
forms of sociability.
Keywords: language, civility, early modern period
Page 1 of 51
‘Speech,’ wrote Ben Jonson, ‘is the only benefit man hath to expresse
his excellencie of mind above other creatures. It is the Instrument of
Society.’1 Questions of language, its past development and present use,
were central to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century conception of
the overall ‘civility’ of a society. Thus the later sixteenth-century French
historian Henri de La Popelinière noted that the Greeks had originally
defined barbarism in terms of language, and had only subsequently
applied the term to a wide range of alien and inferior customs;
Popelinière himself went on to list sweetness of language among the
elements of civility.2 Richard Eden, the compiler of accounts of travel to
the New World, in 1562 voiced the opinion that ‘once all tongues were
barbarous and needy before the knowledge and invention of things.’3
The notion that refinement of language in poetry had been a civilizing
agent in primitive society was taken up from classical myth and
explored by Puttenham, who wrote that poetry had been the means
whereby ‘rude and savage people’ had been drawn ‘to a more civil and
orderly life’.4
At the level of everyday civility in the sense of good manners, the

question of ‘correct’ modes of speech (and, to a lesser extent, of
writing) was likewise one of considerable concern. In the elementary
child-centred texts of Erasmus, Seager, and Fiston, attention to speech
was very limited, largely because of the principle, enunciated by
Erasmus, that ‘sylence becommeth women but rather chyldren.’5 In the
more sophisticated manuals for the young adult, however, speech is
frequently the main area of (p.152) prescription: voice production,
articulation, vocabulary, forms and formulae of verbal and epistolary
deference, and general principles of conversation are all covered. By
far the greater part of the Galateo is concerned with the correction of
all kinds of conversational faults. S. R.'s Courte of Civill Courtesie
largely presents model examples of spoken responses appropriate in a
range of social situations. Youth's Behaviour includes three chapters
specifically on rules of address and social ‘discourse’, and much
incidental comment on speech in others. Courtin's Rules of Civility
continually refers to deference in speech, and in the second, enlarged
edition of the book which appeared in 1678, the original small section
on letters has been filled out to nearly a hundred pages. Finally, The Art
of Complaisance of 1673 is almost exclusively concerned with a series
of different types of conversation suitable for the polite gentleman. Not
only courtesy manuals but also general writings on the gentlemanly
conduct of life show contemporary interest in defining the best modes
of speech. Educational treatises from Elyot's Governour to Walker's Of
Education devote much space to ‘discourse’ and parental advice
literature rarely omits special mention of social and ethical rules of
Page 2 of 51
conversation. In addition, there emerged in the later sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries a genre of specialized handbooks of speech and
epistolary style, which gave precepts and models for the use of
language for social rather than purely literary or academic purposes.6
It would obviously be artificial to divorce consideration of the civility of

language from all the other aspects of behaviour within the idea of
civility, and in previous chapters I have dealt with many issues bearing
on address as well as demeanour. The civility of language in no sense
constitutes a separate code. Basic rules of voice control and vocabulary
are part and parcel of elementary bodily controls and techniques, forms
and formulae of verbal salutation and deference are inseparable from
their gestural and spatial accompaniments, and, in the most
sophisticated courtly images of graceful conduct, speech and
demeanour are combined expressions of grace. Yet the extent of special
prescription about speech in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
conduct literature, and what seems to be a new preoccupation in this
period with the social implications of language, justify some separate
treatment of verbal and epistolary civility in this study.
Late medieval books of courtesy contain very little prescription on

matters of speech, and none at all on letter-writing. Their advice is
limited to (p.153) a few elementary points of social morality and
prudence, such as the condemnation of lying, quarrelling, and tale-
bearing, and to the reiteration of the special obligation of cheerful and
peaceable words at table. Russell went no further than prohibiting
‘groggynge’ (twitting) and ‘atwyngynge’ (blaming) ‘fellowes that be at
the mete’.7 One fifteenth-century book advocates polite greeting of
strangers with the formula ‘Syre, Go[d] you save,’ and a general
meekness in speech and a capacity to listen in silence to superiors;8
another deprecates chattering, mocking, and ribaldry.9 Proverbial
wisdom in support of cautious speech is often cited.10 This kind of
advice—moral, prudential, and essentially negative in that it gives little
idea of the modes and matter of courteous speech—also appears in the
most elementary sixteenth-century courtesy books. In De Civilitate
Erasmus warns against contending, reviling, boasting, and
indiscretion11 in precepts which can be paralleled in much earlier texts
and in the enduring tradition of the Distiches of Cato. Seager brings
together many age-old precepts in a very short section on ‘How to
behave they selfe in talkynge with any man’: the child must listen
carefully, answer without fidgeting, avoid giggling and stuttering, and
accompany his words with the doffing of his hat.12 Yet other sixteenth-
century courtesy books devote a great deal of detailed prescription to
Page 3 of 51
good manners in speech, and this seems to constitute a new

development in the theory of social conduct.
The absence of detailed prescription on speech in fifteenth-century

courtesy books does not, admittedly, mean that late medieval
aristocratic society had no tradition of refined speech beyond a few
simple rules. Gracious speech was part of the chivalric ideal, and a
highly wrought language of compliment and courtship was developed in
the literature of courtly love and probably practised to a certain
extent.13 But what is striking about early modern accounts of good
manners in speech is the interest in discourse and conversation as
social activities which are important in themselves, not just incidental
to the ritual of hospitality or subordinate to the game of courtship.
Della Casa's main concern was to teach how to behave in a ‘company’
which was consistently defined only in terms of its recreational,
conversational activity. Prescriptions for table (p.154) manners and
general bodily demeanour are given in the Galateo mainly as a
preliminary and necessary condition for participation in social
discourse; and advice about the telling of anecdotes and jesting takes
up more space than advice on bodily decency. This emphasis found an
immediate English echo in S. R.'s Courte of Civill Courtesie, which is
concerned with the mechanics of polite verbal exchange in ‘good
company’ as well as prudent conduct in ‘bad company’. How and with
whom the young man can initiate a conversation, the principles of
jesting, and the phrases with which to respond to praise, taunts, and
teasing are all covered. In later works, this emphasis is maintained and
elaborated with the development of the concept of ‘conversation’. The
concept of ‘civil conversation’ was imported into England in the later
sixteenth century, and was popularized partly by Guazzo's treatise of
that name.14 In Guazzo's work, the term did not merely denote the
exchange of views and social pleasantries; it involved ‘behaviour’ as
well as ‘words’, and domestic and familial life as well as public or
recreational activity. But even Guazzo's usage often veers towards the
restricted sense of polite social conversation. The fourth and last book
of his treatise was designed as an illustration of some of the principles
of conduct discussed in the first three. It is an account of a supper
party where six gentlemen and four ladies amuse each other with witty
and decorous debate on such standard Renaissance topics as the nature
of love, happiness, and social virtues and vices. As in the case of
Castiglione's Courtyer, entirely cast in the form of extended, leisured
conversation between friends and acquaintances, the form of Guazzo's
Book IV is no mere literary device; the balance of wit and earnestness,
the discussion of general issues leavened with a gracious banter of
personalities, was an ideal in itself. For Guazzo as for Castiglione,
Page 4 of 51
ideals of conduct, courtly virtue, or ‘conversation’ in the wider sense

are focused and exemplified in the relaxed and (apparently) informal,
refined and witty discourse of friends which was also, in Italian,
designated a conversazione.15 In seventeenth-century courtesy and
conduct literature published in England, the word ‘conversation’ takes
hold and, although it retains flexibility of meaning, veers ever more
towards identification with ‘discourse’ and, moreover, a discourse
which is largely sociable and polite rather than practical. Youth's
Behaviour is subtitled Decencie in Conversation amongst Men, the term
here denoting social intercourse in general, and the matter and manner
of polite speech is dealt with in a special chapter ‘Of Discourse’. In The
Art of Complaisance, subtitled The Means to Oblige in Conversation,
the subject-matter is nearly all concerned with sociable talk. In
Walker's Of (p.155) Education, bodily controls, table manners, and the
protocol of visits are grouped in the chapter ‘Of Civility’, and there is a
separate chapter ‘Of Conversation and Discourse’ dealing with the
choice of companions and different types of discourse.16 Walker lists
the possible subjects of conversation: first, ‘Raillery and Mirth’; second,
‘Other men's lives and actions’; third, ‘Occasional, as History, News &
etc.’; fourth, ‘Erudition and Edification’; and fifth, ‘Business’—matters
of practical concern to oneself or one's friends.17 It is significant that he
places practical business last. People must, of course, always have
amused each other with gossip and anecdotes, and sociably exchanged
views, but from the later sixteenth century onwards, this activity was
increasingly viewed as a social art, worthy of systematic analysis and
prescription.
A number of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writings were

designed, in part at least, as aids to sociable conversation and letter-
writing. Thus Thomas Twyne's The Schoolemaster, or Teacher of Table
Philosophie (1576) was a compendium of table talk containing long
disquisitions on food, model discourses on the duties of each estate,
and an immense number of jokes and anecdotes. W. B.'s A Helpe to
Discourse (1618) was a small encyclopaedia of well-turned phrases,
pieces of useful information on entertaining and edifying topics, and
lists of classical and historical allusions.18 William Fulwood's The
Enimie of Idleness. Teaching the maner and stile how to endite,
compose and write all sorts of Epistles and Letters (1568) was a
practical rather than a literary and academic guide to letter-writing,
which included advice on the general format and style of letters, and a
large number of specimens. Angel Day's The English Secretarie (1586)
covered much the same ground.19 From the 1630s, there appeared a
number of ‘Academies of Complements’, collections of high-flown
phrases, model dialogues and letters, which, while they were
Page 5 of 51
sometimes principally amatory, as in Cupid's Schoole: Wherein

Yongmen and Maids may learn divers sorts of new witty and Amrous
Complements (1632), were often of more general social application, as
in The Mirror of Complements Or a pleasant and profitable Academy,
for all such as have occasion to frequent the Court, or to converse with
persons of wealth and quality (1635).20 Thomas Blount's The Academie
of Eloquence (p.156) (1653) combined an account of the art of rhetoric
with lists of fine phrases and a few models for amatory and polite
letters.
It is often difficult to determine how far such texts were genuinely

manuals of instruction. Letter collections such as Nicholas Breton's A
Poste with a Madde Packet of Letters (1602), which inspired many
imitations over the next fifty years, were primarily amusements; the
letters were simply vehicles for character-writing and anecdote.21
Twyne's Schoolemaster was in many ways simply a more ponderous and
academic version of the popular jest-books, often crude and bawdy,
which were published everywhere in Europe throughout the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries.22 Even collections of compliments were as
much diversions as didactic manuals. It is also clear that more serious,
obviously didactic texts such as the epistolary manuals of Fulwood and
Day were concerned with letter-writing as an academic skill adapted to
official and other practical ends, rather than principally as a polite
social activity. It is, in the first place, difficult to make a firm distinction
between entertaining and didactic text in this period. Court literature,
or literature with pretensions to courtliness, always combined
entertainment with a conscious concern with standards of graceful
discourse. John Lyly's Eupbues; The Anatomy of Wit (1578) and Sidney's
Arcadia (1588), love-stories full of conversation and debate on stock
Renaissance topics, set standards of linguistic style, wit, and
compliment at the Elizabethan court.23 Under the Stuarts, translations
of French courtly novels fulfilled the same dual role of entertainment
and model for polite discourse.24 The vogue for ‘Academies of
Complements’ was, in fact, closely connected with the vogue for French
novels such as d'Urfée's Astrée (translated in part in 1620, and in full in
1657), in which the same kind of polite phraseology was elaborated. In
the second place, there is an interesting tendency during the
seventeenth century for the unambiguously didactic manual of speech-
and letter-writing to become less concerned with the academic form or
substantial practical purposes of discourse, and more concerned with
criteria of politeness.
Page 6 of 51
(p.157) Jean Robertson, in her survey of sixteenth- and seventeenth-

century epistolary manuals, sees 1640, the date of publication of John
Massinger's translation of La Serre's The Secretary in Fashion, as a
turning-point. After this date, she writes, ‘letter-writing became less an
academic accomplishment or frivolous diversion and was increasingly
associated with the teaching of good manners generally and the art of
courtship.’25 It is, perhaps, dubious to see a sharp break occurring in
1640, and it is certainly misleading to see love-letters as merely a minor
preoccupation before this date, but La Serre's Secretary certainly
exemplified a new emphasis on polite aspects of letter-writing within an
increasingly well-defined framework of polite discourse in general.
First, La Serre devoted much more space than previous advisers to the
intricacies of the social deference expressed in the format and general
terminology of letters. Fulwood, for example, had given relatively brief
instructions on these matters, distinguishing between the superlative
terms of respect required in addressing superiors, the ‘familiar
reverence’ to be employed with equals, and the plainness reserved for
inferiors.26 But in The Secretary in Fashion many more such rules are
given; the reader is advised how to express different relationships of
rank, acquaintanceship, and kinship between writer and recipient, in
terms of the spacing of superscription, text, and subscription, and the
degree of abbreviation used in salutation.27
The same conventions, with further additions, were repeated in

Courtin's Rules of Civility.28 Second, the kind of letter envisaged by La
Serre was, in general, the letter written principally to convey polite
sentiments. Fulwood had divided letters into the theological, the
ethical, the official, the commendatory, the admonitory, the amatory,
and the domestic and familiar;29 his specimens were all given the
context of a clear practical purpose or were academic performances.
Thomas Gainsford, in The Secretaries Studie: Containing new familiar
Epistles: or Directions, for the formall, orderly, and judicious inditing of
Letters (1616), includes some categories of letter which are mainly
friendly or ritual social communications, such as ‘wittie’, ‘chiding’, or
‘excusing’ letters, or letters ‘giving thanks’; but much space is devoted
to the category of ‘household business’, with a number of specimens
dealing with farming, house-building, and letting lodgings. In La Serre's
manual, however, nearly all the model letters are stereotyped exercises
in social compliment: messages of thanks, condolence, and
congratulation, and mere assertions of social acquaintance and
goodwill (p.158) predominate. His letters were not then simply politely
written; they were ‘courtesies’ in themselves.
Page 7 of 51
Concentration on letters which are themselves ‘courtesies’ and

‘complements’ was paralleled in the selection appended to Thomas
Blount's The Academie of Eloquence, and was characteristic of the
whole tradition of ‘academies of complements’. It does not necessarily
indicate that the exclusively ‘complemental’ letter was very common in
practice, since polite forms would no doubt be given a more material
context according to the specific needs of the reader. But the fact that
the business of writing letters could, in these texts, appear dominated
by considerations of courtesy was a consequence of the new
significance attached to ‘conversation’ and ‘discourse’ as arts regulated
by civility, which has been noted in the more general courtesy manuals.
In this ‘complemental’ literature, the rules of letter-writing and those of
polite speech converged. In The Academy of Complements (1640), for
example, ‘complemental letters’ are presented together with short
model dialogues illustrating correct phrases for use in dinner-party
invitations and in seating the guests at table. La Serre makes a specific
parallel between social ‘Visits’ and what he calls ‘letters of Visit’, which
‘serve to continue friendship between men when they are absent, and
supply the place of Visits we would afford a Friend if he were near at
hand’.30 Courtin asserted the general principle that polite letter-writing
was the epistolary counterpart of polite discourse when he wrote:
The same rules to be observ'd in our behaviour and discourse, are

to be observ'd in our writing, which is the discourse of the absent:
wherefore we must make use of the same expressions of
Friendship and respect in our Letters, that we are oblig'd to in our
discourse, if we desire to be accounted civil, and persons of good
education.31
The extravagant use of verbal and epistolary compliment was not

without its critics, and the specific phraseology of compliment was very
much subject to fashion. From the 1630s, French styles of compliment
were in vogue, like French fashion in dress, and could change rapidly;
thus the author of The Academy of Complements could scoff at La
Serre's manual as ‘the secretary now out of fashion’.32 But, despite the
ephemeral and frivolous character of much material in these manuals of
polite formulae, their popularity was a measure of change evident in
more sober and enduring courtesy books. Polite conversation and
discourse had come to be regarded as a key social activity, loaded with
implications for the prestige (p.159) of participants, and therefore
increasingly subject to conscious standards and rules. This change was
a major aspect of what I have earlier defined as a shift from modes of
lordship to modes of urbanity in the self-image and social practice of
the élite.33 In the restricted world of the late medieval noble household,
Page 8 of 51
sociable discourse (although no doubt a pervasive form of diversion)

was incidental to the great rituals of service, principally in the banquet,
whereby status was expressed. In the more open-ended world of ‘civil
conversation’ envisaged by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers,
and in the major institutions of that world—the court and the city—
polite discourse became itself a central social ritual. Polite conversation
was the most sophisticated means whereby ‘civil’ gentlemen could
express and elaborate their common culture in an exclusive social
milieu; and polite verbal and epistolary forms and formulae proliferated
to provide the ‘civil’ gentleman with a much expanded repertoire of
signs by which to orientate himself in an increasingly crowded and
complex ‘civil society’. From the later sixteenth century onward,
conduct literature for the adult depicts social life as a life full of
prudent, graceful, and civil discourse.
Close examination of the standards and rules of civil speech and writing
to be found in courtesy manuals reveals, as might be expected, very
much the same underlying themes and principles as have been
analysed earlier in rules of demeanour. What are perceived as
distortions of voice, indecencies of vocabulary attributed to the lower
classes, and insensitivity to others in the company are all condemned in
the same way as physical distortion, indecency, and insensitivity. Thus
Della Casa condemns utterance that is ‘hoarse’ or ‘shrill’,34 and warns
against the ‘base…speech’ of ‘ye scum, as it were, and the froth of the
meanest and vilest sorte of people, Launderers and Hucksters’. Matters
which are ‘vyle, vaine, fowle’ or ‘lothsome’ are not fit subjects for
gentlemanly talk.35 Conversational insensitivities, rather than basic
indecencies, are Della Casa's main concern: the individual's discourse
must always be adjusted to the intellectual level of his companions, and
vocabulary must be plain and easily intelligible. The subject of
discourse must also be chosen to suit the company, and ‘we must not…
reherse fryers sermones to young gentlewomen when they are disposed
to sporte them selves.’36 Boasting of one's own nobility or achievements
is condemned as a social rather than simply a moral fault, because it
implies an insulting desire to ‘contend with’ or overcome the
company.37 Similarly, those who ‘discourse lyke Parleament men,
(p.160) setteling them selves, as it were, in a place of Judgement’ are
exalting themselves above their listeners, as is the man who offers

unsolicited advice.38 Direct contradiction is clearly offensive, and ‘he
that sekes to be well thought of, and would be taken for a plesaunt and
good companion, must not so redily use these speaches: It was not so:
And, Nay: it is as I tell you, I wil lay a wager with you.’39 The
ostentatiously diffident speech is, however, embarrassing, and to be
avoided as much as the insulting.40 If the listener is not to be offended
Page 9 of 51
or embarrassed, he is also not to be bored by conversation of a tedious,

personal nature, and Della Casa is contemptuous of bores who ‘never
have other thing in their mouthe, than their children, their wife, and
their nourse’, and of those who are always talking of their dreams.41
Most of Della Casa's precepts on the civility of speech find

corroboration in other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century courtesy
books. The need for smooth, clear, distinct enunciation was often
stressed, together with insistence on preserving a mean between high
and low pitch, or fast and slow speech. Erasmus writes, ‘Let thy voyce
be softe and styll, not high and clamorous lyke carters, nor so base that
he unto whom thou speakest may not heare thee. Let the speche not be
hastye and over run thy wyt but softe and open.’42 Youth's Behaviour
contains the same advice; and the Earl of Bedford was echoing a
commonplace of the manuals when he advised his sons of the
importance of ‘a graceful manner of speaking without stammering,
lisping, stopping or repetition’.43 Manner of speech was regarded,
according to the principle of ‘representation’, as a clear indication of a
man's inner civil qualities, and therefore, like his dress and demeanour,
had to express the inner refinement of his personality which supposedly
justified his status. Thus Guazzo insisted that
by the sound of words we gather the inward qualities and

conditions of the man. And for that we are so much the more
esteemed of, by how much our Civilitie differeth from the nature
and fashion of the vulgar sort, it is requisite that we inforce our
tongue to make manifest that difference in two principall things:
in the pleasant grace, and the profound gravitic of words.44
Clamorousness, the swallowing of words, stammering, and uncertainty

in delivery were all considered to show a vulgar subjection to impulse
and personal eccentricity inconsistent with the self-mastery of the ‘civil’
gentleman.
(p.161) On the issue of avoiding matters ‘vyle, vaine, fowle’ or

‘lothsome’, Della Casa's precepts, and the similar comments of other
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century didactic authors, require careful
interpretation, for more than one criterion of indecency is involved.
There is first the degree to which restraint and euphemism are
required in mentioning the bodily functions, principally excretion and
micturition, which are themselves subject to prohibition. This problem
has largely been covered in Chapter 3, where I have argued that it is
difficult to find firm evidence of a rising level of shame about ‘the office
of nature’, and that a reasonably consistent degree of euphemism is
Page 10 of 51
present in the language of courtesy writers themselves throughout the

period. Erasmus was the only adviser to offer precise directions about
speech related to these bodily functions:
If the cause requyre that he must name any membre pryve, let
hym cover it with honest circumstance (circuitione verecunda)…
[and] yf it chaunce to speake of vyle thynges, as vomite, a draught
[fart] or a tord he must saye before save reverence.45
This precept certainly indicates more tolerance than Courtin's absolute

prohibition of the mention, as well as performance in public of ‘certain
kinds of actions’;46 but it is implausible to argue for major change in
the century and a half between De Civilitate and The Rules of Civility,
since Courtin's contemporary Josiah Dare, who advised modesty in the
relief of nature in reasonably frank terms, could unselfconsciously
condemn overfilled glasses as ‘piss-pot measure’.47 It may be of some
significance that whereas Dekker criticized his Jacobean ‘gul’ for the
solecism of demanding a close-stool when rising from table, and of
asking his fellows ‘what pamphlets and poems a man might think fittest
to wipe his tail with’,48 the reworking of The Gul's Horn-Booke in The
Character of a Town Gallant (1675) omitted these references. Yet
scatological humour in young male gallant company seems unlikely to
have disappeared during the seventeenth century.
The notion of the ‘vyle, vaine, fowle’ and ‘lothsome’ included not only
the scatological, but also the sexually explicit or suggestive. Sexual
conduct was a subject generally avoided in manuals dealing principally
with good manners, although issues of sexual propriety certainly
underlay prescriptions for special politeness with women. Conduct
literature for women stressed above all the need for a shamefast
demeanour to exhibit and protect chastity, but although female modesty
and chastity could be (p.162) regarded as a mark of civil society in the
widest sense, correct female behaviour was justified by direct appeal to
a moral standard rather than to manners alone.49 Similarly, the
warnings in general prudential and ethical advice to men, such as
Martyn's Youth's Instruction, against loose talk leading to sexual
licence, are moral, and not markedly affected by a sense of the social
unacceptability of such conduct as against its sinfulness. Martyn urges
his son to chastity, and to the avoidance of ‘wanton, lascivious or
uncomely’ talk and of the company of ‘loose’ or ‘suspected’ women.50
Della Casa does, however, suggest that sexually explicit conversation
can be embarrassing rather than simply immoral, and advocates careful
circumlocution; for example, ‘She lay with him: and she satisfied his
desire with her person’ rather than ‘other termes…to filthie to heare’.51
Della Casa's English translator of 1663 repeated his prohibition of blunt
Page 11 of 51
terminology and the double entendre, writing that ‘it is not decent to
suggest to the imagination anything that is obscene or foul.’52 The
development of the word ‘obscene’ from late sixteenth-century usage,
in which it denotes the generally repulsive, to a later seventeenth-
century usage, in which it is more narrowly applied to the sexually
explicit,53 may suggest increasing awareness of the socially disgusting,
rather than just the morally shocking aspects of lewd speech.
Blasphemy and oaths, like ‘lewd’ talk, were condemned as immoral

rather than uncivil.54 In fact, moralistic authors implied that they were
combating a social fashion for profanity rather than asserting a sine
qua non of social acceptability when they criticized profanity. Allestree
called oaths ‘a profuse embroidery’ on everyday gallant conversation,
and earlier authors had complained that profanity was used as a kind of
verbal ornamentation.55 But except where moral standards are invoked
directly, it is as misleading to look for an absolute standard of verbal
decency as it is to try to pinpoint an absolute standard of physical
propriety. ‘Decency’ in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century usage was
much closer in meaning to (p.163) its root ‘decorum’ in denoting the
apt and fitting than was the later usage with its particular overtones of
respectable avoidance of crudity. The persistent use of this word in
relation to language therefore showed a sharp awareness of the
constant need to adjust vocabulary and subject to company, place, and
time. George Puttenham, in The Arte of English Poesie, systematically
expounded the theory of ‘decency’ in conduct as well as poetry, and
sought to show that few statements were inherently indecent; thus,
‘Pleasant speeches…savouring some skurrility and unshamefastness
have now and then a certaine decencie, and well become the speaker to
say, and the hearer to abide.’56 He illustrated this point with two
anecdotes concerning Sir Andrew Flamock, standard-bearer to Henry
VIII, who jested with the king on the subject of farting. Once, passing
off his own fart at the expense of the king, he got away with it; but a
second time, associating farts with the king's mistress, he was
censured.57 In a more serious spirit, Francis Osborne advised his son to
avoid words and Phrases likely to be learned in base company,

least you fall into the error, the Late Archbishop Laud did: who,
though no ill speaker, yet blunted his repute by saying in the star
chamber, Men entered the Church, as a Tinker and his Bitch do an
alc-house.58
The criteria of decency apparent in this anecdote are tangled. There is

the implication that Laud was displaying his ungentlemanly background
in his blunt analogy, but the greatest fault is Laud's error in using blunt
Page 12 of 51
terms in Star Chamber. Ironically, of course, Laud's outburst was

clearly designed to indicate the extremely indecorous demeanour of the
church congregation.
The need to adjust manner and matter of discourse to company is,

indeed, the pervasive theme of writing on sociable discourse during the
seventeenth century, and one aspect of the concern with
‘accommodation’ to the sensitivities of others which has been discussed
in Chapter 4. The flexibility of response required by the principle of
accommodation to some extent undercut the ability of courtesy writers
to give fixed guidelines for discourse. Faret wrote that
it is impossible to prescribe certaine rules how a man should use

his words, by reason of the infinite diversity of encounters which
are in the world, where wee shall hardly finde two spirits that are
altogether like. Wherefore, he that will accommodate himselfe to
the conversation of many, must make use of his owne judgement
for a guide, to the end that knowing the difference of one another,
he (p.164) may at every instant change his language and maximc,
according to the humour of those with whom chance or his
designes have ingaged him.59
Most authors, however, offered some general guidelines. The author of

The Art of Complaisance briefly listed psychological types—the
choleric, the fearful, the confident, etc.—with suggestions as to how to
please them.60 Lingard, in the same way as Della Casa, gave examples
of the worst faults of discourse, indicating the ways in which a man
made himself
ridiculous, tiresome, or unpopular; thus he should not speak with

heat and violence, nor with Reflection upon mens persons nor
with Vanity and Selfepraise: No man therefore should be his own
Historian, that is talke of his own feats, his travels, his
conferences with great men &c. Nor boast of his Descent and
Alliance, nor recount his Treasure, or the manage of his estate, all
of which wears out the greatest patience…and implies a believing
that others are affected and concerned in these things as much as
himself.61
Self-praise, long-windedness, phrases in foreign languages unknown to

the company, tall stories, and any contentiousness which threatens to
turn conversation into a battleground are all regularly condemned by
foreign and English didactic writers; jesting, as will be seen, attracted a
Page 13 of 51
great deal of attention as an activity which required constant control if

it was not to cause offence.62
These general principles of tact seem, in some ways, to be timeless and

universal; but what is interesting is the degree of importance which
they have acquired for late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century
writers. Preoccupation with verbal tact, like the concomitant concern
with possibilities of causing physical disgust in others, showed the
enhanced value placed on a man's general acceptability to his peers
which we have associated with ‘urbane’ values and urban conditions.
But general principles of tact were not the limit of the advice offered by
didactic authors on the civility of language. Discourse at the table was
the subject of special prescription, and later authors maintained the
tradition, evident in medieval courtesy writing, of asserting a special
obligation of cheerful talk at the board. Erasmus prohibited sadness at
table, and Della Casa wrote that one should not put men ‘in minde of
woundes, of sickness, of deathes, of Plagues, or of other doleful
matters’ at their food.63 Antony Stafford, in his advice to Baron Barkely,
pressed the point: ‘At your meate, never so (p.165) much as name
Death, Coffins, or other such mortifying stuffe, for you may chance to
have such mortall Guests, that the feare you strike into their soules may
quite take away their stomakes.’64 This precept still holds, more or less,
in modern English society, as do the general principles of
conversational tact. Less familiar today, or at least less conscious and
elaborate, are the more precise forms and formulae of verbal deference
which sixteenth- and seventeenth-century courtesy writers prescribed
as expressions of distinctions of rank and acquaintance. In the civility of
speech, as in the civility of demeanour and gesture, there existed both a
basic standard of conduct and a code of signs which varied according to
social relationship.
The most obvious element in verbal deference was the use of formal
titles in salutation and discourse. The child or adult was expected not
only to greet a superior or stranger with his proper title, but also to
repeat the title at intervals during the exchange. Thus Fiston wrote ‘in
speaking to any Honourable or Worshipful Person, it is good manners to
repeat now and then the title of his Honour or Worship.’65 Some expert
knowledge was required for the correct use of the titles of notables,
and Youth's Behaviour counsels caution:
Touching the Titles and Attributes which commonly one giveth to

great persons, it is needful to observe the use of times, and of the
Countrey, & to take counsel of them who are versed and
Page 14 of 51
experienced in such things. Also one ought to take heed in

speaking to such an one, that one change not his title, giving unto
him sometimes one, sometimes another, if one be not mistaken at
the first.66
Erasmus suggested a less differentiated everyday usage in advising the

child to use
Som honest title or name of town or dygnyty of hym thou speakest

to. If that pryvate names come not to mynde, name al lerned men
worshipfull maysters, all preestes and monkes reverend fathers,
all companions brethren and frendes: breifly all that be
unknowe[n]; cal them mayster and maystres.67
H. C. Wyld's compilation of greetings from a range of literary sources in

fact shows that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century forms of address
were very diverse in England, various titles of respect and goodwill
with different formulae of ‘Good-Even’, ‘Good Day’, ‘God Save You’, and
so forth, being equally common.68 There was some change over the
period in that, possibly as a result of French influence, ‘Sir’ and
‘Madam’ seem (p.166) to overtake ‘Master’ and ‘Mistress’ as respectful
forms in gallant society and are the forms preferred in ‘Academies of
Complements’.
The dropping or shortening of titles, then as now, was an expression of

familiarity. Dekker's Jacobean gallant, and his descendant, the
Restoration ‘Town-Gallant’, were both presented as engaging in the
boorish one-upmanship of calling a superior by an abbreviated
Christian name; Dekker satirically instructs the gallant to salute any
knight or squire of his acquaintance ‘not by his name of Sir such a one,
or so, but call him Ned, or Jack’.69 Interestingly, however, although it is
the fluid and anonymous environment of the city which makes this
behaviour effective—the gallant's friends do not realise that his
familiarity with the great is spurious—this environment also had the
opposite effect. As has been argued earlier, uncertainty about a man's
real status, likely in the crowded city, bred a tendency to ‘play safe’ in
offering respect. As Della Casa put it:
if wee meete with a man, we never sawe before: with whome,

uppon some occasion, it behoves us to talke: without examining
wel his worthines, most commonly, that wee may not offend in to
little, we give him to much, and call him Gentleman, and
otherwise Sir, although he be but some Soutar or Barbar, or other
Page 15 of 51
suche stuffe: and all bycause he is apareled neate, somewhat

Gentlemanlike.70
For similar reasons, custom dictates that a man say ‘“You” to every one,
that is not a man of very base calling’.71 The gradual disappearance of
the second person singular ‘thou’ form of address from educated
English usage during the seventeenth century probably had something
to do with the pressure in court and city, where polite usage was
generated, to play safe in using the respectful ‘you’ form.72 The
equivalent in conversation to the gestures and spatial conventions
expressing deference was to allow the superior the initiative in
discourse. Erasmus and Fiston insist that the child must not speak until
he is spoken to,73 and for the adult this rule still applies in a moderated
form. In The Courte of Civill Courtesie, it is made clear that it is rude to
broach a conversation with an unknown man much one's superior.
Respectful attention was required of an inferior when talking to a
superior, and he was on no account to interrupt or contradict. As
Cleland put it, ‘if an ancient grave man speake unto you, or one that is
better than yourselfe, harken unto his words with respect, rather like a
(p.167) Scholler to learne, than to a Companion, whom yee maie
contradict.’74 Hale asserted that one must ‘give [superiors] leave to
speak before you, not catching the words out of their mouths before
they have done speaking.’75 Courtin wrote that one should not supply a
word when a superior falters.76 Only the superior has the right to
interrupt a conversation to demand recapitulation, since Youth's
Behaviour tells the reader that ‘Being in the midst of a discourse, ask
not of what one treateth, for that savours of authority.’77
One interesting aspect of verbal deference, which is obviously linked

with prohibitions against direct gaze or the bodily invasion of the
personal space of the superior, was the duty of the inferior to refrain
from blunt or otherwise direct questions. Courtin advised how careful
circumlocution must replace any simple enquiry requiring a direct
answer. Thus, it was rude to ask ‘Sir, will you go into the Army?’ for this
is too ‘irreverent and familiar’, and correct to say ‘I do not question, Sir,
if your health or affairs permit, but you will make your Campagne this
summer.’78 Similarly, direct contradiction had to be replaced by such
phrases as ‘Pardon me Sir, I beg your pardon Madame, if I presume to
say…’79 The immunity of the ‘person of quality’ from direct enquiry
extended, in Courtin's prescriptions, to an enhanced right of privacy as
to his family affairs. Thus,
Page 16 of 51
It is not civil to enquire too particularly, of the husband, after his

wife; unless she has been absent in the country, or desperately ill,
especially, if he be a person for whom we ought to have any
respect…(if we must)…we must not…cry rudely, ‘How old is your
Wife?’ or ‘How does your Wife?’ but observing the quality of the
Husband, say ‘How old is my Lady your Wife? I wish my Lady
President, or my Lady Dutchess much happiness.’80
This precept is to be linked with the enhanced sense of separation

between civil and domestic life which was characteristic of later
seventeenth-century texts,81 and Courtin also counselled against the
use of affectionate family names in public. But the barrier against
direct enquiry varied with rank.82
Courtin's Rules of Civility exhibits a more punctilious and systematic

concern with such forms of respect than does Della Casa's Galateo or
most English courtesy writings. Nevertheless, glimpses of the lavish
(p.168) respect to be paid in speech to superiors are given much earlier
in S. R.'s Courte of Civill Courtesie. S. R. provides the reader with
model responses to ‘courtesies’ and assurances of goodwill from
superiors, equals, and strangers. To a superior, one might say ‘As this
your Lordship's goodnesse riseth of your courtesie without any
desertes, so must I confesse myselfe ever unable to counterpeyse it’; to
an equal, one might say ‘You know I have no curious words in store, but
in plaine terms I thank you, and will requite it if I can’; and to a
stranger, a typical response is ‘Sir, I thank you of this curtasye, and if it
shall lie in me to requite it, I pray you be as boulde with me.’83 In the
response to the superior, the important elements are the recognition
given to title (no direct pronoun can be used), the insistence on the
superior's freedom from any obligation to the inferior, and the inferior's
position of submission, since he cannot repay the debt of gratitude to
the superior. The response to an equal (or ‘but little better being a
friend and familiar’) makes a virtue out of directness and capacity to
requite the debt. The stranger is given the polite title of ‘Sir’, and the
way is left open to a further exchange of courtesies.
This example illustrates not only the recognition of status in speech,

but also the transactional aspect of courtesies and civilities which has
been noted in an earlier chapter.84 The code of deference does not
merely allow the individual to make straightforward recognitions of
differences of rank and acquaintanceship, but has a manipulative
quality as well. Where a gap in status is too great to be modified by
friendship, compliment can, in fact, have a straightforwardly
demonstrative character, because the inferior can never ‘oblige’ the
superior; but in less clear-cut cases, the fictive attribution of superiority
Page 17 of 51
involved in paying lavish compliments and respects imposes an

obligation to a similar response. The literature of ‘complements’ which
emerged under the early Stuarts does not indicate simply an increasing
tendency towards obsequiousness in speech with superiors; it shows
the elaboration of a language of mutual compliment by which a whole
range of social relationships could be adjusted. Vivid evidence of this
manipulative and curiously playful use of verbal respect is given in a
book entitled The Complements and Elegancy of the French Tongue
(1654), which presents polite formulae for a variety of social occasions.
Significantly, the occasions—meetings in the street, visits, small dinner
parties, promenades—are those which I have previously identified with
the growth of ‘civil’ gentlemanly society in court and capital. The
gentleman is instructed, for example, ‘how to gain acquaintance upon a
casual meeting’ with the formula ‘Sir, I esteem it a singular happinesse
to have (p.169) met with such good company, seeing I have by this
means obtained the favour to be acquainted with you.’85 On a first visit,
he is to say:
Sir, when I first had the honour to be acquainted with you: your
courtesie did so far engage me, that I am not able sufficiently to
acknowledge it. I have made bold to come to visit you, and give
thanks for it, and assure you of the continuing ever devoted to
your service.86
The competitive exercise in mutual deference which courtesy writers

both enjoined and sought to limit, in the ceremony of head-baring, is
paralleled here in an extravagantly ‘complemental’ dialogue about
precedence in going in to dinner:
A:
Sir, we will go in when you please.

B:
Sir, I will go in after you.

A:
Sir, you shall walk first if you please.

B:
Sir, I will not commit such an error, I am too conscious of the honour I
owe you.
A:
I pray Sir be not too ceremonious.

B:
Page 18 of 51
I am resolved not to fail in so known a duty.

A:
Sir, you are too fixed in your resolutions. I will therefore go in first to
please and obey you.87
Polite competition in deference was not new, and had found extreme
manifestation in late medieval etiquette,88 but long-standing metaphors
of service and submission were adapted and popularized in the late
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to become the coinage for social
transactions within gallant societies.
Rules of deference in letter-writing were very much allied to those of

discourse. There was, first of all, a straightforward code of epistolary
deference for the man writing to his superior, and this, largely as a
result of French fashion, became more complex from the mid-
seventeenth century onwards. La Serre insisted on the importance of
using the recipient's correct title in the superscription, and prescribed
a progressive abbreviation of title when a man addressed ‘inferiours
and such as are of mean quality’.89 Formulae of subscription were to be
varied according to the rank of the recipient, with service stressed in
the case of a superior and affection in the case of an equal or inferior.
Thus to a superior one should write
(p.170) Your most humble and obedient servant, N. Or your most

obedient and most obliged servant, N; to those of lesser degree
your most humble, and most affectionate servant…And to those of
yet meaner condition, Your affectionate, to do you any courtesie.90
Courtin repeated the same principles, adding the instruction to use a

large sheet of paper for a superior.91 He went further than La Serre in
the precise symbolism of distance and submission which he required
the civil letter-writer to observe in the order and spacing of words. One
is not, for example, to place the words ‘Sir’ or ‘My Lord’ immediately
after the word ‘Me’, nor after the name of another person of ‘inferiour
degree’.92 The more the letter is packaged, according to Courtin, the
more respect is expressed, and thus it is more deferential to place a
letter in a second cover than simply to fold and seal it.93 In the
phraseology of letters, lavish respect to superiors was enjoined;
Fulwood, for example, advocates that superlative terms of praise (but
no more than three in a sentence) should be used to men of higher rank
than the writer. In seventeenth-century manuals, extravagantly
‘complemental’ letters were recommended for use between relative
Page 19 of 51
equals. Thus La Serre advocated that letters of thanks should be

profuse in expressions of gratitude and affection:
Commonly we begin them with a commemoration of the Courtesie

received; then we exaggerate, to shew we know the value of it,
and acknowledging we were not worthy of such a favour having
never done him any obliging service, or if we have, that he hath
now requited it double, treble, or a hundredfold…(and we
continue that) the remembrance of his love shall perpetuallic
remain engraven in the bottom of our hearts, and…we shall have
an everlasting resentment of his courtesie.94
The author of The Academy of Complements suggests an obsequious

reply to another high-flown letter:
When I observe the equall facility and felicity of your expression, I

loath the rudeness and indigestion of mine, and when I consider
the pith and plenitude of your lines, I look upon the emptiness and
inanity of my own with much indignation.95
'Complemental’ letters were also presented as a means to express,

while sugaring over, reproaches to patrons or friends who have failed to
respond to requests, or have not maintained civil communication.96
(p.171) Epistolary compliments, like ‘complemental’ forms in discourse,
were ever more self-consciously presented as a currency used in

establishing and maintaining social relationships within civil society. As
such, they showed a marked tendency to inflation, limited only by the
rule that too much hyperbole, at least to superiors, was insulting.97
In surveying the precepts of courtesy writers on diction, decency,

principles of accommodation, and forms of respect in discourse, I have
done little more than fill out the analysis of the sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century code of civility which has been attempted in
earlier chapters. All of these show, like other precepts of civility, the
new concern with the gentleman's need to distance himself from the
plebeian, integrate himself into the society of his peers, and establish
polite relationships within this society, which I have associated with
‘modes of urbanity’ and the expanding environment of court and city.
Norms of speech and writing were, however, more central to the ideal
of the ‘civil’ gentleman than my treatment has so far suggested. The
code of civility was closely linked to the self-image and ideology of the
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century élite, and it is impossible to
understand the norms of speech put forward by courtesy writers
Page 20 of 51
without exploration of the importance attached to mastery of discourse

within the education and ideology of the early modern gentleman.
In the academic education increasingly adopted by the English gentry

during the sixteenth century, questions of style and facility in written
and spoken English, as well as Latin, came to occupy an important
position. By the end of the century, Francis Bacon was to criticize the
universities for their surviving arid scholasticism, but also for a more
recent obsession with modes of speech which led men ‘to hunt more
after words than matter, and more after the choiceness of the phrase,
and the round and clean composition of the sentence, and the sweet
falling of the clauses…than after the weight of the matter’.98 The extent
and chronology of the ‘humanist’ impact on sixteenth-century education
has been the object of some controversy, but there was certainly a shift
of emphasis at the level of secondary education from logic to grammar,
and at the universities from logic and metaphysics to rhetoric.99
Although both grammar and rhetoric had been part of the medieval
curriculum, these subjects changed in character as they became more
prominent during the sixteenth century, (p.172) becoming less adjuncts
of logic and more ends in themselves. Behind this development was the
overwhelming interest of humanist scholars and educationalists in
questions of classical elegance and purity in language, in reaction to
what was viewed as the linguistic ineptitude of the schoolmen.100
Rhetoric in schools and universities was, of course, principally Latin
rhetoric, but, by the early seventeenth century, English grammars, with
examples of the best modern English style, were being produced in
schools.101
The extraordinary complexity of the classificatory framework and

terminology taught in grammar and rhetoric makes these subjects, at
first sight, academic disciplines remote from everyday speech or
obvious practical purpose. Thus rhetoric was divided into five main
categories—invention (the subject-matter of discourse), disposition (the
order of points of argument), elocution (amplification and
ornamentation of speech), memory, and pronunciation (delivery,
expression, and gesture). Figures of speech within the category of
elocution were divided into figures of thought, such as definition,
distinction, division, etymology, cause, effect, antecedent, consequence,
circumstances, comparison, etc.; figures appealing to emotion, such as
exclamation, interrogation, and vivid description; and approximately a
hundred ornamental figures of speech and two dozen special tropes of
words and syntax.102 Figures of speech were designated by a
bewildering range of approximately 300 names. But what is interesting
is the way in which this vast and often creaking structure of distinctions
Page 21 of 51
and classifications of speech was orientated towards an active rather

than simply an analytical academic ideal. As Foster Watson puts it,
‘Roman and Greek literature were studied not so much as ends in
themselves [but] as the storehouses of adequate and eloquent
expression, the happy hunting ground of the right thing to discourse
about, and the right way of saying it.’103 Schoolchildren were required
not merely to analyse classical texts, but also to write their own pieces
in imitation, and to deliver orations on stock subjects. Mulcaster, who
recommended practice in discourse as part of the education of even the
young child, went so far as to present plays at court in which his
scholars performed (p.173) and were thereby taught, in one
contemporary's words, ‘good behaviour and audacitie’.104 Sixteenth-
century pedagogues were anxious to propound the practical and ethical
oratorical ideas of Cicero and Quintilian, rather than simply teach
techniques for the philosophical analysis of texts.
The rhetorical grounding provided by grammar schools certainly

affected a much broader proportion of the population than the gentry
alone. Handbooks defining rhetorical categories and compilations of
classical quotations and modern examples of good style, such as the
Adagia and Apophthegmata of Erasmus,105 were used in schools by
many of the ‘middling sort’ of people who benefited from the expansion
of education during the sixteenth century. Yet if we are to understand
the relationship between rhetorical training and the civility of speech, it
is important to realize the crucial position of rhetoric within the
developing ideal of the learning requisite for a gentleman. Book-
learning, in the scheme of gentlemanly education put forward by the
humanist popularizer Thomas Elyot, for example, and by the scholar
Vives, was by no means designed to turn the gentleman into an
academic. Instead, it was justified by the need to qualify the gentleman
for governance and counsel, in which the capacity to persuade, derived
from rhetoric, was viewed as crucial. As Elyot put it, recommending
that after the age of 14 the noble child be put to learn the ‘Arte of an
Oratour’ from the writings of Quintilian and Cicero,
The Utilitie that a noble man shall have by redyng these Oratours
is that, when he shall happe to reason in counsaile, or shall speke
in a great audience, or to strange ambassadours of great princes,
he shall not be constrayncd to speake wordes sodayne and
disordrcd, but shal bestowe them aptly and in their places.106
This conception of the gentleman as orator was part of the developing

pattern of ideas associated with the overall concept of ‘civil society’ and
the place of the élite within the commonwealth as civil magistrates and
Page 22 of 51
counsellors. Henry Peacham, writing in the early seventeenth century,

made a clear connection between ‘civil’ nobility and oratory when he
wrote:
This faire Tree [nobility] by two maine branches dispreddeth her

selfe into the Militarie and Civill Discipline. Under the first I place
Valor and Greatness of Spirit: under the other, justice, knowledge
of the Lawes, which is consilii fons; magnificence and
eloquence.107
(p.174) Much earlier, Thomas Wilson, in the preface to his simplified

vernacular rhetorical handbook, The Arte of Rhetorique (1553),108 had
identified eloquent oratory as the original agent of civilization,
asserting that when
men lived brutishly in open feldes havyng neither hous to shroude

them in, nor attire to cloth their backes…[the elect] appointed of
God called the[m] together by utteraunce of speche, and
persuaded with them what was good, what was bad, and was
gainefull for mankind…[and] beyng somewhat drawen, and
delited with the pleasauntnesse of reason, and the swetenes of
utteraunce: after a certain space, thei became thorowe nuture
and good advisement, of wylde, sober: of crucll, gentle, of foolcs,
wise, and of beastes, men: Soche force hath the tongue.109
Eloquence was thus linked historically and in political practice with the
power of an élite. The heroic classical orators, Demosthenes and
Cicero, were held up to the later sixteenth-century gentleman as
models of prestige and authority. Far from being opposed to the
established image of the gentleman as soldier, the two were usually
combined, as in the Governour of Elyot; and some of the martial values
of conquest and superior force emerged as metaphors within the ideal
of gentlemanly oratory. Faret, for example, declared that by words and
accompanying gestures, the orator seeks ‘to vanquish two senses at
one instant, and especially to beseige men's spirits by their eyes and
ears’.110 One of the maxims included in Thomas Blount's The Academie
of Eloquence (1654) asserted that ‘Eloquence does commonly storm the
mind of the auditor; and at length takes him in.’111
Sir John Neale has argued that rhetorical training had considerable
impact on the performance of English gentlemen in the Elizabethan
House of Commons. He has praised the speeches made by Elizabethan
MPs as masterpieces of oratorical skill on the classical-humanist
model.112 This view is probably exaggerated, since in many cases MPs’
use of classical sententiae, allusions, and figures and tropes of speech
Page 23 of 51
seems intermittent and superficial, and argues no more than a slight

veneer of rhetorical knowledge in the speakers.113 Yet what is
important, from the point of view of shifts in the ideology of gentility, is
that efforts, however superficial, were made at all. As I have argued
before, the power of ideals of élite conduct in a society cannot depend
on the capacity of the élite to (p.175) demonstrate the ideals to the
letter; it depends instead on the ease with which members of the élite
can invoke the ideals by mastering a few easily acquired signs and
symbols. The late sixteenth-century English gentleman clearly liked to
think of his political status as having something to do with rhetorical
ability. By extension, he was also coming to interpret his superior
civility in social life in terms of a mastery of social discourse which
owed a great deal to the ideas and principles of rhetoric.
The transposition of principles of rhetorical oratory into a social mode

was most evident in the literature of courtliness. Thomas Gainsford
described ‘discourse and conversation’ as ‘the principall end of a
courtier's life’,114 a view which leaves out the conventional military
aspect of the courtly ideal, but does full justice to the attention devoted
to speech in Castiglione's Courtyer and other treatises on the court. A
large part of Castiglione's Book I is taken up with a debate on the well-
established Renaissance themes of style and elegance in language: the
purest Italian vernacular dialect for the courtier to adopt, the authors
and poets he should imitate, the rhetors and historians who will provide
the best models of expression. Book II is largely devoted to debate on
wit and entertainment in discourse. Despite Castiglione's many
contemporary references, much of this material was taken straight
from Cicero's De Oratore,115 and the main elements of classical and
humanist rhetoric are all present in the recommendations for the
courtier's discourse. First, his speech must be based on knowledge;
second, ‘hee [must] couch in a good order that hee hath to speake or to
wryte, and afterwards expresse it well with wordes [which]…ought to
bee apt, chosen, lere and well applyed, and (above all) in use also
among the people.’116 Rhetorical decorum, the principle that words
should be ‘faire, wittie, subtill, fine and grave according to the matter’,
is particularly emphasized.117 Third, the courtier must observe a
gracious mean in delivery, and his voice must be ‘not to subtyll or soft,
as in a woman: nor yet to boysterous and roughe, as in one of the
Countrey, but shrill, clere, sweete, and wel framed with a proper
pronunciacion, and with fitte maners and gestures’.118 Persuasive
power is all-important, and therefore the courtier must have ‘the
understanding to speake with dignitie and vehemencie to raise those
Page 24 of 51
affections which our mindes have in them, and to inflame or stirre them
according to the matter’.119
(p.176) The courtier's rhetorical skill is, like his overall demeanour,
ultimately elevated to a substantial political role of giving good counsel
to the prince, but Castiglione's treatment of rhetorical technique is, in
fact, largely geared to the social and recreational. Without departing
from Ciceronian principles, he concentrated on and elaborated the area
of rhetorical tradition concerned with wit and delight. He distinguished,
unoriginally, between types of jest—the long anecdote and the ready
quip which involves the playful use of figures of speech, for example—
and pointed out the artifice involved in each type.120 Castiglione
suggested the transfer of principles from serious rhetoric to
recreational conversation when he wrote that
the termes of speache and fygures that have anye grace in grave
talke, are likewise (in a maner) alwayes comelye in jestes and
meerye pleasantness…See how wordes placed contrarywyse give
a great ornament, when a contrarye clause is sett agaynstc
another.121
He gave as illustration the anecdote:
As a Genuese that was verye prodigall and lavysh in hys expences

beeinge reprehended by an usurer, who was most covetous, that
saide unto him: And Wilt thou leave castynge away thy substance?
Then answered he: when thou leavest stealinge of other mens.122
This example is only one of many whereby Castiglione showed how the
orator may be turned into the gentleman conversationalist.
Castiglione's entire presentation of the courtly ideal in a conversazione
is in some ways a transposition of a rhetorical into a recreational
practice. The essence of the courtly conversation was the witty
amplification of and variation on stock themes of discourse such as the
nature of love, or arms versus letters; in formal rhetorical training,
amplification and variation of a theme was a major exercise.123
Elizabethan courtly writers certainly followed Castiglione in the

transposition of rhetorical principles—particularly those of
ornamentation and amplification—into courtly principles of witty
discourse. Sidney, whose Arcadia was to achieve lasting and Europe-
wide fame as a model of courtly rhetoric, claimed that many courtiers
possessed a sounder English style than did many academics. John Lyly's
development of the euphuistic style, a mode of writing
characteristically extravagant in the use of rhetorical devices of
antithesis, alliteration, and historical, mythological, and even scientific
Page 25 of 51
allusion, was a deliberate translation of humanist learning (p.177) into

124
a courtly context. It is, of course, most unlikely that courtiers
attempted full-scale imitations of Sidney's or Lyly's style in everyday
discourse, but it is likely that some gestures were made towards
maintaining the reputation of the court as the home of superior
conversation, which these authors established and elaborated.
Shakespeare's Love's Labours Lost (1595), in which courtly rhetoric is
examined and satirized, was no mere treatment of the literary
conventions established by Sidney and Lyly. Jonson, in Every Man out of
His Humour, depicted a social climber convinced that in the court he
will ‘discourse…with flowing and ambrosian spirits, whose wits are as
suddaine as lightning, and humorous as nectar,’125 and if this view
could be satirized, that at least indicates that highly wrought discourse
was part of the social image of the courtier. Nicholas Breton's plain
countryman, in his anti-court dialogue of 1618, accuses the courtier of
‘writing in time, or talking in prose, with more tongues than teeth in his
head’.126
Concern with rhetorical principles in everyday speech was not limited

to literature with a court context, but also appeared in general conduct
literature for the gentleman. Guazzo wrote that ‘it behooveth a
Gentleman to speake better than a Plebeian,’127 and his comments on
speech show that this superiority was to be based on rhetorical forms.
Civil speech involves ‘sentences, pleasant jests, Fables, Allegories,
Similitudes, Proverbs, Comptes and other delightfull speech, varying
from the common fourme of talke,’128 and the civil gentleman should
cultivate skill in ‘pronuntiation’ (delivery), without which a man's words
would ‘loose their grace and authority’.129 Della Casa, while warning
that ‘ye pompe, bravery and affectation that may be suffered and
allowed to enrich an oration spoken in a public place’130 should not be
adopted in ordinary discourse, still invoked rhetorical principles—for
example, in his condemnation of those who couple the sublime and the
base in metaphors. Thus, one must not use a phrase like ‘As sure as God
is in Heaven; so stands the staffe in the chimney corner.’131 His demand
for sweetness and aptness of words, and observance of a mean in
delivery and gesture, likewise echoed the precepts of rhetors.132 His
section on jesting recalled that of (p.178) Castiglione in concentration
on ‘sodaine and pretty’ word-play.133 In the 1663 translation of the
Galateo, the translator drove home the point that it is rhetorical facility
in jesting which differentiates the gentleman's jokes—‘artificiall’ and
‘prompt’—from those of ‘dull plebeyans’.134 Not all English authors
fully approved of witty jests, and some, like Martyn and Cleland,
Page 26 of 51
preferred to advocate plainness and sobriety of discourse;135 but they

still did so with reference to the rhetorical principle of decorum.
If advice on speech in later sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century

general conduct literature showed the influence of rhetoric, rhetorical
handbooks were published over the same period which showed an
increasing concern with social discourse. Thomas Wilson's Arte of
Rhetoric (1553) offered a systematic account of rhetorical principles
and a range of models in English. He gave long examples of orations:
narrations of events, praise of a man's life, speeches of condolence,
formal advice, and so forth. Wilson was an academic, and his treatise
reiterated principles which were commonplaces of Latin schoolbooks;
but it is significant that his vernacular and much simplified version of
pedagogic texts was designed for the young gentleman who needed a
‘short cut’.136 John Hoskyns's Direccons for Speech and Style, written
at least twenty years later, took rhetorical advice even further from a
pedagogic context; rather than giving advice on the set-piece oration,
as Wilson had done, Hoskyns simply compiled examples of figures of
speech wth short elucidatory and critical comments, and his hope was
that his work ‘may benefitt Conversation’137 (i.e. social intercourse in
general). Significantly, most of his examples were taken from Sidney's
Arcadia. Thomas Blount's Academie of Eloquence (1654) starts with
forty pages of advice on rhetoric lifted from Hoskyns's Direccons, and
adds to these, lists of formulae maiores (epigrammatic sayings,
proverbs, classical and modern quotations), formulae minores (fine
turns of phrase), and a number of model amatory and ‘complemental’
letters. Compilations of proverbs, sententiae, similitudes, etc. had been
standard aids in the teaching of rhetoric from the early sixteenth
century, when Erasmus's celebrated Adagia, Apophthegmata and De
Copia were published in England and inspired many English
pedagogues to similar works; Blount's Academie, with its scheme of
figures and tropes and its alphabetical lists of formulae, clearly owed
much to this tradition, but also made (p.179) it apparent that the
tradition had been pressed into the service of polite social intercourse.
Where he does not borrow from Hoskyns, much of Blount's material is
similar to that of the contemporary ‘academies of complements’, and, in
his title, he appeals to fashion in claiming that his is ‘an easie and
methodical Way to speak and write fluently according to the mode of
the present times’.138
The projection of principles of rhetoric into gentlemanly social life was

evident not only in prescriptions for word use but in advice on gesture.
Classical and humanist rhetors had laid great stress on gesture as an
essential adjunct to persuasive speech. Thus Wilson quoted Cicero's
Page 27 of 51
opinion that ‘the gesture of manne, is the speache of his bodie,’139 and
gave standard advice on the bodily composure and control required for
good oratory:
Gesture is a certaine comely moderacion of the countenance, and

all other partes, of mannes bodye, aptle agreeynge to those
thinges, which are spoken…the hedde to bee holden upright, the
forchedde without frouning, the browes without bendynge, the
nose without blowyng, the eyes quicke and pleasaunt, the lippes
not laied out, the teeth without grenning, the armes not much
caste abroade, but comely sette out, as tyme, and cause shall
beste require.140
It is interesting how far these prescriptions recall those of Erasmus in

the sections of De Civilitate which deal with bodily demeanour,141 and,
indeed, the whole Erasmian concept of manners as ‘representations’ of
inner virtues owed much to the principles and practice of rhetoric.
Della Casa's remarks on gesture are also closely linked with the
rhetorical ideal; for example, when he condemned lewd and disfiguring
gestures in story-telling, he echoed the distinction made by rhetors
between the grace and gravity to be maintained at all times by the
noble orator and the mimic theatricality of the actor or entertainer.142
Graceful and apt gesture, on the rhetorical model, was demanded of the
courtier by Castiglione, and later by Faret, who still used the technical
rhetorical term of ‘action’ to describe the right gestures to accompany
courtly words.143
Striking testimony to the impact of rhetorical conceptions of gesture, in

social discourse as well as in public speaking, is to be found in the work
(p.180) of John Bulwer. His Chirologia: or the Naturall Language of the
Hand, Composed of the Speaking Motions and Discoursing Gestures
thereof, and Chironomia: or the Art of Manual Rhetoricke came out in
1644. Bulwer's approach was partly historical and scientific, and partly
didactic, in that he hoped to evolve a language for the deaf. He starts
from the rhetorical premise that ‘the lineaments of the Body doe
disclose the disposition, and inclination of the minde,’144 and attempts
a systematic classification of manual gestures, expounding their
psychological meanings with a wealth of historical and contemporary
allusions. In the second book, he gives canons for correct and
persuasive gesture, not simply for formal speeches, but because the art
is ‘no small part of civill prudence’.145 Bulwer's descriptions of gesture
in social life are often pertinent to good manners. Thus, for example, he
writes that
Page 28 of 51
To kisse the Hand is the obsequious expression who would adore

and give respect by the courtly solemnity of a salutation or
valediction…There is no expression of the Hand more frequent in
the formalities of civill conversation, and he is a novice in the
Court of Nature, who doth not understand a Baiser de la main and
he is a clown in Humanity, who doth not speake to his betters in
the respectful Language of the Hand.146
He gives an example of a lower-class indecency of gesture still

recognizable today: ‘To locke the Thumbe betweene the next two
fingers is an ironicall vulgarisme of the Hand used by Plebeians when
they are contumaciously provoked thereunto, and see that they cannot
prevaile by vieing words.’147 Bulwer's normative rather than simply
descriptive comments on gesture, such as the condemnation of hand
movements which are ‘slow’, ‘ponderous’, and move the whole arm as
‘rusticall’, or the prohibition of indecent gestures towards the ‘hinder
parts’,148 show that canons of rhetoric and principles of gentlemanly
good manners were deeply entangled. The precision and
comprehensiveness of Bulwer's system of manual rhetoric was unusual,
and few of his readers were likely to have adopted the highly
differentiated manual symbolism which he advocated; but his work still
shows (if in exaggerated form) a general tendency in conduct writing
towards the association of rhetoric and prestigious social technique.
The status of rhetoric in the sixteenth-century education of the
gentleman contributed powerfully to the development of ‘civil’ manners
as a rhetoric of status, and the ‘civic’ ideal of the orator was transposed
into the ‘civil’ ideal of the elegant social conversationalist.
(p.181) The growth of a concept of social discourse and conversation

informed with principles of rhetoric should not be straightforwardly
interpreted as the triumph of ideals of humanist learning in the social
life of the English gentry. In many ways, writings on rules of social
discourse show how humanist ideals were appropriated and
transformed (even debased) so as to provide new sources of prestige
and means of social self-definition for an élite whose attitude to
learning was, at best, ambiguous. Only those aspects of classical and
humanist ideals which could easily be transformed into social signs
bolstering the self-image of the gentry were taken up into the ideal of
polite conversation. Other aspects were increasingly excluded and
repudiated. The substantial academic values of Renaissance humanism
had been of limited interest to more than a small number of the élite.
Indeed, too great a commitment to an ideology of gentility based on
learning would have threatened to set meritocratic criteria of prestige
against values of hereditary right, instead of reinforcing the latter with
Page 29 of 51
the new allure of virtue and learning. It was therefore not surprising
that in the concept of polite conversation (the everyday activity in
which the gentleman demonstrated his cultural superiority), mastery of
discourse was increasingly divorced from the academic and scholarly
values on which the revival of rhetoric had at first been based. Anthony
Wood noted a new anti-academic bent in conversation after the
Restoration:
Since the King was restored it was looked upon as a piece of

pedantry to produce a Latin sentence in discours (and some years
after, to put in titles of books, especially those printed in Oxford at
the Theatre), to dispute theologically at the tables at meals, to be
earnest or zealous in any one thing. But all, forsooth, must be
gentile [i.c. genteel] and neat–no paincs taken, Bantring.149
Distaste for earnest theological conversation in the 1660s may well be

attributed to a short-term reaction after the Puritan ascendancy, but, in
fact, the anti-academic tendency which Wood reported at its most
intense had been emerging from the later sixteenth century. Ironically,
it was based on the elaboration of two principles which had been part
of the classical and humanist theory of the orator and magistrate, but
which were transformed into everyday touchstones of status.
The first of these principles was that everyday discourse should reflect
an education and attitude to knowledge which was liberal rather than
narrowly vocational. Of course, the gentleman had a ‘professional’
vocation as a soldier or counsellor, but this was not regarded as a
profession in the same way as law, medicine, or (most demeaningly)
commerce. Like (p.182) Aristotle's aristocrat, the sixteenth-century
gentleman of humanist theory studied the liberal arts and sciences for
their own sakes, and was thereby fitted for authority. He did not, like
the clerk or lawyer, have to support himself by his learning, and had no
reason to confine his intellectual horizons by specialization. His liberal
education had therefore to be mirrored in his social discourse. Thus, in
an essay published in 1600, Sir William Cornwallis asserted that ‘a
Gentleman should speake like a Gentleman…his knowledge ought to be
generall, it becomes not to talke of any one thing too much, or to be
wayed down with any particular profession.’150 Francis Bacon saw the
essence of discourse in subtle variation of subject.151 Demonstration of
knowledge which was too ostentatious was ungentlemanly. This aspect
of the classical ideal was already particularly attractive to English and
European élites more interested in acquiring prestigious ‘tokens of
education’ than in solid academic achievement.152 Philibert de Vienne
viewed the ‘literary’ quality of sixteenth-century courtly discourse with
Page 30 of 51
outrage, as the debasement of learning into a mere source of casual,

status-enhancing, conversational references; he wrote:
It is a singular good, to have some pretic sprinkled judgemens in

the commonplaces and practizes of all the liberall sciences, chopt
up in a hotchpot together, out of the which we may still help
ourselves in talke with devises and assayes, to have substance
and matter to treate of, and encounter with all manner of things,
and no more.153
(In fact, the methods of academic rhetoric, emphasizing the use of vast
compilations of proverbs, quotations, maxims, etc. divorced from
context and made a common stock of allusion, rather invited this
debasement.) What is important, however, is that a deliberately casual
approach to learning was increasingly written into the ideal of
gentlemanly conversation. Even advisers who were, for the most part,
serious about the benefits of education increasingly implied that the
gentleman should not only refrain from an ostentatious display of
academic seriousness in conversation, but that his education should be
directed simply to giving him the superficial knowledge demanded by
polite conversation. Thus Faret devoted much less space to the solid
classical grounding required of the courtier than had his model
Castiglione, and, for example, dealing with philosophy, wrote that, ‘It is
sufficient if hee have a reasonable tast of the most pleasing questions,
which are sometimes propounded in good company. I desire rather that
hee should be passably instructed in many (p.183) sciences, than solidly
154
profound in one.’ In I. B.'s Heroick Education (1657), the author
recommended simply that the young gentleman be given ‘a tincture of
literature’, so that he may perform well in a discussion not concerned
with hawks and hounds.155
The second principle of discourse to be elaborated in the notion of

polite conversation in such a way as to exclude academic values was
that of ‘natural’ eloquence. Writers on rhetoric in the classical tradition
had all condemned ‘affectation’ and ‘curiosity’ (obvious artifice or
eccentric contrivance) in phraseology and delivery. Castiglione took up
these terms and applied them to faults of general social self-
presentation; the courtier's defining characteristic, in words and
gesture, is sprezzatura or ‘recklessness’: unaffected grace based on
artifice but projecting ‘natural’ effortlessness.156 The attractiveness of
this doctrine in the assertion of everyday social status is obvious; it
allows the gentleman to endow characteristics acquired through
education with the magic of ‘natural’ superiority. This cultural
mystification is set out baldly in Guazzo's Civile Conversation. Guazzo
noted that modern speakers use ‘more arte and method’ than the
Page 31 of 51
ancients, but goes on to say that this artifice is natural: ‘I count it

naturall, for so much as the rude speech of the country clowne, is as
naturall to him, as the fine and polished, is to the Citizen and
Gentleman.’157 Late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century prescriptions
on speech in conduct literature were pervaded with warning against
‘affectation’, and this bugbear included the use of phrases
conspicuously derived from book-learning. Cleland advised his young
nobleman:
Your qualitic being above the Common, I wish that your speech
were also not popular; and with foolish affectation and verbal
pride, not ful of trivial words, but plaine and perspicuous, as
flowing from a natural fountaine of Eloquence; not Pedanticke or
ful of Inkehorne terms.158
The importance of conversation as an activity where the gentleman

displayed his ‘natural’ and easy mastery of language put increasing
value on the ‘sodaine and pretty’ jesting approved by Della Casa, and
ready responsive wit and word-play (the ‘gentile and neat—no paines
taken’) was increasingly stressed at the expense of the lengthy and
serious disquisition. As Faret wrote, ‘The excellency of pleasant
speeches consists principally in being short, quick, plain, delivered with
a good grace, and so fitly, as they may not savour of study, nor that hee
hath brought them (p.184) from home.’159 On the basis of the principles
of universality and ‘natural’ grace in gentlemanly conversation, writers
on conduct increasingly attacked the vice of ‘pedantry’. In the mid-
sixteenth century, the author of The Institution of a Gentleman had
attacked the derision with which young gentlemen castigated the
learned as ‘penmen’;160 his complaint seems to be against
straightforward gentlemanly resistance to humanist ideals. A century
later, gentlemanly anti-intellectualism had become, in some cases at
least, much more subtle. Contrived, ostentatious displays of learning
were implicitly condemned in Castiglione's ideal of sprezzatura, and
explicitly condemned in Guazzo's Civile Conversation; pedants, with
their laboured and finical use of classical maxims and rhetorical figures
of speech, were satirized in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. I. B.'s
Heroick Education was the first treatise of gentlemanly education to
devote much space to ‘Pedants, and their severall kinds’. I. B. criticizes
pedantry as ‘an affectation of wisdom’ manifest in ‘disjointed words’ or
‘prolixity of discourse’.161 He distinguishes between those who err from
‘want of judgement’, and those who merely ‘want experience’; these
latter
Page 32 of 51
speak only out of books, and reason altogether with others

Arguments…They will produce myriads of examples, and
precepts, but not one that is expedient; if you ask them counsel,
they will give you Seneca's or Plutarch's, they are more knowing
in the intrigues of Caesar, or Pompey, than in those of England,
France, or Spain. They have studied replies, for al sorts of
complements, which they use without choice, or distinction.162
The last category of pedants are merely ‘conceited presumers’, who

should be excluded from ‘humane society’.163
Pedantry was and is regarded as a vice in academic discourse, and the

accusation of pedantry is not merely the ploy of the anti-intellectual.
But the chorus of comments on the danger of pedantry to be found in
later seventeenth-century conduct literature suggests that social and
ideological considerations found expression in gentlemanly distaste for
the pedantic. Obadiah Walker found it necessary to insist that ‘a
Schoolmaster is not therefore [for that reason] a Pedant,’164 implying
that a weight of gentlemanly prejudice against the social pretensions of
professional academics lay behind the accusation. Interestingly,
Lingard wished his ‘young gentleman leaving the university’ to be
careful to throw off in society the ‘Husk and Shell’ acquired in Oxford,
and regarded ‘Vaunting of the persons and (p.185) places concerned in
their Education’ as a prime social pitfall for young men. The gentleman
must therefore ‘be sparing in…commendations of [his] University,
College, Tutor,’165 for such commendations will make him ridiculous to
men of the world. Although Lingard betrays no contempt for
scholarship, this warning is certainly linked with the attitude of the
‘young gentleman of the university’ satirized by John Earle in 1628,
who ‘of all things…endures not to be mistaken for a scholar, and hates a
black suit though it be of satin’.166 Serious seventeenth-century
advisers on the conduct of gentlemanly life stopped short of condoning
frivolous contempt for learning, but they made it clear that the culture
and conversation of the gentleman was to be distanced from the mere
scholar's. By the mid-seventeenth century, the definition of pedantry in
conversation appears to have been enlarged to extend this distance.
Thus, although Della Casa had condemned as bad manners the use of
phrases in foreign languages unknown to members of the company,
later advice on speech shows a new attempt to banish Latin or Greek
from polite conversation, just as Anthony Wood reported. Francis
Osborne told his son:
Page 33 of 51
Propose not them for patterns, who make all places rattle, where
they come, with Latin and Greeke, for the moor you seem to have
borrowed from Books, the poorer you proclaime your naturall
parts which can only properly be called your own.167
Walker condemned the man who ‘shews his learning in scraps of Latin
and Greek’. It seems likely that these authors would have found civil
discourse of the type exemplified and recommended by Guazzo or
Bryskett—a discourse full of proverbs, maxims, learned metaphors and
overt classical and scriptural allusions—insufferably pedantic.
One recent study of the development of science in the seventeenth

century has argued convincingly that the seventeenth-century distaste
for pedantry affected academic controversy and discovery itself. In A
Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century
England, Steven Shapin shows how Robert Boyle and his associates in
the Royal Society, stressed their own identities as gentlemen and used
concepts and rules of civil conversation in solving problems of scientific
evidence and debate, for example, in avoiding direct contradiction,
esoteric language, or too positive an affirmation of their conclusions.
Boyle preferred to present (p.186) himself as a disinterested
gentlemanly amateur rather than as a scholar, and self-consciously
distanced himself from scholars.168
Standards of civility in speech and writing changed markedly over the

seventeenth century. In a famous criticism of Elizabethan and Jacobean
drama, John Dryden loudly proclaimed the superior wit and refinement
of Restoration letters, ascribing this to the enhanced ‘gallantry and
civility’ encouraged by a monarch who had returned to find ‘a Nation
lost as much in Barbarism as in Rebellion’.169 Charles's influence was,
in fact, only a contributory factor, and the features of polite discourse
which Dryden praised as a unique facet of his age were manifestations
of the long-term change making speech and conversation central to the
self-definition of the English élite. It is important that Dryden regarded
literary refinement as a simple reflection of refinement of discourse,
and his view is a testimony to the cultural prestige which had come to
be vested in the everyday speech of the court and London élite. Two
points in Dryden's analysis of the faults of Elizabethan and Jacobean
use of language particularly illuminate the degree to which, by the
Restoration, the English gentry had appropriated ideals of fine speech
based on rhetoric, while repudiating the academic aspects of those
ideals. Dryden first taxed Jonson and Fletcher for a conception of wit
which was ‘not that of Gentleman, there was ever somewhat that was
ill-bred and clownish in it: and which confest the conversation of the
authors.’170 Although he made several technical points, Dryden was
Page 34 of 51
mainly objecting to a breach of literary decorum which was also a

breach of social decorum: the use made by these authors of ‘low’
characters and corresponding ‘low wit’. Dryden saw the drama and
conversation of Restoration gentlemen as finally purified from
indecorous entanglement with the discourse of a lower class. Second,
Dryden criticized Jonson's hero ‘True Wit’ in The Silent Woman as an
example of a gentlemanly ideal still too much compromised by the
academic; Truewit is
A Gentleman with an allay of Pedantry: a man who seems mortifi'd

to the world, by much reading. The best of his discourse, is drawn
not from knowledge of the Town, but Books, and, in short, he
would be a fine Gentleman, in a university.171
Dryden praised the easy, elegant, flowing, and bantering language of

the Restoration, in contrast to the supposed stiffness of an earlier style
insufficiently (p.187) emancipated from the academic. Yet the
Restoration style of gentlemanly conversation was simply a further
development of a ‘civil’ standard of speech, expressing a gentleman's
natural superiority and membership of an exclusive social world, which
had been gradually established since the mid-sixteenth century.
So far I have discussed aspects of civility in language which were, on

the whole, common to all European countries in which the values of
civility were developed. The principles of decorum and ‘natural’
eloquence, for example, were applicable in all languages, if with some
variation in particular practices. Sixteenth-century writers and scholars
throughout Europe made use of a common classical tradition in trying
to establish criteria of pure and expressive usage in their different
vernaculars, and an international rhetorical ideal was, in many ways,
transposed into an equally international courtly ideal. Yet in sixteenth-
century England, the extraordinarily rapid and chaotic development of
the vernacular, coupled with a prevailing sense of cultural inferiority,
gave a particular edge to English concern with norms of language. This
was obvious, for example, in Mulcaster's strenuous defence of the
grace and expressive power of the English language,172 and the desire
to prove the worth of English as a ‘civil’ language actually inspired the
translation of foreign courtesy literature. Sir Thomas Hoby, writing to
Sir John Cheke about his translation of The Courtyer, expressed his
desire that it should encourage further efforts ‘that we alone may not
be styll counted barbarous in oure tonge, as in time out of minde we
have been in our maners’.173 George Pettie, in his preface to The Civile
Conversation, showed a similar concern to stand up for English against
the foreigners who ‘count it barren…count it barbarous…count it
unworthie to be accounted of’.174 Ben Jonson, composing an English
Page 35 of 51
Grammar, hoped that his work would ‘free our Language from the
opinion of rudeness and barbarism, wherewith it is mistaken to be
diseased’.175
The value judgements on which theorists sought to base assessments of

the civility or incivility of whole languages were, objectively speaking,
self-referential and empty. Puttenham confidently stated that
(p.188) There is no greater diference betwixt a civill and brutish

utteraunce than cleare distinction of voices: and the most
laudable Languages are alwaies most plaine and distinct, and the
barbarous most confused and indistinct.176
But obviously, any dialect is as distinct as any other to its native

speakers. Yet as ‘civility’ came to define the superiority of élite
practices in society, and not simply the overall values of society, this
distinction, however empty, took on considerable life. Cleland advised
the noble reader that
If Nature have denied you a tunable accent, studie to amend it by

art the best yee maie…and to put a distinction between your
discourses and a Seythians, a Barbarians, or a Gothes. For it is a
pittie when a Nobleman is better distinguished from a clowne by
his Golden Laces, then by his good language.177
Much earlier, Elyot suggested that the gentleman's accent and

enunciation should be protected from his infancy, and therefore that the
noble child's nurses and serving-women should
speke none Englishe but that which is cleane, polite, perfectly and
articulately pronounced, as folisshe women often times do of a
wantonnesse, whereby divers noble men and gentilmennes
chyldren…have attained corrupte and foule pronuntiation.178
John Lyly, who developed the elaborate and artificial courtly style of
language known as ‘Euphuism’ after his work Euphues, gave basic
prescriptions for the protection of the child's civil pronunciation, which
echoed those of Elyot:
They are to be trained up in the language of their Country to

pronounce aptly and distinctly without stammering every word
and syllable of their native speech, and to be kept from barbarous
talk as the ship from the rocks.179
Page 36 of 51
These warnings are at first sight hard to interpret; words like ‘cleane’,
‘corrupte’, and ‘foule’ in relation to basic pronunciation resonate with
value judgements which the writers take for granted and do not
explain. Indeed, the demand that every letter should be enunciated
seems particularly unhelpful, given the lack of standardization in
English orthography. Nevertheless, if these prescriptions are set
against philological evidence on the development of the language, they
appear to be symptomatic of real social change, and not of a mere
literary tendency to comment on the danger of ‘barbarity’ in speech.
English scholars in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries
found the vernacular, already a mixture of (p.189) Saxon and Romance
forms and expanding anarchically in vocabulary, almost hopelessly
difficult to subject to the criteria of purity, regularity, and
orthographical consistency that were easier to apply to the culturally
prestigious Romance languages.180 Yet ironically, the plasticity and
rapid expansion of the language at just the time when the élite was
vesting status in imported ideals of personal culture diffused from the
‘civil’ centres of court and city, allowed in England a particularly radical
differentiation of ‘civil’ (upper-class) and ‘uncivil’ (lower-class)
language. So too did the relative absence in much of England of
differences in language which in France meant that many provincial
élites became effectively bilingual in the face of the advance of a
‘correct’ speech emanating from the centre. By the early modern
period, outside Celtic areas, the use of one vernacular language rather
than another was not a major issue, and perhaps for that reason
distinctions of status expressed in dialect—pronunciation, syntax, and
vocabulary—could develop very vigorously.
Differentiation of status in the basic use of language had, of course,

been the norm in the 200 years after the Norman Conquest, during
which the aristocracy spoke French, and the governed various regional
dialects of English. Even when the élite increasingly adopted English in
the fourteenth century, upper-class speech was probably distinguished
by some rhetorical forms among the better-educated, and there were
court fashions in phraseology and pronunciation. Yet it was not until the
sixteenth century that there emerged, according to the philologist
Wyld, ‘undoubted evidence…of the existence of a standard of speech’
associated with the appearance of a ‘class dialect’, as opposed to the
collection of regional dialects previously spoken by men of all ranks.181
This dialect was originally based on the regional speech of London and
the south-east, but was developed in and from the court away from the
popular dialect of the area. Phonetic study of records therefore makes
sense of the Elizabethan Puttenham's advice to the poet to take as a
standard ‘the usual speech of the court, and that of London and the
Page 37 of 51
shires lying about London within lx myles, and not much above’.182
That this dialect was adopted as a symbol of status elsewhere in
England is suggested by philological research, and by Puttenham's
statement that ‘in every shyre of England there be gentlemen and
others that speake but specially write as good Southerne (p.190) as we
of Middlesex or Surrey do, but not the common people of every
shire.’183 In the far north and west, Puttenham reports, even gentlemen
and the ‘best clarkes’ tended to resist the class dialect, and this is
borne out by the story that Sir Walter Raleigh always spoke with a
Devonshire accent.184 That Raleigh's accent was worthy of note in the
court, however, suggests the degree to which a class dialect had taken
hold. It was spread rapidly by the expansion of education and the
diffusion of books written and printed with the grammatical and
orthographic forms of the court and London.
The ideology which was reflected by and encouraged the growth of a

class dialect was that of ‘civility’, and of the notion of a ‘natural’
superiority acquired in the exclusive society of court and city.
Puttenham made the connection between the dialect and ‘civility’ clear
in his advice to the poet to avoid the speech of ‘poore rusticall or
uncivill’ people, and adopt ‘that which is spoken in the Kings Court, or
in the good townes and Cities within the land…[and by] the better
brought up, such as the Greekes call [charientes] men civill and
graciously behavioured and bred’.185 Charles Butler, in his English
Grammar of 1634, made the same kind of link when he identified
‘Universites and Citties’ as ‘the most civill parts’186 for pronunciation,
although the universities took what was very much second place to the
court and city in the development of polite modes of speech. By the
seventeenth century, fashionable London pronunciation, perceived by
contemporaries as intrinsically better than regional pronunciation, has
become thoroughly recognizable as the ‘good’ English of modern usage.
A Restoration defender of London gentlemanly life gave a detailed
example:
One woul say at London

I would eat more Cheese if I had it.
The Northern man says,
Ay sud eat more Cheese gin ay hadet.
And the Western Man says,
Chud eat more Cheese an chad it.
Be you Judge now, Sir, who speaks best English,
London or Country.187
Page 38 of 51
(p.191) Late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century pronunciation

remained very much more variable in English usage than it is today,
and the differentiation of accent and vocabulary which is so marked a
feature of the modern English class structure was less precise. No
linguistic caste system prevailed, and, as Wyld suggests, late
seventeenth-century provincial gentlemen could probably speak with a
greater or lesser regional dialect according to place and occasion.188
Real standardization of orthography, with its standardizing effect on
accent, was achieved in the eighteenth century. Yet the process by
which difference in pronunciation and syntax became a crucial element
in the everyday recognition of difference of status was already
underway from the late sixteenth century.
Changes in pronunciation, intonation, and basic syntax are in many

ways the province of the linguistician and require technical
explanations for which the historian is not equipped. But the cultural
historian can certainly interpret the appearance of a ‘class
dialect’ (itself a historical concept) and the perceived meanings and
social implications of differences in dialect. The nature of an ‘accent’
may require a more scientific analysis than the nature of style and
vocabulary, but it is nevertheless important in its cultural associations.
Thus a modern Englishman whose verbal style and vocabulary were
middle-class, but whose ‘accent’ was Cockney, would be culturally
identified in a different way from one whose ‘accent’ was middle-class,
but whose vocabulary and style were demotic. Clearly enough, the
‘accent’ would be regarded as ‘betraying’ origins, while the other
features of speech would be seen as forced or at least acquired at a
later stage in life. It has often been suggested that the English are
almost obsessively concerned with distinctions of status as expressed or
‘betrayed’ by accent and use of language; the implied contrast is with
more ‘democratic’ cultures in which only regional differences are
recognizable. The usual English defence is that in fact distinctions of
status are present in all languages, but this begs the question not only
of the particular distinctions expressed in different societies, but also of
the value judgements that surround them. In English what is
interesting is not simply the question of who has ‘posh’ and who
‘common’ accents, but the attribution of ‘accentlessness’ to ‘standard’
English, with the implication that other forms of English are somehow
distorted, ‘incorrect’, or botched and ignorant attempts to meet the
standard.
These characterizations of a ‘correct’ language are not unique to

England; they derive from the conceptions used by the classical
rhetors, which were employed in the Renaissance to establish formal
Page 39 of 51
rules for the (p.192) development of vernaculars throughout Europe. In

England, however, as in France, the cultural and political power of the
capital and court over the regions allowed these abstract conceptions
to become embodied in the development of a fairly homogeneous
‘correct’ dialect used by the educated upper classes and imitated by the
socially aspiring. By contrast, the ‘correct’ versions of languages in
areas where political unification was achieved much later, as in
Germany, tend still to be regarded as academic or literary, rather than
socially enjoined, versions of vernaculars. In France, as is shown by
Richelieu's foundation of the Académie Française in the 1630s, the
development of a pure and standardized vernacular for the use of court
and administration was a conscious concern of government to a much
greater extent than in England.189 This cultural dirigisme no doubt
reflected both the superior cultural pretensions of the French
monarchy and, paradoxically, the anxieties of a centralizing regime in a
country where regional differences were much greater and the
semblance of unity more recently and precariously achieved. In both
cases, however, the essential pattern was one in which classical, ‘civic’
ideals of eloquence were transposed into a social mode by élites drawn
to the ‘society’ of court and capital. Within this expanding ‘society’ a
genuine ‘class dialect’ gradually developed and was nationally diffused
through educational institutions, literature, and the reproduction of
‘society’ in the provinces. Poets and academics certainly helped to
develop the ‘best’ French or English in accordance with classical ideals
and models. Increasingly, however, ideal characteristics, such as
‘naturalness’, decorum, and fluency were judged to inhere in the ‘class
dialect’ itself, as it was transmitted and polished within ‘civil society’.
Notes:
(1) Jonson, Timber: or, Discoveries; Made upon Men and Matter (1640),
in Works of Jonson, ed. Herford and Simpson, vol. 8, 620–1.
(2) Henri de La Popelinière, L'Amiral de France (Paris, 1585), preface.

For La Popelinière's important place in the development of ideas of
civilization, see C. Vivanti, ‘Alle Origini dell'Idea di Civiltà: Le Scoperte
Geografiche e gli Scritti di Henri de La Popelinière’, Rivista Storica
Italiana, 74 (1962), 225–49.
(3) Letter to Sir William Cecil, in The First Three English Books on
America, ed. E. Arber (Westminster, 1895), p. xliii.
(4) Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, ed. Willcock and Walker, bk. 1,
ch. 3, 6; for a survey of Tudor ideas on the development of language,
see Ferguson, Clio Unbound, ch. 9.
Page 40 of 51
(5) Erasmus, De Civilitate, sig. C4v.
(6) Many are listed in J. Robertson, The Art of Letter Writing (1942).
(7) Russell, Boke of Nurture, in Meals and Manners, ed. Furnivall, 18.
(8) The Boke of Curtasye, in Meals and Manners, 184.
(9) The Babees Book, in Meals and Manners, 252–3.
(10) Simple proverbial advice on speech appears in such fragments as

What-ever thow sey, avyse thee welle, in Meals and Manners, 244–6.
(11) Erasmus, De Civilitate, sig. Dr.
(12) Seager, Schoole of Vertue, in Meals and Manners, ch. 7, 235–6.
(13) See, for example, J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, tr. F.
Hopman (Harmondsworth, 1955), ch. 9; A. Denomy, ‘Courtly Love and
Courtliness’, Speculum, 28 (1953), 44–63.
(14) See above, Ch. 2, pp. 54–7.
(15) See Lievsay, Stefano Guazzo and the English Renaissance, ch. 1, 4.
(16) Walker, Of Education, pt. 2, ch. 3.
(17) Ibid., pt. 2, ch. 3, 243.
(18) The author was probably William Bas. A similar handbook, A Helpe
to Memory and Discourse, appeared anonymously in 1621.
(19) Fulwood's manual was based on a French original, La Stile et

manière, of 1556, and Day adapted various European collections
including those of Libanius and Ludovicus Vives.
(20) Others in the same genre were John Gough, The Academie of
Complements: Wherein Ladies, Gentlemen, Schollers, and Strangers
may accommodate their courtly practice with gentile ceremonies,
complementall amorous high expression, and forms of speaking or
writing of letters most in fashion (signed Philomusus (London, 1640));
and The New Academy of Complements by L[ord] B[uckburst], S[ir]
C[harles] S[edley], S[ir] W[illiam] D[avenant] and Others the Most
Refined Wits of this Age (London, 1671).
(21) Breton's letters include mock letters of advice, and compliment,

family, and amatory letters, but most are humorous. For his imitators,
see Robertson, Art of Letter Writing, 26–36.
Page 41 of 51
(22) For a survey of books of jests and merry tales, see F.P. Wilson, ‘The
English Jestbooks of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries’,
Huntington Library Quarterly, 2 (1938–9), 121–58.
(23) For Lyly's influence, see G. K. Hunter, John Lyly, The Humanist as
Courtier (London, 1962), ch. 2. For Sidney's Arcadia, see J. Buxton,
Elizabethan Taste (London, 1966), ch. 6, 269–94.
(24) See L. Charlanne, L'Influence française en Angleterre au XVIIe

siècle (Paris, 1906), ch. 6. A. Harbage, Cavalier Drama (London, 1936),
considers the role of Henrietta Maria in importing French literary
fashion (ch. 1).
(25) Robertson, Art of Letter Writing, 39.
(26) William Fulwood, The Enimie of Idlenesse (London, 1568), fol. (1)v,
fol. (3)r–4r.
(27) See below, pp. 169–70.
(28) Courtin, Rules of Civility, ch. 16.
(29) Fulwood, Enimie of Idlenesse, fol. (7)v.
(30) La Serre, The Secretary in Fashion (rev. edn. London, 1654), sig. Br.
(31) Courtin, Rules of Civility…Newly Revised and much Enlarged

(1678), ch. 17, 169–70.
(32) Gough, The Academy of Complements (7th edn., London, 1640), sig.
(A6)v.
(33) See above, Ch. 4, pp. 112–18.
(35) Ibid. 88–9.
(36) Ibid. 29–30.
(37) Ibid. 37.
(38) Della Casa, Galateo, 36 and 60.
(39) Ibid. 58.
(40) Ibid. 40.
(41) Ibid. 32–4.
Page 42 of 51
(42) Erasmus, De Civilitate, sig. (C8)r.
(43) Youth's Behaviour, ch. 6, 24; Bedford, Advice to his Sons, in

Practical Wisdom, 239.
(44) Guazzo, Civile Conversation, bk. 2, fol. 56r.
(45) Erasmus, De Civilitate, sig. (C8)v.
(47) Dare, Counsellor Manners his Last Legacy, 10.

Hindley, vol. 2, 48.
(49) Guazzo includes warnings in the need for female modesty in Civile
Conversation, bk 3, fol.135r. Codrington's The Second Part of Youth's
Behaviour requires modesty, but almost never mentions the word
‘civility’ when dealing with female behaviour.
(50) Martyn, Youth's Instruction, 60.
(52) Della Casa, The Refin'd Courtier, tr. N[athaniel] W[aker], 211;
Walker, Of Education, pt. 2, ch. 5, 41–2, attacks ‘obscene discourse’ and
‘equivocal phrases’.
(53) See Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. obscene.
(54) Swearing was a constant target for moralistic and particularly

Puritan attack, and seems to have been extremely common. See, for
example, Philip Stubbes's denunciation of blasphemy in The Anatomie
of Abuses (London, 1583), ed. F. J. Furnivall (London, 1877–9), 129–36.
(55) Allestree, The Gentleman's Calling, 36–7; and see Stafford, The
Guide of Honour, 123, and Guazzo, Civile Conversation, bk. 4, fol. 24r–
v.
(56) Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Willcock and Walker, bk.
3, ch. 23 ‘of that which the Latines call Decorum’, p. 267.
(57) Ibid. ch. 23, 268–9.
(58) Osborne, Advice to a Son, vol. 1, 11.
(59) Faret, The Honest Man, 168–9.
Page 43 of 51
(60) Art of Complaisance, ch. 14, 149–57. This systematic psychological

approach to ‘accommodation’ had been adopted much earlier by
Thomas Wright, in The Passions of the Minde (1601).
(61) Lingard, A Letter of Advice, 15–1.
(62) See below, Ch. 6, pp. 237–9.
(64) Stafford, The Guide of Honour, 126.
(65) Fiston, The Schoole of Good Manners, sig. B3r.
(67) Erasmus, De Civilitate, sig. (C8)r.
(68) H. C. Wyld, A History of Modern Colloquial English (London, 1920),

377–9.

Hindley, vol. 2, 36; Anon., The Character of a Town Gallant, in ibid., vol.
2, 2.
(71) Ibid. 45.
(72) See C. Barber, Early Modern English (London, 1976), 208–13; R.

Brown and A. Gilman, ‘The Pronouns of Power and Solidarity’, in Style
in Language (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), 253–76.
(73) Erasmus, De Civilitate, sig. C4r; Fiston, Schoole of Good Manners,

sig. B2v.
(75) Hale, Advice to his Grandchildren, in Practical Wisdom, 216.
(79) Ibid. ch. 5, 30.
(80) Ibid. ch. 5, 34–5.
Page 44 of 51
(81) This sense of separation can be seen, earlier, for example in the
idea of the home as a place of relative freedom from rules, see Ch. 3,
pp. 95–6, and in precepts on the propriety of visiting the sick, Ch. 3, p.
98.
(83) S. R., Courte of Civill Courtesie, 28, 29, and 31.
(84) See above, Ch. 4, p. 123.
(85) N. N., The Complements and Elegancy of the French Tongue. Newly
Corrected and Revised (London, 1654), added to the 1654 edition of La
Serre's The Secretary in Fashion, 238.
(86) Ibid. 239.
(87) Ibid. 252. A similar dialogue appeared in The Academy of

Complements.
(88) Dramatic instances at the fifteenth-century French and Burgundian

courts are described by Huizinga, Waning of the Middle Ages, 42–3.
(89) La Serre, Secretary in Fashion, sig. B5v.
(90) La Serre, Secretary in Fashion, sig. (B6)r.
(91) Courtin, Rules of Civility much Revised and Enlarged, ch. 18, 170–
1.
(92) Ibid., ch. 18, 172.
(93) Ibid., ch. 18, 251.
(94) La Serre, The Secretary in Fashion, sig. B3v.
(95) Gough, The Academy of Complements (7th edn., 1646).
(96) La Serre, The Secretary in Fashion, gives letters of reproach, and

The Complements and Elegancy of the French Tongue suggests how to
refuse a friend money without impoliteness (p. 256).
(97) See, for example, Courtin, Rules of Civility…Revised and Enlarged,

ch. 18, 177, where he advocates plainness to superiors.
(98) Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1605), in Works of

Bacon, ed. Spedding, Ellis, and Heath, vol. 6, 119.
Page 45 of 51
(99) For secondary education, see Charlton, Education in Renaissance

England, ch. 3, 113–14; for the universities, see Curtis, Oxford and
Cambridge in Transition, ch. 4, 94–6.
(100) See H. Gray, ‘Renaissance Humanism and the Pursuit of

Eloquence’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 24 (1963), 497–514.
(101) The most influential was that of Alexander Gill, Logonomia Anglica
(London, 1619), which included model extracts from Spenser, Sidney,
Daniel, and Jonson.
(102) The complexities of amplification and ornament are considered in

W. G. Crane, Wit and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: The Formal Basis of
Elizabethan Prose (New York, 1937), 1–5; for a brief general account of
the elements of sixteenth-century rhetoric, see G. H. McKnight, The
Evolution of the English Language (New York, 1956), ch. 8.
(103) Watson, The English Grammar Schools to 1660, 5–6.
(104) Sir James Whitelocke, quoted in B. L. Joseph, Elizabethan Acting,

ch. 1, 13.
(105) Charlton, Education in Renaissance England, 110–12, lists many of

these texts.
(106) Sir Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named the Governour (1531),
reprinted with an introduction by F. Watson (London, 1907), bk. 1, ch.
9, 42.
(107) Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman, ch. 1, 3–4.
(108) Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique, for the use of all soche as
are studious of Eloquence (London, 1553). Quotation in this study is
from the edition of 1562.
(109) Wilson, Arte of Rhetorique, p.f., sig. (A8)r.
(111) Thomas Blount, The Academie of Eloquence. Containing a

Compleat English Rhetorique (London, 1654), 68.
(112) J. E. Neale, The Elizabethan House of Commons (London, 1949),

407–8.
(113) I am indebted to Mrs Jennifer Loach for an informed general

opinion about the rhetorical skills of sixteenth-century MPs.
Page 46 of 51
(114) Gainsford, Rich Cabinet, fol. 20v.
(115) For Castiglionc's debt to Cicero and to Quintilian, see Woodhouse,

Baldesar Castiglione, passim.
(116) Castiglione, The Courtyer, bk. 1, sig. F3v–Fr4.
(117) Ibid., sig. F4r.
(118) Ibid.
(119) Ibid., sig. F4v.
(120) Castiglione, The Courtyer, bk. 2, sig. K3r.
(121) Ibid., sig. U2r.
(122) Ibid.
(123) Charlton, Education in Renaissance England, 112–14.
(124) See Hunter, John Lyly, chs. 1–2, for the transformation of humanist
ideals into the courtly values of Euphues, see also Javitch, Poetry and
Courtliness, ch. 1.
(125) Jonson, Every Man out of his Humour, Act III, Scene viii, in Works
of Jonson, ed. Herford and Simpson, vol. 3, 557.
(126) Breton, The Courtier and the Countryman, in Works of Breton, ed.
Grosart, vol. 2, 6.
(127) Guazzo, Civile Conversation, bk. 2, fol. 67r.
(128) Ibid., fol. 62v.
(129) Ibid., fol. 58v.
(131) Della Casa, Galateo, 89; Della Casa also criticizes Dante for
indecorous use of base metaphors (p. 83).
(132) Della Casa's debt to Cicero's ideal of decorum is discussed in

Woodhouse, Baldesar Castiglione, 77.
(133) Della Casa, Galateo, 71. Cp. Castiglione, The Courtyer, bk. 2, sig.
K3r.
(134) Della Casa, The Refin'd Courtier, tr. N[athanicl] W[aker], 200.
Page 47 of 51
(135) Martyn, Youth's Instruction, 97; Cleland, Hero-Paideia, 184.
(136) See Crane, Wit and Rhetoric in the Renaissance, 126.
(137) John Hoskyns, Direccons for Speech and Style (first published in
1630, but written between 1568 and 1603), reprinted in L. B. Osborn,
The Life, Letters and Writings of John Hoskyns (New Haven, 1937),
115.
(138) Blount, The Academie of Eloquence, subtitle.
(139) Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique, sig. Pir.
(140) Ibid., sig. P4v.
(141) See above, Ch. 3, p. 82 and especially Ch. 4, pp. 108–9. For
Erasmus's debt to classical ideals of posture and gesture see Fritz Graf,
‘Gestures and Conventions: the Gestures of Roman Actors and Orators’,
in Cultural History of Gesture, ed. Bremmer and Roodenberg, 36–58,
esp. 28–9. In the same collection, Schmitt, ‘The Rationale of Gestures’,
67 considers the medieval notion of gestures of penitence or
asceticism.
(142) Della Casa, Galateo, 70–1; Joseph, Elizabethan Acting, 54–5,

mentions the distinction required by theorists between the gestures of
oratory and those of acting.
(143) Castiglione, The Courtyer, bk. 1, sig. F4v; Faret, The Honest Man,
360.
(144) John Bulwer, Chirologia (London, 1644), cpist., sig. [A5]v.
(145) Ibid.
(146) Ibid. 87–8.
(147) Ibid. 183.
(148) Ibid. 117; ibid. 131.
(149) The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, antiquary, of Oxford, 1632–
1695 described by himself, ed. A. Clark (Oxford Historical Society,
1891–5), vol. 2, 332 (Dec. 1675).
(150) Sir William Cornwallis, Essayes (London, 1600), Essay 17, sig.
(G4)r.
Page 48 of 51
(151) Bacon, ‘Of Discourse’, in Works, ed. Spedding, Ellis, and Heath,
vol. 6, 455.
(152) See above, Ch. 4, pp. 146–7.
(153) Vienne, The Philosopher of the Court, 30.
(154) Faret, The Honest Man, 76.
(155) I. B., Heroick Education, sig. D3r–v.
(156) See below, Ch. 6. p. 200.
(157) Guazzo, Civile Conversation, bk. 2, fol. 56v.
(158) Cleland, Hero-Paideia, bk. 5, ch. 7.
(159) Faret, The Honest Man, 328; see also, in a less courtly context, the
recommendation of ‘conceit[s]’ which are ‘readie, and not too much
premeditated’ in Youth's Behaviour, ch. 3, 16.
(160) The Institucion of a Gentleman, sig. (A7)r.
(161) I. B., Heroick Education, sig. D3r–v.
(162) Ibid., sig. D4r.
(163) Ibid., sig. D5v.
(165) Lingard, A Letter of Advice, 3 and 8.
(166) John Earle, Micro-Cosmographie or a Peece of the World

Discovered (London, 1628), charac. 24, sig. (E8)v.
(167) Osborne, Advice to a Son, vol. 1, 9.
(168) Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in

Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago and London, 1994), see
especially ‘Conversation, Courtesy and Contradiction’, pp. 114–19, and
ch. 4, ‘Who was Robert Boyle?’.
(169) John Dryden, Defence of the Epilogue: or, an essay on the dramatic
poetry of the last age (1672), in Essays of Dryden, ed. W. P. Ker (Oxford,
1900), vol 1, 176.
(170) Dryden, Defence of the Epilogue, 175.
Page 49 of 51
(171) Ibid. 174.
(172) Richard Mulcaster, The First Part of the Elementaire which

entreateth chieflie of the right writing of our English Tung (1582), ed.
E. T. Campagnac (Oxford, 1925).
(173) Quoted in McKnight, The Evolution of the English Language, 137.
(174) Guazzo, The Civile Conversation, tr. Pettie and Young, preface, sig.
(A7)r.
(175) Jonson, The English Grammar (first published 1640), in Works of

Jonson, ed. Herford and Simpson, vol. 8, 465.
(176) Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie.
(177) Cleland, Hero-Paideia, bk. 5, ch. 7.
(178) Elyot, The Governour, bk. 1, pt. 5, 23.
(179) Lyly, Euphues, The Anatomie of Wyt, in The Complete Works of

John Lyly, ed. R. W. Bond (Oxford, 1902), 267.
(180) For the sixteenth-century debate on English orthography, see

Ferguson, Clio Unbound, 319–29.
(181) Wyld, History of Modern Colloquial English, ch. 4, 99; and see
‘Introductory’, 1–3, for definition of ‘class dialect’. See also Barber,
Early Modern English, 37–40, for a more cautious view, and E. J.
Dobson, ‘Early Modern Standard English’, Transactions of the
Philological Society (1955), 25–54.
(182) Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, ed. Willcock and Walker, bk. 3,
ch. 4, 145.
(183) Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, bk. 3, ch. 4, 145.
(184) John Aubrey, ‘Brief Lives’ chiefly of Contemporaries, set down by

John Aubrey, between the Years 1669 and 1696, ed. A. Clark (Oxford,
1898), vol. 2, 182.
(185) Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, bk. 3, ch. 4, 144.
(186) Charles Butler, The English Grammar. Whereunto is annexed an

index of Words (London, 1633), 3.
Page 50 of 51
(187) Anon., Remarques upon Remarques, or a Vindication of the

Conversations of the Town, 93–4; this example was lifted from a work of
1605—see Barber, Early Modern English, 25.
(188) H. C. Wyld, A History of Modern Colloquial English (London,

1920), 162–7.
(189) For Richelieu's interest in eloquence, see M. Fumaroli, ‘Les

intentions de Richelieu, protecteur de l'Académie Française’, 141–52 in
Richelieu et la culture: Actes de Colloque International en Sorbonne
(Paris, 1987). Significantly, Fumaroli sees the Academy as ultimately
turning to the polite world of Paris rather than to the court for its
criteria of the best speech.
Page 51 of 51
Objections to Civility

Anna Bryson

Print ISBN-13: 9780198217657
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198217657.001.0001
Anna Bryson
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198217657.003.0006

This chapter examines conflicts and cross-currents in the development
of the values and language of good manners. It argues that, far from
simply holding up the ‘civilizing process’, such conflicts frequently
underlay and moulded notions of civility, and made codes of manners an
ambiguous and contested area of social change.
Keywords: good manners, values, civilizing process, social change
Page 1 of 59
It is inevitable that modern discussion of the sixteenth- and

seventeenth-century concept of ‘civility’ should be strongly influenced
by the concept of ‘civilization’ which developed from it and is still
central to Western thought. The notion of ‘civilization’ continues to
underpin the self-image of Western society, whether as the ideological
basis for its political, economic, and cultural primacy, or as a standpoint
from which to criticize its shortcomings. Inseparable from the concept
is a vision of history, since ‘civilization’, like ‘education’, is both
transformation and the result of that transformation. While it is
possible to speak of the rise and fall of ‘civilizations’, the historical
perspective implicit in the term ‘civilization’ has been largely that of
‘progress’, an assumption made explicit in social and political discourse
since the Enlightenment,1 but in many ways already implicit in early
modern views of the development of ‘civility’ out of original ‘savagery’.
Twentieth-century historians have understandably lost confidence in
the view expressed by Gibbon, that a society once civilized cannot
relapse into barbarism unless threatened from without.2 Nevertheless,
the notion of ‘civilization’ still carries with it the implication that
progressive moral, social, and political improvement is somehow
‘natural’ in a society, and that the more recent stages of Western
history exhibit a greater degree of ‘civilization’ than the earlier ones. It
is assumed that only a major internal or external crisis can reverse the
process, and that it is the reversal rather than the continuation of the
process which requires special explanation.
Those theorists who have opened up the field of the historical

development of sensibility and ‘affective structure’ have substantially
maintained the progressive implications of the concept of ‘civilization’.
Freud's Civilization and its Discontents presents a theory which
assumes, explains, and predicts a process by which the individual is
increasingly forced to repress biological impulse in the cause of social
cohesion. Elias, in The (p.194) Civilizing Process, rejects Freud's
determinism and examines the notion of ‘civilization’ as a historically
relative concept. In his view, codes of behaviour can only be understood
in the context of the entire social organization and value system
characteristic of a historical period.3 Nevertheless, depite his caution
and his conviction that the rate of civilization of manners is far from
steady and in no way independent of other forms of social and political
change, he still commits himself to an essentially linear theory of the
development of sensibility from the sixteenth century onward. The
‘overall trend’ perceived by Elias consists in the increasing
sophistication and differentiation of the individual's reaction to bodily
Page 2 of 59
function and social intercourse and, above all, in ‘an expanding

threshold of aversion’.4
Elias reveals his commitment to a progressive vision of ‘civilization’ not

only in his confidence about its direction, but in his ambivalence about
its effects. Seeing the ‘civilizing’ process as above all a pacification of
human instincts and drives through an accumulation of internal
constraints, he implies that it has in some ways been achieved at the
cost of a human experience more vivid, direct, and emotional.
Civilization is bought by the sacrifice of the natural, a theme which is,
of course, central to Freud's theory and which in his case leads to the
fear that the cost is too high, and that the repressed drives will return
with a vengeance. Elias has rather more confidence; in any case his
sociological approach links the structure of the psyche with social
organization in any period and so does not allow for the eruption of the
primitive within the civilized. His ambivalence is more akin to that of
Max Weber, for whom modernity meant the triumph of instrumental
rationality and bureaucracy and the loss of a more romantic world of
traditional, magical, and irrational belief and passionate subjectivity.
Weber's influence is very obvious in Book 2 of The Civilizing Process,
which starts with the historical sociology of the rise of the modern
state.5 In an analysis which builds on Weberian terminology, Elias
charts the social configurations which encouraged the growth of the
centralized state with its monopoly of violence and taxation. The
analysis is tied in to the history of ‘manners’ and the psyche by Elias's
conviction that the rise of the state, with its increasingly ‘impersonal’
and rational modes of control, both depended on and required the
internalization of controls in the psychological make-up of (p.195) key
6
social groups and ultimately of the majority of the population. Without
rehearsing a complex argument, it seems far from frivolous to comment
that Elias's Civilizing Process describes a kind of Weberian
bureaucratization of the instincts.
Whether or not Elias regards the Civilizing Process as wholly desirable,

however, it is clear that his approach is progressive and broadly,
although not crudely, concerned with mapping and giving context to an
essentially linear and unidirectional process of increasing inhibition and
sophistication. In Chapter 3 I argued that Elias's view of ‘sensibility’ or
‘affective structure’ is unhistorical, or at least historically dubious. By
reifying ‘sensibility’ as an object of research, he fails to see how far the
whole notion of a psyche refined away from the immediate expression
of natural impulse was itself a historical construct; he hints at but does
not explore its character as a central term in a discourse elaborated by
early modern élites in their search for new modes of self-definition. On
Page 3 of 59
the other hand, the trends in the development of good manners which
have been analysed in previous chapters are not entirely inconsistent
with the ‘progressive’ view of manners which Elias puts forward. In the
sixteenth- and sevententh-century manuals of civility more areas of life
are being considered as subject to regulation. The newly ‘psychological’
approach to social rules implicit in the development of the principles of
‘representation’ and ‘accommodation’ may well have encouraged
greater levels of inhibition and anxiety in some sections of society on
some occasions. Written precepts about eating and other bodily
functions show some change in the direction of greater squeamishness.
Such trends might be counted as ‘advances’ according to Elias's
scheme of slow movement ‘toward that kind of refined behaviour, that
standard of conduct, habits and affect formation, which is
characteristic in our minds of “civilized” society, of Western
“Civilization” ’.7
Yet the evidence of late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century courtesy

literature published in England shows that even a qualified theory of
progression can be distorting. Elias is the first to concede that his
‘process’ is scarcely detectable over a period as short as a century, and
that it is impossible for him to take account of all the ‘fluctuations and
individual curves’8 in the process which would become apparent in a
detailed study. But these qualifications go no way towards doing justice
to the complexity of the values involved in changes in good manners.
There is, of course, no reason to reject out of hand the idea that, in
general, European society since the medieval period has seen a
sophistication of social technique (p.196) and even a containment of
biological impulses. There is also an obvious element of tautology in the
idea that all change in the past is a movement towards the present
state of affairs. The problem begins when Elias imposes upon his
evidence a distorting principle of selection well-known to English
political historians as ‘Whig history’: only those changes which count as
‘advances’ are registered. This principle of selection produces an
exposition which, while not necessarily incorrect, is necessarily
incomplete. Moreover, we inevitably get the impression that what is
dynamic in the development of manners is simply ‘the civilizing
process’, the movement by which ever-widening areas of human
behaviour are subjected to ever more stringent and internalized
constraints. The analysis of other positive traditions in society which
limit or undermine the development of these constraints or the
elaboration of social techniques is therefore ignored. The possibility
that new concepts of manners and new social imperatives emerge as
Page 4 of 59
compromises between conflicting social values and languages or that

conflict and tension are inherent within codes tends to be neglected.
Much of the courtesy literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries takes the form of criticism of contemporary behaviour rather
than simple description of an ideal code, a fact which alone suggests
conflict. However, when a writer merely contrasts the ‘courteous’ and
‘civil’ with the crude and unmannerly we cannot legitimately speak of a
conflict of social values. Depiction of the inverse of good behaviour was
a commonplace, indeed a conventional technique of courtesy writing.
Taken to its furthest lengths in Dedekind's Grobianus or Cacaëthes
Leaden Legacy: or the Schoole of Ill Manners,9 this technique presents
less an accurate picture of contemporary bad manners than an
exuberant and obvious fiction designed to amuse the reader and
perhaps to shock him or her into civility. Furthermore, mere failure to
live up to the ideals of conduct current within a social group cannot
really be regarded as a tradition of conduct in itself. When didactic
authors castigate habits which they ascribe simply to laziness or
ignorance, we may infer something about the gap between ideals and
practice in a society. We may also gather, from the freedom with which
gross behaviour is described, evidence of the kind of affective inhibition
characteristic of a writer and his intended readership. But we cannot
assume that the conduct criticized is not simply the result of a
straightforward gap between the standard and the reality.
Yet this kind of incivility, which presents no threat to Elias's linear,

progressive theory, is not the only kind of conduct condemned in early
(p.197) modern conduct books and satire. Although the elementary,
child-centred tradition of courtesy writing remains to a great extent
focused on the simple distinction between ‘civil’ and ‘uncivil’ habits and
actions, works of advice on behaviour in adult society show a consistent
interest in the distinction between true and perverse or erroneous
notions of civility. By the early seventeenth century, criteria of bad
manners, such as ‘curiosity’, ‘affectation’, rigid ‘formality’, and ‘idle
ceremony’, all remote from mere boorishness and crudity, have become
well established in the language of didactic and satirical authors. This
could be seen, perhaps, as a measure of ‘advancing’ sophistication in
manners, since these criteria emerge strongly only towards the end of
the sixteenth century. None the less, their emergence suggests strongly
that more is at work than a straightforward intensification of inhibition
and refinement. Even more difficult to fit into a scheme of linear
progression in civility is the apparent absence of consensus, especially
in the first half of the seventeenth century, on the value and legitimacy
of the basic principles of civility. This chapter will therefore examine
Page 5 of 59
conflicts and cross-currents in the development of the values and

language of good manners. I shall argue that, far from simply holding
up the ‘civilizing process’, such conflicts frequently underlay and
moulded notions of civility, and made codes of manners an ambiguous
and contested area of social change.
The Puritan divine William Gouge, in his immensely popular manual Of

Domestical Duties (first published in 1622), felt it necessary to include
a subsection countering ‘objections against good manners’.10 The
reasons for objection are listed systematically:
Religion and Grace consisteth not in good manners: many that

have not a sparke of Gods feare in their hearts are able to carry
themselves very orderly and mannerly…Good manners are a
hindrance to grace: they who are most diligent in teaching or
practising the one, are commonly most negligent in the other…
Good manners to grace are as mint, annise and cummin to the
great and weighty things of the Law.11
Gouge's insistence that the practice of good manners is a ‘bounden

dutie’ for the Christian, and his attempt to answer the objections point
for point, indicates the pressing nature of the conflict. That civility and
morality could be regarded as opposed rather than as allied values
argues for a tension in the understanding and practice of good manners
more basic than any suggested by disparities between courtesy writers
on individual points of behaviour.
(p.198) Gouge clearly had in mind a particular minority of English

Puritans as ‘objectors’ to civility, but before turning to the extent and
practical effects of their objections, we should first look carefully at the
relationship between morality and manners as it was perceived by
those who formulated the new principles of social conduct which have
been discussed in Chapter 4. The writers of the two most influential
‘compleat’ manuals of civility during the sixteenth century, Erasmus
and Della Casa, would not seem to have admitted any conflict between
manners and morality. Erasmus defined civility as ‘the outwarde
honesty’12 by which inner virtue and talent could be made socially
visible and effective; Della Casa called good manners ‘either a vertue or
that thing which comes very neere to a vertue’.13 They both assumed
that virtue and civility were compatible and even that the latter was to
be derived from the former. Yet even in these apparently innocent, and
in Erasmus's case explicitly moralizing formulations of what were often
individually uncontroversial precepts, it is possible to discern the basis
for an ethically inspired attack on their codes.
Page 6 of 59
Fifteenth-century courtesy writers had dealt with questions of social

technique and questions of social morality, such as truth-telling, under
the indiscriminate heading of ‘nurture’, a word synonymous with
‘vertue’ in many texts.14 While the word ‘nurture’ as applied to good
manners was abandoned entirely early in the seventeenth century, the
most elementary children's texts throughout the early modern period
continued to make good manners, piety and filial duty into an
indivisible whole. For example, the prefatory verses to Edmund Coote's
reading and writing manual The English Schoolemaster, reprinted many
times between 1596 and 1669, start:
I command thee God to serve

Then to thy parents duty yield
Unto all men be curtcous,
And mannerly in town and field.15
before embarking on a series of specific instructions for conduct at

school. In this specialized context, good manners are an aspect of
discipline, and therefore directly related to the moral value of
obedience to natural superiors. This is a point made clear by the first of
Coote's verses, which warns that the rules listed are those which the
child will be beaten for transgressing. But already in more
comprehensive or sophisticated texts, from Erasmus's De Civilitate
onward, a distinction is being made (p.199) between social and moral
imperatives. By calling civility ‘the outwarde honesty’ of the soul,
Erasmus is contrasting it with ‘inward honesty’, and by justifying good
manners as something ‘very neere’ to a virtue, Della Casa is
introducing an element of doubt. Both De Civilitate and the Galateo
express a new conception of manners which, by implying a separation
between good manners and morality, allow the first to be judged by the
standards of the second.16
Furthermore, while many of the individual precepts proposed by

Erasmus and Della Casa were most unlikely to attract moral criticism,
the general principles of social behaviour which they suggested were
capable of a practical interpretation at odds with the moral codes to
which both authors would no doubt have subscribed. Erasmus's
principle of ‘representation’, so well summed up in Fiston's assertion
that ‘the manners…are lively representations of the dispositions of the
mind,’17 is applied in De Civilitate solely to the man who possesses
virtue and talent but requires social technique to express these
merits.18 Erasmus did not concern himself with the vicious or talentless
man who uses such a representational technique to project absent
merits. Yet once manners are conceived as representational, they can
also be regarded as theatrical and even dissimulatory. Likewise, Della
Page 7 of 59
Casa's emphasis on the accommodation of the self to the sensibilities of

others may seem at first sight to derive from the Christian virtue of
humility, but unless ‘complaisance’ is in some way limited by an ideal of
moral integrity, it can slide into a doctrine of universal flattery. When
the principles of ‘representation’ and ‘accommodation’ are combined in
a ‘philosophy’ of good manners, they may then be interpreted as a basis
for systematic dissimulation in the cause of ingratiation. Thus although
it had long been a commonplace of Christian thought that the demands
of God and the claims of the world could often be at variance, the
conception of good manners emerging in the sixteenth century allowed
‘civility’, ostensibly a virtue, to be seen as a major issue in this conflict.
The tension which is merely implicit in the formulations of Erasmus and

Della Casa becomes explicit in the more sophisticated exposition of
courtliness epitomized in Castiglione's Courtyer. This is to some extent
because Castiglione is presenting a full-blown ideal of noble behaviour
rather than, like Erasmus, setting out rules modestly defined as
‘crassissima philosophiae pars’ and subordinated to piety and learning
in an educational programme. But it is also because Castiglione is
elaborating and (p.200) putting into an adult and very worldly setting
principles which Erasmus's limited purpose allows him to develop
outside a context in which tension becomes obvious. Although The
Courtyer was written in a spirit of high-minded idealism, the image of
the ideal courtier seems to be constructed with a view to the social
impact of noble virtues and accomplishments rather than to their actual
possession. Thus, in the concept of ‘negligence’ or
‘recklessness’ (sprezzatura in the original), Castiglione can recommend
a quality which depends on effort in the rejection of effortlessness, an
illusion justified only by its favourable but essentially misleading effect
upon others. Castiglione writes that the casual grace of ‘recklessness’
accompanyinge any deede that a man doeth, how lyttle soever it

be, but also many times maketh it to bee estemed much more in
effect than it is, because it imprinteth in the myndes of the
lookers on, an opinyon, that who can so slyghtly doc well, hath a
great deale more knowledge than in deede he hath: and if he wyll
apply hys study and diligence to that he doeth, he myght do it
much better.19
Despite the Renaissance attachment to the notion of ‘artifice’ as a

positive aesthetic value,20 there is a certain obvious deceit in
Castiglione's requirement that a man should devote enormous effort to
the projection of ‘natural’ talent: ‘yt may bee saide to be a very arte,
Page 8 of 59
that appeereth not to be art, neyther ought a man to put more diligence
in any thing than in covering it.’21
Castiglione was in fact conscious that the attributes of his ideal might
be criticized as morally trivial, if not actually meretricious, and he put
this accusation into the mouth of one of his disputants. The objection is
countered with the claim that the ultimate justification for courtly
manners is the greater good of the commonwealth, since the courtier's
social acomplishments, however superficial in themselves, will allow
him to gain the ear of the prince and to give good counsel without
causing offence.22 But this exchange is placed late in the work, in Book
IV, and since the issue of public service is signally absent from the
original discussions of the courtly manner, Castiglione's affirmation of
moral purpose has rather the air of a post hoc justification than a
defining theme. Even if his affirmation is taken seriously, it can still be
argued that his ‘courtier’ represents an emasculation of Cicero's image
of the ‘orator’ and of the ‘civic’ humanist ideal of the independent and
responsible patrician politician in a free city. The courtier cannot seek
to persuade frankly, but must ‘court’ the prince like a lover or, what no
doubt seemed worse within a very patriarchal (p.201) order, like a
woman who must seduce by charm and attractiveness.23 ‘Effeminacy’
was a charge frequently levelled against courtiers by moralizing
critics.24
The Courtyer inspired one lengthy moralistic attack which pinpointed

the tension between moral and social imperatives with admirable
clarity. Philibert de Vienne's Le Philosophe de Court (Lyons, 1547),
translated by George North in 1575, satirically presents the reader with
a systematic ‘philosophy’ of court behaviour. Vienne disclaims the
purpose of denouncing the obviously absurd or vicious, and goes to the
heart of the matter with an assault on the graceful, popular, and
apparently virtuous courtier who is none the less morally empty
because his conduct is determined by an external rather than an
internal standard. It is all ‘but too please and be gracious to others,
whereby is obteyned honour and reputation’.25 In Vienne's view, the
projection of merit is always a matter of dissimulation: ‘the semblances
and the apparaunces of all things cunningly couched, are the pryncipall
supporters of our philosophie.’26 The word ‘accommodation’ acquires a
sinister and insistent character in the book, for if men ‘holde, follow
and affyrme their own judgements and opinions, how true and good so
ever they be, they shall be called obstinate fooles.’27 Dissimulation is
perceived not as serving specific evil designs but the general end of
social acceptability. Hence Vienne ironically defends deceit as:
Page 9 of 59
all good fayth, as it were done not of purpose to shewe ourselves

otherwise than we be: but to the end to please the world. It is
therefore worthie great prayse to moderate our affections; that
they appeare not any way to others, and so to dissemble and
accommodate ourselves to everie one.28
For Vienne, ‘courtlie civilitie’ is not derived from virtue but is a

substitute for it. The idea that fair words and apparent deference may
cover evil intentions and that ‘Where too much courtesie is used Take
heed of frawd and subtle guile’29 had long been stock prudential
maxims. But the idea that the code of manners was itself corrupted and
corrupting was relatively new and depended on the new understanding
of the character and use of the codes of courtesy and civility which
developed during the sixteenth century.
(p.202) There is little evidence that Vienne's work was widely read
either in France or in England. Only two French editions are recorded
and the translation of 1575 seems to have been the only one in
England, although Gabriel Harvey mentions The Philosopher of the
Court as one of several foreign books popular in Cambridge in the late
1570s.30 Daniel Javitch has argued that English readers in the 1570s
did not possess the critical conception of courtliness necessary to
understand the force of Vienne's satire, and that North mistakenly
translated the work as a straightforward manual of courtly
advancement.31 This point is immensely difficult to prove; anti-court
themes were present in English writings before the 1570s, for example,
in the poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt who seems to have read and reacted
to Castiglione's original.32 The minor textual changes made by North in
his translation scarcely mask the savagery of the attack with which the
book concludes, as Vienne asserts that the courtly philosophy is directly
contrary to the law of God,33 and the dedication to Sir Christopher
Hatton, a man noted for courtliness, is insufficient proof of the
misunderstanding. Hatton was also the dedicatee of so unashamedly
vitriolic an attack on foreign fashions at court as William Rankin's The
English Ape, the Italian Imitation, the footesteppes of France (1588).
Javitch perhaps underestimates the Elizabethan capacity for ambiguity
in values and attitudes; a man can be both cynical and pious, and
literary anti-court conventions flourish best in literary court circles. The
translator of Guevara's A Dispraise of the Life of the Courtier (1548)
was the courtier, Sir Francis Briant. The would-be courtier, Gabriel
Harvey, could launch a bitter attack on the Italianate manners of the
Earl of Oxford and be himself clearly fascinated by the books which
helped to inspire them.34
Page 10 of 59
There was, it is true, little sophisticated and articulate opposition to the

social ideals of the English court during the 1570s. A greater volume of
anti-court polemic was to be expected in France, where the Italianate
court of Catherine de Medici was deeply unpopular and where
Protestants stood in armed opposition to the crown.35 Impeccably
moralistic advisers (p.203) from the late sixteenth to the early
seventeenth century, such as Roger Ascham and William Martyn, were
prepared to recommend The Courtyer as a definitive handbook of
manners even for those outside the court milieu.36 This generally
uncritical acceptance of Castiglione should be seen in the light of the
educational background of his English readers. A view of ideal gentility
as piety and learning in the service of crown and commonwealth was
well-established in England by the later sixteenth century. Critics might
lament the failure of the English gentry to live up to these ideals, but
the ideals themselves, culled from Erasmus, from Thomas Elyot, from
Cicero, and other classical sources, were already common-places and
the notion of pious state service was particularly entrenched; nor were
classical ideals of conduct, as in Italy, associated with earlier traditions
of civic liberty. Castiglione's rather belated justification of his courtly
graces as a basis for the giving of good counsel would therefore have
loomed especially large in the minds of English readers, who would
associate his advice with that of Elyot rather than with that of
Machiavelli. However, the prestige of the English court in the 1570s
and the continuing acceptance of Castiglione are beside the point.
Vienne's satire expresses a tension in the development of civility which
certainly became manifest in the less systematic anti-court writings of
later English authors, and the Courtyer remains a landmark in the
formulation of an ideal of manners vulnerable to moral criticism.
The image of the courtier as a flatterer or, at best, a man condemned to

flatter was already a well-established theme in European literature
before the Renaissance.37 What is significant, however, is the way in
which this stereotype takes on new life and precision in English writing
from the later years of Elizabeth. George Puttenham, for example, in
The Arte of English Poesie (1589), describes how the courtier, dedicated
to an ideal of dissembling grace, must know how ‘by twentie maner of
his new fashioned garments to disguise his bodie, and his face with as
many countenances’.38 George Pettie, in his preface to Guazzo's Civile
Conversation, protested against the courtly attempt to diguise learning
in a show of Castiglionean ‘recklessness’ and asked, ‘Why, Gentlemen,
is it a shame to shewe to be that, which it is a shame not to be?’39 In
the satirical (p.204) pamphlet, A Quip for an Upstarte Courtier (1592),
Robert Greene humorously identifies the courtier with a pair of velvet
breeches in dispute with a virtuous pair of cloth breeches; Italian
Page 11 of 59
influence, refinement of manners, and affected learning are all

condemned as saturated in deceit and illusion. Greene makes the
courtier an example of sinister ‘wit’, a term which had come to denote
not simply shrewd intelligence, but a facility in jest and compliment
which, in hostile eyes, was a trivial and dissembling use of language.40
This kind of criticism persisted and in some ways intensified during the
early sevententh century, a development which it is tempting to
associate with political conflict between court and country but which
was confined to no identifiable political grouping. Nicholas Breton, in
his dialogue The Court and the Countrey, condemned courtly manners
wholesale, from delicate table manners to courtly diversions such as
making riddling ‘characters’ and emblems: ‘What is the end of all this
wily-beguily? Seeking to deceive others, [the courtier is] deceiv'd
himself most of all.’41 He criticized courtly ‘orations’ as the ‘sound of a
little breath’ and derided fashionable epistolary forms:
Now for your Stiles of honour and worship to this Lord and that
Lady on the outside [of a letter], and a deale of humility and
ceremony on the inside, we thinke it is a wearying of the minde
before you come to the matter.42
In 1630 Richard Brathwayt criticized the ingratiating and conformist

aspect of courtly civility when he lamented ‘that apish and servile
imitation’ which ‘detracts much from the worth of man, who should
subsist on himselfe, and not relie on others postures’.43 In his
‘Character’ of a courtly ‘Travaller’, Brathwayt again inveighed against
accommodatory conduct, condemning the man ‘who can moulde
himselfe to all conditions, fashions and religions’ and ‘hath traced this
Theatre of earth, and made himselfe the Embleme of what he is’.44 The
sense of the whole code of courtly manners as deceitful and oppressive
was best expressed by Allestree who in The Gentleman's Calling (1660)
observed that it:
obliges men in many circumstances to renounce their ease, their

health, yea their understandings too, and keeps them in such
constraint, that one may truly say, a (p.205) less measure of self-
denial would serve to constitute a man a Good Christian, then an
exact courtier.45
The courtly civility condemned by Vienne and others as morally

perverse might be regarded as a minor phenomenon compared with the
basic codes of manners laid down by Erasmus or Della Casa. It might
be argued that even if the principles which inform ‘courtly civilitie’ can
be linked with those formulated in De Civilitate and the Galateo, they
Page 12 of 59
are simply a distortion of the latter brought about by the competitive

atmosphere of what was a narrow, sophisticated, court environment.
Certainly, manuals of courtly advancement more blatantly cynical than
that of Castiglione present the court as an independent world where
dress, address, and demeanour are transformed into weapons in the
struggle for patronage and in which, therefore, ‘civility’ is an aspect not
of obedience or socially directed virtue but of policy. Lorenzo Ducci's
Ars Aulica, or the Courtier's Arte, which appeared in English in 1607,
recommended as an axiom that the courtier ‘must conceal the endevor
of his proper commoditie, under the apparent desire of the Prince's
service’,46 and gave comprehensive advice on advancement based
wholly on calculated self-control and accommodation. Eustache du
Refuge's A Treatise of the Court makes a nod in the direction of the
moralist by mentioning the uncertainties and dangers of court life,47
but later insists on a whole-hearted effort at ingratiation and
dissimulation. Thus in his chapter ‘Of Affabilitie’ du Refuge writes,
Neither is it sufficient to satisfic men's conceits and only make

them beleeve we love them, that we beare them much affection,
and eagerly and carnestly desire to serve and assist them: but we
must endeavor with a pleasing countenance; yea, with an
agreable reception, not only to entice but to allure them to haunt
and frequent our company.48
He asserts bluntly that the courtier must be ‘alwaies covering and over-
vailing his thoughts, desires and designes with an affable and pleasing
countenance’.49 These manuals may seem to prove Vienne's point: court
manners are a language of flattery and illusion, and the product of a
world in which, in Machiavelli's words, ‘it is not…necessary to have all
[positive moral] qualities, but it is very necessary to seem to have
them.’50 However, at first sight they justify moral criticism of courtly
civility rather than of civility in general.
(p.206) In fact, the distinction cannot be pressed very far. Certainly, in

the conventions of ‘character’ literature and no doubt in practice, the
courtier was distinguished by sophistication of clothes, gesture, and
speech.51 But by the early seventeenth century the court was not an
isolated social enclave but the creator and arbiter of fashion for the
fast-growing ‘gallant’ society in London, and increasingly for its
provincial imitators. Although Spenser was to criticize contemporary
courtesy in terms reminiscent of Vienne, he also asserted a general
opinion in calling
…court and royall citadell,
Page 13 of 59
The great schoolmaistresse of all courtesy.52
This point is underlined by the fact that manuals of courtly behaviour

were neither destined for nor read by courtiers alone. Castiglione's
Courtyer enjoyed a popularity far beyond the court and was
recommended by Ascham and by the lawyer and recorder of Exeter,
Martyn, simply as a guide to gentlemanly manners.53 Courtly manuals
and general expositions of politeness overlapped in material and
approach, as is evident from the debt of the anonymous Art of
Complaisance to du Refuge's Honest Man.54 Moreover, from the mid-
sixteenth century onwards, books on gentility and courtesy which do
not deal specifically with the court display that concern with the
‘political’ functions of manners which one might expect to apply
principally to courtiers. There is little overt cynicism in the Galateo, but
Della Casa cannot refrain from hinting that manners are more
consistently necessary to a man than high-mindedness or courage: ‘I
could name you many who (being otherwise of little account) have been
and be style much esteemed and made of, for their cherefull and
pleasaunt behaviour alone.’55 Guazzo suggests that ‘to be acceptable in
companie, we must put of as it were our owne fashions and manners,
and cloath our selves with the conditions of others, and imitate them so
farre as reason will permit.’56 Despite the vague appeal to a qualifying
‘reason’, he is echoing the recommendations of writers on courtly
advancement. The young gentleman envisaged by S. R.'s Court of Civil
Courtesie is above all the ‘social politician’, adept in manipulating every
social occasion to his (p.207) own advantage; he perceives other men's
social positions and humours and accommodates his behaviour to their
taste in order to gain popularity and prestige.
The problem posed to moralists during the sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries, then, was not simply the eternal spectacle of deceit and one-
upmanship near the centre of power. Rather, the development of a new
language of manners, and the expansion of the courtly and urban milieu
in which such a language was appropriate, created what was often an
acute and pervasive sense of the gap between moral and social
imperatives. In his literary study of Sincerity and Authenticity, Lionel
Trilling has drawn attention to the obsession with ‘dissimulation’,
‘feigning’, and ‘pretence’ and to the person who ‘systematically
misrepresents himself in order to practise upon the good faith of
another’ characteristic of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature.
He points out that the very terminology of ‘internal’ and ‘external’
aspects of human character, and hence the ideal of ‘sincerity’, only
emerged during this period; the word ‘sincerity’ in the sense of
frankness and directness began to appear in English during the early
Page 14 of 59
sixteenth century.57 Trilling argues that concern with sincerity was

linked to a substantial increase in social mobility which was
nevertheless limited by a ‘paucity of honourable professions which
could serve the ambitious as avenues of social advancement’. The
aspiring were therefore forced to rely on deliberate falsification,
whether of genealogies and wills or of their social personalities as
outwardly expressed in dress, address, and demeanour.58
It is, however, unnecessary to paint a lurid picture of a society crowded

with the ambitious dissemblers who people Jacobean tragedy in order
to explain the new concern with sincerity and dissimulation in relation
to manners. It is enough to point to the growth of the court and the
comparatively anonymous and competitive ‘society’ of London, and to
the adoption of a quasi-meritocratic, humanist ideology of authority and
status even in rural localities. These factors may have led to a greater
number of gentleman-impostors but, more important, they put pressure
even on bona fide gentlemen to validate their status with social
behaviour informed by the theatricality and accommodation so disliked
by moralizing critics. The experience of court and city, and the
humanist language of ‘internal’ gentlemanly attributes perfected by
education and ‘projected’ in civil behaviour enhanced awareness that
men had social identities distinct from inner character and governed by
social rather than directly (p.208) ethical codes. The constant
juxtaposition of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ aspects of human character
encouraged fascination with the problem of discerning a man's true
intentions and inclinations and hence the ‘psychological’ interpretation
of human behaviour which has been noted in Chapter 4.59 The wise
man had now to ‘read’ the external signs which both concealed and
revealed, for, as the Jacobean essayist Tuvill put it:
There is nothing more hard, and difficult to come by, then a true
and certaine knowledge of the inward disposition, and abilities of
man. His mind is subject to many secret inclinations: 'tis like a
labyrinth, and full of crooked windings, and turnings. His deedes,
wordes and gestures, are never lightlie beautified, but with some
outward imposture: They are fraught with vanitie, and deceite.60
But this mistrustful and ‘psychological’ view of behaviour did not only
underlie interest in the ‘sincerity’ of individuals: it inevitably opened up
problems about the moral status of the social rules which governed
‘external’ conduct.
One such problem was focused in a new categorization of social rules

employed by courtesy writers as well as by crities of social conduct.
‘Ceremonies’ was a term used by sixteenth- and sevententh-century
Page 15 of 59
writers to designate many stereotyped gestures of deference and

respect: head-baring, bowing, kneeling, titles of respect, and
compliments. Although these gestures and verbal formulae were
regarded as an integral part of civility, it is striking how far didactic
authors (with the notable exception of Courtin), expressed scepticism
about their real value and legitimacy. Late medieval texts had dealt
with these matters unselfconsciously, without creating a special
category and without adding qualifying comments. The early modern
codifiers, while insisting on the performance of symbolic acts of
deference, yet often echoed Thomas More's Raphael in Utopia, who
asserted that ‘it is idiotic to attach such importance to a lot of empty
gestures [kneeling and bowing] which do nobody any good.’61 Della
Casa calls ‘ceremonies’ ‘lyes and dreames’ and ‘vaine shewes of honour
and reverence’, although he adds that they are dictated by custom and
that to abandon them would be to return man to a primitive acorn-
eating condition.62 Guazzo's disputants discuss the necessity for
‘ceremonies’ with some scepticism and conclude that they are
important only so that a man may not seem ‘a clown, a rudesby, or a
contemner of others’.63 Cleland, dealing with ‘the manner of reverence
(p.209) making’, comments disapprovingly that ‘courtiers…are
idolators of ceremonie’ but concedes that a young man will have to

‘conforme somewhat’ to ‘al these vaine complements and
ceremonies’.64 Later in the seventeenth century the authors of Youth's
Behaviour were likewise grudging, starting a chapter ‘Of the first
Duties and Ceremonies in Conversation’ with the words, ‘Although
superfluous complements and affectation in ceremonies are to be
eschewed, yet thou oughtest not to leave them that are due.’65 In 1673,
Walker insisted that true civility does not consist ‘in certain modish and
particular ceremonies, and fashions’66 despite the fact that a good
number of his precepts of civility refer precisely to these.
This increased sense that some symbolic social practices are mere
‘form’ is very interesting. In Chapter 1 I cited a modern anthropological
view that social rules can be divided into the ‘substantive’ (law and
ethics) and the ‘ceremonial’ or purely symbolic.67 While this distinction
may have its uses as an ‘objective’ analytical tool, it seems that it was
only emerging as a commonplace mode of interpreting social practices
during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In an extremely
hierarchical society there was enormous investment in the symbols of
rank and deference, and the Elizabethan reverence for ‘ceremony’ was
illustrated, for example, in a lengthy allegorical passage from
Chapman's continuation of Marlowe's poem, ‘Hero and Leander’.
Page 16 of 59
Leander, who impatiently wishes to consummate his love before

marriage, has a sudden vision of
The Goddess Ceremony, with a crown

Of all the stars; and Heaven with her descended;
Her flaming hair to her bright feet extended,
By which hung all the bench of deities;
And in a chain, compact of cars and eyes,
She led Religion…
Devotion, Order, State and Reverence,
Her shadows were: Society, Memory;
All which her sight made live, her absence die.
…From her bright eyes, Confusion burns to death,
And all estates of men distinguisheth:
By it Morality and Comeliness
Themselves in all their sightly figures dress.
Her other hand a laurel rod applies,
To beat back Barbarism and Avarice,
That followed, eating earth and excrement;
(p.210) And human limbs; and would make proud ascent
To seats of gods, were Ceremony slain.68
Nevertheless, despite the courtly notion of ‘ceremony’ as the guarantee

of all order and morality, social ‘ceremonies’ were coming to be
regarded with ambivalence as mere symbols, distinct from the basic
standard of ‘civil’ behaviour which was constructed as somehow
‘natural’ rather than artificial or contingent. The question of the decline
in straightforward belief in ‘ceremony’ and ‘ritual’ in early modern
Europe is one which embraces many areas beyond that of good
manners, but it is sufficiently pertinent to manners to deserve some
further examination here.
Scepticism about the validity of ceremony can only occur when the
social signs which communicate values such as honour, authority, or
allegiance are perceived as quite distinct from those values, and indeed
as arbitrary in that any sign would do as well. This understanding of
signs is the basis for what has been called an ‘elaborated’ code of social
communication and exchange, as opposed to a ‘restricted’ code in
which no clear distinction is made between signifier and signified.69 In
a persuasive analysis of the coronation of Elizabeth 1, David Norbrook
has argued that Elizabethan society was still largely governed by a
‘restricted’ code.70 The objects or ritual gestures which ‘represented’
monarchic authority were experienced as somehow ‘natural’; they
partook of the mystique or power of that which they represented, and
their use in turn reinforced that mystique or power. The coronation was
not then a mere pageant or illustration of the values of monarchy; it
Page 17 of 59
was an effective part and perceived source of those values. Ceremony

therefore bridged the gap between the individual and his idealized
social role, and the potentially dangerous question of whether the
qualities of the individual matched the values of his role, and whether,
for example, a gift expressed ‘real’ allegiance to ‘real’ honour or
virtuous authority was not so easily or so starkly posed as it would be at
a later period.71
Norbrook's analysis of the coronation and of the ‘ceremonial’ aspect of

panegyric poetry (which to the modern reader seems a slavish exercise
in flattery), is clearly relevant to the study of the everyday exchanges of
honour involved in the code of manners. He makes a general social
comment when he claims that (p.211)
vulnerable to many natural hazards, and lacking many modern

means of social control, the social structure was constantly
reinforced by public ceremonies of honour that reiterated the
code with each exchange of messages. Private allegiance had to
be translated into public ceremonies: honour had to be paid not
just with the mind but with the body, so the meaning of the act
and its performance were one and the same.72
Up to the last clause this claim would hold true throughout the early
modern period and even beyond. However, the meaning of certain
ceremonies was already being questioned in the later sixteenth century
in writings which, if not originally English, were extremely popular in
translation. Norbrook shows how, during the reigns of Elizabeth and
James I, belief in the power of ceremony as a creative bridge between
the individual and a role at the political level diminished and was
diluted, even superseded, by a view of royal ceremony as, at best, a
symbolic illustration of values inherent in monarchy or, at worst,
necessary political showmanship.73 The change is analogous to that
which was visible in the literature of manners at a slightly earlier stage.
In this literature there develops a view that ceremonies have no value
or potency in themselves and can be justified only in so far as they
express genuine respect for genuine virtue, defined as existing ‘inner’
feelings and qualities in performer and recipient; where such feelings
and qualities are absent, ceremonies are regarded as mere customary
guarantees of social order.
The Protestant attack on ‘empty ceremony’ in religious practice was

clearly a major aspect of growing scepticism about ritual. Thomas
Cranmer's view of religious ceremony as merely contingent, necessary
simply for the maintenance of right order and harmony in church and
Page 18 of 59
state, echoes the opinions of courtesy writers on social ritual, and is

markedly cooler than Chapman's effusions:
[Ceremonies] ought neither to be rejected nor despised, nor yet to

be observed with this opinion, that they of themselves make men
holy or that they resist sin…nor the Laws and ceremonies of the
Church at their first making were ordained for that intent, but for
a common commodity, and for good order and quietness to be
ordained among subjects.74
Della Casa, significantly, saw the origin of secular ceremony in religious

ceremony,75 but it is obviously impossible to explain the scepticism
about social ritual which was expressed in the Galateo or in Guazzo's
Civile Conversation in terms of Protestant influence. Rather, we are
dealing with (p.212) an overall conceptual change in European culture
which it seems difficult to explain reductively, although increasing
academic education, social mobility, and awareness of non-European
cultures, as well as confessional conflict, may all have contributed. In
any case, it must be clear that the ambiguity which this conceptual shift
brought to the formulation and perhaps the practice of good manners
takes us a long way from Elias's relatively simple theory of increasing
sophistication and constraint. The issue is rather one of shifts in
systems of social meaning, and it is also vital to any understanding of
the background to ‘objections to good manners’.
It now remains to ask how far the newly perceived tension between the
claims of morality and those of civility found substantial social
expression. It is tempting to look first for a Puritan tradition of
behaviour which rejected wholesale the validity of externally defined
social rules. Yet it is enormously difficult to pin down such a tradition.
William Gouge does seem to be addressing a real body of ‘objectors to
good manners’ among the godly readership of his manual, but he does
not define the parts of the code of ‘civility’ most threatened. Elsewhere
in his treatise he writes of good manners and defines them as the basic
deferential gestures of bowing, kneeling, baring the head in the
presence of superiors, and other simple modes of paying respect.76 This
might indicate that he is criticizing a radical Puritan or sectarian
tendency to reject wholesale the language of deference as ‘mere’
ceremony.
Evidence for such systematic rejection is rather scarce from the period
at which Gouge was writing. Some of the Marian martyrs, and the
sectaries Hacket, Coppinger, and Arthington in the 1590s, apparently
refused to bare their heads to superiors,77 and there was likely to have
been some continuity between these sectarian protests against worldly
Page 19 of 59
hierarchy and the explosion of religious radicalism in the wake of civil

war which certainly involved repudiation of deference. In any case,
George Fox and the Quakers took the religiously motivated
condemnation of elementary forms of respect as ‘idle ceremony’ to its
logical conclusion during the 1650s. Fox attacked the use of the polite
second person plural, the formulae and gestures of respectful
salutation, and even the phrases ‘Good-Morrow’ and ‘Good-Even’,
writing that ‘he that Respects Persons, Commits Sin.’78 His objection
was based both on the doctrine of Christian equality and on belief in
the inherent hypocrisy of such forms. As he wrote in a tract of 1657
Concerning the Worlds Hypocritical Salutations, (p.213)
The Customs, and Manners, and Fashions of the World, which are
practized amongst the people in the World, are vain; when they
meet with one another, they will say how do you Sir, d'off the Hat,
scrape a Leg, make a Courtesie. I am glad to see you well, your
servant, your servaunt my Lord, (or Sir) or Mistresse, and when
they are past them, with the same Tongue wish evil to them,
speak evil of them, with hurt to them.79
The Quaker's behaviour, he argued elsewhere, should be the direct

expression of the godly charity of his inner soul, untainted by insincere
worldly forms, so that ‘we honour all Men in the Lord with our Souls,
and with our Hearts’ and those who mistakenly require external forms
are misled by a ‘fleshly Principle, for these things may be done and
practized, and the heart full of envy’.80
This rejection of outward forms provoked violent indignation, and the

Quakers were made particularly socially conspicuous by practising
what they preached. In Jonathan Clapham's A Full Discovery and
Confutation of the Wicked and damnable Doctrines of the Quakers
(1656) there appears the horrified complaint that ‘they expresse no
civil honour by any outward gestures, nor use common salutations, yea
they condemne such as do these things.’81 Clapham pronounces them
‘enemies to all civility and good manners’ and, significantly, considers
them worse than ‘the savage Indians’. He makes use of the stock
opposition between civility and the bestial to enforce his attack, asking,
‘wherein can they [the Quakers] come nearer to bruit beasts, then in
casting off humanity and civil demeanour?’82 But the sheer degree of
outrage provoked by Quaker behaviour suggests that the rejection of
basic forms of deference had never been a commonplace of radical
Protestant tradition in England, and the fear and hatred of Quakers
shown by Presbyterian MPs shows that their conduct was anathema to
most respectable Puritans.83 This conservative Puritan attitude was
understandable. Abandonment of worldly ceremony constituted an
Page 20 of 59
obvious attack on the social and political order—the Leveller John

Lilburne, as well as the Quaker Fox, refused to doff his hat on many
occasions. Quaker rejection of ceremony was eventually to become part
of a quietist, passive withdrawal from the corruption of the world, but
in the 1650s it appeared as a threatening symbol of militancy. It evoked
the same conservative paranoia as was aroused by or perhaps itself
created the Ranter movement. The Ranters were depicted (p.214) as
rejecting not ceremony so much as basic ethically enjoined decencies in
what were depicted as orgies of blasphemy, drunkenness, and sexual
excess.84
The scale of the conservative reaction to the conduct of a small radical

minority is revealing, but in fact suggests the solidity of commitment to
the basic forms and language of civility among the upper and middle
ranks of society. As early as 1642 a Royalist versifier was playing on the
fears of moderate parliamentary supporters rather than accurately
depicting the aims of the parliamentary or even popular Puritan
leadership when he wrote in a satirical ‘roundhead’ manifesto,
Wee'l teach the Nobles how to crouch

And keep the Gentry downe,
Good Manners hath an ill report,
And turns to pride we see.
Wee'l therefore cry all manners downe
And hey then up goe we.85
By the early 1650s sectarian behaviour had seemed to bear out these
fears, and the moderate divine Thomas Fuller could warn an
establishment that needed little encouragement to fear that ‘such as
now introduce Thou and Thee will (if they can) expel Mine and Thine,
dissolving all property into confusion.’86 Basic civility of manners
which, given the larger connotations of the word ‘civility’ was strongly
connected in the seventeenth-century mind with the overall order and
harmony of society, was not seriously questioned by most Puritans of
the gentry or middling ranks. This is illustrated by the publishing
career of Robert Codrington. A strong supporter of the Parliamentary
cause, Codrington had a professional interest in courtesy literature; he
had added ‘Prayers and Graces’ to the 1620 edition of Seager's Schoole
of Vertue and he later added extra precepts and a companion volume to
the French manual Youth's Behaviour, which had been translated by a
Catholic. Religious allegiance was probably largely irrelevant to the
acceptance of basic good manners among the educated classes.
Page 21 of 59
When Gouge sought to argue against ‘objections to good manners’

among the Puritan ‘godly’, what he believed to be threatened was not
the elementary civilitas of Erasmus, so much as the graceful and
accommodatory (p.215) manners described in the more sophisticated
texts. Citing scripture in his defence of manners, Gouge seems to be
defending an innocent kind of courtliness: he writes that good manners
work a kind of delight and love and admiration, in those that

beholde them, as is noted of the Queen of Sheba when she beheld
the comely carriage of Solomon's servants…(good manners) are
an outward ornament to piety and religion.87
It might then be argued that Gouge's comments are a mild and

sympathetic version of the criticism to be found in anti-Puritan satire
from the mid-1570s to the 1640s and beyond: an attack on what were
perceived, not as distinctively Puritan elementary good manners, but as
the stiff and self-righteous rejection of social graces. The Puritan was
usually depicted by the hostile satirist88 not only as a hypocrite and
killjoy, but also as a social boor who refuses to conform to a pleasant
standard of sociability and who constantly asserts his godliness by
truculence, suspicion, and sanctimonious looks and gestures. Jonson's
Zeal-of-the-land Busy in Bartholomew Fair and his Ananias and
Tribulation in The Alchemist are particularly detailed examples of this
stereotype, especially in relation to the jargonized scriptural speech
which critics attributed to Puritans and which no doubt had some basis
in practice. The same criticism was evident in an anonymous pamphlet
of 1602 concerned with wife-choosing. It contains an anecdote about a
youth who fails to win over a Puritan girl until he abandons his
fashionable ‘double ruffe’, long hair, long breeches, and Spanish broad-
toed shoes and adopts a ‘turn'd up…white of eye’.89
This evidence is in various ways problematic. Satirists were usually

attacking lower or middle-ranking Puritans and there is little sign of
peculiarities of Puritan behaviour in the gentry or nobility before 1642,
other than an enhanced moralism and condemnation of fashionable
vices. It is difficult to disentangle specific objections to features of the
code of courtly civility from the overall Puritan distaste for frivolity,
scurrility, profanity, and wordliness at all levels of society. However, in
the demands of Puritans for sobriety, gravity, and constant attention to
religion in discourse there was an implicit rejection of the development
of the gentlemanly ideal which stressed capacity to perform well in
light conversation. The Puritan divine William Perkins, in A Direction
for the Government of the Tongue according to God's Word (1603)
condemned ‘idle words…such (p.216) words as are spoken to little or
no end or purpose,’ and although he seems to approve ‘Urbanitie…a
Page 22 of 59
grace of speech, whereby men in seemely manner use pleasantnesse in

talke for recreation,’ his other precepts suggest that he would limit the
scope and style of conversation much more strictly than Della Casa or
Castiglione.90 He directed the Godly ‘even at table to maintaine talke of
religion, and duties of Godlinesse,’ pronounced most jesting to be
suspect, and asserted that ‘Wise and Godly silence is as excellent a
vertue as holy speech, for he knoweth not how to speak which knoweth
not how to hold his tongue.’91 Godly silence was not, in fact, a noted
characteristic of Puritans, who were constantly attacked for dominating
censoriousness, and insistence on the importance of administering
reprimand brought the Puritan into conflict with ‘accommodatory’
ideals of discourse. Robert Cleaver, in his commentary on the Proverbs
of Solomon, advised
Let us learne to be plaine hearted towards our brethren, and if

ought be ammisse in them, let our lippes faithfully admonish them
in Love, and not flatter them in hatred. It may be a courtly trick to
dissemble, but not an honest part to practise it; it may be
agreeable to carnall policic, but it is altogether contraric to
Christian Wisdome.92
More generally, a Puritan sense of the necessary moral limits to

refinement of manners does seem to accompany growing hostility to
the court in the 1630s, a period in which the moderate Puritan criticism
of over-zealous brethren was subordinated to attacks on the ungodly
influences at the centre of power. Although straightforward and indeed
traditional attacks on lewdness and extravagance at the court were
common, it is interesting that Charles's court was less vulnerable to
charges of debauchery and grossness than had been his father's. This
failed to pacify his critics, however, since not only the real or imagined
self-indulgence of courtiers but the newly ceremonious and aesthetic
values of the Caroline court aroused Puritan anger. When William
Prynne wrote his vitriolic Histrio-Mastix; The Players Scourge, or the
Actors Tragedie, his objection to masquing, dancing, complimental love
poetry, and courtly personal ornamentation was not simply that these
conduced to immorality, but that all social forms—‘vanities, cultures
and diguisment’—which demanded artifice (p.217) in the pursuit of a
worldly aesthetic were intrinsically corrupt and false.93 The views
which we have noted earlier in Philibert de Vienne's The Philosopher of
the Court, in the increasingly embittered atmosphere in England in the
1630s helped to ensure Prynne's persecution.
After 1640, political polarization and upheaval generated polemic on

both Royalist and Parliamentarian sides in which very crude contrasts
between Puritan and Cavalier stereotypes crystallized. A Royalist
Page 23 of 59
pamphleteer in 1642 saw his opponents as characterized by ‘the

roundness of the Ruffe, the length of the Dublet, and the shortnesse of
the Breeches, being a habit correspondent to the pictures of the
Apostles in the Geneva Print’.94 A parliamentarian writer went beyond
clothes to manners, attacking Royalists as creatures weighed down
with ‘periwigs…curled or crisped haire…pearle or ribbons at the eares,’
distinguished by drunkenness and levity,
The nicety and curiosity of the habit, the length of the cloake, the
fashion of the doublet…by the French-trouble and the straddling
of the legges, as far asunder lawyers’ lines, by the swift fanning of
the ayre with the lascivious hand, by the wagging and often
shaking of the hand.95
Short hair became for a time a major symbol of Parliamentary

allegiance, and a pamphlet of c. 1644, probably written by Prynne—A
Gagge for Longhair'd Rattleheads who revile all Civill Roundheads—
traced a connection between long hair and ‘pride, lust, wantonnesse,
effeminacy’ through a bizarre series of ancient and modern examples.
It is, however, difficult to see this clash of hostile stereotypes as more

than politically motivated caricature which replaces a spectrum of
behaviour with the most emphatic contrast available. Political conflict
no doubt made differences in manners more significant and gave them
an overt ideological edge, but they were probably not based on any
major rifts in the social practices of the English governing class. Lucy
Hutchinson's acid account of ‘Roundhead’ manners suggests, in fact,
that these were ephemeral symbols ignored by many Puritan
gentlemen, notably her husband. She wrote that
When Puritanism grew into a faction, the zealots distinguished

themselves both men and women, by several affectations of habit,
looks and words, which, had it (p.218) been a real forsaking of
vanity, and an embracing of sobriety in all those things, would
have been most commendable; but their quick forsaking of those
things, when they had arrived at their object, showed that they
either never took them up for conscience, or were corrupted by
their prosperity to take up those vain things they durst not
practise under persecution.96
The problem of the potential opposition between good manners and

morality was not, therefore, straightforwardly embodied in the conflict
between Cavalier and Roundhead. Although the self-consciously godly
were naturally in the vanguard of those who denounced the fashionable
vices and extravagant fashions of many courtly ‘gallants’, they were
Page 24 of 59
themselves the subject of criticism on the grounds of dissimulation and

theatrical self-representation. It is noteworthy that Lucy Hutchinson
uses the word ‘affectation’ to describe the appearance and mannerisms
of the ‘zealots’: in the vocabulary of manners established in sixteenth-
century texts the term defines attempts to render the self conspicuous
which reveal themselves as artificial.97 The keynote of anti-Puritan
satire from the Elizabethan period to the Restoration is the attribution
of hypocrisy.98 Although this usually takes the form of accusations of
avarice and lechery lurking behind a mask of sanctimonious
righteousness, it also rests on perceptions of specifically Puritan
attempts to express membership of an elect group and thus to make an
impression on those outside the group, a function exactly analogous to
that of gallant or courtly manners. In hostile eyes, the Puritan attempt
to abandon worldly values was yet another attempt to gain social
prestige.
Thus the criticism of Puritan mannerisms was not so much the reaction
of the conventionally civil and courteous to conduct which denied their
basic presuppositions about manners as yet one more manifestation of
a problem intrinsic to the discourse of civility: all stereotyped social
signs, conceived as ‘representations’ of internal qualities, are tainted
with insincerity and subject to ‘political’ manipulation. As sincerity
itself becomes a ‘manner’ it ceases to be sincere. Long before the
outbreak of civil war, and without reference to Puritan conduct, Francis
Bacon stated the problem clearly when he suggested that ‘excusation,
cessions, modesty itself well-governed, are but arts of ostentation.’99
Even earlier, Guazzo expressed scepticism at the possibility of entirely
sincere social behaviour when he called the conduct of those who ask a
man ‘to use no (p.219) ceremony’ with them as just ‘another kind of
100
ceremony’. When the ‘country gentleman’ in the dialogue Of Cyvile
and Uncyvile Life accuses the courtier of being ‘ful of respectes’, the
courtier replies by pointing out that his accuser is, in his own way, just
as ceremonious.101
Discussion of distinctively ‘Puritan’ manners at the level of the gentry

can also founder on the difficulties surrounding the definition of
‘Puritan’, especially if we take at face value the message of the Puritan
polemicists, that moral idealism was a monopoly of the Puritan party. In
fact, at different times in the seventeenth century clergy and anxious
parents of various religious persuasions and political loyalties warned
against fashionable gentlemanly vices and advocated piety, sobriety,
gravity, and simplicity of demeanour. Richard Allestree's The
Government of the Tongue (1674) condemned idle talk, extravagant
modes of expression, and boasting, lying, and swearing as roundly as
Page 25 of 59
any Puritan text. John Norden's The Father's Legacie. with Precepts
Morall and prayers Divine (1625) was sternly pious as well as practical,
rejecting the principle of accommodation with the words, ‘Never strive
to please all men…if thou canst please thyselfe and not offend God, it is
no matter whether others be pleased or no.’ He also advised his son to
‘banish…ignorant and hypocritical puritans’ from the house.102 Sir
Christopher Wandesford's Book of Instructions to his Son and Heir is
full of exhortation against ‘Vanity and Wantonness’, strongly
condemning oaths, advocating daily devotions, and even warning his
son not to be deflected from a sober life by the ‘misapplied Name of
Puritane’.103 The manuals of gentility writen by Brathwayt and
Allestree, both Royalists, are impeccably severe in tone and, if
anything, take a sterner line on drinking, gambling, playhouses, and the
dangers of travel than the Institutions of William Higford, whom
Anthony Wood described as a ‘zealous Puritan’.104 Higford goes so far
as to condemn those ‘rigid Divines’ who condemn dancing, ‘Masks and
other Courtly recreations of Gallant Gentylmen and Ladyes’.105
It is therefore better to see Puritanism in the field of manners as a

broader phenomenon than that of self-conscious, radically Protestant
ideology; to enlarge the terms of the discussion, as does Lawrence
Stone when he writes of two warring traditions of thought and
behaviour in the (p.220) sevententh-century élite: ‘the puritanically
ascetic and the secularly sensual’.106 But even this contrast is
misleading in so far as it suggests that men usually embraced one or
the other. In fact, the conflict of values is evident within individual texts
on conduct rather than between separate bodies of literature. Hence
Gouge and Allestree, whose starting point is always scriptural and
pious, concede the importance of a gracious and attractive social
manner.107 Equally, in the popular imported manuals of courtly civility,
there is a persistent note of moral unease. Della Casa, having justified
his precepts in terms of the value of complaisance, tries to rejustify
them in terms of an aesthetic ideal of ‘decorum’ and the Golden
Mean.108 Faret, in The Honest Man: or the Art to Please in Court, is so
sensitive to the existence of an anti-court tradition that he insists that
‘a good man may live in the corruption of the court without blemish’
and claims that it is a sin for a virtuous gentleman to lock himself up in
rural solitude.109 He becomes entangled in moral difficulty when he
stresses the need for devout piety and practical virtue, but justifies the
first on the grounds that ‘without this principall there is no integrity,
and without integrity no man can be pleasing,’ going on to praise ‘the
feare of God’ as that by which ‘we appeare good without hypocrisie.’110
The Art of Complaisance, based partially on Faret's text, warns against
a ‘sordid compliance’ but quotes Della Casa to the effect that a man
Page 26 of 59
should ‘evince, that he reverenceth, and almost adores his superior’

and should dissimulate his feelings wherever necessary.111 Cleland
describes reverence-making in salutation but adds a passage so
reminiscent of Fox, who would no doubt have horrified the self-
proclaimed teacher of nobility, that it deserves to be quoted in full:
Salutation is the first part of curtesic in our private conversation,

which nowe is become so full of ceremonie, and vanitie, that it is
verie difficult to give anie advice herein, the world is so blinded
with these complements, false ofers and promises of service, with
hyperbolicall and hypocriticall prayers to everie mans knowledge,
as wel his that heareth and receiveth them, as his that presents
them. It is like an agreement made betweene them, everie one to
mocke and scoffe at another, and yet to say ‘I thank you Sir for
your curtesic’ when he never beleeveth one word of al, more than
the other one thinkes he doth promise.112
The tension between the claims of moral integrity and the social
imperatives of complaisance and accommodation, although never
absent in early modern writing on conduct, diminishes markedly in
later seventeenthcentury (p.221) texts, but this should not be regarded
as the victory of a worldly over a puritanical tradition. The popularity of
Clement Ellis's The Gentile Sinner, or England's Brave Gentleman
Characterized (1660), which contrasted a sober ideal with an idle
gallant reality, and the success of Allestree's firmly pious The
Gentleman's Calling,113 indicate the survival of an ‘official’ ideology of
gentility which in no way succumbed to the ‘secularly sensual’. Instead,
what appears to be happening is the development of a sense of the
conventional character of good manners. The sixteenth-century split
between inner reality and external behaviour had introduced into the
concept of good manners the problem of sincerity; the objection to
courtly civility that, at court, ‘many there be that will do of their
bonnette to you, that gladly would se your heades of by the shoulders:
And such there be that makes reverence unto you, that would have his
legge broken to se you dead and carried to your grave’114 could cast a
doubt on all gestures of deference and respect. In the earlier period,
Guazzo is virtually unique ‘civile conversation’. In Book I of his treatise
he puts into the mouth of his brother the assertion that
Hee which knoweth not how to glose and flatter knoweth not how
to behave himselfe in companie…hee which should take flatterie
out of the worlde, shoulde take awaie all humanitie and curtesie,
for then wee should not salute him whom wee take to bee our
Page 27 of 59
enimie, whereas now we see, that hee biddeth us good morrow

with his mouth, which wisheth us much sorrow in his heart.115
Annibal, who usually puts the view approved by the author, answers
with an attack on flattery where the motive is personal gain, but
approves the ‘courteous’ flattery which dissembles dislike.116 In
general, by arguing that social life is governed by considerations of the
‘tollerable’ rather than by the bald criteria of vice and virtue, Guazzo
tries to dissolve the choice between apparent cynicism and puritanical
anti-sociability.117
In the later sevententh century, good manners do not cease to be

recommended as a matter of worldly policy. Walker calls civility
‘necessary for everyone, that would bring his purposes to effect (which
cannot be done without making use of other men's abilities)’;118 but
Guazzo's view (p.222) that there is a positive value to be placed on
artifice which prevents social unpleasantness seems much more
widespread. The problem of flattery ceases to be so acute and pressing.
Thus Sir Thomas Browne, in a work on Christian conduct, could assert
that ‘Civil complacency consists with decent honesty’;119 Jean Gailhard
was confident that ‘compliance is a good quality, very different from
flattery, though to a common eye it appears very like.’120 It became
usual to draw a firm distinction between personal deceit and harmless,
conventional social dissembling of destructive opinions or emotions.
Thus Courtin defines those rules of civility which are not dictated by
‘natural’ physical modesty as ‘formed…of the general consent and
practise of all well-bred men’.121 The way was then open for an attack
on the refusal to comply with convention on the grounds of moral
sincerity as arrogant or absurd, rather than merely imprudent. Richard
Lingard, in his Letter to a Young Gentleman Leaving the University
(1670), condemns the ‘Stoic’ disposition which makes a virtue of
‘Moroseness, Fastidious Contempt of others…[and] Peevishness.’122 His
discussion of good manners centres on the necessity for tolerance as a
social virtue rather than as a means of advancement and he counsels
the reader to ‘Be as severe “ad intra” as you will, but be wholly
complaisant “ad extra”, and let not your strictness to your self make
you censorious and uneasie to others.’123 For Lingard the gap between
the inner and outer man no longer implies hypocrisy and insincerity,
but is simply dictated by the obligation upon individuals to preserve the
good humour on which pleasant and useful social life must be based.
The development of this attitude was the corollary of the growth of a

concept and experience of a public social life in ‘civil society’ which was
distinct from the private spheres of domestic relations or intimate
friendship.124 Lingard appeals to this distinction when he advises the
Page 28 of 59
reader to ‘be alwaies mild and easie to those that are about you, your
Relatives and Servants, not only for their own sakes but for your own, if
you be displeased at every peccadillo, you will become habitually
froward, which you cannot put off when you appear abroad.’125 In
private, then, irritability is a vice, but in public it becomes an
inconvenience which threatens the conventional mutual
accommodation ensuring easy social relations. The (p.223) man whose
‘strictness to himself’ leads him to abandon accommodation to others,
like Alceste in Molière's Le Misanthrope, is not displaying admirable
moral rectitude and sincerity, but confusing necessarily artificial social
deference and complaisance with flattery, taking seriously modes of
behaviour which ought to be recognized as partly theatrical, and laying
himself open to a charge of social exhibitionism. William Wycherley's
The Plain-Dealer, a comedy first performed in 1676, reworked Molière's
theme in a London ‘Town’ society setting which allowed him both to
satirise the hypocrisy and conformism of fashionable manners while
pointing out the imprudence and absurdity of a refusal to follow social
convention. The hero ‘Manly’, who declares a hatred of ‘decorums,
supercilious forms and slavish ceremonies’ is surrounded by fops,
parasites, and snobs, whose very names, such as ‘Lord Plausible’,
‘Vernish’, and ‘Novel’, indicate their subservience to fashionable
manners and ‘seeming’. But Manly's ‘plain-dealing’ merely involves him
in humiliation and betrayal, and the voice of sense in the play is his
friend ‘Freeman’, who accepts and understands the code of manners
while refusing to take it too seriously.126
The increasing use of the word ‘civility’ to define good manners during
the seventeenth century is perhaps of some significance in the
development of the sense of a public world regulated and sustained by
convention, since the term has connotations of conformity to an entire
social order which are absent from ‘courtesy’. Thus Hobbes makes
‘Compleasance: that is to say, that every man strive to accommodate
himself to the rest’ a fifth law of nature among those laws which, he
argued, underpinned ‘civil’ association; he likens individuals who
neglect ‘compleasance’ to bricks in the social edifice which have to be
thrown away because of their ‘asperity’ and ‘irregularity’.127 Hobbes's
political theory was in many ways a radical rethinking of political
values, but it is significant that contemporary writers on manners
sometimes use similar terms in justifying rules of civility. Both Walker in
Of Education and the anonymous author of The Art of Complaisance
claim that because, in gentlemanly society at least, men regard
themselves as essentially each other's equals, even if formally they are
not, accommodating behaviour entailing a recognition of this equality is
Page 29 of 59
necessary in order to avoid social unpleasantness and disruption.

Walker asserts that (p.224)
All men are in some sense disparata, and even those who are
under the relations of superiority and inferiority, yet those
obligations being satisfied as to all other matters, account
themselves as equals.128
In The Art of Complaisance we are told that ‘there are few who will not
take it as an affront, that any should presume to be better Gentlemen
than themselves.’129 Such passages are surprisingly similar to that of
Hobbes in which he argues that
every man looketh that his companion should value him, at the
same rate he sets upon himselfe. And upon all signs of contempt,
or undervaluing, naturally endeavours, as far as he dares…to
extort a greater value from his contemners, by dommages: and
from others by the example.130
Hobbes's political theory, which starts from a hypothesized ‘state of

nature’ of warring individuals, has been regarded as an early example
of ‘possessive individualism’ in political thought. It has been seen as a
source of the later theories of ‘civil society’ in which, in contrast with
doctrines of a natural hierarchy in the social and political order, society
is regarded as an artificial entity in which atomized individuals make
and break contractual relationships.131 There has been some
controversy over whether this makes Hobbes an essentially ‘bourgeois’
theorist, and Keith Thomas has argued persuasively that Hobbes's
stress on competition for ‘glory’ and reputation makes it more plausible
to see him in the context of the continuing aristocratic society of
seventeenth-century England.132 The similarities between the writers
on manners and Hobbes quoted above would seem to underline Keith
Thomas's point, but they also, like much in the early modern literature
of civility, suggest that it is questionable to see later theories of ‘civil
society’ as purely ‘bourgeois’ or ‘commercial’ in origin and character.
The notion of gentlemanly ‘society’ as a fluid world of potentially
competitive individuals, whose harmonious coexistence must be
secured by ‘convention’, was already encoded in the theory and
practice of seventeenth-century ‘civility’ at the time when political
theorists began to extend this model of association to society as a
whole. From the evidence of writing on manners, it developed at least
partly as a response and a solution to the problem posed by ethical
unease about the emptiness of the proliferating ‘ceremonies’ which
upheld the social order. (p.225) Tension between the claims of civility
and virtue did not exist simply at the level of intellectual theorizing
Page 30 of 59
about manners. Strong objections to over-ingratiation and dissimulation

acted concretely to limit the development of constraints directed solely
to the placation of others. Most texts on manners stress that social
intercourse between relative equals should at least seem to be frank,
unconstrained, and ‘natural’. Courtin, for example, insists that ‘having
performed our formalities, and paid those respects a person of quality
might in reason expect, we are not afterwards to show any awe, or
timorousness before him, but speak freely and ingeniously to him.’133
Lingard actually condemns the ‘Reservedness’ recommended by so
many previous advisers as the only policy in a dangerous world, and
calls ‘a plain communicative man…useful and acceptable to the
world’.134 There is, it is true, an element of the theatrical social fiction
in this demand for frankness; it is one aspect of the Castiglionean ideal
of the apparently ‘natural’ ease based on considerable art. Thus the
anonymous I. B., in his treatise of gentlemanly education published in
1657, states that
The best maxime I can give…to do all things compleatly, is to do

them without constraint or affectation, with a natural assurance,
and an ingenuous confidence, imploying all one's art, to hide that
art from view.135
Francis Osborne advised his son to cultivate an open expression while

maintaining an extreme reserve:
When you speake to any (especially of Quality) looke them full in

the face; other gestures betwraying want of breeding, confidence,
or honesty, Dejected eyes confessing to most judgements, guilt or
folly.136
Yet even where artificial frankness is demanded, it puts a brake on

unlimited complaisance.
A certain scepticism, in the form of conscious irony, seems to be written

into the conduct recommended by authors on manners and to be
involved in the paradoxical inflation of respects and compliments at a
time when the value of ‘ceremonies’ was in doubt. Increasingly, in
seventeenth-century compliments, avowed suspicion of empty and
interested respect becomes part of the compliment itself. Guazzo had
suggested this manœuvre by recommending that a man say to those
who expect flattery, that he ‘will not utter their praises in their
prescence, for feare to be thought to flatter them’.137 In mid-
seventeenth-century courtesy writing, this disclaimer had (p.226)
Page 31 of 59
become the basis for polite assurances of service. Thus a representative

example from La Serre's model letters reads:
Sir,
If you expect nothing but Compliments from me, you shall never
receive any, I am a sworn enemy of Courtship and Civility towards
any person whom I honour extremely, as I do you; it sufficing me
that I perform my dutie in their behalf, and that I take care to do
it with a good grace. This is the study in which I practice my self,
and I beseech you think that I will not lose the least occasion to
witnesse it to you, because I find my interessed in the Resolution
which I have taken, to be all my life,
Sir,
Your most humble servant,
N138
A typical compliment in Gough's Academy of Complements read,

‘Suppose not I use court language, when I assure you I am more than
any man living, Sir, your most humble servant.’139 Play on the
emptiness of compliments, which gives seventeenth-century
competitions in deference a certain ironical elegance, was much less
marked in, for example, the earlier complimental formulae given by the
Elizabethan manual, The Courte of Civil Courtesie. It makes acceptance
of the potential moral emptiness of deference a paradoxical element of
the code itself, thus rather removing the force of moral anxiety.
It is often difficult to distinguish between the constraints on

accommodation imposed by the value of moral integrity and limitations
arising from the value of gentlemanly self-assertion and independence.
Alongside the extension and intensification of social inhibitions during
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there survived a strong sense
that a gentleman should not be seen to be subservient to rules or to the
opinions of others. This is very clearly indicated in the concept of
‘magnanimity’ as an essentially gentlemanly ideal.140 This originally
Aristotelian concept, adjusted and developed as it was by early modern
writers, contained throughout the period the notion of the great-
hearted man's self-sufficiency and even his indifference to the praise or
blame of the world. He performs admirable deeds solely for their
intrinsic merits. William Vaughan in The Golden-Grove of 1600 includes
an eight-point definition of magnanimity, including absolute honesty,
plainness ‘without dissimulation’, and lack of concern with the
reactions of others.141 Seventy years (p.227) later Obadiah Walker
Page 32 of 59
reiterated the same enduring ideal when he wrote of the true

gentleman that ‘He feares nothing, he despiseth nothing, he admires
nothing.’142
Although the magnanimous man is presented as one whose virtue

transcends his worldly conditions, the ideal is nevertheless generally
identified with the noble and gentlemanly, whose rank was often
expressed in terms of their freedom from the constraints of social or
legal rule. In a revealing comment, Peacham writes of nobles that ‘they
ought to take their recreations of hunting, hawking. freely, without
controule in all places.’143 One major stumbling-block to the sumptuary
legislation proposed during the parliaments of James I was the feeling
that gentlemen should not be subject to such laws in the same way as
those of lower degree.144 Obvious constraint was associated with low
social status, where it acted as an appropriate acknowledgement of
inferiority. The obsession with relative rank among gentlemen did not
affect the notion of an essentially gentlemanly independence, and the
gradual breakdown of permanent master–servant relationships within
the nobility and gentry during the later sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries only accentuated concern with self-sufficiency. Hannibale
Romei's fashionable courtly manual, The Courtier's Academie, written
in the 1580s and rapidly translated, like its model Castiglione's The
Courtyer, assumed aristocratic dependence on the prince, yet states
firmly that ‘there is not a greater indignity, nor anything that more
prejudiceth nobility, than for one noble through want, to go led, as we
commonly say, by another man's hand.’145
The ideal of magnanimous self-sufficiency is also apparent in the

agreement of courtesy writers that gentlemen must not display too
elaborate or too rigid an adherence to the rules of civility which they
themselves propound. Della Casa defines ‘overlavish ceremony’ as the
vice which ‘worse beseemeth a gentleman’;146 and James Cleland, in
his chapter on ‘the Manner of Reverence-Making’, concedes that ‘a man
will have to conform somewhat’ to the rules of courtly compliment and
deferential salutation, but advises that this be done ‘in a generous and
free manner…that everie man may know yee can use al these vaine
complements (p.228) and ceremonies, but that yee wil not be bound to
do them, or make your judgement and wil slaves unto such vanitie.’147
Courtin, who gives an extremely detailed description of correct
deferential forms of address and gesture, still warns the reader against
rigidity, ‘when out of too much curiosity we are scrupulous of
everything, making our selves slaves to these ceremonies, and by the
immoderate desire of being exact, becoming troublesome and
ridiculous to everybody.’148 The increasing currency of the word
Page 33 of 59
‘affectation’ to describe a principal pitfall in manners is another aspect

of the insistence on gentlemanly freedom in the interpretation and
practice of the rules of civility, since by the late sixteenth century the
term was used not only to define unsuccessful attempts to project
natural grace, but also any manifestation of over-formality and
excessive regularity or stiffness of manner. ‘Take heed of affectation
and singularity,’ wrote the Earl of Bedford, ‘if not you act the nobleman
instead of being one.’149
Distaste for obvious subjection to the letter of good manners is

paralleled in didactic texts by a continual objection to over-timidity in
deference towards others, even superiors. Thus Cleland, despite
advocating that a noble child be taught to ‘accommodate himselfe when
he shall be of age, unto al kinde of honest fashions’, nevertheless
advises parents to ‘embolden him against a foolish shamefastness in
hanging downe of his head, and blushing at everie light word, which
maketh him astonished at everie grave countenance and sharp word
that is spoken.’150 Fiston's The Schoole of Good Manners states that
‘shamefastnesse is a Vertue beseeming a Childe, so as it bee moderate;
for as to be brazen faced and shamelesse is a Vice; so to be
overbashfull and ashamed to show his face is a fault also.’151 George
Herbert, in a set of pious yet shrewd verses of advice in The Temple,
published in 1633, criticizes ‘empty Boldnesse’ but counsels no
exaggerated expressions of Christian humility. He regards confidence
as an ornament to ‘substantial worth’, and advises
Towards great persons use respective boldnesse

That temper gives them theirs
And yet doth take Nothing from thee.152
The concept of ‘respective boldnesse’ is of key importance in the

development of the gentlemanly manner, since it expresses not only
social (p.229) identity but also sexual differentiation. Social timidity and
an over-nice preoccupation with the detail of good manners are often
identified by courtesy writers as the characteristics of women, and
hence in men are marks of effeminacy as well as of childish shyness.153
Elementary physical techniques are clearly affected by the need to

protect gentlemanly and manly independence. The conception of an
affected, effeminate over-refinement at table enters the literature of
manners with Erasmus's warnings against the supposedly ‘courtly’
habit of crumbling bread with the fingertips and the use of tooth
powder ‘in the manner of maidens’.154 Cleland quoted James I's
Basilikon Doron when he advised the reader to adopt a mean between
grossness and daintiness and to ‘eate in a manly, round and honest
Page 34 of 59
fashion’.155 Courtin, after censuring such practices as blowing one's

nose on the napkin, warns that ‘we must not on the other side simper
and mince, but eat freely and civilly as we have occasion.’156 The same
qualification to refinement is made to apply to care of physical
appearance. Hawkins's translation of Youth's Behaviour starts a chapter
‘Of Clothes and Arraying the Body’ with a negative rather than a purely
positive directive: ‘Be not too solicitous in setting thy bands, thy hair or
thy beard.’157 After advocating the washing of face and hands and the
combing of hair in the morning, Youth's Behaviour adds that these
offices should be performed ‘none too curiously’.158
Of course, the degree of cleanliness and delicacy at table consonant

with ‘manly, round, and honest’ manners may have increased during
the seventeenth century, for example, in the acceptance of the fork, so
the survival of the caveat against over-refinement does not offer a
direct threat to a linear theory of the development of inhibitions.
Further, the objections of courtesy writers to scrupulousness and
curiosity are in no sense justifications for gentlemanly slovenliness or
ignorance of correct manners. As Courtin put it in the revised version
of The Rules of Civility, there is a vast difference between the easy,
informal behaviour of the gentleman and the familiarity ‘practis'd by
persons quite destitute of honour’.159 This distinction is part of the
pervasive ideal of gentlemanly ‘recklessness’ or ‘negligence’: the
conduct of the gentleman rises above (p.230) the mere rules of good
manners to embody an ideal of ‘natural’ civility seemingly free of
constraint. The non-gentleman's behaviour is natural only in the sense
of falling short of the rules of manners or following them with obvious
effort. Nevertheless, the suspicion of rule-bound over-scrupulousness
which accompanies the formulation even of highly sophisticated
precepts indicates ambiguities in ‘the civilizing process’ which Elias
seems to ignore. The ‘Puritan’ stress on plainness and independence in
social behaviour was not simply a doctrinally-based protest against
increasingly complaisant patterns of civility, a protest that collapsed
with the Puritan political cause. ‘Puritan’ criticism of hypocrisy, slavish
conformity to fashion, and effeminacy was one aspect of a vigorous
tradition, opposing true gentlemanliness to accommodation and
dissimulation, which survived the seventeenth century.
Gentlemanly independence was not, however, a value which invariably

found favour with moralists, since it was frequently expressed in
behaviour which they found as objectionable as ingratiation and
hypocrisy: self-assertion, boastfulness, extravagant exhibitionism in
dress and demeanour, and general excessive haughtiness. Many
authors felt that they were fighting against a strong tradition of ‘gentle’
Page 35 of 59
conduct, in which birth was considered sufficient excuse for manners

which embodied an arrogant sense of superiority unjustified by virtue
or learning. Indeed, this tradition was more often the target of writers
on gentility than was fawning compliance. The anonymous author of
The Institucion of a Gentleman of 1555 inveighed against gallants who
despise learning and whose behaviour towards strangers is the reverse
of ‘civility’. These he defined as the ‘gentyle ungentyle’.160 Vaughan, in
1600, described ‘Cavaleers’ whose ‘properties…are to flaunt like
Peacockes, to play the Braggadachians, and to trust most impudently in
the hugeness of their Lims and in their drunken gates’.161 Thomas
Dekker's The Gul's Horne-Book characterizes gallant behaviour as
deliberately lacking in sensitivity to others, and his ‘gul’ is shown
pushing others aside at the fire, neglecting civility to elders, and, at
table, eating ‘as impudently as can be, for that is most
gentlemanlike’.162 Such criticism persisted throughout the seventeenth
century. The 1675 Character of a Town Gallant, which updates The Gul's
Horne-Book, depicts a gallant whose talk is ‘all…Rhodomontado and
Bounce’.163 John (p.231) Evelyn's rather jaundiced Character of
England of 1659 presents a lamentable picture of surliness, over-
familiarity, and mutual abuse in supposedly polite English society.164
Such assertively unaccommodating behaviour can be subject to no

single interpretation. On one level it is, paradoxically, just another
aspect of the conformity which elsewhere manifests itself as
‘complaisance’. Most critics stressed that extravagance in dress,
address, and demeanour, and the social vices of profanity and sabre-
rattling aggression are group norms which young men newly arrived in
the city were encouraged to embrace in order to gain acceptance by
their peers.165 In so far as this behaviour was directed mainly against
social inferiors, it is compatible with the theory of increasingly
accommodatory behaviour within the upper ranks. The growth of an
urban gentlemanly ‘society’ which encouraged complaisant manners
between gentlemen also encouraged those which emphasized the
distance betwen gentleman and non-gentleman. Allestree's comment
that
Gentlemen behave themselves disdainfully and imperiously, as if

they could not set a just value on themselves without the unjust
contempt of others…this is commonly a wind that blows but one
way, down the hill, onely upon those below them, upwards they
breathe gentle gales.166
indicates how long-standing habits of aristocratic loftiness could

survive and even intensify in a society where a degree of increased
social mobility rendered more acute the need to project status
Page 36 of 59
theatrically through everyday manners. Allestree's point is well

illustrated in Brathwayt's ‘Character’ of ‘A Traveller’, published in a
collection of 1631, a portrait which also shows how highly sophisticated
manners could coexist with a very unaccommodating attempt to
express distance and contempt. The ‘Traveller’ is a gallant who has
picked up pretentious foreign manners, is exquisite ‘in that which this
age calls a Complement’, and has ‘not an irregular haire about him, nor
an uncomposed cringe to accoutre him’. Nevertheless, rather than
depicting him as a flatterer, Brathwayt imagines ‘with what contempt
he resalutes a common congee. And as it were derogation, to a man of
his place not to observe his distance, in a spit, ducke or nod, as well as
pace.’167
It was commonplace to denounce the sin of pride in gentlemen, but in

fact the assertion of privilege and distance, as well as simply
complaisance, was an important and uncontroversial aspect of the code
of civility. Most of the material in the manuals of manners concerns the
correct way to (p.232) show respect, but this is largely because the
reader envisaged by the authors is a child or an inexperienced adult,
who is unlikely to be in a position to demand deference, and because
the higher a man's social status, the more he was enabled to dispense
with social forms. Yet some indications are given of the need to
preserve dignity and to limit humility. The Earl of Bedford's Advice to
his Son warns ‘fail not, upon occasion, to be master of great modesty;
but withal know when to be high.’168 Courtin, whose primary concern is
a minute description of the ways to show deference, yet devotes a
whole chapter to the problem of how ‘to expect and receive honour
ourselves, and when not to receive it’.169 Here again the vexed question
of the relation between social forms and moral imperatives arises, since
the assertion of dignity might be regarded as a betrayal of Christian
humility. Matthew Hale, who expected of his grandchildren ‘a decent
and becoming humility’, recognized the potential conflict and was quick
to add that ‘the demonstration of humility is not of one and the same
standard or measure unto persons of differing qualities; namely to
superiors and inferiors’.170 He resolved the problem by taking refuge in
the idea of a mental reservation against pride in the performance of
these differential civilities. Yet he was being disingenuous in suggesting
that the deliberate witholding of many ‘external tokens of respect’
which was correct in the salutation of inferiors, did not involve a
symbolic assertion of superiority going beyond the passive acceptance
of the need to maintain social hierarchy. Despite scepticism about the
validity of ceremony, the physical and verbal language of deference and
condescension continued, during the seventeenth century, to rest on a
Page 37 of 59
still vigorous concept coexisting with, and in some ways cutting across,
humanist notions of social and individual virtue. This was the concept of
‘honour’.
Anthropologists who have conducted research on Mediterranean

societies in which ‘honour’ is still a key social value have analysed in
some detail the way in which the code of honour diverges from
Christian perceptions of virtue.171 First ‘honour’, while not a wholly
public value, is still largely a matter of reputation. It cannot be entirely
lost until it is seen to be lost, and thereafter cannot be regained by any
change of attitude on the part of the individual concerned. Only a
formal act directly related to the circumstances of the original loss of
honour, such as revenge, can restore honour. Second, honour is based
on lineage, to the extent that the individual must preserve and enhance
the honour transmitted to him by (p.233) his ancestors and, should he
fail to do so, his shame is passed on to his descendants. His honour
affects, and is affected by, the actions of his relatives and those friends
in whom he has voluntarily invested a part of his honour. Lastly, the
preservation and acquisition of honour are focused on a limited number
of actions and these are radically different for the sexes. For a man,
honour is a function of physical courage, the keeping of promises,
sexual conquest, and the chastity of his female relatives; for a woman,
honour is restricted to the maintenance of chastity.
These crudely summarized features of honour codes in some

contemporary societies are all to a greater or lesser extent present in
sixteenth-and seventeenth-century writings on gentility. Hannibale
Romei's The Courtier's Academie, available in English translation in the
1570s, contains a particularly sophisticated and well-focused ‘discours
of honour’ in which several participants examine the view that ‘an
honest man, and an honourable, bee not the same thing.’172 Without
necessarily endorsing the values involved in ‘honour’, they discuss the
way in which, contrary to Christian teaching, adultery enhances the
honour of the seducer while injuring that of the ‘innocent’ cuckold.173
They stress the public character of honour in their agreement that
‘honour perisheth not before the opinion [of the world] be lost; and
opinion cannot be lost before some defect be manifest and made
known.’174 Once ‘justly lost’, honour cannot be regained, although it
may be temporarily suspended through an error in public
judgement.175 Being grounded in public opinion, it is always vulnerable
to the initiative of an injurer, however unjustified his accusations, and
so ‘an honourable man is tyed in right or wrong by his own proper
valor, to repell an injury, and also to maintain an unjust quarrel, lest he
remain dishonoured.’176 He must also seek revenge on behalf of a
Page 38 of 59
‘father, son, brother, frend or such like’.177 Although ‘injustice’ in

general wounds honour, ‘common opinion holdeth base and cowardly
men, more infamous than unjust,’ and honour tends to be identified
with, as it is defended by, physical valour. Finally, Romei's disputants
observe that even murder cannot dishonour women, since female
honour consists solely in sexual modesty and chastity.178
Romei's work is obviously insufficient evidence for contemporary

English attitudes, and it is probable that much English concern with
points of honour in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries
was superficial and the result of the prestige of foreign literature on the
(p.234) subject. Mervyn James179 has argued that the period 1485–
1642 saw the decline and disintegration of the concept of honour as the
major element in aristocratic political and social behaviour in England.
The violence and competitive assertion embodied in the code of honour
was incompatible with the extension of royal authority, and the crown
gradually whittled away at the sense of individual aristocratic
autonomy, underpinned by the values of honour, which had given
political allegiance a voluntary and conditional character. According to
James, the ‘honour cult of lineage, ceremony and magnificence’ was
increasingly opposed by the humanist concept of a ‘nobility of virtue’,
which stressed individual moral excellence and learning in the service
of the state, and therefore suited both the Tudor crown and the fast-
growing gentry. Thus, when opposition to the crown finally emerged in
force in the mid-seventeenth century, it was to be justified as the last
resort of conscience rather than as a course of action always available,
at least in theory, to the man of honour. James's argument is cogent at
the political level; late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century
discussions of honour accept as a commonplace that the crown in
principle, acting through the College of Heralds in practice, is the fount
of all honour, and that personal honour cannot justify the non-political
private violence of the duel, let alone political rebellion.180 Yet although
English writers do not show the obsessive concern with rules of honour
which seems to have characterized Spanish society,181 and although
they experienced obvious strains in integrating honour into an overall
ideal of gentility which drew on other values, their continuing
fascination with honour reveals a code of conduct still deeply
entrenched.
The development of the doctrine of ‘nobility of virtue’ certainly led

many early modern authors to seek to diminish the association between
lineage and honour. Few were as uncompromising as the anonymous
author of the mid-sixteenth-century Institucion of a Gentleman who
declared that ‘Honour falleth to no man by descent, no man can intayle
Page 39 of 59
honoure to hys heyres male’;182 in an advice letter of 1634 Baron

Barkely was warned that if a man loses his honour his ‘posterity will
wish [he] had (p.235) never beene, and [his] friends blush at the sound
183
of [his] name.’ Most agreed that high birth adds lustre to honour,
and they were attached to the rule that only a man who could trace
gentlemanly ancestors back three generations could claim
uncontestable gentlemanly rank. Nevertheless, early modern theorists
preferred to see honour as a quality bestowed and exacted by a
gentleman's high position and responsibilities in the community rather
than as a quantity held in trust for lineage.184 But a degree of
dissociation from lineage does not necessarily dampen the struggle for
honour, and may even intensify it through the pressure on the
individual to acquire a prestige not quite presupposed by his name. As
a modern anthropologist has observed, where honour/shame ranking is
insecure and unstable, ‘even when honour is inherited with the family
name it has to be asserted and vindicated.’185
The newly pervasive idea of ‘nobility of virtue’ is also behind writers’

continual attempts to resolve the apparent contradictions between
honour and Christian or classical ideals of virtue. From Spenser to
Allestree, honour was presented as a spur to and a social expression of
virtue, a quality which adds a particular glamour to gentlemanly good
behaviour but is no substitute for it. James regards the Elizabethan
circle of Sir Philip Sidney as having attempted a synthesis of the ideals
of personal honour, piety and public service which could not be
sustained;186 but throughout the seventeenth century the same
combination is invoked repeatedly, if with some strain. Francis
Markham's The Booke of Honour of 1625 insists that
whosoever will be a founder of true honour and nobility, must not

only give over vice and arts which are base and mechanicall, but
also apply himselfe to vertue…and the artes liberall.187
Stafford's pious and prudential letter of advice to George, Baron

Barkely, in 1634 was entitled The Guide of Honour, and Allestree in The
Gentleman's Calling asserted that ‘honour’ and ‘heroism’ find their
most appropriate expression in resistance to moral temptation and
excess.188
Of course, the mere use of the term ‘honour’ does not prove the
survival of late medieval codes of conduct, since writers may simply be
employing a fading but still culturally alluring concept to reinforce the
meritocratic theory of gentility which was in fact emptying it of
meaning. (p.236) But the continuing selection of the virtues of
liberality, resolution, constancy of word, and physical courage as
Page 40 of 59
peculiarly gentlemanly shows that for seventeenth-century writers

‘honour’ has not become simply a vague synonym for moral worth and
talent. Writers may have attacked the exaggerated bravado and
aggression with which gallants expressed ‘honour’, and they lamented
the fashion for duelling in the defence of honour which developed
under Italian influence during the sixteenth century and replaced less
stylized and also less murderous ways of settling gentlemanly
disputes.189 But they could not altogether abandon the language of
honour. Thus Stafford advises Barkely that ‘if any man of your owne
Ranke doe you an affront, shew that you are sensible of your Honour,’
although he adds in a mournful and revealing marginal comment that
‘This is not so consonant to the doctrine of Christ, as I would it
were.’190 The ‘Puritan’ Higford , despite the generally grave and
religious nature of his Institutions, devotes a long passage to the
description of an ancestor riding the great horse at an Elizabethan tilt
as the best example for his grandson and, while he condemns duelling,
he describes fashionable means of self-defence in some detail.191
Duelling constituted one of the most extreme cases of the conflict

between the claims of honour and those of Christianity and the state.
But in the field of everyday manners, rules closely bound up with the
values of honour aroused much less controversy. Much of what were
termed ‘ceremonies’ and ‘respects’ were indeed ways of paying
‘honour’ to the ‘honour’ of the recipient. Romei, in his ‘discours of
honour’, speaks of
Honours not permanent…which after their performing, remaine

not in action: and these by the Philosopher, are called, barbarous
customes, and by us much frequented, as to give the place, to
bow, to kisse the hand, the hemme of the vesture, the knee, the
foote, putting off the hat, and such like.192
Francis Markham indicates that manners which in some texts are

described as matters of complaisance may also be viewed, from a
complementary angle, as ‘Priviledges of Honour’. He includes among
the latter ‘To sit when others stand, to bee covered when others are
bareheaded, and to ride when others walke’.193 A failure to perform a
gesture of deference required by the status of another noble or
gentleman is not merely a boorish failure of complaisance, but a
positive injury to the honour of the other, hence the degrading impact
of formalized incivility in the ‘cut’, (p.237) for example.194 On the other
hand, the involvement of honour in manners imposed a responsibility
upon the individual, not just to respect the honour of another, but to
preserve his own honour and hence to limit social humility. Della Casa
states forcefully that to take the lowest place when the highest is due is
Page 41 of 59
‘abject’, and S. R.'s Court of Civill Courtesie asserts that giving up one's
place at table is ‘an abasement not to be suffred’.195 Mervyn James's
view that the earlier seventeenth century saw ‘an extreme attenuation
of the social dimension of honour’ results from his concentration on
those aspects of the code which in the later medieval and earlier Tudor
period offered the greatest political threat to the crown: loyalty to
lineage and ‘friends’ and competitive assertive violence. Other aspects,
principally the sense that the gentleman possesses a degree of social
credit or purity of reputation which is vulnerable to the opinion of his
peers, survived and received sophisticated expression in everyday rules
of civility. Not only rules of ‘ceremony’, but also the very content of
gentlemanly sociability as reflected in seventeenth-century manuals of
manners, showed the survival of assertive and competitive values of
‘honour’ in what was perhaps a comparatively domesticated form. This
is particularly clear in the treatment of ‘jesting’, an important but
potentially dangerous social activity, as personal quarrels and libel
actions show even today. Most courtesy writers condemned loud
laughter in the gentleman, as evidence of uncontrolled passion, and
also because it could be insulting and derisive to others.196 But they
also approved witty speech and repartee as an agreeable social
occupation, and as a particularly gentlemanly talent showing the
gentleman's exemplary and ‘natural’ mastery of social discourse.197
Jesting, indeed, was the activity in which the individual could show
himself most civil or most uncivil, since it could either reinforce the
sociability of a gathering or destroy it. Thus jesting received what to
the modern reader seems an unusual amount of attention from
moralists and writers on manners. The divine, Thomas Fuller,
considered ‘jesting’ in a compendium of moralistic ‘characters’ and
immediately related the issue to the concepts of civility and savagery;
he condemned jokes about religion and jests at the expense of the
absent or unfortunate, and wrote that ‘seeing we are civilized
Englishmen, let us not be naked savages in our talk.’198 Incivility in
(p.238) jesting was held to include ungentlemanly lewdness, or faults of
technique which made jokes leaden or ridiculous, but above all it was
defined as jesting which mocked, taunted, or otherwise annoyed others
in the company. Della Casa devoted much space to the criticism of
‘scoffes’ and biting words, which he distinguished from innocent
‘mockes’.199 Youth's Behaviour advised that the child should ‘Neither
mock nor scoff in anything of importance, nor be reproachful, nor also
break a jest, biting like a dog’.200 Walker carefully considered mocking
and ‘drolling’, criticized unchristian jests, and finally turned with relief
to the ‘innocent’ activity of storytelling.201
Page 42 of 59
In a society where values of gentlemanly ‘honour’ and ‘reputation’ were

prevalent, it is not surprising that jesting should be an activity fraught
with danger; as Lord Burghley warned, a clever jibe might easily cost a
man a ‘friend’,202 where a friend was a category of political and not
merely personal significance. But jesting of a combative kind seems to
have been not only especially hazardous but also endemic in early
modern society. Faret described such jesting as a ritual or game in
which the man who first showed himself hurt or annoyed lost face.203
By the later seventeenth century in England, the combative jest
appears to have become socially institutionalized in the practice of
‘raillery’, a mode of conversation based on the exchange of witty taunts;
this was the fashion described by Wood as ‘bantring’.204 A pamphleteer
of 1673 sought to defend ‘Curtisie, Charity, Civility, and the Duty of
Good Language’ from the ‘New Canting, Drolling Way’ of ‘Raillerie à la
Mode’.205 Raillery was presented as a peculiarly gentlemanly pursuit
and not as plebeian humour, and it is significant that it was perceived
as artificial and rhetorical, albeit debased. Thus the same pamphleteer
wrote that
One may observe a sort of Naturall Rhetorick, even among the

Common Professors of the Art of Railling: they have their figures,
Graces, and Ornaments peculiar to their kind of Speech…their
Dry Bobs, their Broad Flouts, Bitter Taunts, their Fleering
Frumps, and Privy Nips.206
He presents raillery as a parodic analogue not only of ‘civil’ rhetoric but

also, interestingly, of the science of physical combat and that officially
forbidden competition of honour, the duel. The attitude taken by
courtesy (p.239) writers towards raillery was significantly ambivalent.
Courtin approved light witty banter, and Walker, although attacking
humour that undermined a man's reputation, added:
yet it seems, to condemn all raillery is to tether the wits; and

therefore if preserved in a mediocrity, it might be allowed. For it
makes men stand better upon their guard, when they know that
they are likely to hear again of their actions; besides it iniureth
them to bear harsh words, and bridle their passions. But to raill
handsomely is very difficult.207
Whatever their commitment to manners as a language of

‘accommodation’, therefore, even moralistic authors were attached to
the view that the honourable gentleman must have some licence to
compete and to be toughened by competition.
Page 43 of 59
The assertive aspects of the code of ‘honour’, transposed into a social

key, were balanced by aspects of the honour code which limited
assertion. In theory at least, the honourable man was not a hothead,
and to be too ready to take offence, for example, in reacting angrily to
jests, was itself to invite ridicule. Where no serious affront is offered,
the man of honour forgives errors and ignores those of lower social
status who are beyond the pale of the community of honour and
therefore have no power to injure in the technical sense.208 The
prescriptions of writers on gentility and civility follow this pattern by
insisting that it is good manners to ignore others’ bad manners and
allow a greater degree of familiarity with inferiors.209 Lastly, the
competition for prestige implied by the code of honour finds some limit
in the obligation, imposed by the code, for an individual to respect the
pride of others in order to protect the solidarity of the community of
honour. Cleland is not simply advising humility, but is articulating a
principle of honour when he warns that ‘yee dishonour you selves
alwaies, when yee take place above your betters.’210 This principle, as
much as Christian morality, lies behind the advice that ‘Curtesy and
friendly behaviour is more honour to him that useth it, then to whom it
is done.’211 Honour itself, then, may be invoked to justify a degree of
apparent complaisance qualified by the need to protect honour through
a wary refusal to risk it by ingratiation. Ramesey, an extremely pious
author on gentility who wrote The Gentleman's Companion, published
in 1676, touched on this wariness when he wrote that (p.240)
for…superiors (other than the Prince), the Honour and Respect

their place and Quality requireth of thee, thou art likewise to give
them: Yet keep thy distance so, as thou may'st be rather beloved
than slighted.212
The survival of values of ‘honour’ in the seventeenth-century code of

civility may seem to contradict the suggestion made earlier in this
chapter that the ‘ceremonies’ expressing and reinforcing honour were
viewed with increasing scepticism during the early modern period, and
that a sense of sharp distinction between inner man and social persona
allowed such ceremonies to appear as mere empty form. The literary
evidence in some ways suggests that this contradiction simply existed
within the seventeenth-century discourse of manners and social status.
There was a tendency for ‘honour’, a curious mixture of ideas of inner
purity and public esteem, to slide into the concept of ‘reputation’, a
more unambiguously ‘external’ concept and thus the target for cynics
and moralists concerned with inner virtue or its absence. Yet the
attacks of the moralists show how pervasive was the concern for
‘reputation’, and the rules of civility, with whatever qualifications,
Page 44 of 59
upheld and embodied this concern. Furthermore, the contrast between

a seventeenth-century experience of manners as, in some sense, mere
conventions which maintain harmony and hierarchy, and a medieval
experience of ritual in manners as the ‘natural’ expression of lordship
and service should not go unqualified. Both late medieval and early
modern English society were dominated by aristocratic values and, not
unnaturally, it has been customary to identify aristocratic culture with
concepts of hierarchy and degree, in contrast with the meritocratic or
even democratic assumptions of bourgeois society. Yet this contrast can
be too simple, for the aristocratic investment in rank as the
consequence of the natural condition of birth was always
counterbalanced by a sense of equality and competition between the
male members of the community of honour. It was precisely the
voluntary character of acts of promising and homage between
gentlemen which made the relations of lordship and service thus
created at least theoretically sacred, and a possible threat to a crown
which demanded unconditional obedience from noble and commoner
alike. Moreover, as James has shown, the politically unreliable and
erratic behaviour of many fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century nobles
was a matter not just of opportunism but of a cultural self-image which
stressed autonomy and independence and was appropriate to a
relatively unpacified society.213 If a violent politics of honour declined
during the sixteenth century, the individualistic and assertive aspects of
the (p.241) honour code could none the less survive, rewritten into the
world of ‘civil conversation’. They could even survive and prosper, as
Stephen Shapin has argued, amid what might seem to be the new world
of seventeenth-century science. According to Shapin, not just the rules
of polite conversation, but the notion of gentlemanly autonomy and
freedom, as well as a sense of the dangers of ‘giving the lie’ or insulting
an equal in scientific debate, were characteristic of the conduct of
controversies in the early Royal Society.214 In the formulation of codes
of civil conduct, therefore, what emerges is less a single standard than
an effort, sometimes strained, to articulate social languages and
imperatives which were often contradictory and had rather to be
balanced than fully integrated. The achievement and enactment of
gentlemanly solidarity in the reproduction of an exclusive social world
in court and city demanded an ‘urbane’ accommodation to others of like
status. But the world of ‘civil conversation’ was also the milieu of
competition for prestige and reputation, where the gentleman had
constantly to maintain, protect, and enhance his status in defensive or
assertive social display. Manners which referred to a ‘civil’ hierarchy
and a harmonious social order had also to be vehicles for the
individual's efforts to assert honour and to navigate a highly
competitive society. Such tensions were manifest in the irony and
Page 45 of 59
cynicism which accompanied the proliferation of social ceremonies and

compliments. They also meant that ideals of civility were double-edged
in their relation to political order. In an interesting article, Orest
Ranum has argued that Louis XIV developed and directed ‘ceremonies’
of courtesy of the type defined by Courtin, as part of his centralizing
and absolutist policies; through the manipulation of the language of
honour, the king and his agents were able to humiliate and bring to
heel dissident aristocrats and parlementaires.215 This model does not
quite fit England, in that Charles I failed and Charles II scarcely tried to
coordinate the exploitation of patronage with a full-scale manipulation
of honour and ceremony at the level of manners. Nevertheless, court
and ‘Town’ manners did reflect the ceremonious values of hierarchy on
which both monarchy and aristocracy depended. But they also reflected
a less hierarchic vision which was as much linked to aristocratic
competition for honour as to any emergent bourgeois ethic and which
made a virtue of the controlled disorder of civil society. The Earl of
Shaftesbury claimed that (p.242)
All politeness is owing to Liberty. We polish one another, and rub

off our Corners and rough sides by a sort of amicable Collision. To
restrain this, is inevitably to bring a Rust upon Mens
understanding. Tis a destroying of Civility, Good Breeding, and
even Charity it-self, under pretext of maintaining it.216
The collisions of civil society were not, however, always amicable, and
the balance between assertive and accommodatory aspects of
gentlemanly conduct which writers on manners propounded was often
highly unstable. In the next chapter I shall explore some radically
‘uncivil’ aspects of gentlemanly conduct in the seventeenth century,
focused around the ‘libertine’ code of behaviour which seemed to pit
‘liberty’ against ‘civility’.
Notes:
(1) See above, Ch. 2, pp. 44–5. See also J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress
(London, 1920).
(2) Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire, ed. J. B. Bury (London, 1909–19), vol. 4, 180.
(3) Elias's debt to Freud is acknowledged, for example, when he

suggests that the ‘superego’ is the instrument of society's control over
the individual; see Civilizing Process, vol. 1, 90.
(4) Ibid. 83.
Page 46 of 59
(5) Elias, Civilizing Process, vol. 2, pt. 1. Weber's notion of ‘ideal types’
is noted on 339. For Weber and rationalization see, for example, Max
Weber: Rationality and Modernity, ed. S. Lash and S. Whimster
(London, 1987).
(6) Elias, Civilizing Process, vol. 2, pt. 2 ‘synopsis’, passim.
(8) Ibid. 100.
(9) See above, Ch. 3, p. 102.
(10) William Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties (London, 1622), treat 6, 532.
(11) Ibid.
(12) Erasmus, De Civilitate, sig. A2r–v.
(14) See above, Ch. 2, p. 47 and p. 64.
(15) Edward Coote, The English Schoolemaster (London, 1627), 57; see
also William Fiston, The Schoole of Good Manners, sig. (A3v).
(16) Guazzo, Civile Conversation, bks 1 and 2, is mainly concerned with

the discussion of social rules set against a standard of morality.
(17) Fiston, The Schoole of Good Manners, preface.
(18) Erasmus, De Civilitate, sig. A2r–v.
(19) Castiglione, The Courtyer, bk. 1, sig. E3v.
(20) See Peter Burke, Culture and Society in Renaissance Italy, 1420–
1540 (London, 1972) for discussion of ‘artifice’ as an aesthetic value.
(21) Castiglione, The Courtyer, sig. E2r.
(22) Ibid., bk. 4, sig. MM4v.
(23) On the immorality of the courtier see, for example, F. Whigham,

“Fayned Showes and Forgerie”: Courtesy and Political Suasion in
English Renaissance Literature (Berkeley, Calif., 1978) and S. Anglo,
The Courtier's Art: Systematic Immorality in the Renaissance (Swansea,
1983). For the courtier, women, and effeminacy see E. William Monter,
Page 47 of 59
‘The Pedestal and the Stake: Courtly Love and Witchcraft’ in Becoming
Visible: Women in European History (London, 1977).
(24) See above, Ch. 4, p. 125.
(25) Philibert de Vienne, The Philosopher of the Court, tr. George North
(London, 1575).
(26) Ibid. 56.
(27) Ibid. 58–9.
(28) Ibid. 98.
(29) The Second Table of Good Nurture’ in The Roxburghe Ballads, ed.
Chappell, vol. 2, 574.
(30) For Vienne's influence in France, see C. A. Mayer, ‘L'honnête

homme: Molière and Philibert de Vienne's Philosophe du Cour’, Modern
Language Review, 46 (1951), 196–217; for Harvey's mention of Vienne,
see above, Ch. 4, p. 148.
(31) D. Javitch, ‘The Philosopher of the Court: A French Satire

Misunderstood’, Comparative Literature, 23 (1971), 105–24.
(32) See David Starkey, ‘The Court: Castiglione's Ideal and Tudor
Reality’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 45 (1982),
232–9.
(33) Vienne, Philosopher of the Court, pt. 3, passim.
(34) See above, Ch. 3, pp. 76–8; for Harvey's collection of courtesy
books see C. Ruutz-Rees, ‘Some Notes of Gabriel Harvey's in Hoby's
translation of Castiglione's Courtier (1561)’, Publications of the Modern
Language Association of America, 25 (1910), 608–39.
(35) P. M. Smith, The Anti-Courtier Trend in Sixteenth-Century French

Literature (1966), ch. 4.
(36) See above Ch. 1, p. 37n, and Ch. 4, p. 122.
(37) See, for example, Alain Chartier, Le Curial, first translated into
English and published in England by William Caxton in 1484 and
republished in 1549 as A Brefe Declaration of the Great Myseries in
Courtes Ryal, and Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Of the Vanitie of Artes and
Sciences Englished by Ja. San[ford] (London, 1569).
Page 48 of 59
(38) George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London, 1589), ed.
G. D. Wilcock and A. Walker (Cambridge, 1970), bk. 3, ch. 25, 299.
(39) Guazzo, Civile Conversation, tr. Pettie and Young, preface, sig. A5v.
(40) Greene, A Quip for an Upstarte Courtier (London, 1592), in Old

Book Collector's Miscellany, ed. C. Hindley, vol. 1, 21–6. and 12.
(41) Breton, The Court and the Country; dialogue-wise between a

Courtier, and a Countryman (London, 1618), reprinted in Works…of
Nicholas Breton, ed. A. B. Grosart (New York, 1879 and 1966), 11.
(42) Ibid. 12.
(43) Richard Brathwayt, The English Gentleman (London, 1630), 83.
(44) Richard Brathwayt, Whimzies: or a New Cast of Characters

(London, 1631), 150 and 153–4.
(45) Allestree(?), The Gentleman's Calling (1660), 49.
(46) Ducci, Ars Aulica, tr. Blount, table of contents.
(47) Du Refuge, Treatise of the Court, tr. Reynold, ch. 3, ‘Of the
Uncertainty of the Court’.
(48) Ibid. 8.
(49) Ibid. 171–2.
(50) Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, tr. L. Ricci and rev. E. Vincent
(New York, 1950), 65.
(51) See, for example, Gainsford, Rich Cabinet, ‘Courtier’, 17–21, or

Samuel Butler, Characters and Passages from Note-Books, ed. A. R.
Waller (Cambridge, 1908), ‘A Hufing Courtier’, 35–8.
(52) Edmund Spenser, The Vaerie Queene, bk. 6, Canto 6, ll. 5–6, in
Spenser's Works, ed. Smith and Selincourt, 171. For Spenser's ideal of
courtly virtue and his critique of courtly manners, see A. C. Judson,
‘Spenser's Theory of Courtesy’, Publications of the Modern Language
Association, 47 (1932), 122–36. See also F. F. Whigham, Ambition and
Privilege: the Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley,
1984).
(53) See above, Ch. 1, p. 37n and Ch. 4, p. 122.
(54) See above, Ch. 1, p. 38.
Page 49 of 59
(57) L. Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (London, 1974), ch. 1, 16 and

12–13. See also Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. sincere.
(58) Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, 15–16.
(59) See above, Ch. 4, pp. 111–12.
(60) Daniel Tuvil, Essaies Politicke and Morall (London, 1608), sig. Q4v.
(61) Thomas More, Utopia (1516), tr. Paul Turner (Harmondsworth,

1965), bk. 2, 94.
(63) Guazzo, Civile Conversation, bk. 2, fol. 77r–v.
(67) See above, Ch. 1, p. 13.
(68) Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman, “Hero and Leander”,

in The Works of George Chapman, vol. 2, Poems and Minor
Translations, ed. R. H. Shepherd and with an introduction by A. C.
Swinburne (London, 1875), 72–3 (ll. 113–18, 120–3, and 133–41.)
(69) See Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols (Harmondsworth, 1973), chs. 2

and 10 for a discussion of this distinction, based on the work of Basil
Bernstein.
(70) David Norbrook, ‘Panegyric of the Monarch and its Social Context
under Elizabeth I and James I’ (unpublished D.Phil. thesis, University of
Oxford, 1978).
(71) Ibid. 5–6.
(72) Ibid. 7.
(73) Ibid. 12.
(74) Miscellaneous Writings and Letters of Thomas Cranmer, ed. J. E.

Cox (Cambridge, 1846), 326–7.
Page 50 of 59
(76) Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, treatise 7, 602.
(77) Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (Harmondsworth,

1975), 247.
(78) George Fox, Gospel Truth Demonstrated, in a Collection of

Doctrinal Books (London, 1706), 107.
(79) George Fox, Concerning the Worlds Hypocritical Salutations, in

Gospel Truth , 107.
(80) Fox, Gospel Truth, 28; see also Fox, Concerning Good-Morow and
Good-Even (London, 1657).
(81) Clapham, A Full Discovery, sect. 12, 66.
(82) Ibid., sect. 12, heading, 66 and 67.
(83) For the persecution of the Quakers see C. Hill, The World Turned
Upside Down, ch. 10.
(84) C.Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, ch. 9 and A. L. Morton, The
World of the Ranters: Religious Radicalism and the English Revlution
(London, 1970), ch. 4, for supposed Ranter nakedness and blasphemy.
(85) ‘The Roundheads Race’ in The Distractions of Our Times (London,

1642), 3–7.
(86) Thomas Fuller, Church History of Great Britain (London, 1655), vol.
3, dedication to bk. 8.
(87) Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, treatise 6, 531.
(88) For a survey of anti-Puritan stereotypes see W. P. Holden, Anti-

Puritan Satire 1572–1642 (New Haven, 1954), and A. M. Myers,
Representation and Misrepresentation of the Puritan in Elizabethan
Drama (Philadelphia, 1931).
(89) Anon., How a Man may Chuse a Good Wife from a Bad (London,
1602), 52–3.
(90) William Perkins, A Direction for the Government of the Tongue

according to God's Word (London, 1593), in The Works…of William
Perkins (London, 1605), 521–38, ch. 3, esp. 525, and ch. 7, 532.
Page 51 of 59
(91) Ibid., ch. 7, 533 and ch. 11, 535. Perkins is, in fact, relatively
tolerant about laughter. For Puritan views on sober and edifying
speech, see R. L. Greaves, Society and Religion in Elizabethan England
(Minnesota, 1981), 522–5.
(92) Robert Cleaver, A Plaine and Familiar Exposition of the Ninth and
Tenth Chapters of the Proverbes of Solomon (London, 1612), 100.
(93) William Prynne, Histrio-Mastix. The Players Scourge, or the Actors

Tragedie (London, 1633), pt. 1, 3. For cultural conflict during the
1630s, see P. W. Thomars, ‘Two Cultures? Court and Country under
Charles I’, in The Origins of the English Civil War, ed. Conrad Russell
(London, 1973), 168–96.
(94) Anon., The Resolution of the Roundheads (London, 1642).
(95) Anon., A Witty Answer and Vindication to a Foolish Pamphlet

Intituled New Orders New Agreed Upon by a Parliament of Rattleheads
(London, 1642), Order 7, sig. (A3)v.
(96) Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. J.

Hutchinson (London, 1968), 95.
(97) See, for example, Ch 5, pp. 182–3.
(98) See W. P. Holden, Anti-Puritan Satire, 56.
(99) Francis Bacon, ‘Of Vain-Glory’, in Essays, with an introduction by

M. J. Hawkins (London, 1972), 159.
(101) Cyvile and Uncyvile Life, in Inedited Tracts, ed. Hazlitt, 10–11.
(102) Norden, Father's Legacie (London, 1625), sig. A4v and sig. A6v.
(103) Wandesforde, Book of Instructions, p. xxxvii, 23.
(104) Anthony Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, ed. Bliss, vol. 3, 429.
(105) Higford, Institutions, pt. 3, 81.
(106) Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–
1800 (London, 1977), 224.
(107) Allestree, Gentleman's Calling, 48.
Page 52 of 59
(109) Faret, The Honest Man, 116 and 128–9.
(110) Ibid. 103 and 107.
(111) Art of Complaisance, 140 and 3.
(112) Cleland, Hero-Paideia, bk. 5, 176.
(113) Ellis's tract reached its seventh edition before 1690. Allestree's
book went through at least seventeen editions before 1693. For a
survey of such courtesy literature in the later part of the seventeenth
century, related to social themes in Restoration drama, see D. R. M.
Wilkinson, The Comedy of Habit: An Essay on the Use of Courtesy
Literature in a Study of Renaissance Comic Drama (Leiden, 1964), pt. 1.
(114) Guevara, Dispraise of the Life of a Courtier, tr. Briant (1548), sig.
K8r.
(115) Guazzo, Civile Conversation, bk. 1, fol. 33v and fol. 34v.
(116) Ibid., bk. 1, fol. 37v.
(117) Ibid., bk. 1, fol. 23v.
(119) Sir Thomas Browne, Christian Morals (published posthumously,

1716), in The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. C. Sayle (Edinburgh,
1927), vol. 3, 455.
(120) Gailhard, Compleat Gentleman, bk. 1, 106.
(121) Courtin, Rules of Civility, 13–14.
(122) Lingard, Letter of Advice, 26.
(123) Ibid. 21.
(124) R. Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (Cambridge, 1977), pt. 2, puts
the development of the sense of public and private worlds in the
eighteenth century. Stone, Family, Sex and Marriage, pt. 4, more
plausibly traces it to the seventeenth century.
(126) William Wycherley, The Plain Dealer, first published 1677,

reprinted in The Plays of William Wycherley, ed. Peter Holland
Page 53 of 59
(Cambridge, 1981). Holland briefly notes Wycherley's debt to Moliere

in his introductory preface, 345–6.
(127) Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), with an introduction by K.

Minogue (London, 1973), pt. 1, ch. 15, 178.
(129) Art of Complaisance, ch. 14, 146–7.
(130) Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. 1, ch. 13, 64.
(131) See C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive

Individualism (Oxford, 1962).
(132) Keith Thomas, ‘The Social Origins of Hobbes's Political Thought’,

in Hobbes Studies, ed. K. C. Brown (Oxford, 1965), 185–236.
(135) I. B., Heroick Education or Choice Maxims, pt. 2, ch. 1, sig. E6v.
See also Faret, The Honest Man, 53.
(136) Osborne, Advice to a Son, 22.
(137) Guazzo, Civile Conversation, bk 2, (fol. 39v).
(138) La Serre, The Secretary in Fashion, 3–4.
(139) Gough, The Academy of Complements, 8.
(140) M. Greaves, The Blazon of Honour: A Study in Renaissance

Magnanimity (London, 1964), provides a useful but rather slight
account of the origins and development of this ideal.
(141) Vaughan, The Golden-Grove, bk. 2, pt. 5.
(142) Walker, Of Education, pt. 1, ch. 6, 56. The same value must
underlie Courtin's precept that in gambling the gentleman must show
no ‘heat, passion, or impatience to win’ (Rules of Civility, ch. 12, 119).
(143) Henry Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman, 14.
(144) See J. Kent, ‘Attitudes of Members of the House of Commons to the

Regulation of “Personal Conduct” in Late Elizabethan and Early Stuart
Page 54 of 59
England’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 46 (May

1973), 46–71.
(145) Hannibale Romei, The Courtier's Academie: Comprehending seven

several dayes Discourses, tr. I[ohn] K[epers] (London, 1598), 226.
(149) Bedford, Advice, in Practical Wisdom, 238. See also I. B., Heroick
Education, sig. F6v. In The Art of Complaisance, 72, barristers are
accused of stiffness and affectation.
(151) Fiston, Schoole of Good Manners, ch. 2, sig. Br–v.
(152) George Herbert, The Temple (Cambridge, 1633), pt. 1, ‘The

Church Porch’, v. 43, in The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E.
Hutchinson (Oxford, 1941), 16.
(153) See for example Gainsford, Rich Cabinet, 38, for the ‘effeminate’
courtier who ‘dares scarce tread on the ground, smelleth of perfumes,
holdes a fanne in his hand to keepe the wind from his face, rideth too
softly in the streets, and must alwaies tread on a matted floor’.
(154) Erasmus, De Civilitate, sig. (A7)v and sig. (B7)r.
(158) Ibid.
(159) Courtin, The Rules of Civility…Newly Revised and much Enlarged

(London, 1678), ch. 19, 258.
(160) Anon., Institution of a Gentleman, sig. B2v.
(161) Vaughan, Golden-Grove, bk. 2, pt. 5, ch. 29.
(162) Dekker, Gul's Horne-Book, in Old Book Collerctor's Miscellany, ed.

Hindley, vol. 2, ch. 3, 25; ch. 5, 48.
Page 55 of 59
(163) Anon., The Character of a Town Gallant (London, 1675), in Old

Book Collector's Miscellany, ed. Hindley, vol. 2, 2.
(164) Evelyn, A Character of England, in Harleian Miscellany, vol. 10,

189–98.
(165) See, e.g. Remarques on the Humours and Conversations of the

Town, discussed below, Ch. 7, pp. 265–6.
(167) Brathwayt, Whimzies, Charac. 19, 152–3.
(168) Bedford, Advice, in Practical Wisdom, 244.
(169) Courtin, Rules of Civility, ch. 17.
(170) Hale, Letter of Advice, in Practical Wisdom, 210.
(171) See Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society, ed.
J. G. Peristiany (London, 1965) and J. Pitt-Rivers, The Fate of Shechem:
The Politics of Sex (Cambridge, 1977).
(172) Romei, Courtier's Academie, Discourse 3, 100.
(173) Ibid. 96.
(174) Ibid. 99.
(175) Ibid. 106–7.
(176) Ibid. 101.
(177) Ibid. 103.
(178) Ibid. 126.
(179) James, ‘Concept of Honour and English Politics’, Past and Present,
Supplement no. 3. See also his article, ‘At the Crossroads of the Political
Culture; the Essex Revolt 1601’, in M. E. James, Society, Politics and
Culture: Studies in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1986).
(180) Standard arguments against duels were marshalled by Sir Francis

Bacon in The Charge of Sir Francis Bacon…touching Duels (London,
1614).
(181) See, for example, J. C. Baroja, ‘Honour and Shame: a Historical

Account of Social Conflicts’, in Honour and Shame, ed. Peristiany, 79–
Page 56 of 59
124. For a literary approach see C. A. Jones, ‘Spanish Honour as

Historical Phenomenon, Convention and Artistic Motive’, Hispanic
Review, 33 (1965), 32–9.
(182) Institucion of a Gentleman, sig. (F8)v; Higford sees ‘honour’ as

bound up with virtue and landed estate (Institutions, pt. 1, 3–4).
(183) Anthony Stafford, The Guide of Honour (London, 1634), 79.
(184) See James, ‘Concept of Honour’, 27ff.
(185) Honour and Shame, ed. Peristiany, introduction, 11.
(186) James, ‘Concept of Honour’, 71–2.
(187) Markham, The Booke of Honour, Dec. 1, epist. 3, 12.
(188) Allestree, (?) The Gentleman's Calling, 70.
(189) For a history of duelling see V. G. Kiernan, The Duel in European

History: Honour and the Reign of Aristocracy (Oxford, 1988) and see
below, Ch. 7, p. 248.
(190) Stafford, Guide of Honour, 76–7.
(191) Higford, Institutions, pt. 3, 69. and 74.
(192) Romei, Courtier's Academie, Discourse 3, 83.
(193) Markham, Booke of Honour, Decad. 1, epist. 9, 34.
(194) An example of ‘cut’ used in this sense in 1634 is to be found in the

Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. cut but I have not found it in didactic
writing on manners.
(195) Della Casa, Galateo, 40; S. R., Courte of Civill Courtesie, 4.
(196) See, for example, Youth's Behaviour, ch. 1, 8; Della Casa, The
Refin'd Courtier, 185; Courtin, Rules of Civility, ch. 7, 58.
(197) See, for example, Bedford, Advice to his Sons, in Practical Wisdom,
241; Art of Complaisance, 42; Youth's Behaviour, ch. 3, 16.
(198) Thomas Fuller, The Holy and Profane States (Cambridge, 1642),
reprinted, ed. A. Young (Cambridge, 1831), 153.
Page 57 of 59
(202) Cecil, Certaine Precepts, precept x, 15–16.
(204) See above, Ch. 5, p. 181.
(205) Anon., Raillerie à la Mode Consider'd: or the Supercilious

Detractor (London, 1673), publisher's letter to reader and 7.
(206) Ibid. 41.
(207) Walker, Of Education, pt. 2, ch. 3, 244.; see also Courtin, Rules of
Civility…Revised and much Enlarged, ch. 19.
(208) Pitt-Rivers, Fate of Shechem, ch. 4, 70.
(209) See, for example, I. B., Heroick Education, ch. 6, sig. F6v: we must
not ‘trouble our selves with others, if they do not pay that honour to us,
which we justly deserve’. For familiarity to inferiors, see above, Ch. 3,
p. 87.
(211) Gainsford, Rich Cabinet, 18.
(212) William Ramesey, The Gentleman's Companion or, A Character of

True Nobility and Gentility in the way of essay (London, 1576), 68.
(213) See James, ‘Concept of Honour and English Politics’, Past and
Present, suppl. 3 (1978).
(214) Shapin, A Social History of Truth, 66–74. Shapin discusses issues

of lying and honour, self-control, and the need to avoid servility in
seventeenth-century scientific debates.
(215) O. Ranum, ‘Courtesy, Absolutism and the Rise of the French State,
1630–1660’, Journal of Modern History, 52 (1986), 426–51.
(216) Quoted by L. Klein, ‘Liberty, Manners and Politeness’, Historical

Journal, 32 (1987), 590.
Page 58 of 59
Page 59 of 59
Anti-Civility: Libertines and Rakes

Anna Bryson

Print ISBN-13: 9780198217657
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198217657.001.0001

Anna Bryson
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198217657.003.0007

This chapter discusses the development and significance of one further
image or stereotype of gentlemanly behaviour. It is one which differs
markedly from that of the ‘civil gentleman’ or even, despite some
continuities, the ‘man of honour’, in that it was almost always
unequivocally condemned by writers on conduct. For this reason it
emerges from codification of manners and from satire almost entirely
through criticism and even outrage, and yet it also clearly involved a
‘code’ of conduct which exercised some fascination over a substantial
number of young gentlemen. This was the image of the gentleman as
‘libertine’ or ‘rake’ which crystallized in the later 17th century, and
which, in its repudiation of much of the code of ‘civility’, presents a
major obstacle to any linear theories of the civilization of manners.
Keywords: gentlemanly behaviour, manners, code of conduct
Page 1 of 40
Codes of manners, as this study should have made clear, are closely
related to ‘images’ or stereotypes of character and conduct. This is
partly because the technique of didactic and satirical writers on social
conduct is to present the reader with an ideal or caricatured figure,
whether of the ‘courtier’, the ‘country gentleman’, or the ‘gallant’. But
it is also because codes of manners, when conceived as
‘representations’ of idealized social personality, refer even in practice
to the production of images. In modern society it is obvious that
conscious decisions to adopt or adapt manners are at least partly
related to the desire on the part of individuals to appear to be or to be a
certain kind of person. Even our less conscious habits might in turn be
seen as a result of our parents’ and educators’ wishes to produce and
reproduce a certain type of personality. Stereotypes in the literature of
manners do no justice to the complexity of social behaviour, but they
strongly suggest the social and ideological context of change, since
each stereotype suggests a social world and the meanings which inform
that world. This chapter will discuss the development and significance
of one further image or stereotype of gentlemanly behaviour. It is one
which differs markedly from that of the ‘civil gentleman’ or even,
despite some continuities, the ‘man of honour’, in that it was almost
always unequivocally condemned by writers on conduct. For this reason
it emerges from codification of manners and from satire almost entirely
through criticism and even outrage, and yet it also clearly involved a
‘code’ of conduct which exercised some fascination over a substantial
number of young gentlemen. This was the image of the gentleman as
‘libertine’ or ‘rake’, which crystallized in the later seventeenth century,
and which, in its repudiation of much of the code of ‘civility’, presents a
major obstacle to any linear theories of the civilization of manners.
The word ‘libertine’ entered English usage from the end of the
sixteenth century.1 An importation from the French, it had originally
denoted a form of heresy, and in English it continued to denote
religious (p.244) heterodoxy of a freethinking or supposedly atheistical
kind. The constant association, in hostile eyes, of atheism and sexual
immorality meant that the term was rapidly applied to looseness in
morals rather than simply or exclusively to antinomian religious or
philosophical beliefs. Gabriel Harvey, in 1593, wrote of ‘the whole
brood of venerous Libertines, that know no reason but appetite’.2 An
early seventeenth-century Puritan denounced London gallants as
‘epicures’, ‘atheists’ and ‘libertines’,3 and the term was increasingly
deployed to characterize a particularly upper-class type of lawlessness.
While, in seventeenth-century France, libertinism was associated with a
particular intellectual tradition of freethinking, sometimes traced back
to Montaigne's scepticism or identified with the materialism of some
Page 2 of 40
natural scientists,4 in England the term tended to be applied rather to

temperament and conduct; but it is important that it retained
connotations of antinomian principles and did not designate simple
laxity and self-indulgence.5 The words ‘rakehell’ and its abbreviated
form ‘rake’ were likewise first used in a religious context and, in the
sixteenth century, ‘rakehell’ seems to have been synonymous with
‘devilish’ in religious polemic; in 1556, for example, one reformer
attacked ‘filthie rakehelle mass priests’. Later it came to denote the
mores of disreputable individuals on the margins of society, and in a
work of 1604 was applied to ‘loose vagabonds’.6 By the end of the
seventeenth century, however, its meaning had converged with that of
‘libertine’ to characterize an image of aristocratic lawlessness and vice,
Ned Ward's satirical poem, The Libertine's Choice or the Mistaken
Happiness of the Fool in Fashion (1709) used the terms ‘libertine’ and
‘rake’ interchangeably in the denunciation of an entire stereotype of
fashionable but vicious morals and manners. It was only during the
eighteenth century that the terms became entirely commonplace,7 but
it seems justifiable to discuss the rake as a late seventeenth-century
phenomenon; first, because the essential features of the image had
already emerged in the literature of this period, and second, (p.245)
because the court wits of the Restoration, and Charles II himself, came
later to be regarded as prototypes of the ‘rake’ or ‘libertine’.8
One author has declared that the distinguishing mark of the rake was
excess: excess in drinking, gambling, wenching, duelling, rioting, and
blaspheming.9 But this definition does not give much scope for the
exploration of any novelty in aristocratic behaviour underlying the
appearance of the new terms. In the later sixteenth century such
excess, under the name of ‘roystering’, seems to have been the
standard practice of many gentlemen. The author of The Institucion of a
Gentleman of 1555 lamented that gentlemen were given up to drink
and gaming:
he that cannot thus dooc is called a Lout or a miser and one that
knowcth no facion…it becommeth a gentleman (saye they) to be a
Royster, whych worde I doe not well understand onles it signify a
ruffian…but if there be any difference between a Royster and a
Ruffian, it is such a difference as Chaucer maketh betweene a
common Harlotte, and a gentlewoman of lyke condition.10
Henry Peacham in 1622 had asserted that ‘to be drunke, sweare,

wench, follow the fashion and to do just nothing are the attributes and
markes nowadayes of a great part of our gentry.’11 Gentlemen had
always had the leisure and resources to indulge in drinking, gaming,
and whoring with greater ease than those lower down the social
Page 3 of 40
hierarchy, and Peacham was to some extent merely making the same
mistake as many earlier and later moralists in believing that there was
something peculiarly recent about this phenomenon. It can also
scarcely have been new to the seventeenth or even the sixteenth
century for gentlemen to endow their vices with a prestige denied to
the corresponding vices of the poor. As has already been stressed,
freedom from social constraints and obligations was part of an older
language of gentlemanly status which to some extent survived in the
code of civility, coexisting with the converse gentlemanly obligation to
show exemplary self-restraint. The ‘licence’ shown by gentlemen in
their recreations was thus to some extent the expression of this
language in forms which moralists, whatever their commitment to
limited ideals of gentlemanly freedom, felt bound to deplore. Yet in the
stereotype of the ‘rake’ and in the recorded conduct of the Restoration
court (p.246) wits12 and their gallant imitators, the new and
characteristically libertine twist to this ‘licence’ was the will to outrage
others, rather than simply to enjoy excess. Libertine codes of conduct
depended on the positive elaboration of grossly ‘uncivil’ modes of
behaviour and on the open transgression of some of the forms of ‘civil’
nobility. This chapter will identify what seem to be the essential
elements of the ‘libertine’ stereotype and then interpret these in the
context of some of the themes and conflicts in the development of
manners which have already been discussed.
In some ways, there is a marked continuity between the depictions of

‘Town Gallants’ in Jacobean drama and satire and the libertine gallants
depicted and described after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660.
Both Dekker's anti-hero, in The Gul's Horn-Booke, and the target of the
updated and much abbreviated version of Dekker's text, The Character
of a Town Gallant of 1675, are idle, obsessed with fashion, boorishly
aggressive and disrespectful, and profane. According to the standards
of the courtesy writers, they embody two aspects of incivility: boorish
indecency and foppish affectation. Dekker adapted his model,
Dedekind's Grobianus, which had portrayed an ignorant country boor,
into an upper-rank urban figure in whom lack of consideration and
physical and verbal indecency appear as perverse assertions of status;
to this he added the inept over-sophistication of the fop, obsessed with
fashion and compliments. The Character of a Town Gallant retained
these two elements, updated to include the overwhelming
Frenchification of fashion in the later period. Thus the ‘Town Gallant’ is
made up of ‘a thousand French apish tricks’ and justifies his impudence
as ‘the Boon Assurance’.13 Dekker's ‘gul’ is also still recognizable in the
‘gallants’ of Restoration comic drama. For example, Dekker's satirical
advice to the ‘gul’ to make himself noticed by loudly interrupting during
Page 4 of 40
a play gives the same detail of behaviour as Shadwell's comedy The

Virtuoso, where one character ridicules young gallants who ‘come
drunk and screaming into a playhouse and stand upon the benches, and
toss their full periwigs and empty heads, and cry, ‘“Damme, this is a
Damn'd Play, Prethee, lets to a Whore, Jack”’.14 If we compare Dekker's
Jacobean gallant with Ned Ward's ‘Libertine’ of 1704 we find both
similarity of milieu—the tavern, the playhouse, the brothel—and
similarity (p.247) of preoccupation—drinking, gambling, fashionable
clothes, and a self-dramatizing one-upmanship.15
Despite continuity, however, it is clear that the gallant libertine figure

which gathers coherence in the satire and anecdote of the Restoration
was radically uncivil in a way unknown to Dekker and his
contemporaries. The hostile or humorous picture of the early
seventeenth-century gallant focused on the gullibility of the young
gentleman in pursuit of idle fashion.16 Indeed, together with the
country bumpkin, the gallant was presented as the archetypal victim of
the touts, thieves, and confidence tricksters of the London
underworld.17 The hostile picture of the Restoration libertine, however,
portrayed him as predator rather than ‘gull’ and as a character bent on
humiliating and ridiculing the innocent or sober. The Elizabethan and
Jacobean underworld had included individuals of indeterminate social
origin who adopted an exaggerated pseudo-gentlemanly concern with
‘honour’, picking fights with strangers in order to fleece them. In The
Court of Civill Courtesie, the author offered the young gentleman
advice on how to deal with these criminal ‘Roysters’.18 The ‘Roaring
Boy’, whom Sir Thomas Overbury described as a drunken, profane,
sabre-rattling, and cheating character of London low life, was very
similar.19 In the later sevententh century, the ‘gallant’ has begun to
appear as the imitator rather than the victim of such types. It is
significant, for example, that while Dekker's gallant, after a night in a
tavern, tries to impress passers-by with cursing and swearing,20 the
‘town gallant’ of 1675 is depicted as engaging in unprovoked violence,
supported by ‘a squadron of his fellow gallants…fit for anything but
civility’.21
The contrast should not be taken to imply that gentlemen of an earlier

period never engaged in drunken brawls. What is important here is not
the general level of violence in the life of the élite, but change in the
forms of violence associated with images of gentility. The pursuit of
family disputes in the counties by violent means certainly diminished
over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries;22 duelling, on the other
hand, despite (p.248) condemnation by Church and State, took hold
from the later sixteenth century and persisted throughout the early
Page 5 of 40
modern period.23 Duelling was a problematic aspect of the code of

gentlemanly behaviour for moralistic conduct writers, who were
nevertheless committed to ideals of ‘honour’. It certainly had a place in
the image of the libertine, and gave some clue to the political
significance of rakish behaviour. But the practice of duelling, however
illicit, lacked the element of deliberate outrage which in my view gave a
particular edge to the libertine gallant stereotype, for many nobles who
would have resisted the label of ‘libertine’ yet felt bound to defend their
honour in combat. If outrage was produced when the Duke of
Buckingham killed the Earl of Shrewsbury in a duel in January 1668,
this was not because outrage was intended, and much moral sympathy
was probably on Shrewsbury's side, given the scandal of Buckingham's
affair with his wife.24 In any case, the duels of Restoration courtiers can
be paralleled by much earlier incidents involving Elizabethan and
Jacobean courtiers who cannot be described as ‘libertine’; Sir Philip
Sidney, for example, had to be restrained from a duel with the Earl of
Oxford over precedence on the tennis court.25 What appears to be more
novel, and more outrageous, in the satire and recorded incidents of the
later sevententh century, is gratuitous and criminal violence indulged in
by predominantly upper-class groups for purposes of social self-
definition.
T. S. Graves26 has traced the history of late-night rampages involving

gentlemen back to 1604, when one observer wrote that in London
‘Divers sects of vitious persons going under the Title of Roaring Boys,
Bravadoes, Roysters etc, commit many insolencies.’27 As early as the
1620s ‘skirmishing’ with the London Watch had become common.28 But
the ‘Roaring Boys’ were not always, not by definition, upper-class; like
‘roysters’, they belonged to the low life of the taverns and ordinaries,
where riotous young gentlemen (like Shakespeare's Prince Hal) mixed
with rowdy, pseudo-gentlemanly ex-soldiers and retainers,
confidencetricksters, (p.249) and prostitutes. Only gradually did a
specifically ‘gallant’ pattern of violence emerge in this environment.
The somewhat shadowy ‘Tityre-Tues’ and ‘Bugles’ of the 1620s, upper-
class clubs suspected of political subversion, and devoted to drinking,
sexual conquest, cheating, and brawling, were the first representatives
of a new tradition which reached a peak in the murderous ‘Mohock’
club outrages against Londoners of 1711–12.29 The Civil Wars scarcely
interrupted this development and war, indeed, seems to have
encouraged this ‘rakehell’ violence; the ‘Hectors’, the most famous club
of the 1650s, was apparently started by demobilized officers who felt
unfitted for civilian life and so fell back on living by their wits in the
London taverns.30 They are described in an anonymous pamphlet of
1652, A Notable and Pleasant History of the Famous and Renowned
Page 6 of 40
Knights of the Blade, commonly called the Hectors, a title which alone
suggests a membership of individuals trying to project an image of
gentility, however parodied and distorted, rather than conventional
criminals. John Evelyn in 1659 reported the gang's supposed activities
with horror; he described
a sort of perfect debauchee, who style themselves Hectors, that in

their mad and unheard of revels, pierce their veins and quaff their
own blood; which some of them have done to that excess, that
they died of the intemprance. These are a professional atheistical
order of bravos, comprised for the most part of cadets, who
spending beyond their pensions, and to supply their
extravagancies, practise now and then the high-way.31
Even if Evelyn's account is exaggerated, some such gang probably

existed, and the word ‘hector’ became a generic term for violent and
debauched gallants; in The Character of a Town Gallant, the gallant is
defined as ‘three parts fop and the rest Hector’, and Walker, in 1673,
warned young gentlemen against ‘Hectors, and…Brutish persons’.32
There is some evidence that in the 1630s a pattern of ‘gallant’ violence,

quite distinct from duelling, was emerging in connection with such
gangs. In James Shirley's play The Gamester (first acted in 1633), there
is a reference to
the blades, that roar,
In brothels, and break windows, fright the streets,
At midnight worse that Constables, and sometimes,
Set upon innocent bell-men.33
(p.250) By the 1660s this pattern had become well-established and

ritualized. Drama and satire presented the practice of ‘scowring’ as a
typical London sport: a group of gentlemen revellers and their hangers-
on, sometimes, but not always, organized in a club, would forcibly clear
a tavern of its other patrons and would then rush out into the street to
smash windows and assault bystanders and the Watch.34 This activity
was far from a simple expression of uncoordinated rowdiness. It had its
own norms, and a definite rationale: that of humiliating the outsider
and asserting group solidarity and superiority. Moreover, while
‘scowring’ and ‘skirmishing’ were directly contrary to both the
aesthetic ideal of The Courtyer and the sober godly image of gentility
set up by Brathwayt and Allestree, they were nevertheless recognized
by contemporaries as assertions of gentlemanly status, however
Page 7 of 40
misguided. An incident in Shadwell's play The Scowrers illustrates the

point. In one scene a ‘noble scavenger’, Sir William Rant, is enraged to
discover that a lower-class imitator, Whacum, has scoured a tavern full
of tradesmen, and he castigates him for trying to ‘usurp the sins of
gentlemen’.35
It is extremely difficult to estimate the proportion of young gentlemen

who actually took part in these delinquent frolics and, by their very
nature, tales of dramatic outrage become distorted and much
embroidered. But it is clear that leading members of court society
under Charles II, and not merely less sophisticated hangers-on,
engaged in casual violence against innocent members of the lower
orders. The ‘affray’ at Epsom in June 1676, recounted here in a letter of
Charles Hatton's, provides a good example. A Mr Downs, Lord
Rochester, George Etherege, and a Captain Bridges
were tossing some fiddlers in a blanket for refusing to play, and a

barber, upon the noise, going to see what was the matter, they
seized upon him, and to free himself from them, he offered to
carry them to the handsomest woman in Epsom and directed
them to the Constable's house, who demanding what they came
for [they] told him a whore and, he refusing to let them in they
broke open his doors and broke his head and beat him very
severely.36
What made the affair memorable was less the unprovoked attack on the
Constable than the fact that Downs was later killed by the Watch after
Rochester had needlessly dawn his sword on them.
Gratuitous violence was one aspect of libertine behaviour which

conflicted sharply with the image of the ‘civil’ gentleman and was
frequently defined, within the discourse of civility, as ‘brutish’. Another
aspect was (p.251) a self-conscious defiance of modesty and decency in
speech. Blasphemy had been constantly criticized as a gentlemanly vice
throughout the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and when the
1675 ‘Town Gallant’ was satirized for ‘discourses…buttered with oaths
which he uses Euphoria Gratia,’ there was little novelty in the
accusation.37 But although scurrility had also been the subject of
moralistic concern in the sixteenth century, the Restoration saw a newly
conspicuous defiance of standards of sexual decorum in speech.
Courtin's rules forbidding indecency and sexual innuendo in
conversation seem to find little support in the language of Restoration
courtiers and gallants. It is a commonplace that Restoration comedy,
often produced by the court wits and their protégés, is freer in
language than the drama of the somewhat lifelessly refined court of
Page 8 of 40
Charles I, and more focused on sexual gossip and intrigue than the
comparably frank Elizabethan and Jacobean comedy. This last contrast
is particularly disturbing for any theory of progressive refinement in
manners, in the sense of inhibition, since Restoration comedy
supposedly catered for and described the gentlemanly society of the
‘Town’, whereas Jonson and his contemporaries had felt free to depict
every social rank. As one critic has put it, Restoration comedy was
essentially a comedy of manners—the manners of the upper class—
while Elizabethan and Jacobean comedy had been a comedy of
humours, the follies of all mankind.38
It is true that the public stage usually stopped short of direct

anatomical reference to sex; other writings of the time were more
explicit. The Character of a Town Gallant has the gallant in possession
of a book entitled Venus Undrest, a version of The Wandering Whore
(1660), which was one of many pornographic pamphlets produced in
England from the Restoration.39 Some pornographic pieces were in
circulation in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries,
notably Aretino's Postures, but it was only in the later part of the
seventeenth century that the pornographic book trade really expanded,
and a multitude of salacious books were produced, often translations
from the French.40 Rochester himself produced poems and satires, such
as The Imperfect Enjoyment and A Ramble in St. James's Park, more
sexually explicit than the work of earlier court poets.41 The play-parody
Sodom, probably misattributed to Rochester and written (p.252)
sometime after 1670, was an entirely pornographic piece dealing with
buggery and bestiality.42 Obscenity in writing does not, of course,
necessarily mean obscenity in conversation, but it is difficult to believe
that there was no licentiousness of talk corresponding to that of
literature. Hamilton's stories of the dire consequences of Rochester's
satires when they were found by their victims show that the satires
were in very free circulation at court.43 Charles II was scarcely an
example of modesty and propriety and, although his grandfather had
the same taste for bawdy songs, Charles seems to have been freer in
exhibiting the taste. In 1668 Pepys recorded that when the court
stopped at Thetford, the King, Sir Charles Sedley and Lord Buckhurst,
sent for all the fiddlers of the town, and made them ‘sing all the bawdy
songs they could think of’.44
It must be stressed that ‘libertine’ manners after the Restoration were

fashionable, and not to be explained, for example, as the result of a
timelag in English absorption of the advanced notions of propriety put
forward in Courtin's Rules of Civility and other imported courtesy
books. Interest in sophisticated French fashions was most evident in
Page 9 of 40
those who undertook the most celebrated outrages. Sedley and

Buckhurst, for example, were two of the four literary amateurs who in
1664 jointly translated that most decorous work, Corneille's La Mort de
Pompée.45 Moreover, the image of the libertine at its most sophisticated
was in some respects a foreign importation. Shadwell's play The
Libertine (first acted in 1676) was a version of the Don Juan story based
directly on the contemporary work of the French dramatists Rosimond
and Dorimand. The manners of the libertine gallant were in no respect
a straightforward reversion to grossness, and part of their novelty lies
in the self-conscious sophistication of those who embraced them.
Clarendon lamented that after the Restoration: ‘The very mention of
good manners was laughed at and looked upon as the mark and
character of a fool, and a roughness of manners, or hardheartedness
and cruelty was affected.’46 Clarendon almost certainly exaggerated,
but his account shows, in his use of the word ‘affected’, the contrivance
rather than the mere laxity of rakish manners.
The incivility of the libertine or rake is, then, better understood as

‘anticivility’ than as straightforward rudeness. It was not truly anarchic,
since (p.253) it was bound to its opposite in an attitude of defiance. The
forms of civility repudiated were those with the heaviest ethical loading
and relationship to Christian morality, and obviously much more was
involved in libertinism than manners alone. The libertine figure was
identified by contemporaries with an atheistic and antinomian
philosophy of life. The author of the Character of a Town Gallant added
to the traits of Dekker's ‘gull’ a quite new attribution:
He denies that there is any difference betwixt Good and Evil,

deems conscience a thing fit only for children, and ascribes all
honesty to simplicity, and an unpracticedness in the ways and
methods of the Town.47
Atheism had long been an accusation levelled by moralists against

pleasure-seekers, but in the later seventeenth century positive atheist
opinions (rather than simply a godlessness deduced by the
disapproving from immoral behaviour) were presented as the mark of
the modish libertine gallant. Libertine use of the ideas of Lucretius and
Hobbes will be discussed later, in relation to the sources of libertine
behaviour, and it is sufficient here to point out the place of irreligion as
sign in the social image of the rake. The ‘Town Gallant’ of 1675 is also,
in fact, satirized for holding views which are merely superficial and
ignorant, and which he knows nothing about except as a matter of
social image:
Page 10 of 40
His religion…is pretendedly Hobbian; And he swears that

Leviathan may supply all the lost leaves of Solomon. Yet he never
saw it in his life, and for ought he knows it may be a treatise
about catching of Spratts, or new regulating the Greenland
fishing trade.48
Atheistic bravado of this kind highlights the defining purpose of

libertine manners: pleasure in producing a shock effect. For the late
seventeenth-century gallant, the gratification of impulse in violence or
sexual licence seems to take second place to the gratification of
transgressing the rules which, according to the discourse of civility,
constrain the expression of impulse.
A comparison of the licentious gallants portrayed by the Jacobean

dramatist Fletcher with those of the Restoration playwrights Shadwell
and Etherege reveals the development of obsession with transgression,
and the repudiation of ‘civil’ and ‘moral’ laws, out of a more
straightforward hedonism. In Fletcher's work a typical character is
Mirabel in The Wild-Goose Chase, first acted in 1621. He is a bumptious
young man who has just returned from Italy, keeps a book of sexual
conquests, and breaks vows on the grounds that women's love is ‘but a
matter of crying for a (p.254) codpiece’.49 But he still seems to pursue
pleasure with a healthy sense of enjoyment. In Restoration drama the
gallant heroes or anti-heroes, despite constant discussion of vice, seem
to protest too much. Shadwell's Don John and Don Antonio in The
Libertine spend much of their time thinking of ways to overcome the
boredom of debauchery, delivering such weary remarks as ‘I Hate to
commit the same dull sin over and over again, as if I were married to
it.’50 Etherege's Dorimant, in The Man of Mode (first acted in 1676), a
morally ambiguous hero compared with the reprobate Don John,
emerges as a languid intellectual for whom, in the words of one critic,
‘sensuality is less a positive pleasure than a means of mocking man's
conventional pretensions.’51 It might be added that the ‘conventional
pretensions’ at stake included the language which opposed ‘civility’ to
the rule of natural instinct. Etherege's friend Lord Rochester, the
probable model for Dorimant, displayed the same concern with the
style and significance of pleasure-seeking rather than with the pleasure
itself. It is this concern which makes his licentiousness so mannered.
Dorimant is an infinitely more sophisticated and complex figure than
the inept and ignorant ‘Town Gallant’ of satire, but they are linked by
self-conscious concern with assault on aspects of the official ‘moral’ and
‘civil’ standard. Such self-consciousness underlies the most important
aspect of anti-civil libertine conduct. The libertine demands an
Page 11 of 40
audience: the encouraging, impressed audience of his peers, and the

horrified audience of respectable citizens.
The need for an audience suggests that the manners of the rake drew
strength from from a well-established standard of ‘civility’ and do not
indicate the wholesale breakdown of that standard. Blasphemy
demands a bedrock of belief in order to produce its characteristic
frisson in speaker and hearer; the libertine extended the idea of
blasphemy into the wider field of manners and mores. Hence women
are pursued beyond the limits set by accepted forms of courtship, the
direct use of indecent language is encouraged, and innocent citizens
are assaulted and humiliated largely because these activities are
experienced by others, and perhaps the self, as shocking. Nothing
illustrates this principle better than the most famous anti-civil incident
of the reign of Charles II: the ‘frolic’ in Bow Street in June 1663.
Anthony Wood described it with prurient relish: Sir Charles Sedley,
Lord Buckhurst, and Sir Thomas Ogle were all drinking at ‘a (p.255)
cooks house at the signe of the Cocke in Bow Street neare Covent
Garden’ and
went out of their roome into the balcony adjoyning, put downe
their breeches, and excrementiz'd in the street. Which being
done, they all (I am sure, Sedley) did put off their clothes, and
Sedley preached blasphemy stark naked to the people.52
The frolic, more obviously than drinking or whoring, was purely

directed towards shocking an external audience and impressing the
protagonists with a sense of their own freedom from convention. The
exercise would have been entirely pointless without the crowd of
‘clamorous’ citizens who ‘would have forced the dore’ of the tavern, and
without the ‘phanaticks’ who spread the story and ‘aggravated it to the
people’.53 Sedley added the finishing touch of condescending
impudence to the affair when, at his trial, the judge Sir Robert Hyde
asked him whether he had read Henry Peacham's The Compleat
Gentleman; Sedley answered that he believed that he had read more
books than the Lord Chief Justice.54
The anti-civility of the ‘frolic’ was clearly quite different from the
unselfconscious coarseness of the courtiers which Wood reported in
1666, reporting that the courtiers who visited Oxford ‘were neat and
gay in their apparell, yet…very nasty and beastly, leaving at their
departure their excrements in every corner, in chimneys, studies,
colehouses, cellars’.55 Indeed, the ‘frolic’ argues a high level of shame,
and consequent fascination with outrage, in the audience of citizens. It
is significant that so many apocryphal stories were told about leading
Page 12 of 40
‘libertine’ courtiers. For example, while there is good documentation,

including the court case, for the Bow Street incident, and for a similar
‘streaking’ escapade by Sedley in 1668,56 there is apparently little basis
for the story recorded by Thomas Hearne, that Rochester
used sometimes, with others of his companions, to run naked, and

particularly they did so once in Woodstock Park, upon a Sunday in
the afternoon, expecting that several of the female sex would have
been spectators, but not one appeared.57
Pepys, always fascinated by libertines, reported in July 1668 an almost

certainly unfounded piece of gossip that Archbishop Sheldon kept
‘wenches’ (p.256) and that Sedley had stolen one of them.58 Libertine
courtiers clearly found a ready audience and at one level such stories
are significant regardless of their truth. The more mythical aspects of
the libertine image could emerge from the fear and fascination of the
respectable with the inversion of the ‘civil’ code. Moreover, the more a
hostile but fascinated reaction was evoked from the audience by
libertine conduct, the more libertine courtiers and gallants strove to
improve on the image.
To define the elements of the rake stereotype, and to observe how it

crystallized in the minds of disapproving observers, is not fully to
understand why it should have emerged in the first place. The reaction
of the young Cavalier nobility and gentry, and indeed, of the nation as a
whole, against the Puritan attempt to impose a rigid standard of
morality was clearly one factor. This reaction had begun before 1660.
John Evelyn, for example, attests the growth of fashionable cliques
meeting in the Mulberry Gardens and frequenting taverns, cockfights,
and illicit dramatic performances in the later 1650s.59 The escapades of
Philip Stanhope, second Earl of Chesterfield, and his mistress Barbara
Villiers, in a circle which included Charles Sedley's brother William,
looked forward to those of the court wits of Charles II.60 The ‘Hectors’,
as we have seen, were a phenomenon of the 1650s. The young
Cavaliers of Stanhope's circle were unlikely to have experienced much
personal pressure to adopt Puritan manners, and so the disruptive
effect of the wars and the exile of leading Royalists rather than the
Puritan ascendancy per se may be regarded as a principal immediate
cause of the wildness of manners among young gallants in London.
Many young heirs were left in unexpected independent and
unsupervised control of their day-to-day lives and finances. Dorothy
Osborne suggested in 1654 that it was the absence of a court to enforce
a decorous standard of behaviour which was responsible for the
scandalous behaviour of young members of the gentry and nobility:
Page 13 of 40
I have the charity to believe that they appear very much worse
than they are, and that the want of a Court to govern themselves
by is in great part the cause of their ruin; though that was no
perfect school of virtue, yet Vice there wore her mask, and
appeared so unlike herself that she gave no scandal. Such as were
really as discreet as they seemed to be gave good example, and
the eminency of their condition made others strive to imitate
them, or at least they durst not own a contrary course. All who
had good principles and inclinations were encouraged in (p.257)
them, and such as had neither were forced to put on a handsome

disguise that they might not be out of countenance at
themselves.61
Clarendon explained the roughness and licentiousness of young

Royalists after the Restoration in similar terms;62 the disrupted lives
and financial difficulties of second-generation Royalists had led to
indiscipline and cynicism which Charles II, re-establishing the court,
encouraged rather than curtailed. Writers on conduct had always
warned that parental negligence led to extravagant and outrageous
behaviour in youths, and Royalist mortality and exile ensured a
widespread breakdown of parental authority in circumstances of
disillusion and defeat among the older generation. It is interesting that
Magendie, in his study of theories of civility in seventeenth-century
France, notes that the socially disruptive French Wars of Religion had
been succeeded by an outburst of bizarre, extravagant and anti-civil
behaviour comparable to that of the Restoration in England.63 It is
important that libertinism was on the whole a phenomenon of youth.64
The older generation of Royalists clearly failed ever to recover its social
authority in the 1660s and 1670s, and Clarendon, for example, was
ruthlessly ridiculed and mocked by the younger courtiers, notably
Buckingham.65
Not only family disorganization, but also the collapse of religious

idealism in the last years of the Interregnum, certainly contributed to
libertine patterns of behaviour and the atheism associated with
fashionable Restoration wits and gallants. This atheism was focused in
the vogue for the philosophy of Hobbes (whose atheism is much in
doubt, but was claimed by contemporaries) and in the popularity of
Lucretius, the Latin exponent of Epicurus, among the generation which
had not experienced the original religious conflict. Hobbes and
Lucretius provided respectively the negative and positive poles of the
arguments supposedly justifying the libertine.66 The first was held to
assert the essential selfishness of mankind, and so to undermine the
ethical arguments for treating others with respect; the second glorified
Page 14 of 40
natural impulse and its gratification as (p.258) right and proper, and
was used to oppose Christian doctrines of original sin. In the careers of
the more eminent and intellectual libertines, and preeminently
Rochester, these philosophical positions seem to have been of genuine
significance. Gilbert Burnet, who oversaw Rochester's almost deathbed
conversion, reported his views on the innocence of gratifying natural
appetites where these caused no harm to others67 and a Hobbesian
cynicism was apparent in many of Rochester's satires. Wood called him
‘a perfect Hobbist’.68 It is even possible that Rochester derived some of
his irreverence towards established authority from his brief studies at
Wadham College, Oxford, in 1659, where the innovative (but scarcely
impious) Warden John Wilkins organized the circle which developed
into the Royal Society.69
Yet it is difficult to sustain an explanation of libertine manners,

considered as a social phenomenon, based on currents in ideas alone:
the discredit of religious zeal leading through scepticism and
naturalism to an intellectually inspired repudiation of rules of civility
and morality. Even the intellectual Rochester's libertine position was
philosophically incoherent. Hobbesian and Lucretian ideals were
glaringly incompatible, and even taken separately they did not underpin
libertine anti-civility. Hobbes was no rake, and, as has been noted,70 he
justified social accommodation and complaisance as a law of nature. In
his hands, the notion of human self-interest was elaborated to justify,
not libertarianism, but the most stringent limits to human autonomy
and impulse. In the context of Hobbesian theory, libertine repudiation
of civil forms would logically appear as irrational transgression of the
civil and natural law which kept society from the destructive chaos of
the state of war. Epicurean tradition enjoined only a moderate and
healthy pursuit of pleasure, and, in any case, accorded ill with the
savage censoriousness and pervasive sense of sin which characterized
Rochester's attitudes. Ideas were both used and assumed in libertine
opinions and behaviour; libertine thought and action assumed the
opposition between ‘nature’ and the ‘civil’ or social set up in the
concept of civility, and assaulted the social by identification with the
‘natural’, in its negative aspects of appetite and self-indulgence.71 But
the rakes’ behaviour seems to have been as much a matter of social
gesture (p.259) as of intellectual conviction. The genuinely despairing
cynicism of a Rochester (or the more comfortable cynicism of a Sedley)
was transformed into an affected cynicism by gallants following courtly
fashion. The name of Hobbes was bandied about in gallant society as
part of the libertine risqué image; less because of the real impact of
Hobbes's ideas than because, for the rake's admiring or outraged
audience, the name was (perhaps unfairly) synonymous with atheism.
Page 15 of 40
The discredit of religious zeal in sections of Restoration society was

significant as the context, but not the full explanation, of libertinism as
a social phenomenon.
The personal influence of Charles II was certainly of great importance

in encouraging libertine elements in gallant manners. His easy-going
participation in many of the uproarious activities of his younger
courtiers, and his not unnatural cynicism about the love and loyalty of
his subjects, were more immediately significant social models for
fashionable young men than any philosopher was.72 Indeed, it is worth
emphasizing that, throughout the early modern period, the particular
tastes of each monarch produced considerable fluctuations in manners.
James I's court in many ways had as bad a reputation for drunkenness
and debauchery as that of his grandson, and the court of William and
Mary was later to establish a more sober moral tone.73 Yet, as has been
suggested, libertine behaviour patterns more complex than mere
riotousness had been developing before the Restoration, and even
before the Civil Wars, despite the decorous example set by Charles I. It
is therefore helpful to look more closely at the links between the rakish
gallant of the Restoration and the image of the Cavalier which emerged
before and during the Interregnum.
The caricatured, exaggerated pictures of Puritan and Cavalier manners

which appeared in the polemic of the 1640s indicate some real cultural
differences, however distorted by satire. It seems clear, for example,
that there was something behind the Puritan accusation of extreme
profanity among many Royalists, who came to be called ‘Dammees’ by
their opponents.74 A full, hostile picture of Cavalier manners was given
in the anonymous Picture of an English Antick, with a list of his
ridiculous Habits and apish Gestures (1646), where the author gave a
twenty-six-point list of slovenly and foppish Cavalier attributes,
including:
1. His hat in fashion like a close-stoolepan…

4. A feather in his hat, hanging down like a Fox taile…
(p.260) 5. Long Haire, with ribands tied to it…
11. A long wasted dubblet unbuttoned half way…
15. His breeches unhooked ready to drop off…
17. His codpiece open tied at the top with a great Bunch of
riband…
19. His sword swapping betweene his legs like a Monkeys
taile.75
Page 16 of 40
This description of a manner compounded of effeminate flamboyance of

dress, sensuality, affected negligence, and the hint of violence bridges
the gap between the caricature of the Jacobean gull-gallant and the
disapproving accounts of Restoration libertines.
Less hostile evidence of continuity between Caroline Cavaliers and

Restoration rakes can be found, for example, in John Aubrey's account
of Sir John Suckling, the poet and courtier who died in exile in 1642.
Aubrey describes him as ‘the greatest gallant of his time and the
greatest Gamester’ and recounts his ‘readie sparkling witt’, his taste
and extravagance in dress and entertainment, and his bravado in the
face of ill-fortune.76 When he was ‘at his lowest ebbe in gaming…then
would he make himselfe most glorious in apparell’.77 Suckling's
manners were consciously easy and relaxed, according to the model of
French sophisticated informality, and Aubrey recounts his distaste for
the stiffly arrogant and old-fashioned formality of the English nobility
(interestingly, Aubrey implies that such stiffness was a thing of the past,
due to the influence of Charles II).78 While Suckling was charming and
courtly, however, he was also identified by one contemporary with the
‘gallant’ violence of the London taverns, and Aubrey records a practical
joke of Suckling's which hinged on a sexual assignation.79 The
Restoration court wits had much in common with Suckling, and greatly
admired him. They also, according to Hamilton, admired the Cavalier
poet Sir John Denham (who survived the Restoration) for his biting and
ruthless wit.80
The Cavalier tradition, which in Suckling had shown some libertine

elements of highly self-conscious and mannered excess, was rendered
more sharp and cynical by the experience of the Civil Wars, and Charles
II certainly reinforced its more scandalous tendencies. In the reign of
his father, the comparative idealism of the court, and the royal couple's
encouragement of a ‘spiritualized’, ‘platonic’ approach to love and
courtship, together with the leading court role of the Arminian clergy,
had cut off (p.261) the tavern life of the ‘blades’ from the mainstream of
fashion. Charles II, however, did not prevent the intermingling of court
and riotous London life. He protected his favourites from the legal
consequences of some of their escapades, and participated in their
sexual competition.81 He made little attempt to protect the clergy from
the jibes of libertine courtiers. But Charles's tolerance was simply an
encouragement and partial legitimation of some trends in social
behaviour which require explanation in terms of social developments
not simply initiated at court.
Page 17 of 40
How does the crystallization of ‘libertine’ modes of conduct relate to or

illuminate the developments in the values and rules of good manners
which have been the theme of this study? In earlier chapters I have
tried, first of all, to examine the nature and development of the social
ideals which informed the rules of courtesy and civility as they were
presented in the work of didactic writers on manners. I have also tried
to interpret these ideals not simply as intellectual tradition, but as a
living language of social action which linked an idealized vision of the
social order with the changing pressures and conditions of social life. I
have suggested that a new emphasis on the ‘representation’ of
gentlemanly virtues in company, and on gentlemanly ‘accommodation’
to the sensibilities of others, shows the impact of a new language of
élite status which vested prestige in the concept of an exclusive ‘civil
society’ to which all gentlemen belonged. The concept was encouraged
and given material form by the growth of court and city as gentlemanly
social milieux from the mid-sixteenth century. Lacking an ‘urban’
culture, the English nobility and gentry nevertheless began to embrace
‘modes of urbanity’ in their self-image and conduct, and to create the
urban conditions in which to deploy these. This process of adaptation,
however, was not without its tensions. The language of ‘honour’ with its
assertive and competitive implications survived, transposed, in the
‘complaisant’ world of ‘civil’ gentlemanly society, and the very
discourse of ‘civility’ itself created new contradictions in relating the
ethical life of the individual to the ‘civil’ life of the community. Should
libertine codes of conduct be regarded as an aspect of the development
of civility and civil society, as an expression of its inner contradictions,
or as a protest against it? Some tentative answer must take all three
possibilities into account.
(p.262) The Restoration period saw the intensification of the

development of London as social centre for the élite which, it has been
argued, was crucial to the development of ‘civil’ manners. The
importance of the London ‘season’, and the supremacy of the
gentlemanly society of the capital as the arbiter of fashion for the
English gentry became much more marked than under the early
Stuarts. Improved transport brought even more gentry ever more
frequently to London, and the West End developed rapidly.82 Arenas for
polite social intercourse and competition in London multiplied, and St
James's Park and Hyde Park provided newly extensive and prestigious
areas of rendezvous and mutual observation for fashionable men and
women. The playhouses were, to a much greater extent than before the
Civil Wars, the playthings of the upper ranks of society. Dekker's ‘gul’,
by contrast with the Restoration gallant, had had to content himself
with the promenade in St Paul's Cathedral, and a theatre shared with
Page 18 of 40
the lower orders. Outside London, spas and pleasure-grounds were

proliferating to extend or to imitate the world of London ‘society’.83
This social world was two-sided; it epitomized the cultural solidarity of
the English élite, but was also highly competitive. Moreover, social
competition in the upper levels of this society, where fashions in civility
and incivility were set, was unconfined by any stable order of
precedence in family or office established within the court. In France,
Louis XIV had managed for a time to direct the energies of the French
nobility at court into struggles for ‘fetishes of prestige’84 in etiquette
which the crown could control and manipulate. In the English court and
town, a less regulated struggle for prestige established shifting
hierarchies of fashion and ‘breeding’ only loosely associated with
priorities of birth. In these circumstances, aggressive, outrageous, and
predatory modes of establishing status could be given full rein.
Curiously, anti-civil patterns of behaviour served the same twin
purposes of sophistication in civil behaviour, viewed as strategy and not
simply as ideals: the theatrical distancing of the gentleman from the
social ranks immediately beneath him, and the definition of social
relationships within fashionable society.
Rakish violence was characteristically directed towards the lower but

not the lowest orders of the London population. Unlike duelling,
‘scowring’ and ‘skirmishing’ constituted contemptuous violence against
tradesmen. (p.263) Sedley's ‘frolic’ in Bow Street was not simply an
outrage, but an outrage employing particular symbols of superiority
and contempt for his audience; as the manuals of manners had made
clear, presenting the buttocks (and even more, baring the privy parts)
implied that one's audience consisted of individuals ‘to whom a man
needs use no reverence’.85 The ‘blasphemy’ which Sedley preached was
certainly an ironic challenge presented to puritanical citizens, such as
apprentices who had rioted against ‘Bawdy Houses’ in 1660,86 but it
was a challenge in which the social language of derision predominated
over any genuine religious or moral politics. It was an exaggerated
version of the rather more subtle practical jokes directed against the
middle classes in the capital by libertine courtiers. Hamilton recounts
the story of Rochester's escapade in the merchant community of the
City: he disguised himself as a merchant, ingratiated himself with
leading families, and joined with them enthusiastically in complaining
about the licentious exceses of courtiers such as himself.87 Despite
some social overlap between the World of the West End and Whitehall
and the mercantile world of the City, gallants viewed the latter with
great condescension, and dramatic gestures of ridicule, alongside a
Page 19 of 40
more straightforward snobbery, were used to dramatize the gallants’

superiority to the merchant.
It might be objected that, in the later seventeenth century, the pressure

of upward social mobility from the merchant ranks was insufficient to
account for the increase in dramatic gestures of exclusion and
contempt. The rate of infiltration into the gentry from the professions
and trade was not marked enough to cause more than the usual
disproportionate grumblings, and radical challenge to the landed
establishment had been thoroughly discredited. But this objection to
the notion of libertinism as an exercise in social exclusion overlooks the
fact that, while there was very limited infiltration into gentry society by
men of the middling ranks, the pattern of cultural imitation of gentry
manners was increasingly wellestablished at this period. Fynes
Moryson, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, had noted the
process of imitation which motivated changes in fashionable dress:
All manners of attire first came into the city and country from the
court, which, being once received by the common people, and by
the stage-players themselves, the courtiers justly cast off, and
take new fashions (though somewhat too curiously); and
whosoever wears the old, men look upon him as a picture in Arras
hangings.88
(p.264) The mechanisms of fashion, with the leaders of the mode

constantly changing their dress to keep ahead of imitators, applied to
manners as well as dress; new aspects of ‘civility’, from forks to styles
of compliment, were diffused in this way.
The behaviour of rakes can be seen, at least partly, simply as a further

move in the game of fashion, and one which combined modishness with
an actual assault on the pretensions of the imitators of fashion. In later
seventeenth-century London and the provincial capitals, the prosperous
middle ranks showed ever more eagerness to adopt gentlemanly
fashion, especially since it was increasingly exhibited to them on their
doorsteps. The market for a book such as Courtin's Rules of Civility was
as much that of prosperous merchants and professionals as of gallants,
if not more so (although quantitative evidence is lacking, apart from
scattered and inconclusive records in auction catalogues).89 In these
circumstances, fashionable courtiers and young gentlemen of the Town
had to work hard to maintain their lead over their audience. On the
other hand, the tradition of gentlemanly ‘licence’ and ‘roystering’
provided an excellent language with which to attack the pretensions of
the middling sort of people. Middle-class piety and prudence were little
bar to the imitation of the gentlemanly mores idealized in the work of
Page 20 of 40
Peacham, Brathwayt, and Allestree, but were formidable obstacles to

competition in libertinism. Just as the ideal of the ‘natural’ in speech
had been increasingly reformulated to exclude the ‘pedant’ who might
wish to base claims to gentility on merit and education alone, so the
code of libertinism glorified a lawless ‘nature’ to counteract middle
rank ability to project a ‘civil’ control of the natural equal to that of the
‘masters of civility’. Pepys's rather wistful, fascinated, and horrified
reaction to libertine conversation epitomized precisely the reaction
which libertine gallants hoped to inspire:
And so to supper in an arbour: but Lord: their mad bawdy talk did
make my heart ache! And here I first understood by their talk the
meaning of the company that lately were called Ballers: Harris
telling how it was by a meeting of some young blades, where he
was among them, and my Lady Bennet and her ladies; and they
were dancing naked, and all the roguish things of the world. But
Lord! what loose cursed company was this, that I was in tonight,
though full of wit; and worth a man's being in it for once, to know
the nature of it, and their manner of talk, and lives.90
(p.265) Libertine manners expressed the social tension produced by the

proximity and, in taverns, ordinaries, playhouses, and coffee-houses the
intermingling of a self-consciously exclusive gentlemanly society and its
various middle-class emulators. The ironic sympathy for the criminal
classes (like the prostitutes Lady Bennet and her ladies) shown by
gallants and libertines may also be interpreted as an implicit attack on
the prudential and ethical rigour of the middle ranks.
Libertine manners were not only deployed to emphasize the exclusive

character of gentlemanly society in court and capital, and to hold the
social aspirant at arm's length; they were also encouraged and
elaborated as part of the social competition between cliques and groups
within gallant society, as the development of rakishness through clubs
suggests. In a satirical attack on London life of 1673, Remarques on the
Humours and Conversations of the Town, which criticized gallant
manners much more subtly than did The Character of a Town Gallant,
more or less fashionable circles are depicted in detail. First there are
ordinary gallants who
will admit you of their society, if you can but Discourse tollerably
of Good Wine, of dressing and the Mode of your habilments; if you
can deliver a pretty good judgement of a New Tune, or a French
Page 21 of 40
Dance; if you will be a companion to them at a Play, and at the

other divertisements good of their Lives.91
Second, there are the ‘men of wit’, for whom the author reserved the
greatest censure, writing sarcastically that they are
of great generosity…for they pretend to value persons for their

worth, and hate a fop, though he spreads himself in a great many
titles, or stands mounted on half a score manners; they are
courteous and obliging to their inferiours, desiring no ceremonies
to be paid to their acquirements, and grandeur, shewing as little
to those who expect it; they are always in humour, and in short, if
they were not so fatally corrupted, they are perfectly practised in
all the arts of the most obliging conversations.92
The third group identified is that of inept young men at the Inns of
Court who seek to emulate both circles:
you shall see them manage the affected strut, and their half-
moded garniture: hear them speak in the phrases of a Play (that
modish sort of canting)…[they] even scorn the learning of their
own Society, whilst they extoll the magnanimitie of a Bravo: they
pride themselves in their amours to a Sempstress; and in
swearing like those who keep company with the Wits: nay you
must take their wit; for they believe their profuseness that way, a
sufficient proof of their being furnished with that quality.93
(p.266) Libertine elements of behaviour pervaded the conduct of all

these groups, and competitive drinking, whoring, and street violence
appear as traits common to all the gallant types satirized in the
pamphlet.94 But these elements emerge in different combinations with
other status symbols in the various circles. The sophisticated ‘Wits’,
conscious of their social preeminence despise the affectation and
foppery of ordinary gallants; they combine easiness and refinement of
manners with a libertinism concentrated in a highly wrought atheistical
wit ‘exceeding the prescriptions of Vertue, and modesty, and…scorning
the limits…set to the extravagancies of men’.95 The less exalted
gallants lack the Wits’ facility both in courtly manners and in formalized
‘anti-civility’. The young men of the Inns are conspicuous for their inept
‘affectation’ of libertine manners, and of less controversial aspects of
courtly dress and conversation. Remarques on the Hunours and
Conversations of the Town, therefore, sketched the ‘pecking-order’ of
groups in self-defining groups in London society, which was also vividly
and extensively illustrated in contemporary comic drama.96 Each group
saw those less fashionable as comparatively ‘affected’, ‘crude’, or
Page 22 of 40
unsophisticated, according to a standard which combined libertine

irreverence with all the criteria of graceful manners with which this
study has been concerned. The combination was unstable; given the
pressure of social competition in court and capital, courtly
complaisance was often entirely abandoned for violent assertions of
superiority among the Wits. Rochester indicated the frenzied self-
regard of the court literary clique in his Imitation of the Tenth Satire of
the First Book of Horace:
I loathe the Rabble, tis enough for me,
If S[hadwell], S[edley], S[heppard], W[icherley],
G[odolphin], B[utlcr], B[uckhurst], B[uckingham],
And some few more, whom I omit to name
Approve my sense, I count their censure fame.97
The counterpoint of complaisant, courtly urbanity and libertine

repudiation of ‘civil’ and ethical norms which was the language of
prestige in the gallant society of the Restoration court and town can be
illustrated in the combination of compliment, wit, and satire which
characterized fashionable conversation and discourse. Hamilton, with a
characteristic edge of elegant irony, asserted that
(p.267) The atmosphere of the Court…was redolent of…all the

refinements of splendour and urbanity which could be suggested
by the influence of a Monarch who was naturally tender and
amorous. Its beauties were bent on charming; the gentlemen had
no other end but to please. In short every man made the best use
of his talents that he could. Some distinguished themselves by
their dancing, others by their deportment and their magnificence;
some by their wit, many by their disposition to gallantry, a very
few by the constancy of their attachments.98
The ideal of urbane, gracious, and witty courtship, in which competition

in courtly accomplishment was contained in a Castiglionean exercise of
mutual admiration,99 was undercut by a violent social and sexual rivalry
between courtiers which justified Hamilton's irony. Moreover this
rivalry, certainly a feature of nearly all European courts in the early
modern period, was made sharper by the proximity of a town society
which provided an enlarged theatre and audience for competition, and
by the absence of a stable hierarchy of honour by birth in Charles II's
Page 23 of 40
court. The Duke of Richmond, for example, might have expected social
prominence in such a hierarchy; but Hamilton wrote of him that:
For all his breeding [he] was only moderately distinguished at

Court where the King took less notice of him even than did the
courtiers. It was apparently with the object of making a better
impression that he decided to fall in love with Miss Stuart.100
The pressure to ‘distinguish oneself’ in a social context where

reputations could be made by an extravagant ‘frolic’, audacious sexual
conquest, or talent for repartee was very great. A courtier's failure to
compete in the race meant loss of prestige; failure to succeed in a
stratagem meant a barrage of ridicule; a refusal to play the gallant
game, as when Lord Chesterfield took his wife to the country to prevent
her from having an affair with the Duke of York, brought down the full
weight of satire on the victim's head.101 The most dramatic moves in
this game were the most radical instances of libertinism; for example,
in the notching up of sexual conquests with a view to the discomfiture
of the rival rather than the actual pleasure of the affair. Courtly
compliment in self-presentation was therefore balanced by ritualized
satirical abuse and ridicule in self-assertion at another's expense—
whether in Rochester's scurrilous satires, or in the town gossip of
gallants with its ‘grave discourse / Of who fucks who, and who does
worse.’102 If malicious gossip was no new feature of court life, it was
raised into a performance art by the conditions of (p.268) Restoration
society, in which courtiers and gallants acted with acute consciousness
of the vulnerability of their social image to the judgement of what
Hamilton persistently called ‘the public’:103 the audience of their peers
and inferiors.
This analysis of libertine conduct, whether as full-blown stereotype or

as language integrated perversely with more ‘civil’ elements of courtly
behaviour, shows it to be just as much an aspect of the development of
‘civil society’ as the ‘official’ code of civility itself. It was parasitic on
the development of the official code, in that its motive was essentially
transgressive, but paradoxically it fulfilled some of the same strategic
ends of the official code, above all in defining social identity and
effecting social exclusion. It was the creature of London court and town
—Rochester's behaviour was said to improve markedly when he got
beyond Turnham Green—and, more seriously, the spread of libertinism
to the provinces depended on the development of social and
educational institutions which emulated those at the centre.104 At the
same time, libertinism certainly expressed some of the tension in the
development of ideals of civility which, as has been seen, was inherent
in the very construction of the language of ‘civility’ and was made very
Page 24 of 40
much manifest by the conditions in which the language was employed.

Pierre Bourdieu has characterized the development of aesthetic taste
as a matter of ‘ideological strategies’ which ‘naturalize’ cultural
difference, converting ‘differences in the mode of acquisition of culture
into differences of nature’.105 Thus in the modern world, the person
who prefers Mozart to Mantovani, and the dinner party to the
discothèque experiences these preferences as genuine and ‘natural’,
and this in turn reinforces his or her claim to superior status within
society. Bourdieu's formulation may or may not have validity in the
study of all cultures, but it unquestionably characterizes the early
modern discourse of manners, which inscribed the category of the
‘natural’ in acquired tastes and modes of conduct and opposed these to
a second concept of the ‘natural’ as animal and unadorned instinct. The
libertine anticipated the ‘ideological’ unmasking of manners, scarcely
surprising since even the idealistic advocates of courtly manners had,
in a sense, admitted the mystification involved in the ‘artificial’
production of ‘natural’ manners.106 The libertine took pleasure in the
constant exposure of polite social life as ‘dissembling’, ‘hypocrisy’, and
artifice. As a contemporary playwright put it,
(p.269) Why are harsh statutes gainst poor players made,
When acting is the universal trade?107
But the libertine was no anthropologist. His cynicism was a gesture of

status and hence, perversely, reasserted that status in the very act of
sneering at the hypocrisy of the language which officially supported it.
No radical, he viewed civil forms and codes not as an obstacle to
humanity, but as the mask of the eternally brutish and selfish character
of mankind whose methods might be sophisticated by ‘civil’ society but
whose basic aims could not be transformed within it.
But while the libertine played with the language of civility, and
responded to the competitive pressures of a real rather than an
idealized ‘civil society’, his assertion of status through inversion of the
code cannot be understood if it is not related to the older traditions of
gentlemanly status which invested rank with freedom from constraint.
The libertine self-consciously gloried in the anti-Christian aspects of the
code of ‘honour’, particularly in relation to sexual conquest and the
combative search for and defence of reputation. The fashion for
‘raillery’ was taken to extreme lengths by the court Wits; Rochester
confessed to Burnet that it had been his love of ridicule and derision
that had led to his downfall.108 Raillery entangled the rhetorical ideals
of civil nobility with the aggressive and competitive aspects of the
‘honour code’ and both were sharpened by the combative atmosphere
Page 25 of 40
of the town. The effect was an almost bathetic transposition of heroic,

military metaphors into social recreation, and comment showed that
raillery far escaped the bounds set even by liberal writers on manners.
As the author of Remarques put it, ‘the desire of glory and singularity
among gentlemen is now as violent as ever, though its satisfaction is
placed in such trifling, and idle requirements.’109 Raillery was not by
any means confined to gallants and libertines, as the following
anecdote attests. The divine Isaac Barrow met Rochester at court one
day:
his lordship, by way of banter, thus accosted [Barrow]: ‘Doctor, I

am yours to my shoe-tic.’ Barrow, seeing his aim, returned his
salute as obsequiously, with ‘My Lord, I am yours to the ground.’
Rochester, improving his blow, quickly returned it with ‘Doctor, I
am yours to the centre’; which was as smartly followed by Barrow,
with ‘My Lord, I am yours to the Antipodes’: upon which
Rochester, scorning to be foiled by a musty old piece of divinity
(as he used to call him) exclaimed ‘Doctor, I am yours to the
lowest pit of hell!’ on which Barrow, turning on his heel, answered
‘There, my lord, I leave you.’110
(p.270) Nevertheless raillery, combined with the violence of duelling

and such sports as ‘scowring’, was the code of the ‘honourable’
gentleman whose attachment to the forms of ‘civil society’ was
equivocal.
Duelling and ‘scowring’ were, of course, not only élite pursuits; they
were masculine pursuits. The masculine character of the ideal of both
the ‘civil’ gentleman and the man of ‘honour’ has so far been taken for
granted in this study, as it was in the writings which describe these
social codes. This assumption must be carefully handled, for to say that
these codes were masculine is not to say that women lived by entirely
different codes in practice. There is no reason to suppose that
gentlewomen did not share many of the same basic standards and
techniques in manners as men, modified by their obligation (in theory
at least) to show modesty and reserve and the forms of salutation and
ceremony which applied to females specifically. Women clearly took a
major role in entertainment and display in court and ‘town’, as
moralists lamented. Women would also defend ‘honour’ further than the
theoretical limitation of their ‘honour’ to chastity would imply. Under
Elizabeth and James I, noblewomen had fought physically for
precedence at table, and the Countess of Shrewsbury paid a herald
ritually to insult a Lord Stanhope, who had defaced the family coat of
arms on an inn sign at Newark.111 The full-scale history of female
modes of behaviour at this period remains to be written, but in this
Page 26 of 40
study it is enough to point out that the codes of ‘civility’ and ‘honour’
were none the less essentially masculine in applying principally to men
and, if in slightly different ways, constructing women as the subjects of
patriarchal control. Within the discourse of the ‘civil’ society, woman
was inferior to man because she lacked the same reasoning faculty to
ensure self-control and to develop ruling virtues; she was nearer to
‘nature’ than man, just as the child was nearer to nature than the adult,
and the lower orders nearer than the ruling orders to the unreasoning
and animal. According to the code of honour, as it emerged from a
violent and military order, woman was subject to man because she
lacked the autonomy of the fighting man, and her ‘honour’ was less her
possession than the possession of father, husband, or family.112
The libertine code too was essentially male. This may seem a
questionable judgement, given that women in the seventeenth century
could and did engage in sexual promiscuity and the riotous living which
is most frequently associated with the term. The Restoration court was
famous for the sexual licence of both sexes. Not simply the humble Nell
Gwynn, but court ladies like Barbara Castlemaine, another royal
mistress and also (p.271) the mistress of Wycherley, were celebrated
for their many affairs. Barbara Villiers, mistress of the Earl of
Chesterfield, took part in the drunken escapades of her lover and his
friends. Male libertine poets, especially Rochester, constantly pointed
out that female modesty was a sham, and that female lust and
ruthlessness were as great as man's, if not greater. Yet neither the fact
of female sexual licence, nor the repeated attribution of lust to women
by men both moralizing and rakish, can really allow one to speak of
female ‘libertines’. First, libertine behaviour characteristically involved
more than sexual promiscuity: as has been stressed, group drunkenness
and violence were characteristics of rakes and largely unavailable to
women. Second, libertine attitudes to women were not merely, if at all,
libertarian; they were in fact thoroughly misogynistic, involving a view
of female sexuality as both alluring and repulsive. The libertine did not
reject the Christian ascetic tradition in which woman was seen as
dangerously and degradingly sensual; he merely repudiated the ideals
of male continence associated with this tradition. Women were not to
be avoided or controlled, but on the contrary openly pursued and
exploited. Moreover, the libertine was often less concerned with
physical pleasure and more with a sexual politics of seduction and
betrayal in which the male aim was conquest or humiliation of the
woman. In Restoration comedy the rake figure replaces the forms of
courtship with the forms of political stratagem and the metaphors of
military attack. Women are, of course, depicted as responding to the
rake's advances in various ways, but never as libertines themselves in
Page 27 of 40
the strict sense. In Etherege's The Man of Mode, for example, we see
two female responses to the male rake: one woman (named Mrs
Loveit!) is ruined and abandoned because she succumbs to the hero;
the other, an heiress, gets her man because she refuses conquest
outside the civil forms of marriage. The play partly endorses and partly
criticizes the libertine figure, but it certainly shows the way in which,
for the libertine, woman is constructed either as victim, as opponent, or
as a source of funds.
The male libertine stereotype, then, is depicted as essentially predatory

and misogynistic in relation to women. In the area of sexual relations,
the perceived equivalent of the male libertine was not the female
libertine but the ‘whore’. For majority opinion the females who
transgressed sexual norms were ‘whores’ and the libertine agreed,
adding the loud rider that even respectable women were ‘whores’ or
could be made to be so. The asymmetrical character of the definitions
‘libertine’ and ‘whore’ is highlighted if the transgressive nature of
libertinism is remembered. Libertinism depended for its content largely
on the social and moral codes which it challenged or inverted. Hence,
given that codes of sexual and (p.272) social behaviour for men and
women in the early modern period were different, rule-breaking by men
and women automatically had different meanings and would be
perceived in divergent terms. Thus, for example, one famously
anomalous and freethinking woman in Restoration England, Aphra
Behn—professional writer and government agent—was never wholly
identified with libertinism, despite the fact that she outraged social
convention and was the social and literary associate of Rochester and
Sedley. The very fact of her writing, its explicit sexual content, and her
independent life brought her violent derision, but as ‘whore’ and not as
libertine. In her turn, she assaulted not only repressive morality, but the
very sexual attitudes which defined male libertinism. Writing ironically
of the politics of sexual conquest she asserted
Why do we put attractions on,
Since either way tis we must be undone,
They fly if honour take our part.
Our virtue drives them from the field,
We lose them by too much dessert,
But oh! they fly us if we yield.113
Page 28 of 40
Behn's point, that women have to put on a show of modesty and virtue
even if it does them no more good than succumbing immediately,
highlights another difference between male libertinism and female
defiance of convention. Male libertinism was essentially a public
stance, while female sexual transgression usually had to be at least
nominally covert.
Libertinism in relation to the history of sexual relations is too large a

subject to be considered here. In relation to manners and the code of
civility, the masculinity of libertinism leads back to the question of
gentlemanly identity, and indeed ideology, within a changing overall
language of status and authority. It might be argued that the very overt
transgression of the forms of self-control and distance from ‘nature’
involved in libertine conduct were as paradoxical in relation to
patriarchy as they were in relation to less explicitly gendered
conceptions of rank and hierarchy. By ‘excrementizing’ in the street,
did not Sedley undermine not only his own pretensions to ‘civil’
authority as a gentleman, but also his pretensions to superior reason as
a man? Clearly this was not the case, since libertines asserted their
masculinity as well as their rank through ostentatious gestures of
freedom. The interest of this theatrically masculine as well as
theatrically ‘gentlemanly’ transgression lies in an earlier relation
between (p.273) masculinity and ‘honour’ which was to some extent
threatened by the development of civility and of a new image and
experience of society and polity. This development did not mean the
abandonment of patriarchal assumptions, but it was accomplished at
the cost of some strain to earlier constructions of the link between
gender, status, and authority.
As Mervyn James has shown, the late medieval political world was
dominated by an aristocratic politics in which the code of ‘honour’
expressed but also regulated an often violent competition between
nobles who perceived themselves as autonomous members of a
community in which they could make and break alliances through
voluntary ‘promise’. The concept of ‘honour’ could be idealized, even
given religious content in chivalric literature, but in practice it operated
to legitimate and regulate the settling of local and even national
disputes by force or the threat of force. The Crown never launched a
frontal attack on ‘honour’, for monarchs were men of ‘honour’ too and
used the same language as their allies and friends, but the monarchy
like other European regimes gradually tried to centralize and
monopolize the value, just as they tried to centralize and monopolize
the use of violence. It was in this context that the ideology of civility
took hold, both as a vision of society and as a code of manners; there
Page 29 of 40
was increasing emphasis not on the valour of the nobleman and his
loyalty to friends (always a value predicated on the possibility of his
disloyalty) but on the status of a gentleman as a ‘civil’ governor, a
courtier, or an agent of delegated authority. The image of the
gentleman as ‘swordsman’ was gradually, if never entirely, replaced by
the image of the gentleman as politician and magistrate. This process,
part of the growth of the state, was in no respect a defeat for the
aristocracy, as has sometimes been suggested. Rather, the nobility and
multiplying gentry retained their power in rural areas and found it
useful to reinterpret their identity in terms of service to the state. This
scarcely prevented them from opposing the state, but when they did so
it was increasingly in the language of the state rather than with the
code of honour.
In some respects, however, this reinterpretation of status involved

conflict and sacrifice. To those who, under Elizabeth, hankered after a
more physical and direct politics, the role of courtier or civil office-
holder could seem dishonourable and servile. James identifies the Essex
Revolt in the last years of Elizabeth as the last major manifestation of
political dissidence based on ‘honour’ in England.114 The fashionable
and chivalric Earl of Essex, known as the hero Sidney's heir, regarded
his political career as blocked by lawyers, bureaucrats, and placemen
of the far from (p.274) chivalrous Robert Cecil. More seriously, he
found subjection to the political will of a woman difficult to tolerate. At
various times he made the point that Elizabeth could command his
loyalty but not his ‘honour’—the quality of personal autonomy owed, in
his view, indivisibly to his rank and sex. No social boor, he yet
committed the intolerable incivility, and even sacrilege, of trying to
draw his sword in a dispute with the Queen, who subsequently
politically isolated him and forced him into armed rebellion. Essex had
fashionable intellectual tastes, and may have interpreted his conflict
with the Queen in the Machiavellian image of the man of virtu, a
significantly masculine term115 taking on the Goddess Fortuna. But
James sees his essential inspiration as commitment to a vanishing world
of ‘swordsmen’, and loyalty based on allegiances of ‘honour’ which
prompted a refusal to accept the hierarchical conception of society,
guaranteed by religion, which made noblemen wholly subjects, albeit
privileged ones.
It was not necessary for an early modern state to be headed by a

woman in order for it to generate dangerous noble nostalgia for a
politics of honour based on military prowess rather than civil office-
holding. Only a few years after the Essex rebellion, the Earl's friend,
Biron, was executed for a similar revolt in France. It seems that the
Page 30 of 40
emergent state, with its ideology of civil order, and despite its appeal to
the upper ranks of society in offering them new powers and forms of
patronage, could be seen as somehow feminizing. The monarchy and
state remained patriarchal, guaranteeing a society in which women
were subjected to men, as servants to masters and children to parents,
but it became less directly a matter of masculine alliance. The criticism
of the ‘courtier’ as servile and ‘effeminate’ reflected a sense that the
service of the monarch could unsex the nobleman, who would be
dishonoured by such behaviour regardless of the powers it gave him.
This criticism could be extended to the entire code of civility, with its
symbols of self-restraint and duty of accommodation. The libertine
behaviour of Restoration gallants might then be interpreted as the
protest and reformulation, in attenuated, bizarre, and consciously
politically impotent forms, of older forms of aristocratic masculine
autonomy. As in the case of duelling, a double process was involved. On
the one hand, the development of ‘civil order’ and the claims of the
state made duelling a practice as it were ‘left over’ from a period in
which the private settling of dispute by violence was in general
legitimate; on the other, the duel became ‘fashionable’ in its Italianate
form, just when it was losing official sanction, and acquired meaning as
a (p.275) gentlemanly transgression and gesture of freedom from the
emergent system of values.116 The overall libertine rejection of civil
forms may be seen in the same way. The ‘blades’ of the town in later
seventeenth-century England scarcely compare with Essex's
‘swordsmen’ in political seriousness and intent, but they were in some
ways their descendants; a political reality had become social theatre. It
is noteworthy that the libertine court wits of Charles II were relatively
marginal to Restoration politics. Despite the common leadership of the
monarch, the social and political hierarchies of the court diverged and
the scurrilous attacks on the civil order characteristic of the libertine
gallants were confined to a social stage. Rochester wrote
extraordinarily sexualized attacks on the crown, such as
All monarchs I hate and the thrones they sit on
From the hector of France to the cully of Britain.117
But the monarchy knew better than to interpret such views as a

genuine political threat. Those wits who took to serious politics did so,
like Sedley, after renouncing much of their libertine language and
gestures.
In conclusion, libertine conduct was ‘over-determined’ in the sense of

being based both on the development of civility and on reaction to it. In
so far as it was based in the conditions of ‘civil society’ and depended
Page 31 of 40
on the transgression of civil forms for its effect, its development

underlined and did not undermine those conditions and forms. In so far
as it was a critique of civility in its political and social modes, its
strategic purpose emptied that critique of substance. It was meant to
elaborate a social identity which those modes already upheld, and
which young gentlemen could scarcely do without. But it shows that the
relation of the gentleman to manners was far from straightforward, and
that codes of manners could ‘represent’ not only the ‘official’ forms of
prestige and authority in early modern society, but conflict and
counterpoint between a variety of images of status. No threat to the
order of ‘civil society’, libertine manners provide an ironic commentary
upon its assumptions and development.
Notes:
(1) Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. libertine.
(2) Gabriel Harvey, Pierces Supererogation, or a new prayse of an old

asse (London, 1593).
(3) Thomas Adams, The Gallants Burden (sermon preached at St Paul's

Cross in 1612), 15–17.
(4) See F. T. Perrens, Les Libertins en France au dix-septième siècle

(Paris, 1896) and Les Libertins au dix-septième siècle, ed. A. Adam
(Paris, 1964).
(5) See D. Underwood, Etherege and the Seventeenth-Century Comedy

of Manners (New Haven, 1932), ch. 2; Underwood discusses the
European ‘Libertine’ tradition, and the particular place of English
libertines within it.
(6) Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. rakehell and rakel.
(7) See the full-scale study of eighteenth-century rakery by L. C. Jones,

Clubs of the Georgian Rakes (New York, 1942).
(8) E. B. Chancellor, in his massive work of popular history, Lives of the

Rakes (6 vols, London, 1924–5), vol. 1, deals with Charles II himself
(‘Old Rowley’), and vol. 2, with ‘Restoration Rakes’. Among ‘Restoration
Rakes’ Chancellor places George Villiers, second Earl of Buckingham,
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Sir George Etherege, Sir Charles
Sedley, Charles Sackville (Lord Buckhurst), Henry Brouncker, Henry
Jermyn, William Wycherley, and several others.
(9) Jones, Clubs of the Georgian Rakes, 1–2.
Page 32 of 40
(10) Institucion of a Gentleman, sig. (A6)v.
(11) Peacham, Compleat Gentleman, 10.
(12) For a study of the ‘court wits’, see J. H. Wilson, The Court Wits of
the Restoration (Princeton, 1948).
(13) Anon., The Character of a Town Gallant, exposing: the extravagant

fopperies of some vain Self-Conceited Pretenders to gentility and good
breeding (London, 1675), in Old Book Collector's Miscellany, ed.
Hindley, vol. 2, 4.
(14) Thomas Shadwell, The Virtuoso (1676), Act 1, in The Complete

Works of Thomas Shadwell, ed. M. Summers (London, 1927), vol. 2,
106.
(15) Ned Ward, The Libertine's Choice: or The Mistaken Happiness of

the Fool in Fashion (London, 1609).
(16) See, for example, John Stephens's characterization of an idle

gallant as ‘a weake-brain'd gull’ in Satyrical Essayes (London, 1615),
Character X.
(17) See F. Aydelotte, Elizabethan Rogues and Vagabonds (London,

1967), ch. 2.
(18) S. R., Court of Civill Courtesie, ch. 2, 14.
(19) Sir Thomas Overbury, Sir Thomas Overburie his Wife etc., sig.
(17)r–v.; and see ‘A Ruffian’ in Brathwayt, Whimzies; or a New Cast of
Characters.
(20) Thomas Dekker, The Gul's Horn-Booke, in Old Book Collector's

Miscellany, ed. Hindley. vol. 2, 7.
(21) Character of a Town Gallant, in Old Book Collector's Miscellany, ed.

Hindley. vol. 2, 7.
(22) See Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, 223–42 for the decline of
violence.
(23) See Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, 242–50 and V. G. Kiernan, The
Duel in European History: Honour and the Reign of Aristocracy (Oxford,
1988). Fencing remained an important part of the ‘official’ education of
the gentleman; see J. D. Aylward, The English Master of Arms from the
Twelfth to the Twentieth Century (London, 1956), chs. 4–9. For an
Page 33 of 40
interesting analysis of eighteenth-century duelling, see D. T. Andrew,

‘The Code of Honour and its Critics: the opposition to duelling in
England 1700–1850’, Social History, 5 (1980), 409–34.
(24) A full acount of the duel between Buckingham and Shrewsbury can
be found in J. H. Wilson, A Rake and his Times: George Villiers, second
Duke of Buckingham (London, 1954), 93–100.
(25) Sir Fulke Greville, Life of Sir Philip Sidney (first published 1652),
reprinted with an introduction by N. Smith (Oxford, 1907), 63–9. The
Earl of Oxford was notoriously violent as well as fashionable.
(26) T. S. Graves, ‘Some Pre-Mohock Clansmen’, Studies in Philology, 20

(1923), 395–421.
(27) Ibid. 397.
(28) Ibid. 398.
(29) Ibid. 399–405.
(30) Ibid. 409–17.
(31) Evelyn, A Character of England, in Harleian Miscellany, ed. Park,

vol. 10, 194.

Hindley, vol. 2, 1; Walker, Of Education, pt. 2, ch. 3, 240; and see
Walker's reference to the ‘bestial love of injuriousness’ characteristic of
Hectors (p. 242).
(33) James Shirley, The Gamester (1637), Act I, Seene i, in The Dramatic
Works and Poems of Shirley, ed. W. Gifford and A. Dyce (New York,
1966), vol. 3, 199.
(34) Graves, ‘Some Pre-Mohock Clansmen’, 417–18.
(35) Shadwell, The Scowrers (1691), Act IV, Scene i, in Complete Works,
ed. Summers, vol. 5, 134.
(36) Charles Hatton to his brother, 29 June 1676, in The

Correspondence of the Family of Hatton (London, 1878), vol. 1, 133.

Hindley, vol. 2, 3; and see the complaints cited in Ch. 5, p. 162.
(38) See Three Restoration Comedies, ed. G. Salgado (Harmondsworth,

1968), introduction.
Page 34 of 40
(39) Character of a Town Gallant, in Old Book Colletor's Miscellany, ed.

Hindley, vol. 2, 5.
(40) See R. Thompson, Unfit for Modest Ears: A Study of Pornographic,

Obscene and Bawdy Works Written or Published in England in the
Second Half of the Seventeenth Century (London, 1975), 63–4.
(41) See The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. D.
M. Victh (New Haven, 1968), 37–41.
(42) Parts of Sodom are reprinted in J. Adlard, The Debt to Pleasure:

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (Cheadle, 1974), 46–50.
(43) Hamilton, Memoirs of Gramont, 9 and 220. Courtiers avidly read

Rochester's satires.
(44) Pepys, Diary, ed. Latham and Matthews, vol. 9, 356.
(45) V. de Sola Pinto, Sir Charles Sedley 1639–1701: A Study in the Life
and Literature of the Restoration (London, 1924), 80.
(46) Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and
Civil Wars in England, also his life written by himself (Oxford, 1843),
1004.
(47) Character of a Town Gallant, vol. 2, 9.
(48) Ibid.
(49) John Fletcher, The Wild-Goose Chase, Act II, Scene ii, in The Works
of Beaumont and Fletcher, with notes by A. Dyce (London, 1845), vol. 8,
138.
(50) Shadwell, The Libertine (1676), The Complete Works of…Shadwell,

ed. Summers, vol. 3, Act III, 66.
(51) Underwood, Etherege and the Seventeenth-Century Comedy of

Manners, 125.
(52) The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, antiquary, of Oxford, 1632–
1891–5), vol. 2, 353; and see Pepys's even more lurid account in Diary,
ed. Latham and Matthews, vol. 4, 209.
(53) Wood, Life and Times, ed. Clark, vol. 2, 353.
(54) Ibid.
Page 35 of 40
(55) Ibid. 68.
(56) See Pepys, Diary, ed. Latham and Matthews, vol. 9, 335–6, for
Sedley and Buckhurst running naked through the streets.
(57) Thomas Hearne, Remarks and Collections, ed. C. E. Doble et al.

(Oxford Historical Society, 1885–1921), vol. 9, 78.
(58) Pepys, Diary, vol. 8, 364.
(59) Evelyn, A Character of England, in Harleian Miscellany, vol. 10,

passim (although the society presented is relatively shabby).
(60) See Wood, Life and Times, ed. Clark, vol. 2, 147; and Wood, Athenae
Oxonienses, ed. Bliss, vol. 1, 42.
(61) The Letters from Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, ed. E. A.
Parry (London, 1914), letter 57 (Feb. 1654), 207.
(62) Clarendon, Life, in The History of the Rebellion, etc., 1003–4.
(63) Magendie, La Politesse mondaine, vol. 1, 1–10.
(64) Chancellor, Lives of the Rakes, vol. 2, ch. 4; Rochester, shortly

before his death, seems to have been turning towards serious political
interests; see Adlard, The Debt to Pleasure, 122–3.
(65) See Chancellor, Lives of the Rakes, vol. 2, 30.
(66) Underwood, Etherege and the Seventeenth-Century Comedy of

Manners, ch. 2, provides an excellent account of the intellectual aspects
of libertine manners; see Shadwell, The Libertine, in Works of Shadwell,
ed. Summers, vol. 3, passim, for the popular statement of these values
within the libertine stereotype.
(67) Gilbert Burnet, Some Passages in the Life of John, Earl of

Rochester, in Burnet's Lives, Characters etc., ed. J. Jebb (London, 1883),
191.
(68) Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, ed. Bliss, vol. 3, 1229; Buckingham was
also known as a disciple of Hobbes; see Gilbert Burnet, Bishop Burnet's
History of His Own Time (Oxford, 1823), vol. 1, 172.
(69) See Pinto, Sir Charles Sedley, 40–1, for the Wadham education of
some of the court wits.
(70) See above Ch. 6, p. 223.
Page 36 of 40
(71) See Underwood, Etherege and the Seventeenth-Century Comedy of

Manners, ch. 2, 12–18.
(72) For Charles Il's cynicism, see Burnet's History of His Own Time, vol.
1, 159.
(73) See, for example, Harrington's description of a drunken Jacobean

court masque in James I by his Contemporaries, ed. R. Ashton (London,
1969), 242–4.
(74) See Richard Baxter, Autobiography, abridged by J. M. Lloyd Thomas,

ed. with an introduction by N. H. Keeble (London, 1974), ch. 3, 36.
(75) Quoted in Politics, Religion and Literature in the Seventeenth

Century, ed. W. Lamont and S. Oldfield (London, 1976), 63–4.
(76) Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Clark, vol. 2, 240–1.
(77) Ibid.
(78) Ibid.
(79) Ibid., vol. 2, 242–4; Graves, ‘Some Pre-Mohock Clansmen’, 407,

cites an anonymous pamphlet of 1641, The Sucklington Faction: or
[Suckling's] Roaring Boys.
(80) Hamilton, Memoirs of Gramont, 169.
(81) See, for example, Charles's protection of Sedley after his naked
jaunt through London, in Pepys, Diary, ed. Latham and Matthews, vol. 9,
336; or Charles's failure to censure Rochester for boxing Tom
Killigrew's cars in the royal presence (Pepys, Diary, vol. 9, 541). For
Charles's own escapades, see Chancellor, Lives of the Rakes, vol. 1.
(82) Stone, ‘Residential Development of the West End’, in After the

Reformation, ed. B. C. Malament (Manchester, 1980), 167–212.
(83) See Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and
Society in the Provincial Town, 1660–1770 (Oxford, 1989), pt. 4, for a
description of this development.
(84) See Elias, The Court Society, ch. 5 for a description of ‘fetishes of
prestige’ in the French court, and O. Ranum, ‘Courtesy, Absolutism and
the Rise of the French State’, Journal of Modern History, 52 (1968),
426–51.
Page 37 of 40
(85) Della Casa, Galateo, 17; this principle is discussed above, Ch. 3, p.
87.
(86) See T. Harris, ‘The Bawdy House Riots of 1668’, Historical Journal,
29 (1986), 536–56.
(87) Hamilton, Memoirs of Gramont, 256–7.
(88) Fyncs Moryson, An Itinerary…Containing his ten yeeres Travell

(1617), 4 vols (Glasgow, 1907), vol. 1, 428.
(89) I have looked through a number of library and auction catalogues,

but the character of much courtesy literature as pamphlet ephemera
means that these books are often not mentioned by name.
(90) Pcpys, Diary, ed. Latham and Matthews, vol. 9, 219. Lady Bennet
was a noted procuress.
(91) Remarques on the Humours and Conversation of the Town (London,

1673), 40–1.
(92) Ibid. 42.
(93) Ibid. 117–18.
(94) Remarques on the Humours and Conversation of the Town (London,

1673), 29–30.
(95) Ibid. 93.
(96) See, for example, Sir George Etherege's Man of Mode (1676), in
which the wits are contrasted with the fop, ‘Sir Fopling Flutter’, whom
they despise; see also Shadwell's Virtuoso (1676), in which the
sophisticated hedonists, Bruce and Longville, are the critics of the
young ‘pit fops’ at the theatre.
(97) Rochester, Complete Poems, ed. Vieth, 126.
(99) See above, Ch. 4, pp. 126–8.
(101) Ibid. 185 and 188.
(102) Rochester, A Ramble in St. James's Park, in Complete Poems, ed.

Vieth, 40.
Page 38 of 40
(103) Hamilton, Memoirs of Gramont, e.g. 188.
(104) See T. S. Graves, ‘Some Pre-Mohock Clansmen’.
(105) P. Bourdicu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, tr. Nice, 78.
(106) See above, Ch. 6, p. 200 and p. 225.
(107) Source unknown.
(108) Burnet, Some Passages in the Life of Rochester, in Burnet's Lives,

179.
(109) Remarques upon the Humours and Conversations of the Town,

128.
(110) Quoted from British Library Add. MS. 19, 117, f. 61 (Davy MSS),
notes on Isaac Barrow, in Adlard, The Debt to Pleasure, 33.
(111) See V. A. Wilson, Society Women of Shakespeare's Time (London,

1924), 180–1.
(112) See above, Ch. 6, pp. 232–3.
(113) Aphra Behn, ‘To Alexis in Answer to his Poem against Fruition.
Ode’ in The Poems of Aphra Behn: A Selection, ed. Janet Todd (London,
1994), 38 (ll. 21–6). For a sensitive discussion of Aphra Behn and her
relationship with the court wits see Angeline Goreau, Reconstructing
Aphra: A Social Biography of Aphra Behn (New York, 1980).
(114) M. E. James, ‘At the Crossroads of Political Culture: the Essex

Revolt, 1601’, in Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern
England (1986), 428.
(115) James, Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern

England (1986), 445.
(116) See V. G. Kiernan, The Duel in European History.
(117) Rochester, ‘A Satire on Charles II’, in John Wilmot, Earl of

Rochester, The Complete Works (Harmondsworth, 1994), ed. F. H. Ellis,
30 (ll. 14–15).
Page 39 of 40
Page 40 of 40
Conclusion

Anna Bryson

Print ISBN-13: 9780198217657
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198217657.001.0001
Conclusion
Anna Bryson
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198217657.003.0008

This chapter summarizes the preceding discussions and presents some
concluding thoughts from the author. The book showed the value of
approaching 16th- and 17th-century ‘good manners’ as coherent social
codes which reveal much about the changing self-image and social
strategies of what remained a largely aristocratic dominant culture. It
shows the rich possibilities as well as the problems involved in using
the evidence of literary sources as guides to living codes of social
conduct and their cultural context. For all their unclear relationship to
practice in society at large, these sources can be used both to excavate
the overall character of the values of ‘courtesy’ and ‘civility’ and the
ambiguity and complexity of the social meanings involved in the
perception of good and bad manners.
Keywords: good manners, social codes, courtesy, civility
Page 1 of 9
Conclusion
What are manners? Are they simply a mass of custom and habit
sanctified by tradition and familiarity? Are they collective symptoms of
repression arising from the always problematic relation of a society to
‘natural’ human impulses and biological realities? Are they a kind of
symbolic protocol that passively reflects social hierarchy ? This book
started with these questions and has, I hope, shown the value of
approaching sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ‘good manners’ as
coherent social codes which reveal much about the changing self-image
and social strategies of what remained a largely aristocratic dominant
culture. My account of these codes can scarcely claim to be exhaustive,
since the didactic writings on manners on which it is based provide
neither a complete nor a reliable picture of social attitudes and habits.
In any case, the language of manners is so complex and leaves its mark
on so many artefacts and records that no single study can do more than
open up one of many possible approaches. I hope, however, that I have
shown the rich possibilities as well as the problems involved in using
the evidence of literary sources as guides to living codes of social
conduct and their cultural context. For all their unclear relationship to
practice in society at large, these sources can be used both to excavate
the overall character of the values of ‘courtesy’ and ‘civility’ and the
ambiguity and complexity of the social meanings involved in the
perception of good and bad manners.
This book has described not a static structure of values and practices,
but a transition in the history of manners. Following Norbert Elias, I
have argued that the early modern period in England, as in Western
Europe as a whole, was one in which there occured a major cultural
shift in ‘ways of seeing’ social conduct and social life. This was
expressed and focused in the development of the concept of ‘civility’,
which during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries gradually
displaced the concept of ‘courtesy’ in writing on correct social
behaviour. ‘Civility’ was never the only term used to characterize good
manners, nor did the appearance of the term involve any sudden break
with the values and practices of the later Middle Ages. Nevertheless,
the birth of the concept of civility in manners signalled a (p.277)
gradual restructuring of the principles and assumptions governing the

social behaviour of the élite, and its development reflected a new
pattern of values linking overall concepts of social and political
organization with ideals of everyday social behaviour. In Foucaultian
terms, the term ‘civility’ was a key element in a new ‘discourse’ of
social and political order. I have tried to map this transition in English
élite culture, where the concept of civility was initially a foreign import
and was gradually adapted to English conditions.
Page 2 of 9
Conclusion
The use of the term ‘civility’ in the field of manners was related to its
earlier and concurrent meanings in political thought. The concepts of
‘civility’ and ‘civil life’ entered English usage in translations and
adaptations of largely Italian humanist writings propagating the
classical ideal of the well-ordered polis. Here ‘civility’ denoted
principles of political order and ‘civil life’ was the ideal of a life of ‘civic
virtue’ to be practised by the patrician citizens of the city state. Shorn
of dangerous republican implications, the concept was used in English
humanist discussion of the values of the monarchic ‘commonwealth’
and the personal characteristics of virtue and learning necessary in its
aristocratic rulers. A further dimension was added to the concept
during the sixteenth century as the opposition between the ‘civil’ and
the ‘barbaric’ implicit in classical writings was elaborated and
developed in response to the challenge presented by the discovery of
the New World and its ‘savage’ inhabitants. ‘Civility’ began to take on
connotations later fully developed in the concept of ‘civilization’. The
concept began to focus a new self-valuation of European society which
could take the place of the disintegrating concept of a unified
Christendom. It emphasized the high level of political, social and moral
order distinguishing the European from the lawless and animal savage,
and increasingly involved the notion of the historical development of a
civil state of polity and society out of an original condition of savagery.
The introduction of the term ‘civility’ into the vocabulary of good

manners via humanist educational texts and conduct manuals projected
these larger concepts of political and social order onto the field of
social behaviour. While late medieval manuscripts setting out rules for
‘courteous’ conduct had focused on rituals of lordship and service
within the noble household, early modern manuals of manners
presented ‘civil’ behaviour as a technique for the representation of
personal virtue within a broader ‘civil’ community. In my analysis of
writings on manners I have tried to show that this change was not just
a change in the intellectual context of such writing but was encoded in
the structure and detail of the precepts offered. The body, for example,
was newly subjected to scrutiny and control as the site of an original
‘brutishness’ which must be controlled and (p.278) refined in order to
allow the individual to achieve the ‘civility’ proper to man. The
opposition between the ‘civil’ and the ‘savage’ was mapped onto the
social order by the attribution of comparative animality to the
behaviour of the lower ranks of society. Stress was increasingly laid on
the individual's capacity to ‘accommodate’ himself to others and to
avoid giving offence in order to integrate himself successfully into the
‘civil conversation’ of his peers. The social superiority of the ‘courteous’
medieval gentleman who had mastered the rituals of lordship and
Page 3 of 9
Conclusion
service within the noble household was reinterpreted as the social

superiority of the ‘civil’ gentleman whose self-control and capacity to
navigate ‘civil society’ elevated him above the brutish multitude.
I am very much aware that in making the theme of a transition from

‘courtesy’ to ‘civility’ central to this book, I have risked presenting a
simplistic account of change which does insufficient justice to
continuities in perceptions of manners from the late medieval period to
the seventeenth century. The title of the study, From Courtesy to Civility
is meant as a kind of shorthand for slow and complex developments in
the structure of codes of conduct. It should not be taken to imply a
sudden or absolute conceptual revolution. This kind of implication is a
particular pitfall for historians working with literary sources which may
exhibit sudden shifts in structure and style which could not, by any
stretch of the imagination, be matched by equally sudden shifts in
social or political structure. The risk is even greater when, as in the
present case, the historian is dealing with a period of transition from a
predominantly aural to a more literary culture. The danger then arises
that the appearance of literary sources is held to be equivalent to the
appearance of that which they describe. While I have done my best to
explore the relationship of didactic writing on manners to its social
context, I am conscious that this danger should always be taken into
account. It is particularly pressing in relation to the late medieval
sources, since the simplicity and limited focus of their prescriptions
almost certainly obscures more extensive and sophisticated attention to
manners in the aural culture. The chronological focus of this study and
the availability of sources have meant that I have given a much fuller
account of the relation of didactic writings to their cultural context in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than in the earlier period. It is
to be hoped that continuing research on the value of ‘courtesy’ in
medieval society will correct this imbalance and this will almost
certainly modify the contrast between the two periods which is posited
in this book.
The dangers inherent in using a particular category of writing as

evidence for social attitudes should not, however, cause the historian to
(p.279) retreat into the safe haven of claiming that he or she is writing
no more than a history of that category. Not only may codification of
manners constitute in some cases unique, however uncertain, evidence
for practice but, as I have emphasized in the introduction, there is no
simple distinction between literary codifications and ‘real’ attitudes and
behaviour. Literary codification is a part of culture, not a more or less
distant or accurate commentary on it, and so, for example, the
development of a sophisticated literary discourse on manners in the
Page 4 of 9
Conclusion
early modern period is a significant cultural fact rather than just a

useful extension of evidence. Sixteenth-century schoolboys may have
often behaved in very un-Erasmian ways, and ‘real’ courtiers may
scarcely have lived up to the Castiglionian ideal, but they were part of a
culture in which the values of conduct expressed by Erasmus or
Castiglione were recognizable if partial or contested points of reference
for the educated. The problem is not to gauge some linear distance
between written ideals and ‘real’ attitudes or behaviour, but to explore
the multiple relations between the codifications and the working codes
in society. To do so one must, of course, look outside the sources
themselves, but one must also pay very careful attention to the ways in
which codes are formulated as practical guides to conduct.
In considering the layers of meaning surrounding the formulation of

precepts of ‘civility’ I may have appeared to be writing intellectual
rather than social history. But a major theme of this book has been the
practical and strategic use of codes of manners and the relationship of
literary formulations of good behaviour to the social conditions and
needs of their potential readership. Some of these practical aspects can
be excavated from codifications of manners themselves. First, it is clear
from these texts that the values of courtesy and civility were values
connected with the expression of social status and the enforcement of
social exclusion and hierarchy. Manners whether ‘courteous’ or ‘civil’
were meant to express the superiority of the governing class by
dramatizing this superiority in everyday life. Second, manners
embodied not just a standard of social superiority, but a language of
social interaction in which individuals could express various forms of
relationship—deference, condescension, alliance, or hostility—within
certain defined social situations and milieux. The codes of conduct
formulated in the manuals were thus clearly useful in two ways: they
expressed the superiority of the gentleman according to the ideology of
status which they expressed, and they provided a language of
orientation within gentlemanly society. While the appearance of the
new ‘civil’ formulations in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England
was originally a matter of the importation of foreign ideals, I have tried
to show how the cultural needs and social milieux of the English élite
(p.280) were gradually changing in such a way as to allow ‘civil’ values
to take root.
I have suggested, first of all, that during the sixteenth century the
English nobility and gentry were in search of new sources of cultural
authority and prestige. The world of the late medieval noble household,
in which lineage and rank were expressed in the preservation of large
and highly visible hierarchies of service and in which military values
Page 5 of 9
Conclusion
were still predominant, was in gradual decline. The sheer numbers of

families claiming gentry status in what was an increasingly pacified
society, as well as the crown's pressure to undermine local military
power bases and to involve the nobility and gentry in lucrative and
expanding royal patronage networks, was undermining both the
viability of the old form of household organization and its status-
bearing rituals and assumptions. In these circumstances the political
language of humanism, which emphasized learning and virtue rather
than lineage and military ‘honour’ as the basis of authority and status,
offered less a radical challenge to the élite than a useful means of
ideological readjustment. The nobility and gentry increasingly gave
their sons an education informed with the rhetoric of civic humanism
and accompanied by a training in ‘civil’ manners. One of the main
themes of this book has been to suggest that in so far as the élite took
up academic education primarily as a way of enhancing status, the
acquisition of the manners which projected this education became more
important than the degree of ‘real’ learning achieved. As I have shown,
one of the significant aspects of early modern writing on conduct is the
way in which, despite efforts to maintain an elevated and idealizing
tone, authors were often frank in their admission that to possess the
manners projecting desired personal attributes could be more
important than possessing the attributes themselves.
Development in manners was related not simply to overall ideological

changes in perceptions and justifications of hierarchy, but also to
organizational and institutional change in the social world which the
practitoners of manners inhabited. Here I have tried to describe a
certain oddity in the English experience, in that the social milieu
envisaged in influential translated manuals of civility such as Erasmus's
De Civilitate and Della Casa's Galateo at first differed strikingly from
that of the English élite. The social world of ‘civil life’, as it was
naturally perceived and developed within a predominantly Italian
tradition, was an essentially urban and relatively open environment
providing for varied and selective social relations between relative
equals. For the rural English aristocracy and gentry of the sixteenth
century, however, everyday life was usually conducted in the limited
environment of the local community and household, with (p.281) its
relatively fixed and stable hierarchies. Yet while the English élite never
became an urban aristocracy, and never ceased to invest time and
money in maintaining their position in the counties, they gradually
evolved a new and quasi-urban way of life in which the code of ‘civility’
was an important means of definition and orientation. The key
developments in this process were, as I have tried to describe, the rapid
growth of the court and of London as centres of gentlemanly social as
Page 6 of 9
Conclusion
well as political life. By the end of the seventeenth century the majority
of the English élite was socially amphibious, undertaking some part of
its education at urban centres and often seasonally alternating
residence between London and the counties.
A substantial part of this book has been taken up with analysing the
complex relations between the codes of manners presented in manuals
of civility and the social milieu of court and city. I have tried to show
how these environments encouraged and even required ways of
dramatizing and sustaining social identity very different from those
appropriate to the rural aristocratic household. While the court in many
ways maintained medieval rituals of lordship, service and magnificence,
it was also a highly competitive and fluid milieu in which modes of self-
presentation were intensively cultivated and scrutinized. In both court
and city the individual had to assert membership of gentlemanly society
through dress, address, and demeanour and had to orientate himself
and maintain prestige in a shifting world of social relationships, many
with comparative strangers. The social geography of this world became
ever more extensive and complex with the proliferation of educational
and recreational institutions serving the gentry at a national level.
While the growth of court and city in the early modern period is not a
novel theme for social historians, I have attempted to look at these
developments from the comparatively unexplored perspective of their
significance for the everyday construction and perception of
aristocratic cultural identity. Seen in this way, they appear as crucial to
a process by which the élite created and was in turn moulded by a ‘civil
society’ transcending the local community. The code of ‘civility’
expressed both the vision of status which this ‘society’ within a society
was supposed to embody and the ground rules for negotiation within it.
It would be a gross exaggeration to claim that the medieval English

aristocracy and gentry had no sense of a common cultural identity and
community cutting across the local hierarchies in which their power
bases lay. Nor did the medieval court fail to provide some focus for
aristocratic culture. Nevertheless, the growth of the court and of the
capital as a centre of élite social life during the early modern period
immeasurably (p.282) strengthened what might be termed the cultural
solidarity of the aristocracy and gentry. This study of the codes of
manners which were associated with these institutional developments
has shown, I hope, that the change was qualitative rather than simply
quantitative. In contrast to medieval rules of ‘courtesy’, with their
stress on the ritual of lordship, service and open-house hospitality, the
rules of ‘civility’ presented an ideal in which superior status was to be
continuously encoded in demeanour, deportment, gesture, and
Page 7 of 9
Conclusion
conversation. Moreover, the acquisition of ‘civility’ was perceived to be

not simply a matter of following rules, but of continuous contact with
‘civil’ society and avoidance of polluting contact with social inferiors.
This conception of manners could only be fully elaborated within the
social context which the growth of the court and city as centres of
gentlemanly life provided. Once the dominance of these centres had
been fully established, however, modes of civility could be imitated and
diffused even in the social life of the counties and county towns.
In the introduction to this study I suggested that the prevalent

‘revisionist’ view of early modern English political history, which rejects
both the notion of the defeat of the aristocracy by an emergent
centralized state and any idea of ‘bourgeois’ revolution in this period,
challenges social historians to produce accounts of change within an
enduringly aristocratic society. I have certainly tried to write the history
of one aspect of the successful adaptation of aristocratic values and
practices to changing political and social conditions. But I have also
tried to emphasize that this process of adaptation involved strain and
conflict. The code of civility, particularly in relation to court culture,
attracted the attacks of religious dissidents and political radicals who
considered it deceitful and hypocritical. A modern analysis of early
modern manners as ‘ideological’ or modes of ‘cultural legitimation’
scarcely seems necessary when even the writers of conduct manuals
were ready to admit the social fiction and theatricality of projecting
‘natural’ superiority through acquired manners and mannerisms.
Moreover, codes of manners could exhibit an enduring tension between
competing traditions of aristocratic behaviour, for example, in potential
opposition between the ‘civil’ ideal of self-control and accommodation
to others and the assertive implications of the concept of ‘honour’.
Gentlemen could even appear to reject the entire basis of ‘civil society’
in scandalous expressions of libertinism.
One healthy aim of recent attempts to stress the conservative and

aristocratic nature of early modern English society and politics has
been to discourage over-eager and distorting attempts to identify the
period as one of modernization. This aim can be distorting, however, if
it prevents us from exploring the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
foundations of (p.283) cultural developments which we regard as
distinctively modern. It is clear, for example, that the early modern
concept of ‘civility’ resonated with many of the meanings which we
associate with the later concept of ‘civilization’, for example, in already
denoting an ordered polity and society distanced from an original
savagery. One secondary theme of this book has been to suggest that
the development of the concept of ‘civility’ in manners, and not merely
Page 8 of 9
Conclusion
in early anthropological writings, casts significant light on the origins

of modern concepts of society and social change. In contrast to
intellectual historians who have seen the ‘civic humanist’ political
thought of the Renaissance as lacking any concept of society, I have
tried to show that humanist writing on conduct reveals a new sense of a
social sphere of ‘civility’ and ‘civil conversation’, governed by principles
that are neither purely ethical nor purely political. Political thought in
the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries tended to subject all
areas of human activity and association to the same hierarchic
principles of order, but writing on manners anatomized social relations
as a distinct category. When later Enlightenment philosophers
formulated an explicit theory of ‘society’, therefore, this supposed
revolution in political thought should be related to the emergence of an
implicit notion of society and social relations in earlier writing on
manners. It seems appropriate to end this study of the social history of
conduct with the reflection that the very notion of social history owes
something to the development of the concept of civility in manners.
Page 9 of 9
Primary Sources

Anna Bryson

Print ISBN-13: 9780198217657
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198217657.001.0001
Primary Sources
Bibliography references:
Anon., The Accomplished Courtier (London, 1658).
—— The Art of Complaisance: or the Means to oblige in Conversation

(London, 1673).
—— Bienséance de la conversation entre les hommes (by the pensioners

of the Jesuit college at Pont-à-Mousson) (Rouen, 1618).
—— Cacoëthes Leaden Legacy, or His Schoole of Ill Manners (London,

1624).
—— The Character of a Town Gallant (London, 1675), in Old Book

Collector's Miscellany, ed. C. Hindley (London, 1873), vol. 6, item 6.
—— Cupid's Schoole: Wherein Yongmen and Maids may learn divers

sorts of new witty and Amrous Complements (London, 1632).
—— Cyvile and Uncyvile Life: a discourse where is disputed, what order

of Lyfe best beseemeth a Gentleman (London, 1579).
(Another issue, under the title The English Courtier and the Cu[n]tey-
gentleman (London, 1586)
Page 1 of 18
Primary Sources
is reprinted in Inedited Tracts illustrating the Manners of Englishmen

during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. W. C. Hazlitt
(Roxburghe Library, London, 1868), pp. 1–93)
—— The English Courtier, and the Cu[n]try-gentleman (London, 1586);

see Cyvile and Uncyvile Life.
—— A Gagge for Long-hair'd Rattlebeads who revile all Civill

Roundheads (London, c. 1644). (Possibly by William Prynne.)
—— A Health to the Gentlemanly Profession of Servingmen (London,

1598).
(Reprinted in Inedited Tracts illustrating the Manners of Englishmen

during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. W. C. Hazlitt
(Roxburghe Library, London, 1868), pp. 95–167.)
—— A Helpe to Memory and Discourse (London, 1621).
—— How a Man may Chuse a Good Wife from a Bad (London, 1602).
—— The Institucion of a Gentleman (London, 1555). (In this study the

edition cited is the later edition of 1568.)
—— The Mirror of Complements, Or a pleasant and profitable Academy,

for all such as have occasion to frequent the Court, or to converse with
persons of wealth and quality (London, 1653).
—— The New Academy of Complements by L[ord] B[uckhurst], S[ir]

C[harles] S[edley], S[ir] W[illiam] D[avenant] and Others of the Most
Refined Wits of this Age (London, 1671). (Authorship uncertain.)
—— The Picture of an English Antick with a List of his Ridiculous Habits

and Apish Gestures (London, 1646).
—— Raillerie à la Mode Consider'd: or the Supercilious Detractor

(London, 1673).
—— Remarques on the Humours and Conversations of the Town

(London, 1673).
—— Remarques upon Remarques, or, A Vindication of the

Conversations of the Town (London, 1673).
—— The Resolution of the Roundheads (London, 1642). (p.285)
Page 2 of 18
Primary Sources
—— ‘A Table of Good Nurture’ and ‘A Second Table of Good

Nurture’ (Temp. Jac. 1), in The Roxburghe Ballads, with short notes by
W. M. Chappell, 10 vols. (The Ballad Society, 1869–99), vol. 2, 570–2.
—— A Witty Answer and Vindication to a Foolish Pamphlet Intituled

New Orders New, Agreed Upon by a Parliament of Rattleheads
(London, 1642).
—— Youth's Behaviour: or Decencie in Conversation amongst Men, tr.

Francis Hawkins (4th edn., London, 1646). (Translation of Bienséance
de la Conversation first published in the early 1640s; republished 1661
with additional material first published in the 1651 edition.)
Adams, Thomas, The Gallant's Burden: A Sermon (London, 1612).
Agrippa, Henrie Cornelius, Of the Vanitie of Artes and Sciences…

Englished by Ja. San[ford] (London, 1569).
Allestree, Richard(?), The Gentleman's Calling (London, 1660).
—— The Government of the Tongue (Oxford, 1674).
—— The Whole Duty of Man (London, 1658).
Arber, Edward (ed.), English Reprints, 8 vols. (London, 1869–71).
Aristotle, Aristotle's Politiques or Discourses of Government, tr. John

Dickenson from the French of Loys Le Roy (London, 1598).
Ascham, Roger, The Scholemaster (London, 1570, collated with 1571

edition), ed. E. Arber (London, 1870).
Aubrey, John, Brief Lives, chiefly of Contemporaries, set down by John

Aubrey, between the Years 1669 and 1696, ed. A. Clark (Oxford, 1898).
B., I., Heroick Education, or Choice Maxims and Instructions for the
most sure and facile training up of Youth (London, 1657).
B., W. (probably William Bas), A Helpe to Discourse (London, 1618).
Bacon, Sir Francis, Lord Bacon's Works, ed. J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and
D. D. Heath (London, 1857–9).
Bas, William, Sword and Buckler; a Serving Man's Defence (London,

1602).
Baxter, Richard, A Christian Directory (London, 1673).
Page 3 of 18
Primary Sources
—— Autobiography, abridged by J. M. Lloyd Thomas, ed. with an

introduction by N. H. Keeble (London, 1974).
Behn, Aphra, The Poems of Aphra Behn: A Selection, ed. J. Todd

(London, 1994).
Blount, Thomas, The Academie of Eloquence. Containing a Compleat

English Rhetorique (London, 1654).
Bolton, Edmund, The Cities Advocate: Whether Apprenticeship

extinguisheth Gentry (London, 1629).
Brathwayt, Robert, The English Gentleman (London, 1630).
—— Whimzies, or a New Cast of Characters (London, 1631).
Breton, Nicholas, The Court and the Country; Dialoguewise between a

Courtier and a Countryman (London, 1618),
reprinted in The Works…of Nicholas Breton, ed. A. B. Grosart (New

York, 1879 and 1966).
—— A Poste with a Madde Packet of Letters (London, 1602).
Browne, Sir Thomas, Christian Morals (published posthumously in

1716) in The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. Geoffrey Keynes, 4 vols.
(London, 1964), vol. 1, pp. 243–69. (p.286)
Bryskett, Lodowick, A Discourse of Civill Life containing the Ethike Part

of Morall Philosophy (London, 1606).
Buck, Sir George, The Third Universitie of England or A Treatise of all

the Colledges, auncient schooles of priviledge, and of houses of
learning, and liberall Arts within and about the most famous cittie of
London, appended to John Stow, The Annales or General Chronicle of
England (London, 1603).
Bulwer, John, Chirologia: or the Naturall Language of the Hand.

Composed of the Speaking Motions and Discoursing Gestures thereof
(London, 1644).
—— Chironomia: or the Art of Manuall Rhetoricke (London, 1644).
Burnet, Gilbert, Bishop Burnet's History of His Own Time, ed. M. J.

Routh, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1823).
—— Some Passages in the Life of John, Earl of Rochester, in Burnet's

Lives, Characters, etc., ed. J. Jebb (London, 1833), pp. 165–264.
Page 4 of 18
Primary Sources
Butler, Charles, The English Grammar. Whereunto is annexed an index

of Words (London, 1633).
Butler, Samuel, Characters and Passages from Note-Books, ed. A. R.

Waller (Cambridge, 1908).
Calviac, Gilbert, La civile honesteté pour les enfants (Paris, 1559).
Campbell, Archibald, Eighth Earl of Argyll, Instructions to a Son

(London, 1661).
Casa, Giovanni Della, Il Galateo. Ovvero de’ Costumi, in his Opera

(Venice, 1558). Translations and adaptations of the Galateo in English
were as follows:
—— Galateo of Maister Iohn Della Casa. Archebisbop of Benevanta. Or

rather, a Treatise of the Maners and behaviours, it behoveth a Man to
use and eschew, in his familiar conversation, tr. Robert Peterson
(London, 1576).
(This translation was appended to T. Darell, A Short Discourse of the

Life of Serving men (London, 1578).)
—— The Rich Cabinet furnished with varietie of excellent descriptions.

Whereunto is added the Epitome of good manners, extracted from mr. I
de la Casa (by T[homas] G[ainsford] (London, 1616).
—— Lucas Graçian Dantisco, Galateo Espagnol, or the Spanish Gallant,

tr. W. S[tyle] (London, 1640).
—— The Refin'd Courtier, or A Correction of Several Indecencies crept

into Civil Conversation, tr. N[athaniel] W[aker] (London, 1663). (A new
and updated translation.)
—— Josiah Dare, Counsellor Manners his Last Legacy to his Son

(London, 1673). A loose adaptation.
Castiglione, Baldassare, Il Cortegiano (Venice, 1528).
—— The Booke of the Courtyer. Done into Englyshe by T[homas] H[oby]

(London, 1561).
Cawdrey, R[obert], A Godly forme of householde Government, gathered

by R.C. now augmented by J. Dodd and R. Cleaver (London, 1600).
Cecil, William, Lord Burghley (?), Certaine Precepts or Directions for

the Well-Ordering of a Man's Life (Edinburgh, 1618).
Page 5 of 18
Primary Sources
Chambers, R. W. (ed.), A Fifteenth Century Courtesy Book (Early

English Text Society, Extra Ser., 47, 1904).
Chartier, Alain, A Brefe Declaration of the Great Myseries in Courtes

Ryal (London, 1549). (p.287)
Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Canterbury Tales, in The Works of Geoffrey

Chaucer, ed. W. W. Skeat (Oxford, 1923).
Clapham, Jonathan, A Full Discovery and Confutation of the Wicked and

Damnable Doctrines of the Quakers (London, 1656).
Cleaver, Robert, A Plaine and Familiar Exposition of the Ninth and

Tenth Chapters of the Proverbes of Solomon (London, 1612).
Cleland, James, Hero-Paideia: or the Institution of a Young Nobleman

(Oxford, 1607).
Codrington, Robert, The Second Part of Youth's Behaviour; or Decency

in Conversation Amongst Women (London, 1664).
Coote, Edmund, The Englishe Schoolmaister (London, 1596).
Cornwallis, Sir William, Essays (London, 1600).
Courtin, Antoine de, Nouveau Traité de la civilité qui se pratique en

France parmi les honnêtes hommes (Paris, 1670).
—— The Rules of Civility, or Certain Ways of Deportment observed in

France, amongst all Persons of Quality, upon Several Occasions, tr.
Anon. (London, 1671).
—— The Rules of Civility, Revised and much Enlarged (London, 1678).
Cranmer, Thomas, Miscellaneous Writings and Letters of Thomas

Cranmer, ed. J. E. Cox (Parker Society, Cambridge, 1846).
Dare, Josiah, Counsellor Manners his Last Legacy to his Son (London,
1673). (An adaptation of Giovanni della Casa, Il Galateo.)
Darrell, T., A Short Discourse of the Life of Serving Men (London,

1578). (Contains Giovanni della Casa, Calateo: A Treatise of the
Maners, tr. Robert Peterson.)
Day, Angel, The Englishe Secretarie: or plaine and direct method for the
enditing of all manner of epistles or letters (London, 1586).
Dedekind, Frederik, Grobianus (Frankfurt, 1555).
Page 6 of 18
Primary Sources
—— The Schoole of Slovenrie: or Cato turn'd Wrong Side Outward, tr. R.

F. (London, 1604).
Dekker, Thomas, The Gul's Horn-Booke (London, 1609).
(Reprinted in An Old Book Collector's Miscellany, ed. C. Hindley, 6 vols.

(London, 1872), vol. 2, item 4).
Dryden, John, Defence of the Epilogue; or, an essay on the dramatic

poetry of the last age (1672), in Essays of Dryden, ed. W. P. Ker, 2 vols.
(Oxford, 1900), vol. 1, pp. 162–77.
Du Refuge, Eustache, Le Traité de la Cour (Paris, 1616).
—— A Treatise of the Court, tr. John Reynolds (London, 1622).
Ducci, Lorenzo, Ars Aulica, or the Courtier's Arte, tr. Edward Blount
(London, 1607). (First published in Ferrara, 1601.)
Earle, John, Micro-Cosmographie, or a Peece of the World Discovered

(London, 1628).
Eden, Richard, Letter to Sir William Cecil, in The First Three Early
English Books on America, ed. E. Arber (Westminster, 1895), pp. xliii–
xliv.
Ellis, Clement, The Gentile Sinner: or England's Brave Gentle man Both
as he is and should be (Oxford, 1660).
Elyot, Sir Thomas, The Boke Named the Governour (London, 1531).
(Reprinted with an introduction by F. Watson (London, 1907).)
Erasmus, Desiderius, De Civilitate Morum Puerilium (Antwerp, 1526).

(p.288)
Erasmus, Desiderius, De Civilitate Morun [sic] Puerilium. A Lytell

Booke of Good Maners for Chyldren: into the Englysshe tonge by R.
Whytyngton (London, 1532).
Etherege, Sir George, The Man of Mode (1676), reprinted in Three

Restoration Comedies, ed. C. Salgado (Harmondsworth, 1986), pp. 43–
146.
Evelyn, John, A Character of England: as it was lately presented in a

letter, in Harleian Miscellany, ed. T. Park (London, 1808–13), vol. 10, pp.
189–98.
Page 7 of 18
Primary Sources
Faret, Nicolas, L'honnête homme ou l'art de plaire à la cour (Paris,

1630).
—— The Honest Man: or the Art to Please in Court, tr. E[dward]

G[rimstone] (London, 1632).
Ferguson, Adam, Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. D. Forbes

(Edinburgh, 1967).
Ferne, Sir John, The Blazon or Gentrie: devided into two parts (London,
1586).
Finett, Sir John, Finetti Philoxenis: som choice observations touching

the reception and precedence, the treatment and audience, the
punctillios and contests, of forren ambassadors in England (London,
1656).
Fiston, William, The Schoole of Good Manners, or a New Schoole of

Vertue, Teaching children and youth, how to behave themselves, in all
companies: Also the manner of serving and taking up a table…Newly
Corrected and Augmented by W. F. (London, 1629). (First edn. 1609;
text licensed in 1595.)
Fletcher, John, The Wild-Goose Chase (1621) in Beaumont and Fletcher,

Dramatic Works, ed. Fredson Bowers, 10 vols. (Cambridge, 1966–96),
vol. 6, pp. 225–335.
Fortescue, Sir John, De Laudibus Legum Anglie, ed. and tr. by S. B.

Chrimes (Cambridge, 1942).
Fox, George, Gospel Truth Demonstrated, in a Collection of Doctrinal

Books (London, 1706).
—— Concerning Good-Morrow and Good-Even (London, 1657).
Fuller, Thomas, Church History of Great Britain (London, 1655).
—— The Holy and Profane State (Cambridge, 1642); reprinted, ed. A.

Young (Cambridge, 1831).
Fulwood, William, The Enimie of Idlenesse. Teaching the maner and

stile how to endite, compose and write all sorts of Epistles and Letters
(London, 1568).
Furnivall, F. J. (ed), The Babees Book etc. (Early English Text Society,
Original Ser., 32, 1868). (Contains Hugh Rhodes, The Boke of Nurture
Page 8 of 18
Primary Sources
for Men, Servauntes and Chyldren, with Stans Puer ad Mensam (edn. of
1577).)
—— A Books of Precedence (Early English Text Society, Extra Ser., 8,

1869).
—— Meals and Manners in Olden Time (Early English Text Society,

Original Ser., 1868 and 1894).
(Contains (attrib.) Lydgatc, Stans Puer ad Mensam; The Lytylle

Childrenes Lytil Book (MS 1480);
The Babees Book (MS 1475);
Wynkyn de Words's Boke of Kervynge (1514);
Sir John Harington, The Preservation of Health (1624);
Urbanitatis; The ABC of Aristotell (MS c.1430);
John Russell, Boke of Nurture (c.1450); The Boke of Curtasye (late 15th
century);
F[rancis] S[cager], The Schoole of Vertue (edn. of 1557);
Richard Weste, The Booke of Demeanor (1619); The Young Children's

Book; What-ever thow say, avyse thee welle.)
Gailhard, Jean, The Compleat Gentleman: Or Directions for the

Education of Youth As to their Breeding at Home and Travelling Abroad
in Two Treatises (London, 1678). (p.289)
G[ainsford], T[homas], The Rich Cabinet furnished with varietie of

excellent descriptions. Whereunto is annexed the Epitome of good
manners, exttracted from mr. I. de la Casa (London, 1616). (A
translation of Giovanni della Casa, Il Galateo.)
—— The Secretaries Studie: Containing new familiar Epistles: or

Directions, for the formall, orderly, and iudicious inditing of Letters
(London, 1616).
Gill, Alexander, Logonomia Anglica (London, 1619).
Giraldi, Giovanni Battista, Tre Dialoghi della Vita Civile (1565).

(Adapted by L. Bryskett, A Discourse of Civill Life.)
Gouge, William, Of Domesticall Duties: Eight Treatises (London, 1622).
Page 9 of 18
Primary Sources
Gough, John, The Academie of Complements: Wherein Ladies,

Gentlemen, Schollers and Strangers may accomodate their courtly
practice with gentile ceremonies, complementall amorous high
expression, and forms of speaking or writing of letters most in fashion
(signed Philomusus) (London, 1640; rev. edn. 1646).
Gracian Dantisco, Lucas, Galateo Espagnol or the Spanish Gallant tr. W.

S[tyle] (London, 1640). (An adaptation of Giovanni della Casa, Il
Galateo. First published in Spanish in the 1590s.)
Greene, Robert, Mamilia; A Mirour or Looking Glasse for the Ladies of

England (London, 1583).
—— A Quip for an Upstart Courtier, or a Quaint Dispute between Velvet

Breeches and Cloth Breeches (London, 1592), in An Old Book
Collector's Miscellany, ed. C. Hindley, 6 vols. (London, 1871–3), vol. 1,
item 4.
Greville, Sir Fulke, Life of Sir Philip Sidney (1652), reprinted with an
introduction by N. Smith (Oxford, 1907).
Guazzo, Stefano, La Civil Conversatione del Sig. Stefano Guazzo

(Brescia, 1574).
—— The Civile Conversation of M. Steeven Guazzo, tr. George Pettie

and Bartholomew Young (London, 1586). (The first three books, tr.
Pettie, appeared in 1581.)
Guevara, Antonio de, The Diall of Princes…Englyssed out of the

Frenche by T[homas] North (London, 1557).
—— The Diall of Princes. Now newly revised, with an amplification also

of a fourth book, intituled The favored courtier (London, 1568).
—— A Dispraise of the Life of a Courtier and a Comendacion of the Life

of a Labouring Man tr. Sir Francis Briant (London, 1548).
—— Menosprecio (1539).
Hale, Sir Matthew, ‘Advice to his Grand-children’, in Practical Wisdom:

or the Manual of Life. The Counsels of Eminent Men to their Children,
ed. E. Strutt (London, 1824), pp. 192–220.
Hamilton, Anthony, Memoirs of the Comte de Gramont, tr. Peter

Quennell, with an introduction by C. H. Hartmann (London, 1930).
Page 10 of 18
Primary Sources
Harington, Sir John, The Englishmans doctor. Or the Schoole of Salern

(London, 1624).
(Reprinted in part as ‘The Preservation of Health’ in Meals and

Manners in Olden Time, ed. F. J. Furnivall (Early English Text Society,
1868–94), pp. 256–9.)
Harvey, Gabriel, The Works…of Gabriel Harvey, ed. A. B. Grosart, 3 vols.

(London, 1884).
—— Pierces Supererogation, or a new prayse of the old asse (London,

1593). (p.290)
Harvey, Gabriel, Gabriel Harvey's Marginalia, ed. G. C. Moore Smith

(Stratford, 1913).
Hatton Family see Thompson, Edward Maunde.
Hearne, Thomas, Remarks and Collections, ed. C. E. Doble, et al., 11

vols. (Oxford Historical Society, 1885–1921), vol. 9.
Herbert, George, The Temple (Cambridge, 1633),
pt. 1, ‘The Church Porch’, in The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E.

Hutchinson (Oxford, 1941), pp. 6–24.
Higford, Sir William, Institutions, or Advice to his Grandson (London,

1658).
(Reprinted as The Institution of a Gentleman (London, 1600).)
Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan (London, 1651), with an introduction by K.

Minogue (London, 1973).
Hoole, Charles, A Discovery of the Old Art of Teaching Schools in Four

Small Treatises (London, 1660).
Hoskyns, John, Direccõns for Speech and Style (first published 1630,
but written between 1568 and 1603), reprinted in L. B. Osborn, The
Life, Letters and Writings of John Hoskyns (New Haven, 1937), pp. 114–
66.
Howell, James, Instructions for Forreine Travell (London, 1642, collated

with the edn. of 1650), ed. E. Arber (London, 1868).
Humphrey, Lawrence, The Nobles, or Of Nobilitye (London, 1562).
Page 11 of 18
Primary Sources
Hutchinson, Lucy, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. J.

Hutchinson (London, 1968).
Hyde, Edward, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil
Wars in England, also his Life written by himself (Oxford, 1843).
James I, Basilikon Doron. Or his majesties Instructions to his dearest

sonne (Edinburgh, 1603).
John of Salisbury, Frivolities of Courtiers and Footprints of

Philosophers, tr. and selected from Policratus by J. B. Pike (Minneapolis,
1938).
Jonson, Ben, Works, ed. C. H. Herford and P. Simpson (11 vols., Oxford,
1925–52). Cited are: The Alchemist (1612), vol. 5; Every Man out of his
Humour (1600), vol. 3; Bartholomew Fair (1631), vol. 6; Cynthia's
Revels (1601), vol. 4; The English Grammar (1640), vol. 8; Timber; or,
Discourses: Made upon Men and Matter (1640), vol. 8.
Kynaston, Sir Francis, Constitutions of the Musaeum Minervae (London,

1636).
La Perrière, Guillaume De, The Mirrour of Policie, tr. Anon. (London,

1598).
La Popelinière, Henri de, L'Amiral de France (Paris, 1585).
La Serre, Jean Puget de, The Secretary in Fashion, translated into

English, with a Collection of epistles written by the most refined wits of
France, by J[ohn] M[assinger] (London, 1654) (2nd rev. edn. 1658).
Legh, Gerard, The Accedens of Armory (London, 1572).
Leigh, Dorothy, The Mother's Blessing (London, 1613).
Lily, William, Brevissima Institutio (A Short Introduction to Grammar)

(London, 1549).
Lingard, Richard, A Letter of Advice to a Young Gentleman leaving the

University (London, 1671).
Locke, John, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), ed. J. W. and

J. S. Yolton (Oxford, 1989). (p.291)
Lupton, Donald, London and the Countrey Carbonadoed and Quartred

into Severall Characters (London, 1632), in Harleian Miscellany, ed. T.
Park (London, 1808–13), vol. 9, pp. 310–31.
Page 12 of 18
Primary Sources
Lyly, John, Euphues: The Anatomy of Wyt (1578), in The Complete

Works of John Lyly, ed. R. W. Bond, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1902), vol. 1, pp.
177–228.
Machiavelli, Niccolò, The Prince, tr. L. Ricci and revised by E. Vincent

(New York, 1950).
Markham, Sir Francis, The Booke of Honour: or five decads of epistles

of honour (London, 1622).
Marlowe, Christopher, and Chapman, George, ‘Hero and Leander’, in

The Works of George Chapman, vol. 2, Poems and Minor Translations,
ed. R. H. Shepherd, with an introduction by A. C. Swinburne (London,
1875), pp. 57–102.
Martyn, William, Youth's Instruction (London, 1612).
Millar, John, The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks in John Millar of

Glasgow 1735–1801, ed. W. C. Lehmann (Cambridge, 1960), pp. 175–
322.
More, Sir Thomas, Utopia (1516), tr. Paul Turner (Harmondsworth,

1965).
Moryson, Fynes, An Itinerary written by F. Moryson, Gent (London,

1617). (Reprinted in 4 vols., Glasgow, 1907–8.)
Mulcaster, Richard, The First Part of the Elementaire which entreateth

chieflie of the right writing of our English Tung (1582), ed. E. T.
Campagnac (Oxford, 1925).
—— Positions, Wherein those Primitive Circumstances be Examined,

which are Necessarie for the Training up of Children…(London, 1581).
N., N., The Complements and Elegancy of the French Tongue. Newly
Corrected and Revised (London, 1654), added to the 1654 edn. of La
Serre's The Secretary in Fashion, tr. J[ohn] M[assinger].
Nashe, Thomas, The Anatomie of Absurditie (London, 1589), in The

Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow, 5 vols. (London, 1910),
vol. 1, pp. 5–49.
Naunton, Sir Robert, Fragmenta Regalia: Or, Observations on the late

Queen Elizabeth, her Times and Favourites, in Harleian Miscellany, ed.
T. Park (1808–13), vol. 2, pp. 81–108.
Page 13 of 18
Primary Sources
Nenna, Giovanni Battista, Nennio, or a Treatise of Nobility, tr. W. Jones

(London, 1595).
Norden, John, The Father's Legacie. With Precepts Morall and prayers
Divine (London, 1625).
Osborne, Dorothy, The Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William

Temple, ed. E. A. Parry (London, 1914).
Osborne, Francis, Traditional Memoirs, in Secret History of the Court of

James I, ed. W. Scott, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1811), vol. 1, pp. 17–122.
—— Advice to a Son (Oxford, 1656–8).
Osorio da Fonseca, Jeronimo, The five Bookes of Civill and Christian

Nobility, tr. W. Blandic (London, 1576).
Overbury, Sir Thomas, Sir Thomas Overburie his Wife, with new Elegies
upon his…untimely death. Whereunto are annexed, New Newes and
Characters (London, 1616).
Palmer, Thomas, An Essay of the Meanes How to Make Our Travails…

the More Profitable and Honourable (London, 1606). (p.292)
Paynell, Thomas, The Civility of Childehode (London, 1560).
Peacham, Henry, The Art of Living in London; or a Caution how

Gentlemen, Countreymen and Strangers, drawne by occasion of
Businesse, should dispose of Themselves in the Thriftiest Way; not
onely in the Citie, but in all other Populous Places (London, 1642), in
Harleian Miscellany, ed. T. Park (1808–13), vol. 9, pp. 84–9.
—— The Compleat Gentleman, fashioning him absolute in the most

necessary and commendable Conditions concerning Minds and Bodie,
that may be required in a Noble Gentleman (London, 1622; enlarged
edn., 1627).
Pepys, Samuel, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. R. Latham and W.

Matthews (12 vols., London, 1970–83).
Percy, Henry, Ninth Earl of Northumberland, Advice to his Son, ed. G. B.

Harrison (London, 1930). (Written 1609.)
Perkins, William, A Direction for the Government of the Tongue

according to God's Word (London, 1603), in The Works…of William
Perkins (London, 1605).
Page 14 of 18
Primary Sources
—— Of the Right Manner of Ordering a Family according to Scripture

(London, 1609).
Piccolomini, Alessandro, De la Institutione di tutta la Vita de l'Homo

nato nobile e in citta libera (1560).
Prynne, William (?), A Gagge for Long-hair'd Rattleheads who revile all
Civill Roundheads (London, c.1642).
—— Histrio-Mastix. The Players Scourge, or the Actors Tragedie,

Divided into Two Parts (London, 1633).
Puttenham, George, The Arte of English Poesie (London, 1589), ed. G.

D. Willcock and A. Walker (Cambridge, 1970).
R., S., A New Yeere's Gift. The Courte of Civill Courtesie…assembled in

the behalf of all younge gentlemen, and others, to frame their
behaviour according to their estates, at all times and in all companies
(London, 1577). (Supposedly written by Bengalassa del Mont. Prisacchi
Retta; probably written by Simon Robson.)
Raleigh, Sir Walter, Instructions to his Son, in Practical Wisdom: or the

Manual of Life. The Counsels of Eminent men to their Children, ed. E.
Strutt (London, 1824), pp. 7–30.
Ramesey, William, The Gentleman's Companion or, A Character of True

Nobility and Gentility in the way of essay (London, 1676).
R[ankins], W[illiam], The English Ape, The Italian imitation, the

footesteppes of Fraunce (London, 1588).
Rhodes, Hugh, The Boke of Nurture for Men, Servauntes and Chyldren,
with Stans Puer ad Mensam (London, c.1555).
Edn. of 1577 reprinted in The Babees Book etc., ed. F. J. Furnivall (Early
English Text Society, original ser. 32, 1868), pp. 61–114,
Rich, Barnaby, Roome for a Gentleman (London, 1609).
—— The Fruites of Long Experience (London, 1604).
Romei, Hannibale, The Courtier's Academie: Comprehending seven

severeal dayes Discourses, tr. J[ohn] K[epers] (London, 1598).
Russell, William, Fifth Earl of Bedford, ‘William, carl of Bedford's

Advice to his Sons’, in Practical Wisdom: or the Manual of Life. The
Page 15 of 18
Primary Sources
Counsels of Eminent men to their Children, ed. E. Strutt (London,

1824), pp. 226–61. (Date and attribution uncertain.) (p.293)
Salter, James, Calliope's Cabinet opened, Wherein Gentlemen may be

informed how to adorn themselves for funerals, feastings and other
heroic meetings (London, 1665).
Sandys, Edwin, A Relation of the state of Religion…in…these Western

Parts of the World (London, 1605).
S[eager], F[rancis], The Schools of Vertue and booke of good Nourture

for chyldren and youth to learn theyr dutie by (London, c.1550).
(Edn. of 1557 reprinted in Meals and Manners in Olden Time, ed. F. J.

Furnivall (Early English Text Society, 1868–94), pp. 333–56.)
Shadwell, Thomas, The Complete Works of Thomas Shadwell, ed. M.

Summers (5 vols., London, 1927). Cited are: The Virtuoso (1676), vol. 3,
The Libertine (1676), vol. 3, The Scowrers (1691), vol. 5.
Shirley, James, The Dramatic Works and Poems of Shirley, ed. W. Gifford
and A. Dyce (New York, 1966). The Gamester (1637) is in vol. 3.
Sidney, Sir Philip, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (London, 1588).
Slingsby, Sir Henry, ‘The Father's Legacy’ in The Diary of Sir Henry
Slingsby, ed. D. Parsons (London, 1836). (Orig. date c.1568.)
Smith, Sir Thomas, De Republica Anglorum (London, 1583), ed. M.

Dewar (Cambridge, 1982), p. 73.
Spenser, Edmund, The Faerie Queene, Book VI, proem., stanza iv, in The
Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt
(Oxford, 1912), vol. 3, p. 310.
—— A View of the Present State of Ireland, ed. W. L. Renwick (London,

1934). (Written in 1590s.)
Stafford, Anthony, The Guide of Honour, Or the Ballance wherein she

may weigh her Actions (London, 1634).
Stanley, James, Seventh Earl of Derby, Lord Derby's Second Letter to

his Son (Chetham Soc., 70, 1867).
Starkey, Thomas, The Dialogue between Reginald Pole and Thomas

Lupset, ed. J. M. Cowper (Early English Text Society, Extra Set., 12,
1871).
Page 16 of 18
Primary Sources
Stephens, John, Satyrical Essayes, Characters and Others (London,

1615).
Stubbes, Philip, The Anatomie of Abuses (London, 1583), ed. F. J.

Furnivall (London, 1877–9).
Thompson, Edward Maunde (ed.), Correspondence of the Family of

Hatton (Camden Society, London, 1878), vol. 1.
Tipping, William, The Father's Counsell: or Certain Usefull Directions,

for all young Persons…by W. T[ipping] (London, 1643).
Trenchfield, Caleb, A Cap of Gray Hairs for a Green Head; or the

Father's Counsel to his Son, an apprentice in London (London, 1671).
Tuvil, Daniel, Essaies Politicke and Morall (London, (?) 1608).
Twyne, Thomas, The Schoolemaster, or Teacher of Table Philosophic

(London, 1576).
Urfée, Honoré de, Astraea (London, 1657).
Vaughan, William, The Golden-Grove, moralized in three parts (London,

1600).
Vienne, Philibert de, Le Philosophe du Court (Lyons, 1547).
—— The Philosopher of the Court, tr. George North (London, 1575).
W[aker], N[athaniel], The Refin'd Courtier, or A Correction of Several

Indecencies crept (p.294) into Civil Conversation (London, 1663). (A
translation of Giovanni della Casa, Il Galateo.)
Walker, Obadiah, Of Education, Especially of Young Gentlemen (Oxford,

1673).
Wandesford, Sir Christopher, Book of Instructions to his Son and Heir

(Cambridge, 1777). (Written in 1630s.)
Wentworth, Thomas, First Earl of Strafford, Advice to his Nephew, and

Advice to his Son, in Practical Wisdom: or the Manual of Life. The
Counsels of Eminent Men to their Children, ed. E. Strutt (London,
1824), pp. 65–73, 77–81.
Weste, Richard, ‘The Books of Demeanor and the Allowance and

Disallowance or certaine Misdemeanours in Companie’, in his The
Schools of Vertue (London, 1619).
Page 17 of 18
Primary Sources
(Reprinted in Meals and Manners in Olden Time, ed. F. J. Furnivall

(Early English Text Society, 1868–94), pp. 289–96).
Wilmot, John, Earl of Rochester, The Complete Poems, ed. D. M. Vieth

(New Haven, 1966).
Wilson, Thomas, The Arte of Rhetorique, for the use of all soche as are
studious of Eloquence (London, 1553). (Quotation in this study is from
the edition of 1562.)
Wood, Anthony, Athenae Oxonienses, ed. P. Bliss (3rd edn., London,

1813).
—— The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, antiquary of Oxford, 1632–

1891–5).
Wright, Thomas, The Passions of the Minde (London, 1601).
Page 18 of 18
Secondary Sources

Anna Bryson

Print ISBN-13: 9780198217657
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198217657.001.0001
Secondary Sources
Books and Articles
Adam, A., (ed.), Les Libertins au dix-septième siècle (Paris, 1964).
Adlard, J., The Debt to Pleasure: John Wilmot Earl of Rochester

(Cheadle, 1974).
Andrew, D. T., ‘The code of honour and its critics: the opposition to
duelling in England 1700–1850’, Social History, 5 (1980), 409–34.
Anglo, S., ‘The Courtier: the Renaissance and Changing Ideals’, in The
Courts of Europe, ed. A. G. Dickens (London, 1977), pp. 33–54.
—— The Courtier's Art: Systematic Immorality in the Renaissance

(Swansca, 1983).
Ariès, P., Centuries of Childhood, tr. R. Baldick (London, 1973).
—— The Hour of our Death, tr. H. Weaver (Harmondsworth, 1981).
Ashton, Robert, The English Civil War (Bath, 1978).
Aydelotte, F., Elizabethan Rogues and Vagabonds (London, 1967).
Aylward, J. D., The English Master of Arms from the Twelfth to the
Twentieth Century (London, 1956).
Barber, C., Early Modern English (London, 1976).
Page 1 of 14
Secondary Sources
Barnett, G. L., ‘Gabriel Harvey's Castilio, Sive Aulicus and De Aulica: A

Study of their Place in the Literature of Courtesy’, Studies in Philology,
42 (1945), 146–63.
Baroja, J. C., ‘Honour and Shame: An Historical Account of Social

Conflicts’, in Honour and Shame, ed. J. G. Peristiany (London, 1965),
79–124.
Baron, H., The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, 2nd edn.
(Princeton, 1966).
Becker, M. B., Civility and Society in Western Europe, 1300–1600

(Bloomington, Ind., 1988). (p.295)
Bénéton, P., Histoire des mots: Culture et civilisation (Paris, 1979).
Berger, P. and Luckmann, T., The Social Construction of Reality

(Harmondsworth, 1967).
Bornstein, D., The Lady in the Tower: Medieval Courtesy Literature for
Women (Hamden, Conn., 1983).
Borsay, P., ‘The English Urban Renaissance: the development of

provincial urban culture c.1680–c.1760’, Social History, 1–2 (1976–7),
581–603.
—— The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the

Provincial Town, 1660–1770 (Oxford, 1989).
Bourdieu, Pierre, Outline of a Theory of Practice, tr. Richard Nice

(Cambridge, 1977).
—— Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, tr. R. Nice

(London, 1985).
Bray, A., ‘Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in

Elizabethan England’, History Workshop, 29 (Spring 1990), 1–20.
Bremmer, J., and Roodenburg, H. (eds.), A Cultural History of Gesture

(Oxford and Cambridge, 1991).
Brown, R. and Gilman, A., ‘The Pronouns of Power and Solidarity’, in

Style and Language, ed. T. A. Sebcok (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), pp.
253–76.
Burke, P., Culture and Society in Renaissance Italy 1420–1540 (London,

1972).
Page 2 of 14
Secondary Sources
—— Venice and Amsterdam: A Study of Seventeenth-century Elites

(London, 1974).
—— Sociology and History (London, 1990).
—— ‘The Language of Gesture in Early Modern Italy’, in A Cultural

History of Gesture, ed. J. Bremmer and H. Roodenburg (Oxford,
Cambridge, 1991), 71–83.
Bury, J., The Idea of Progress (London, 1920).
Buxton, J., Elizabethan Taste (London, 1966).
—— Sir Philip Sidney and the English Renaissance (London, 1966).
Caspari, F., Humanism and the Social Order in Tudor England (Chicago,
1954).
Chancellor, E. B., Lives of the Rakes (6 vols., London, 1924–5).
Charlanne, L., L'Influence française en Angleterre au XVIIe siècle

(Paris, 1906).
Chartier, R., ‘From Texts to Manners. A Concept and Its Books. Civilité
between Aristocratic Distinction and Popular Appropriation’, in The
Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, tr. L. Cochrane
(Princeton, 1987), pp. 71–109.
Charlton, K., Education in Renaissance England (London, 1965).
Clark, P., English Provincial Society from the Reformation to the

Revolution: Religion, Politics and Society in Kent 1500–1640 (Hassocks,
1977).
Clark, P. and Slack, P., English Towns in Transition 1500–1700 (Oxford,

1976).
Cliffe, J. T., The Yorkshire Gentry from the Reformation to the Civil War
(London, 1969).
Collett, P., ‘The Rules of Conduct’, in Social Rules and Social Behaviour,
ed. P. Collett (Oxford, 1977), pp. 1–27.
Corbin, Alain, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social
Image (New York, 1986).
Crane, T. F., Italian Social Customs of the Sixteenth Century (New

Haven, 1920).
Page 3 of 14
Secondary Sources
Crane, W. G., Wit and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: The Formal Basis of
Elizabethan Prose (New York, 1937). (p.296)
Curtin, Michael, ‘A Question of Manners: Status and Gender in

Etiquette and Courtesy’, Journal of Modern History, 57 (1985), 395–423.
Curtis, M. H., Oxford and Cambridge in Transition 1558–1642 (Oxford,

1959).
Denomy, A. J., ‘Courtly Love and Courtliness’, Speculum, 28 (1953), 44–

63.
Dobson, E. J., ‘Early Modern Standard English’, Transactions of the

Philological Society (1955), 25–54.
Douglas, M., Natural Symbols (Harmondsworth, 1973).
Duby, G., ‘The Diffusion of Cultural Patterns in Feudal Society’, Past and
Present, 39 (1968), 3–10.
Einstein, L., The Italian Renaissance in England (New York, 1902).
Elias, Nobert, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners, tr. E.

Jephcott (Oxford, 1978).
—— The Civilising Process: State Formation and Civilisation, tr. E.

Jephcott (Oxford, 1982).
—— The Court Society, tr. E. Jephcott (Oxford, 1983).
Febvre, L., ‘Civilisation, the evolution of a word and a group of ideas’, in

A New Kind of History, ed. P. Burke (London, 1973), pp. 219–57.
Ferguson, A. B., The Indian Summer of English Chivalry (Durham,

North Carolina, 1960).
—— Clio Unbound: Perceptions of the Social and Cultural Past in

Renaissance England (Durham, North Carolina, 1979).
Firth, R., ‘Verbal and Bodily Rituals of Greeting and Parting’, in The
Interpretation of Ritual, ed. J. S. La Fontaine (London, 1972).
Fisher, F. J., ‘The Development of London as a Centre of Conspicuous

Consumption in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, Transactions
of the Royal Historical Society, 4th ser., 30 (1948), 37–50.
Fletcher, A. J. and Stevenson, J. (eds.), Order and Disorder in Early

Modern England (Cambridge, 1985).
Page 4 of 14
Secondary Sources
Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality: Volume One: An Introduction

Foxon, D. F., ‘Libertine Literature in England, 1660–1745 I’, Book

Collector, 12 (1963), 21–36.
Franklin, A., La Civilité, l'étiquette, la mode, le bon ton, du XIIIe au

XIXe siècle (Paris, 1908).
Freud, Sigmund, Civilization and its Discontents, tr. J. Rivière, rev. J.

Strachey (London, 1963).
Gent, L., and Llewellyn, N. (eds.), Renaissance Bodies: The Human

Figure in English Culture c.1540–1660 (London, 1990).
Gibbon, Edward, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire, ed. J. B. Bury, 7 vols. (London, 1909–14).
Girouard, M., Life in the English Country House: A Social and

Architectural History (New Haven and London, 1978).
Goffman, Erving, ‘The Nature of Deference and Demeanor’, American

Anthropologist, 58 (1956), 473–502.
—— The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Harmondsworth, 1971).

(p.297)
Goreau, A., Reconstructing Aphra: A Social Biography of Aphra Behn

(New York, 1980).
Graves, T. S., ‘Some Pre-Mohock Clansmen’, Studies in Philology, 20

(1923), 395–421.
Gray, H., ‘Renaissance Humanism and the Pursuit of Eloquence’,

Journal of the History of Ideas, 24 (1963), 497–514.
Graz, F., ‘Gesture and Conventions: The Gestures of Roman Actors and
Orators’, in A Cultural History of Gesture, ed. J. Bremmer and H.
Roodenberg (Oxford and Cambridge, 1991), 59–70.
Greaves, M., The Blazon of Honour: A Study in Renaissance

Magnanimity (London, 1964).
Greaves, R. L., Society and Religion in Elizabethan England (Minnesota,

1981).
Greenblatt, S., Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare

(Chicago and London, 1980).
Page 5 of 14
Secondary Sources
Grente, C. (ed.), Dictionaire des lettres françaises, XVI siècle (Paris,

1951).
Harbage, A., Cavalier Drama (London, 1936).
Harker, R., Mahar, C., and Wilkes, C. (eds.), An Introduction to the Work
of Pierre Bourdieu: The Practice of Theory (Basingstoke, 1990).
Harries, T., ‘The Bawdy House Riots of 1688’, Historical Journal, 29

(1986), 536–55.
Heal, F., ‘The Idea of Hospitality in Early Modern England’, Past and
Present, 102 (1984), 63–93.
—— Hospitality in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1990).
Heltzel, V. B., A Checklist of Courtesy Books in the Newberry Library

(Chicago, 1942).
Hexter, J. H., ‘The Education of the Aristocracy in the Renaissance’, in

Reappraisals in History (Chicago and London, 1979), pp. 45–70.
Hill, C., The World Turned Upside Down (Harmondsworth, 1975).
Holden, W. P., Anti-Puritan Satire 1572–1642 (New Haven, 1954).
Hont, I. and Ignatieff, M. (eds.), Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of

Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1983).
Huizinga, S., The Waning of the Middle Ages, tr. F. Hopman

Hull, S. W., Chaste, Silent and Obedient: English Books for Women
1485–1640 (San Marino, Calif., 1982).
Hunter, G. K., John Lyly, The Humanist as Courtier (London, 1962).
Jaeger, C. Stephen, The Origins of Courtliness: Civilizing Trends and the

Formation of Courtly Ideals, 939–1210 (Philadelphia, 1985).
James, M. E., ‘English Politics and the Concept of Honour, 1485–1642’,

Past and Present, supplement no. 3 (1978).
—— Family, Lineage and Civil Society: A Study of Society, Politics and

Mentality in the Durham Region 1500–1640 (Oxford, 1974).
—— Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England

(Cambridge, 1986). (This collection includes a reprint of ‘English
Page 6 of 14
Secondary Sources
Politics and the Concept of Honour, 1485–1642’ and the more recent,
‘At the Crossroads of Political Culture. The Essex Revolt, 1601’.)
Javitch, D., ‘The Philosopher of the Court: A French Satire

Misunderstood’, Comparative Literature, 23 (1971), 105–24. (p.298)
Javitch, D., Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England (Princeton,

1978).
Jones, C. A., ‘Spanish Honour as Historical Phenomenon, Convention

and Artistic Motive’, Hispanic Review, 33 (1965), 32–9.
Jones, L. C., Clubs of the Georgian Rakes (New York, 1942).
Joseph, B. L., Hlizabethan Acting (Oxford, 1951).
Judson, A. C., ‘Spenser's Theory of Courtesy’, Publications of the

Modern Language Association, 47 (1932), 122–36.
Kelso, R., The Doctrine of the English Gentleman in the Sixteenth

Century (Urbana, Ill., 1929 and 1964).
Kent, J. R., ‘Attitudes of Members of the House of Commons to the

Regulation of “Personal Conduct” in Late Elizabethan and Early Stuart
England’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 46 (May
1973), 41–71.
Kiernan, V. G., The Duel in European History: Honour and the Reign of
Aristocracy (Oxford, 1989).
Kipling, G., The Triumph of Honour: Burgundian Origins of the

Elizabethan Renaissance (Leiden, 1977).
Klein, Lawrence E., ‘Liberty, Manners and Politeness in Early

Eighteenth-Century England’, Historical Journal, 32 (1989), 583–605.
——Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and

Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge,
1994).
Kupperman, K. O., Settling with the Indians: The Meeting of English

and Indian Cultures in America, 1500–1640 (London, 1980).
Lamont, W. and Oldfield, S. (eds.), Religion and Literature in the

Seventeenth Century (London, 1976).
Lash, S., and Whimster, S. (eds.), Max Weber: Rationality and Modernity
(London, 1987).
Page 7 of 14
Secondary Sources
Latham, R. E., Revised Medieval Latin Word List (London, 1965).
Lathrop, H. B., Translations from the Classics into English from Caxton
to Chapman 1477–1620 (New York, 1967).
Lee, S., The French Renaissance in England (Oxford, 1910).
Lewis, C. T. and Short, C., A Latin Dictionary (Oxford, 1879).
Lievsay, J. L., Stephano Guazzo and the English Renaissance 1525–1675

(Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1961).
McKnight, G. H., The Evolution of the English Language (New York,

1956).
Magendie, M., La Politesse mondaine et les théories de l'bonnêteté en

France…au XVIIe siècle, de 1600 à 1660 (Paris, 1925).
Major, J. Russell, ‘“Bastard Feudalism” and the Kiss: Changing Social

Mores in Late Medievall and Early Modern France’, Journal of
Interdisciplinary History, 17 (1986–7), 509–35.
Mann, J., Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (Cambridge, 1973).
Manuel, F. E., ‘The Use and Abuse of Psychology in History’, Daedalus

(Winter 1971), 187–213.
Mason, J. E., Gentlefolk in the Making: English Courtesy Literature

1531–1774 (Philadelphia, 1935).
Mayer, C. A., ‘L'Honnête Homme: Molière and Philibert de Vienne's

Philosophe du Court’, Modern Language Review, 46 (1951), 196–217.
(p.299)
Mennell, S., All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and
France from the Middle Ages to the Present (Oxford, 1985).
——Norbert Elias: Civilization and the Human Self-Image (Oxford,

1989).
Mitchell, R., ‘Italian Nobiltà and the English Idea of the Gentleman’,
English Miscellany, 9 (1958), 23–87.
Mitford, N. (ed.), Noblesse Oblige (London, 1956).
Monter, E. W., ‘The Pedestal and the Stake: Courtly Love and
Witchcraft’, in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. R.
Bridenthal and C. Koonz (London, 1977), pp. 119–36.
Page 8 of 14
Secondary Sources
Morton, A. L., The World of the Ranters: Religious Radicalism in the

English Revolution (London, 1970).
Motley, Mark, Becoming a French Aristocrat: The Education of the

Court Nobility, 1580–1715 (Princeton, 1990).
Murphy, G., A Bibliography of English Character Books 1608–1700

(Oxford, 1923).
Murray, J. A. H., Bradley, H., Craigie, W. A., and Onions, C.T. (eds.), The
Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford, 1884–1933).
Myers, A. M., Representation and Misrepresentation of the Puritan in

Elizabethan Drama (Philadelphia, 1931).
Myers, A. R. (ed.), The Household of Edward IV: The Black Book and the
Ordinances of 1496 (Manchester, 1959).
Neale, J. E., The Elizabethan House of Commons (London, 1949).
Nichols, J., The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth

(London, 1823).
Nicholis, Jonathan, The Matter of Courtesy: Medieval Courtesy Books

and the Gawain-Poet (London, 1983).
Norbrook, D., Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London,

1984).
Noyes, G., A Bibliography of Courtesy and Conduct Books in

Seventeenth Century England (New Haven, 1937).
O'Day, R., Education and Society 1500–1600 (London, 1962).
Orgel, S., The Illusion of Power. Political Theatre in the English

Renaissance (Berkeley, Calif., 1975).
Orme, N., From Childhood to Chivalry: The Education of the English

Kings and Aristocracy, 1066–1530 (London, 1984).
Parks, G. B., ‘The Decline and Fall of the English Renaissance

Admiration of Italy’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 31 (1967–8), 341–57.
Parry, C., The Golden Age Restor'd: The Culture of the Stuart Court,
1603–42 (Manchester, 1981).
Peristiany, J. G., Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean

Society (London, 1965).
Page 9 of 14
Secondary Sources
Perrens, F. T., Les Libertins en France au dix-septième siècle (Paris,

1896).
Phillipson, N. T., ‘Culture and Society in the Eighteenth-Century

Province. The Case of Edinburgh and the Scottish Enlightenment’, in
The University and Society, ed. L. Stone, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1974), vol.
2, pp. 407–48.
Pinto, V. de Sola, Sir Charles Sedley 1639–1701: A Study in the Life and
Literature of the Restoration (London, 1924).
Pitt-Rivers, J., The Fate of Shechem: The Politics of Sex (Cambridge,

1977). (p.300)
Pocock, J. G. A., The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political

Thought and the Atlantic Tradition (Princeton, 1985).
—— Virtue, Commerce and History (Cambridge, 1985).
Polhemus, T. (ed.), Social Aspects of the Human Body (Harmondsworth,

1976).
Prest, W. R., The Inns of Court under Elizabeth and the Early Stuarts
(London, 1973).
Ranum, Orest, ‘Courtesy, Absolutism, and the Rise of the Modern

French State, 1630–1660’, Journal of Modern History, 52 (1985), 426–
51.
Reynolds, R., Cleanliness and Godliness (London, 1943).
Rickert, E., The Babees Book: Medieval Manners for the Young (London,
1906).
Robertson, J., The Art of Letter Writing: An Essay on the Handbooks

Published in England during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
(Liverpool, 1942).
Roosen, W., ‘Early Modern Diplomatic Ceremonial. A Systems

Approach’, Journal of Modern History, 57 (1985), 395–423.
Rossetti, W. M., ‘Italian Courtesy-Books’, in Sir Humphrey Gilbert, A

Booke of Precedence, ed. F. J. Furnivall (Early English Text Society,
extra series 8, 1869), part II, pp. 1–76.
Ruhl, F., ‘Grobianus in England’, Palaestra, 38 (1904), whole volume.
Page 10 of 14
Secondary Sources
Ruutz-Rees, C., ‘Some Notes of Gabriel Harvey's in Hoby's translation

of Castiglione's Courtier (1561)’, Publications of the Modern Language
Association of America, 25 (1910), 608–39.
Rye, W. B., England as Seen by Foreigners in the Days of Elizabeth I

and James I (London, 1865).
Salgado, G. (ed.), Three Restoration Comedies (Harmondsworth, 1968).
Santosuosso, A., Vita di Giovanni Della Casa (Rome, 1979).
Scaglione, Aldo, Knights at Court: Courtliness, Chivalry, and Courtesy

from Ottonian Germany to the Italian Renaissance (Berkeley and
Oxford, 1991).
Schmitt, J.-C., ‘The Rationale of Gestures in the West from the Third to
the Thirteenth Century’, in A Cultural History of Gesture, ed. J.
Bremmer and H. Roodenburg (Oxford and Cambridge, 1991), 59–70.
Sennett, R., The Fall of Public Man (Cambridge, 1977).
Shalk, Ellery, From Valor to Pedigree (Princeton, 1986).
Shapin, Steven, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in

Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago and London, 1994).
Sheehan, B. W., Savagism and Civility: Indians and Englishmen in

Colonial Virginia (Cambridge, 1980).
Sheridan, A., Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth (London, 1980).
Simon, J., Education and Society in Tudor England (Cambridge, 1966).
Skinner, Q., The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (2 vols.,

Cambridge, 1978).
Smith, P. M., The Anti-Courtier Trend in Sixteenth Century French

Literature (Geneva, 1966).
Starkey, D., ‘Representation through Intimacy’, in Symbols and

Sentiments, ed. Ioan Lewis (London, 1977), pp. 187–224.
—— ‘The Age of the Houschold; Politics, Society and the Arts, c. 1350–c.
1550’, in The Context of English Literature: The Late Middle Ages, ed.
S. Medcalf (London, 1981), pp. 225–90. (p.301)
—— ‘The Court: Castiglionc's Ideal and Tudor Reality’, Journal of the

Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 45 (1982), 232–9.
Page 11 of 14
Secondary Sources
Steele, R. R., Proclamations of Tudor and Stuart Sovereigns, 1485–1714

(Oxford, 1910).
Stone, L., The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800

(London, 1977).
—— The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558–1641 (Oxford, 1965).
—— The Causes of the English Revolution (London, 1972).
—— ‘The Residential Development of the West End of London in the

Seventeenth Century’, in After the Reformation: Essays in Honour of J.
H. Hexter, ed. B. C. Malament (Manchester, 1980), pp. 167–212.
Summerson, J., Georgian London (London, 1945).
Thomas, K., ‘The Social Origins of Hobbes's Political Thought’, in

Hobbes Studies, ed. K. C. Brown (Oxford, 1965), 185–236.
—— Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–

1800 (London, 1983).
Thomas, P. W., ‘Two Cultures? Court and Country under Charles I’, in
The Origins of the English Civil War, ed. C. Russell (London, 1973), pp.
168–93.
Thompson, E. P., ‘Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture’, Journal of Social

History, 7 (1974), 382–405.
Thompson, R., Unfit for Modest Ears: A Study of Pornographic, Obscene

and Bawdy Works Written or Published in England in the Second Half
of the Seventeenth Century (London, 1975).
Thornton, P., Seventeenth-Century Interior Decoration in England,

France and Holland (New Haven and London, 1978).
Thrupp, S., The Merchant Class of Medieval London (Chicago, 1948).
Trilling, L., Sincerity and Authenticity (London, 1974).
Uhlig, Claus, Hofkritik in England des Mittelalters and der Renaissance

(Berlin, 1973).
Underwood, D., Etherege and the Seventeenth-Century Comedy of

Manners (New Haven, 1932).
Ustick, W. L., ‘Advice to a Son. A Type of Seventeenth Century Conduct

Book’, Studies in Philology, 29 (1932), 409–41.
Page 12 of 14
Secondary Sources
—— ‘Changing Ideals of Aristocratic Character and Conduct in

Seventeenth Century England’, Modern Philology, 33 (1932), 147–66.
—— ‘The Courtier and the Bookseller’, Review of English Studies, 5

(1929), 143–54.
Vivanti, C., ‘Alle Origini dell ‘Idea de Civilta: Le Scoperte Geografiche e

gli Scritti di Henri de La Popclinière’, Rivista Storica Italiana, 74 (1962),
225–49.
Vovelle, M., Ideologies and Mentalities, tr. E. O'Flaherty (Cambridge,

1990).
Watson, F., The English Grammar Schools to 1660 (Cambridge, 1908).
Weeks, Jeffrey, ‘Foucault for Historians’, History Workshop Journal, 14

(1982), 106–19.
Whigham, F. F., ‘Fayned Showes and Forgerie’: Courtesy and Political

Suasion in English Renaissance Literature (Berkeley, Calif., 1978).
—— Ambition and Privilege; the Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy

Theory (Berkeley, Calif., 1984).
Wildeblood, J., The Polite World: A Guide to the Deportment of the

English in Former Times (rev. edn., London, 1973). (p.302)
Wilkinson, D. R. M., The Comedy of Habit: An Essay in the Use of

Courtesy Literature in a Study of Renaissance Comic Drama (Leiden,
1964).
Williams, N. J., Henry VIII and his Court (London, 1971).
Williams, P., ‘Court and Polity under Elizabeth I’, Bulletin of the John
Rylands University Library, 65 (1983), 259–86.
Wilson, F. P., ‘The English Jestbooks of the Sixteenth and Early

Seventeenth Centuries’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 2 (1938–9), 121–
58.
Wilson, J. H., The Court Wits of the Restoration (Princeton, 1948).
—— A Rake and his Times: George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham

(London, 1954).
Wilson, V. A., Society Women of Shakespeare's Time (London, 1924).
Page 13 of 14
Secondary Sources
Woodhouse, J. R., Baldasar Castiglione: A Reassessment of ‘The

Courtier’ (Edinburgh, 1978).
Wright, L. B., Middle Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Chapel Hill,

North Carolina, 1935).
Wyld, H. C., A History of Modern Colloquial English (London, 1920).
Ziegler, G., The Court of Versailles (London, 1966).
Unpublished Theses
Mews, H., ‘Middle Class Conduct Books in the Seventeenth
Century’ (University of London, MA thesis, 1934).
Norbrook, D., ‘Panegyric of the Monarch and its Social Context under
Elizabeth I and James I’ (University of Oxford, D.Phil. thesis, 1978).
Whigham, F. F., ‘“Fayned Showes and Forgcrie:” Courtesy and Political

Suasion in English Renaissance Literature’ (University of California,
San Diego, Ph.D. thesis, 1976).
Page 14 of 14
(p.303) Index

Anna Bryson

Print ISBN-13: 9780198217657
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198217657.001.0001
(p.303) Index
ABC of Aristotell 64
accommodation:
as ideal of conduct 110–11, 159–60, 163–5
in court and city 122–3, 136
see also hypocrisy
Accomplished Courtier, The 38
Adams, Thomas 244
adults, courtesy texts for 32–4
and self-education 72–3
affectation, dangers of 183, 218, 228, 252
affective structure 11–12, 96–106, 193–5
Agrippa, Henrie Cornelius 203 n. 37.
Allestree, Richard 36, 72, 112, 134, 139, 145, 162, 204–5, 219–21
passim, 235
animality 84–6, 105
see also savagery
Annales School 19
anti-court literature 41–2, 201–5
anti-Puritan satire 215, 218
apprentices 65–6, 263
architecture, and social forms 121, 130–1, 138–9, 142–3
Argyll, earl of, see Campbell, Archibald
Arieès, Philippe 67
aristocracy:
changing social life of 118–42
courtesy and civility as values of 58–70
social and political power of 21–5
Page 1 of 17
(p.303) Index
see also gentleman; honour; lordship

Aristotle 51, 56, 145, 226
arrogance, of gentlemen 230–2
Art of Complaisance, The 38, 49, 62–3, 68–9, 110, 111, 137, 141–2, 152, 154,
164, 223–4
artifice:
condemned as immoral, see hypocrisy
as ideal of conduct 122, 200, 225
Ascham, Roger 37 n. 70, 122, 203
Ashley Cooper, Anthony, third earl of Shaftesbury 46, 241
atheism 243–4, 253
Aubrey, John 260
B., I., see Heroick Education
Babees Book, The 27, 65, 102, 153
Bacon, Sir Francis 57, 171, 175, 182, 218, 234 n. 180
banquets:
and conspicuous consumption 121
medieval importance of 27–8
social rules at 91–2
see also dinner parties; hospitality
barbarism 63–4, 79, 151, 187–8
see also savagery
Barkely, Baron 164, 234–6
Barrow, Isaac 269
Bas, William 142 n. 145, 155 n. 18
Baxter, Richard 38 n. 73,
Beccles, Danicl of 27
Bedford, earl of, see Russell, William
bedroom, manners in 83, 87, 98
Behn, Aphra 272
blasphemy 162, 246–7, 251, 259
Bloch, Marc 19
Blount, Edward 37 n. 68
Blount, Thomas 34, 155–6, 158, 174, 178–9
bodily propriety:
change in standards of 96–102
deliberate transgression of 254
perceived limits to 229
rules of 82–7, 108–10
body, the:
commonwealth conceived as 52–3
and power of ceremony 210–11
sacred 124
Boke of Curtasye, The 28, 64, 70, 108 n. 1, 153
Bolton, Edmund 135
Bourdieu, Pierre 16–17, 268
bourgeoisie:
and civility 58, 60–1, 62–6
Page 2 of 17
(p.303) Index
and individualism 224

mocked by libertines 262–5
social ambitions of 135–6, 264
Bow St., the ‘frolic’ 254–5
Boyle, Robert 185–6
Brathwayt, Robert 36, 41, 145, 204, 231
Breton, Nicholas 41, 62 n. 71, 156, 204
Briant, Sir Francis 41 n. 87, 202
Brown, Norman O. 9–10
Browne, Sir Thomas 222
Bruto, Giovanni 38
Bryskett, Lodowick 53–4, 129
Buck, Sir George 149
(p.304) Buckingham, duke of, see Villiers, George
Bulwer, John 180

Burghley, Lord, see Cecil, William
Burke, Edmund 43
Burnet, Gilbert 258
Butler, Charles 190
Butler, Samuel 206 n. 51
Cacoëthes Leaden Legacy 40–1, 102, 196
Calviac, Gilbert 31 n. 49
Cambridge 148
Campbell, Archibald, eighth carl of Argyll 39, 141
carnival 102–3
carving, as social ritual 92
Casa, Giovanni Della 32–3, 37, 48, 57, 60–2, 73, 77, 80, 83–101 passim, 109,
110–12 passim, 128, 132, 148, 152–4 passim, 159–60, 162, 164, 166, 177–8,
179, 183, 198–9, 206, 208, 211, 220, 226, 237, 238
Castiglione, Baldassare 36–7, 58, 116 n. 37, 122–3, 126–7, 128, 132, 148, 154,
175–6, 179, 199–203, 205, 206
cavaliers:
in Civil War satire 217–18
and libertine conduct 259–60
Cawdrcy, Robert 38 n. 73
Cecil, William, Lord Burghley 39, 141, 238
ceremony:
criticism of 208–13, 220–1
irony in use of 225–6
as etiquette 13, 87–8
Louis XIV and 215
see also deference
Chapman, George, see Marlowe, Christopher
character literature 41
Character of a Town Gallant, A 161, 166, 230, 247, 249, 251, 253
Charles I 128, 216, 241, 245, 260
Charles II 241, 252, 256, 257, 259, 260–1, 267, 275
Chartier, Alain 203 n. 37
Page 3 of 17
(p.303) Index
Chartier, Roger 47
Chaucer, Geoffrey 59, 92
Cheke, Sir John 187
children:
courtesy writing for 29–31
duties at table 91
in household and school 65, 67–8
need to civilize 71–2
and shame 228
chivalry:
medieval 27, 35, 58–9, 61, 66
and Tudor court 121, 145
christianity:
associated with courtesy 59, 66, 197
incompatible with honour code 235–6, 269
see also atheism; blasphemy; puritanism
Cicero 145, 173, 174, 175, 200
cities: associated with civility 58, 60–3, 115–18 see also London
civic humanism 44, 49–51, 55, 74
civil conversation 54–7, 154–5
civil life 49–50, 53–4
civil society, concept of:
and civility of manners 69–74
in enlightenment thought 45–6
in pre-enlightenment thought 49–50
as social community of the élite 146–150
and speech 159, 173
upheld by convention 222–4
civil virtue 69–70, 145–6
Civil Wars, English:
and conflict of manners 42, 212–14, 217–18
and libertine behaviour 257–8
civilitas 49–50
civility, as key word in manners 46–9
Civilizing Process, see Elias, Norbert
civilization:
modern theories of 10–11, 193–4
in renaissance thought 51, 72–3, 79
Clapham, Jonathan 213
Clarendon, earl of, see Hyde, Edward
Clark, Peter 130
class dialect, development of, see language, the English
classical ideals:
and gentility 35, 145, 227
and rhetoric 173–4
cleanliness 59, 91, 100, 101–2
Cleaver, Robert 38, 216
Page 4 of 17
(p.303) Index
Cleland, James 35, 56–7, 68–9, 71–2, 78 n. 17, 89–90, 109–10, 133–4, 166–7,
188, 220, 227–9 passim, 239
clergy 26, 59
Clerke, Bartholomew, 37 n. 67
clubs, libertine 248–50
codes:
elaborated and restricted 210–11
see also manners as codes
Codrington, Robert 38–9, 79, 162 n. 49, 214
commerce:
and courtliness 124
and the enlightenment 44–6
(p.305) compliments 168–71, 226
academies of 34, 155–6, 158

Complements and Elegancy of the French Tongue 168–9
convention, idea of 221–4
conversation:
as important area of manners 153–9
puritan views of 215–16
and rhetoric 176–9
rules of 159–169, 154
see also civil conversation
Coote, Edmund 30, 198
Cornwallis, Sir William 182
court and country:
dialogues 41, 115–7
tension, see anti-court literature
Courte of Civill Courtesie 33, 48, 68, 76, 86, 91–6 passim, 99, 111, 137, 148,
152, 167–8, 206–7, 226, 237, 247
courtesy:
and medieval culture 27–8, 35, 58–60
use as key word 47–9
courtesy literature 4–8
early modern 29–42
medieval 26–9
relevance to English practice 75–81
on speech and writing 155–9
courtiers, see courts
Courtin, Antoine de 33, 48, 49, 62, 69, 76, 81–100 passim, 104, 110, 112, 137–
40 passim, 152, 157, 158, 161, 167, 170, 222, 225, 228–9, 251, 264
courts:
and civility 62
and courtly speech 176–7
growth of and impact on manners 118–28
handbooks for courtiers 36–8
hypocrisy of conduct at 199–206
and libertinism 56–7, 266–8
and origins of courtesy 58–9
Page 5 of 17
(p.303) Index
Courtyer, see Castiglione, Baldassare

Cranmer, Thomas 211
Cyvile and Uncyvile Life 37 n. 70, 41, 53, 61, 62, 114–17, 132, 133
Dare, Josiah 32 n.52, 80, 100, 110, 111, 136, 161
Darrell, Thomas 32 n. 52, 142 n. 145, 177
Day, Angel 34, 155, 156
decency 49, 162–3
see also bodily propriety
De Civilitate Morum Puerilium, see Erasmus, Desiderius
De Vere, Edward, seventeenth carl of Oxford 76–7, 202, 248
decorum 165, 186
Dedekind, Frederik 40–1, 102, 196, 246
deference: 87
effect of urban life on 137–9
perceived cultural differences in 80
physical 86–96
verbal 165–71
see also ceremonies; servants
Dekker, Thomas 41, 85, 138, 161, 166, 230, 246–7
Demosthenes 174
Denham, Sir John 260
Derby, earl of, see Stanley, James
Devereux, Robert, second carl of Essex 125, 273–5
dinner parties 126, 130, 142
discourse:
manners as 14–16, 104–5
polite, importance of 159
disgust 9, 12
alleged increase in levels of 96–105
duty to avoid causing 66–7, 111
see also accommodation; bodily propriety
Distiches of Cato 26–7, 64, 153
drinking:
pledging 93
use of common cup 80–1
Dryden, John 186–7
Ducci, Lorenzo 37, 205
duelling 234, 235, 247–8
see also honour; violence
Earle, John 41, 185
Eden, Richard 151
education:
courtesy texts used in 29–31, 67–8
exploited as social currency 147–50
place of rhetoric in 171–3
Edward IV, Household Ordinances of 65
effeminacy:
and courtiers 125, 200–1
Page 6 of 17
(p.303) Index
need to avoid 229

Elias, Norbert 10–11, 14, 16, 46–7, 79, 96–7, 98, 104–5, 107, 193–6, 212
Elizabeth I 78, 210–11, 273–4
Ellis, Clement 41, 149, 221
Elyot, Sir Thomas 36, 120, 145, 173, 188, 203
English manners, alleged superiority of 6–7
Epsom, the affray at 250
Erasmus, Desiderius, 113, 145, 173, 178
De Civilitate 29–31, 46–7, 60, 67, 79, 82–5 passim, 88, 91 n. 109, 97, 99,
100–1, 107–9, 122, 147, 151, 153, 160, 161, 165, 166, 179, 198–9, 205,
229
(p.306) Essex, earl of, see Devereux, Robert
Etherege, Sir George 250, 254, 266 n. 96, 268–9, 271

ethies:
and the critique of civility 197–208
and honour 235–6
see also ceremony, criticism of
etiquette, see ceremony
euphemism 97, 100–2, 161
Euphuism 156, 188
Evelyn, John 93, 140, 230–1, 249, 256
familiarity:
as assertion of superior status 87
avoidance with strangers 95–6
manipulation of 137–8
family, child's duties in 67–8
Faret, Nicholas 37, 123, 163–4, 183
fashion:
foreign 75–8
and social competition 262–2
Febvre, Lucien 19
Ferguson, Adam 45, 73
Ferne, Sir John 94
Finett, Sir John 90 n. 103
Fisher, F. J. 130
Fiston, William 31, 67–8, 79, 89, 102, 109, 137, 151, 165, 166, 228
Flamock, Sir Andrew 163
flattery 203–5
see also hypocrisy
Fletcher, John 253–4
foreign manners, criticism and perception of 75–81
forks 79, 81, 99
Fortescue, Sir John 148
Foucault, Michel 14–16, 104
Fox, George 212–13
France:
anti-court feeling 202–3
French novels 156
Page 7 of 17
(p.303) Index
French language 191–2

importation of French manners 75–80, 142
and salon culture 128
wars of religion 257
freedom, as social right of gentlemen 227–30
Freud, Sigmund 9–10, 193–4
friendship:
changing concepts of 115–16
and degrees of acquaintance 137–8
and manners at court 123
see also pollution; salon mentality
Fuller, Thomas 237
Fulwood, William 34, 155, 156
furniture 90
Gailhard, Jean 36, 71, 80–1, 222
Gainsford, Thomas 47 n. 13, 49, 63, 70 n. 99, 118, 157, 173, 229 n. 153, 239
gait and expression 108–9
Galateo, see Casa, Della
gallants 130, 132, 135, 138, 166, 206, 230–1
and libertinism, 246–7, 249–51, 253–4, 260, 265–6
Garland, John, see Distiches of Cato
genitals 97, 100
gentleman, ideal of:
associated with civility 60–70
court and country models 114–18
literature on 35–6, 145–6
and oratory 173–4
and self-sufficiency 226–7
virtue and lineage 234–5
see also aristocracy; courts; gentry; honour
gentry:
attracted to London 129–31
and development of civil society 143–50
rhetorical skills of 173
see also aristocracy; gentleman
gesture 179–8;
see also gait and expression
Gibbon, Edward 193
Gill, Alexander 172 n. 101
Giraldi, Giovanni Battista 128
Goffmann, Erving 13, 88, 108,
Gouge, William 38 n. 73, 197–8, 212, 214–15
Gough, John 155, 158, 225
Gracian Dantisco, Lucas 97, 98, 102
Gramont, comte de, see Hamilton, Anthony
Graves, T. S. 248–9
Greene, Robert 41, 56, 203–4
Greville, Sir Fulke 248 n. 25
Page 8 of 17
(p.303) Index
Grimstone, Edward 37 n. 69
see also Faret, Nicholas
Grobianus, see Dedekind, Frederik
Guazzo, Stefano 32–3, 54–7, 58, 64, 78–9, 112, 148, 154, 160, 162 n. 49, 183,
184, 206, 208, 218–19, 221, 225
see also Pettie, George
Guevara, Antonio de 41, 119–20, 123, 221
Hale, Sir Matthew 40, 138, 140, 167, 232
Hamilton, Anthony, Comte de Gramont, 131, 252, 260, 263, 266–7
handkerchiefs 82, 83
Harrington, Sir John 101
Harvey, Gabriel, 76–7, 78, 125, 148, 202, 244
(p.307) Hatton, Charles 250
Hatton, Christopher 124, 202

Hawkins, Francis, 31, 79
see also Youth's Behaviour
Health to the Gentlemanly Profession of Serving Men, A 68, 142 n.
Hearne, Thomas 255
Hectors 249
Helpe to Discourse, A 155
Henrietta Maria 156 n. 24
Henry VIII 163
Herbert, George 228
Herbert, Philip, fourth earl of Pembroke 128
Herbert, Mary, countess of Pembroke 128
Heroick Education 69, 70, 183, 184, 225, 239 n. 209
Higford, Sir William 40, 124 n. 70, 144–5, 219, 236
Hobbes, Thomas 224, 253, 257–9
Hoby, Sir Thomas 37, 187
see also Castiglione, Baldassare
honour, code of 232–41, 269–70, 273–5
Hoole, Charles 30 n. 46
Hoskyns, John 178–9
hospitality:
and country life 115–16
decline of 140–3
rules of 92, 95–6
see also visits
household:
court as 119
education in 29
medieval, and courtesy 27–29
medieval, decline of 142–3
manuals 38
ordinances 65
see also hospitality; lordship; servants
Howell, James 76
humanism:
Page 9 of 17
(p.303) Index
exploited as social cliché 146–7

ideas on nobility and education 35–6, 69–70, 145–6
on rhetoric and oratory 173–5
Hume, David 45
Humphrey, duke of Gloucester 28
Humphrey, Lawrence 69–70, 145
Hutchinson, Lucy 217–18
Hyde, Edward, earl of Clarendon 252, 257
hygiene 86
hypocrisy:
and libertines 268–9
as problem in manners 199–223 passim
ideology, manners as 17 n. 20, 268
Indians (American), 51–2, 213
Inns of Court 130, 135, 148–9
Institucion of a Gentleman, The 66, 69, 70 n. 99, 184, 230, 234, 245
Ireland, barbarism of 52
Italy:
and civic culture 60–2, 113, 121
courts 126, 128–9
importation of manners from 75–80
James 1 39, 130, 211, 229, 259
James, M. E. 20, 24, 143–4, 234, 240–1, 273–4
Javitch, Daniel 202
jesting 156, 177–8, 183, 237–9
Jones, Inigo 138, 130–1
Jonson, Ben, 76, 125, 132, 151, 175, 187, 215
kiss, and homage 144
Klein, Lawrence 46
Kynaston, Sir Francis 57
La Perriere, Guillaume de 50
La Popeliniere, Henri de 151
La Tremouille, Madame 142
language, the English:
defence of 187
development of class dialect 187–92
Latini, Brunetto 35
Laud, William, Archbishop 163
Legh, Gerard 148
letter-writing 34, 157–8
Licvsay, J. L. 56
Lilburne, John 213
Lily, William 30
lineage, and honour 234–5
Lingard, Richard 78, 184–5, 222, 225
local community 140–5;
see also lordship
Locke, John, 5–6, 46
Page 10 of 17
(p.303) Index
London:
attracts gentry and nobility 126, 129–31
as educational centre 149
effect on manners 131–40
guilds and courtesy 65–6
and libertines 246–7, 248–50, 262–8
and polite language 166, 186, 189–90,
lordship, as sociological model 112–18, 140–4
Louis XIII 128
Louis XIV 81, 241, 262
lower classes:
animality of 63–4, 85–6
incivility of 63–64, 159, 180
(p.308) Lucretius 253, 257–8
Lupton, Donald 129, 131, 149

Lydgate, John, see Stans Puer ad Mensam
Lyly, John 156, 176–7, 188
Lytylle Children's Lytil Boke 66
Machiavelli, Niccolò 203, 205, 274
Magendie, M. 257
magnanimity 226–227
manners:
as accommodation 110–11, 159–60, 163–5
changing vocabulary of 46–9
as codes 12–13, 86–8
as conventions 221–4
enlightenment concept of 42–6
and historiography 3–8
as household skill 27–9
and modern social theory 8–18
as representations 107–10
sources for study of 26–42
as standards 86
as strategies 16–18, 122–3
Marcuse, Herbert 9–10
Markham, Sir Francis 94, 235, 236
Marlowe, Christopher, and George Chapman 209
Martyn, William 37 n. 70, 57, 70, 162, 203
masculinity 229, 270–5
Massinger, John 157
see also Serre, Jean Puget de la
mentalities, study of 19–20, 24
merchants, see bourgeoisie
Meun, Jean de, see Roman de la Rose
Millar, John 43, 45
Molière 223
monarchy:
and aristocratic protest 273–5
Page 11 of 17
(p.303) Index
and the body 124

and ceremony 210–11
and patronage 120–121, 146–7
see also courts
monasticism 26, 59
Montaigne, Michel 244
More, Sir Thomas 208
Moryson, Fynes 263
Mulcaster, Richard 35, 70, 172–3, 187
N., N., see Complements and Elegancy of the French Tongue
nakedness, impropriety of 97–8, 100
Nashe, Thomas, 78, 125 n. 75
nature:
civility as distance from 85, 104–5
glorified by Libertines 257–8
and limits to ceremony 225
manners as ‘second nature’ 9
the ‘natural’ as ideal 183, 229–30, 268
see also animality; artifice
Naunton, Sir Robert 124 n. 70, 125
Neale, Sir John 174
Nenna, Giovanni Battista 145
Nicholls, Jonathan 27
nobility, see aristocracy; gentleman, ideal of
Norbrook, David 210–11
Norden, John 219
North, George 41 n. 87, 202
Northumberland, earl of, see Percy, Henry
nurture, as synonym for manners 46–8, 198
obligation, creation of social 123–4, 168
obscenity 161–2, 251, 274
odour 83, 98
oratory 173–4, 200–1
Osborne, Dorothy 256–7
Osborne, Francis 39–40, 121, 138, 163, 185, 225
Osorio da Fonseca, Jeronimo 145 n. 156
Overbury, Sir Thomas 41, 131, 141, 247
Oxford, earl of, see De Vere, Edward
Oxford 184–5, 255, 258
Palmer, Thomas 77
parental advice, as genre 39–40
patronage 120–4, 146–7, 205
Peacham, Henry 36, 131–2, 139, 173, 227, 245, 255
pedantry, as social vice 181–6
Pembroke, earl of, see Herbert, Philip
Pepys, Samuel 40, 255–6, 264
Percy, Henry, ninth earl of Northumberland 39, 134
Peristiany, J. G. 235
Page 12 of 17
(p.303) Index
Perkins, William 38 n.73, 215–16

Peterson, Robert 32 n. 52, 77
Pettie, George 77, 187, 203
Piccolomini, Alessandro 54
Picture of an English Antick 259–60
Pocock, J. G. A. 44–6
poetry:
as civilizing agent 151
and medieval courtesy 28
and renaissance courtiers 125–6
policy, courtesy as instrument of 122–3, 205, 221
politics, revisionist view of English 21–3
pollution, danger of social 117, 133–4
pornography 251–2
precedence 94–6
(p.309) and honour 239
privacy: private parts 97, 100–1

superior's greater right to 89–90, 167
progress 45–6, 193–7
protestantism 211
Prynne, William 216–17
psychoanalysis 9–10
psychology, renaissance interest in 112, 208
puritanism:
anti-Puritan satire 214–15, 218
and household manuals 38
and manners 197–8, 212–20
Puttenham, George 34, 151, 163, 187–8, 189–90, 203
Quakers 212–13
Quintilian 173
R[obson], S[imon], see Courte of Civill Courtesie, The
Raillerie a la Mode Consider'd 238
raillery 238–9, 269
Raleigh, Sir Walter 134, 190
Ramesey, William 239–240
Rankins, William 75–6, 77, 202
Ranters 215–16
Ranum, Orest 241
Refin'd Courtier, The 32, 77, 80, 162, 178
see also Casa, Giovanni Della
Refuge, Eustache du 37, 49, 121, 122, 123, 205.
Remarques on the Humours and Conversations of the Town 141 n. 140, 265–6
Remarques upon Remarques 135, 190
representation:
civility as 107–10, 179–8
and courtly manners 122–3
and urban context 132–3, 146–7
see also hypocrisy
Page 13 of 17
(p.303) Index
repugnance, rising standard of 96–105

see also disgust
reputation, see honour
Restoration, the:
and libertinism 257, 259–61, 274–5
and polite speech 186
and sexual license, 251–2
retinues 115, 132, 141, 142–3
revisionism, and social history 21–4
Reynold, John 37
see also Refuge, Eustace du
rhetoric 34, 171–5
in social mode 175–87
Rhodes, Hugh, 28, 119
Rich, Barnaby 56
Richelieu, Cardinal 192
Rickert, Edith 60
Roaring Boys 247, 248
Robertson, Jean 157
Rochester, earl of, see Wilmot, John
Roman de la Rose 27
Romei, Hannibale 227, 233, 236
roundheads 217–18
‘Roundheads Race, The’ 214
Royal Society 185–6, 241
Russell, John 28, 65, 91, 101, 102, 153, 237 n. 197
Russell, Lucy, countess of Bedford 128
Russell, William, fifth carl of Bedford 39, 123 n. 66, 160, 228, 232
St Paul's Cathedral 138
Salisbury, John of 125 n. 72
salon mentality 119, 127–8
Salter, James 94 n. 125
salutations 88–90, 165–6
hypocrisy of 212–13, 220
Sandys, Edwin 77
satire, and courtesy literature 40–2
savagery: 51–2, 72, 102–3
see also animality; barbarism
schools, see education
Scottish Enlightenment 42–6, 73
Seager, Francis 30, 47, 67, 89, 91, 95, 101, 151, 153
Sedley, Sir Charles, 252, 254–5, 256, 262–3
self-fashioning, manners and 108
see also representation
sensibility, see affective structure
Serre, Jean Puget de la 157–8, 169–70, 226
servants:
decline of non-menial 115–16, 132, 142–3
Page 14 of 17
(p.303) Index
and medieval courtesy 28–9, 65–6

rules of behaviour for 86, 91–2
as source of social pollution 116, 134
service, see lordship
Shadwell, Thomas 246, 250, 252, 254, 266 n. 96
Shaftesbury, earl of, see Ashley Cooper, Anthony
Shakespeare, William 103, 177
shame 228–9
see also honour
Shapin, Steven 185–6, 241
Shirley, James 249
Sidney, Sir Philip 125, 156, 177, 178, 235, 248
sincerity 207, 221
see also hypocrisy
(p.310) Slingsby, Sir Henry 39,
Smith, Adam 43, 73

Smith, Sir Thomas 147
snobbery, more radical in urban context 133–6
sociability, new stress on 68–9
social advancement, and manners:
in court and city 205–7
medieval 65
social form 87
see also ceremony; deference
social hierarchy, and manners 58–71
socialization 9, 71–2
society, concept of 43–6, 55–6, 73–4
Spain 75–80, 234
Spenser, Edmund 53, 118, 206
sprezzatura 183–4, 200, 205, 225, 229–30
Stafford, Anthony 164–5, 234–5, 236
Stans Puer ad Mensam 27
Stanhope, Philip, second earl of Chesterfield 236
Stanley, James, seventh earl of Derby 39, 141–2
Starkey, David 24, 124
Starkey, Thomas 50, 105
Stephens, John 132, 247 n. 16
stereotypes, social 41–2, 242
Stone, Lawrence 143, 219–20
Stow, John 119
streaking 255
structuralism, and manners 16–17
Stubbes, Philip 162 n. 54
Suckling, Sir John 125, 260
sumptuary laws 227
table manners 80–1, 82–3, 84, 91–3, 98–100
Talbot, Charles, 12th carl of Shrewsbury 248
theatre:
Page 15 of 17
(p.303) Index
and sexual licence 251

as social arena 245–6
Thomas, Sir Keith 224
Thrupp, Sylvia 64–5
transactional courtesies 123–4, 168
travel, bad effects of 76, 78
Trenchfield, Caleb 40 n. 80, 135–6
Trilling, Lionel 207
Turks 80
Tuvill, Daniel 56, 208
Twyne, Thomas 155, 156
universities, and manners 147–9, 184–5, 190
urbanity 61, 129
modes of, as sociological model 113–18, 171
Urbino, court of 126–7
Urfée, Honoré d’ 156
Vaughan, William 52–3, 226, 230
verbal propriety 159, 161
vices, gentlemanly 245
Vienne, Philibert de 41, 148, 182, 201–3
Villiers, Barbara 271
Villiers, George, second duke of Buckingham 248, 257
violence:
and honour 240
and libertines 247–50, 270
see also duelling
visits 139–40
and letters 158
Vives, Luis 145
Waker, Nathaniel, see Refined Courtier, The
Walker, Obadiah 36, 48, 73, 81, 89, 90, 95, 98 n. 144, 99, 100, 109, 111, 134,
137, 139, 154–5, 162 n. 52, 184, 209, 221, 223–4, 227, 239
Wandesford, Sir Christopher 40, 112, 134, 219
Ward, Ned 244, 246–7
Watson, Foster 172
Weber, Max 194–5
Wentworth, Thomas, first earl of Strafford 39, 123 n. 66
Weste, Richard 30–1, 67, 83–4, 109
Wilkins, John 258
Wilmot, John, earl of Rochester 250, 251–2, 255, 263, 266, 267, 268, 269, 271,
275
Wilson, Thomas 34, 174, 178, 179
wit 183–4, 186, 204, 260
Wits, the Court 260, 266
Wolsey, Cardinal 126
women:
and chaste language 161–2
and courtesy literature 38–9
Page 16 of 17
(p.303) Index
and honour 233

and libertines 270–1
and modesty 229
and precedence 94–5
and salon society 127–8
Wood, Anthony 30 n. 47, 181, 219, 254–5
Wright, L. B. 38, 58
Wright, Thomas 90, 112, 140
Wrightson, Keith 19
Wyatt, Sir Thomas 202
(p.311) Wycherley, William 223
Whytyngton, Robert 29, 102

see also Erasmus, Desiderius
Wyld, H. C. 165, 189, 191
Young, Bartholomew 32 n. 52,
Youth's Behaviour 31, 48, 79, 88–101 passim, 133, 138, 152, 154, 160, 165,
167, 209, 229, 237 n. 197, 238
Page 17 of 17

From Courtesy To Civility

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

From Courtesy To Civility

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

From Courtesy To Civility

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Title Pages

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online