In Pursuit of Civility

Manners and Civilization in Early Modern England

Keith Thomas

• Publisher: Brandeis University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781512602821
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Keith Thomas's earlier studies in the ethnography of early modern England, Religion and the Decline of Magic, Man and the Natural World, and The Ends of Life, were all attempts to explore beliefs, values, and social practices in the centuries from 1500 to 1800. In Pursuit of Civility continues this quest by examining what English people thought it meant to be "civilized" and how that condition differed from being "barbarous" or "savage." Thomas shows that the upper ranks of society sought to distinguish themselves from their social inferiors by distinctive ways of moving, speaking, and comporting themselves, and that the common people developed their own form of civility. The belief of the English in their superior civility shaped their relations with the Welsh, the Scots, and the Irish, and was fundamental to their dealings with the native peoples of North America, India, and Australia. Yet not everyone shared this belief in the superiority of Western civilization; the book sheds light on the origins of both anticolonialism and cultural relativism. Thomas has written an accessible history based on wide reading, abounding in fresh insights, and illustrated by many striking quotations and anecdotes from contemporary sources.

1

CIVIL BEHAVIOR

Those little civilities and ceremonious delicacies which, inconsiderable as they may appear to the man of science, and difficult as they may prove to be detailed with dignity, yet contribute to the regulation of the world by facilitating the intercourse between one man and another.

Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, 98 (February 23, 1751)

THE CHRONOLOGY OF MANNERS

From Elizabethan times onward the word “manners” was often used to mean polite behavior. Edmund Spenser wrote in The Faerie Queene (1596) that

the rude porter, that no manners had,
Did shut the gate against him in his face.

Similarly, in the 1690s, John Locke stressed the need for children to learn “manners, as they call it.”¹ At the same time, the term “manners” also continued to be employed in the older and much wider sense of the customs, morals, and mode of life prevailing in any particular society. In 1651, for example, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes explained that by “manners,” he did not mean “decency of behaviour, as how a man should salute another, or how a man should wash his mouth, or pick his teeth before company”; his concern was with “those qualities of mankind that concern their living together in peace and unity.”² That was what contemporary moralists meant by “manners” when they called, as they repeatedly did, for their “reformation.” They wanted public authorities to take action against swearing, drunkenness, prostitution, gambling, and sabbath breaking.³ By contrast, Joseph Addison, writing in the Spectator in 1711, took the restricted view, explaining that “by manners, I do not mean morals, but behaviour and good breeding.”⁴ It is manners in Addison’s narrower sense of the conventions governing personal interaction, what Hobbes called “decency of behaviour,” that are the subject of this chapter.

In the later Middle Ages, the idea of good manners was conveyed by such terms as “courtesy,” “nurture,” and “virtue.” From the mid-sixteenth century onward, the word “civility” began to be used in their place: Archbishop Cranmer’s Catechism of 1548 referred to “the nurture and civility of good manners.” Thereafter, “civil” and “civility” gradually came into circulation. “If you were civil and knew courtesy, / You would not do me thus much injury,” says Shakespeare’s Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (ca. 1595–1596). In the seventeenth century “civility” overtook “courtesy” in popularity; and in the eighteenth century it remained the term most commonly employed to convey the notion of good manners, more often than the increasingly popular expression “politeness,” and much more often than “courtesy” and “good breeding.”⁵ Until at least the 1770s, “civility” also retained its broader meaning as a synonym for what would come to be called “civilization.”

“Courtesy,” as the word suggests, related initially to the behavior associated with the court, whether of monarchs or of feudal lords. It was the essential attribute of courtiers.⁶ “Civility,” by contrast, was the virtue of citizens.⁷ The term derived from the classical notion of an organized political community or civitas, which for Aristotle and Cicero was the only place where the good life could be lived. As an Elizabethan translator explained, the Greek word ρολιτεια (polity) “in our tongue we may term ‘civility.’”⁸ In late medieval Italy civiltà (civility) expressed the values of the independent city-states, where, as has been well said, la vita civile (the civil life) was “a life that was at once civilized, civilian, and civic.”⁹ In his Dictionary (1538), the diplomat Sir Thomas Elyot equated “civility” with “politic governance” and explained that to be “civil” was to be “expert in those things that appertain to the ministration of a commonweal.”¹⁰

By extension, “civility” came to epitomize the way of life of good citizens. In Tudor times this involved the dutiful acceptance of established authority. The early sixteenth-century humanist Thomas Starkey declared that “obedience” had always been “reputed the chief bond and knot of all virtue and good civility.”¹¹ Elyot also associated civility with “courtesy” and “gentleness in speech.”¹² It involved tactful behavior, the repression of anger and insult, and a determined attempt to reduce the combative aspect of social interaction. In this respect, its prescriptions overlapped with those of good neighborliness and Christian charity. The “chief signs” of civility, thought the Elizabethan schoolmaster Richard Mulcaster, were “quietness, concord, agreement, fellowship, and friendship.” Citizens were expected to display tolerance, mutual respect, and self-control by ordering their actions in such a way as to ease the task of living harmoniously with their fellows. For the translators of the King James Bible, “civility” distinguished humans from “brute beasts led by sensuality.” As the Recorder of Exeter told his son in 1612, it was “by courtesy and humanity” that “all societies among men are maintained and preserved.” “Society,” he explained, was “nothing else but a mutual and reciprocal exchange of gentleness, of kindness, of affability, of familiarity, and of courtesy among men.” John Locke agreed: civility was “that general good-will and regard for all people, which makes any one have a care not to show, in his carriage, any contempt, disrespect, or neglect of them.”¹³

In ordinary parlance, to be “civil” was to behave in a decent, law-abiding fashion. Civility involved consideration and accommodation to the needs of others. It was closely associated with notions of kindness and amiability, and it taught the importance of hospitality and the friendly reception of strangers. “Civility money” was what people paid to jailers and bailiffs to ensure goodwill and preferential treatment.¹⁴ “Common civility” involved care of the body, so as to avoid exposing fellow citizens to unpleasant sights and smells. By extension, it called for “decency and gracefulness of looks, voice, words, motions, gestures, and of all the whole outward demeanour”; and it came to mean being easy and agreeable in company.¹⁵ These modes of behavior were all seen as necessary ingredients of what came to be called “civil conversation,” a concept that related as much to actions as to speech, “conversation” being a synonym for social interaction of every kind. In 1707 a lexicographer regarded “civility” and “courtesy” as interchangeable terms, both meaning “a kind and obliging behaviour and management of one’s self.”¹⁶ “As “civility” became increasingly the word for everyday courtesy, its political and governmental connotations gradually withered away; and in the later eighteenth century they were transferred to the new word “civilization.”

The rules of civility were set out in a huge prescriptive literature, much of it derivative from continental originals, for writing on the subject was a phenomenon of the European Renaissance, and the English were intensely aware of being relative latecomers to the genre. Works on civility took many forms. There were “books of nurture,” teaching manners to children, of which far and away the most influential was the one by the great Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus, whose De Civilitate Morum Puerilium (1530) was translated into English in 1532 as A Lytell Booke of Good Maners for Chyldren and reissued half a dozen times in the sixteenth century. There were guides to conduct at court, of which the most famous was the Italian Baldassare Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano (1528; first English translation, 1561); and there were Italian works on the civil behavior appropriate for everyday life more generally, such as Giovanni della Casa’s Galateo (1558; first English translation, 1576) and Stefano Guazzo’s La civil conversazione (1574; English translation, 1581–1586). In the seventeenth century, French models predominated, led by Nicolas Faret’s L’Honnête homme (1630; translated, 1631), which was about “the art of pleasing at court,” and Antoine de Courtin’s Nouveau traité de la civilité (1671, translated in the same year and offering detailed guidance on correct behavior in a wide range of social situations).

These books and others like them were reissued frequently, paraphrased, adapted, imitated, plagiarized, and extensively read.¹⁷ There were also many English treatises on the nurture of children, the education of nobles and gentlemen, and on conversation, letter writing, and other social accomplishments. There were innumerable letters of parental advice on manners, both published and unpublished, the most celebrated example being the collection of letters written to his illegitimate son between 1738 and 1768 by the diplomat and politician Lord Chesterfield, which were posthumously published in 1774 and repeatedly issued or excerpted thereafter. It has been estimated that there were, at the very least, five hundred separate editions of works on good manners published in England from 1690 to 1760 alone.¹⁸ In the eighteenth century the novel emerged as another influential guide to conduct: Samuel Richardson saved readers the trouble of ploughing through his multivolume narratives of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison by issuing in 1775 a separate Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, Maxims, Cautions and Reflexions they contained.

This mountain of published literature of advice has received a great deal of attention from modern historians.¹⁹ But it is important to remember that civility was a social phenomenon rather than a literary one. Civil behavior preceded the literature of civility; and although many individuals conscientiously followed the precepts set out in the manuals, those precepts were usually codifications and rationalizations of previously existing social practices and attitudes. Huge though it was, the volume of publication gives only a faint indication of the amount of time and attention that was devoted by early modern parents, teachers, and others to the training of the young in bodily comportment and civil behavior.

Writing in the 1930s, Norbert Elias regarded this activity as part of what he called “the civilizing process,” by which he meant the increasing self-regulation of bodily drives and emotional impulses.²⁰ He saw the Middle Ages as a time of unchecked impulses, when people lacked self-control and were given over to childlike oscillations of mood, accompanied by carelessness about the bodily functions, and a disposition to spontaneous violence.²¹ It was only during the early modern period, he thought, that Western European monarchs managed to achieve something approaching a monopoly on physical violence,* by pacifying their warlike nobility and forcing them to abandon their old military values, to learn civil modes of behavior, and to look to the court for their advancement and to the law for the resolution of their disputes. Elias suggested that in the later Middle Ages those of high social rank imposed a stricter control of emotions and bodily impulses on their social inferiors. It was regarded as offensive to belch, say, or to wipe one’s nose on one’s sleeve in the presence of the king or some great man. Later, with the increasing division of labor in society at large and the lengthening of chains of social and economic interdependence in the world outside the court...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by David Katz
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Civil Behavior
• 2. Manners and the Social Order
• 3. The Civilized Condition
• 4. The Progress of Civilization
• 5. Exporting Civility
• 6. Civilization Reconsidered
• 7. Changing Modes of Civility
• Note on References
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Index