In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civization in Early Modern England

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In Pursuit of Civility

Manners and

Civilization

in Early Modern

England

Keith T homas

in pursuit of

Civility

12

the menahem stern jerusalem

Lectures

Brandeis University Press

Historical Society of Israel

1 Keith thomas 2

In Pursuit

of

Civility ․․․․․․․

manners and

Civilization in early

modern england ․․․․․․․

Brandeis University Press

Waltham, Massachusetts

12

historical society of israel /

brandeis university press

An imprint of University Press of New England

www.upne.com

© 2018 Keith Thomas

All rights reserved

For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact

Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Suite 250,

Lebanon NH 03766; or visit www.upne.com

The excerpt from Richard Wilbur’s translation of Molière’s The Misanthrope

is reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing.

F. R. Scott’s poem “Degeneration” is reprinted by permission of

William Toye, literary executor for the estate of F. R. Scott.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

available upon request

Hardcover isbn: 978-1-5126-0280-7

Paperback isbn: 978-1-5126-0281-4

Ebook isbn: 978-1-5126-0282-1

1 to 2

john,

richard,

and

madeline

Contents

․․․․․․․

Foreword by David Katz ix

Preface xiii

Introduction 1

1 1 2 civil behavior 11

The Chronology of Manners 11

Manners and Gentility 23

Refinement 37

1 2 2 manners and the social order 49

The Social Hierarchy 49

The Topography of Manners 57

The Civility of the Middling Sort 62

The Manners of the People 65

Civilizing Agents 70

Plebeian Civility 74

1 3 2 the civilized condition 86

Civil Society 86

Civilized Warfare 104

A Civilized Compassion 110

Civilized Manners 121

The Fruits of Civility 127

1 4 2 the progress of civilization 134

The Ascent to Civility 134

Barbarous Neighbours 153

1 5 2 exporting civility 159

Confronting the Barbarians 159

Civilizing by Force 163

Inventing Race 173

Fighting and Enslaving 176

1 6 2 civilization reconsidered 183

Cultural Relativism 183

Another Kind of Civility 188

The Civilizing Mission Disputed 198

The Defects of Civilization 206

Civilization Rejected 210

1 7 2 changing modes of civility 219

Xenophobic Masculinity 219

Manners and Morality 223

The Quaker Challenge 230

Democratic Civility 235

The Future of Manners 247

Note on References 257

Abbreviations 259

Notes 261

Index 349

Foreword

David S. Katz

․․․․․․․

The great Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt prefaced his study of the civi￾lization of the Renaissance in Italy by remarking that to “each eye, perhaps,

the outlines of a given civilization present a different picture.” The historical

sources are a “wide ocean,” and in fact “the same studies which have served

for this work might easily, in other hands, not only receive a wholly different

treatment and application, but lead also to essentially different conclusions.”

Burckhardt wrote these words, derived from his personal experience at the

coal face of historical research in the mid-nineteenth century, at a time when

the field was becoming professionalized in the Age of Ranke. Historiograph￾ical theory eventually caught up with what Burckhardt already knew. In the

1930s we were informed that it is the job of historians to recognize patterns in

the stream of past events. Fifty years later it was revealed that there is no his￾tory “out there” waiting to be transferred to the printed page. It is the historian

who chooses the subject and paints a coherent picture from the material he or

she selects. This is why Burckhardt wrote that his bulky book was merely “an

essay in the strictest sense of the word.”

For over half a century, Keith Thomas has sailed that “wide ocean” of early

modern English historical sources, alighting on scholarly islands of his own

creation: religion and the decline of magic, man and the natural world, the

ends of life, and now the concept of civility, not to mention smaller but im￾portant islets along the way. His working technique is no secret, observable

not only to regular denizens of the Upper Reading Room of the Bodleian

Library at Oxford, but also to readers of the London Review of Books, where

in a fascinating article published in 2010 he revealed how he does it (“Diary,”

London Review of Books, 10 June, 2010). Keith Thomas developed a unique

system, which begins with note taking, then cutting up the gobbets into strips

that are crammed into envelopes bearing subject titles and are finally stapled

onto pieces of paper that are stacked in a particular order, and this all before

he begins to write. The technology is old-school, and as Thomas himself com￾ments sardonically, most of what takes him days to do can now be done by

searching a database for a key word.

But all that depends on knowing upon which wide ocean to sail. As Ranke

x foreword

himself insisted, after the documents have been collected, “intuition is re￾quired.” Keith Thomas never accepted the dubious claim that fine writing is

literature and the rest is mere historical raw material ready for mining and

production. The sort of historical anthropology that he practices involves

casting the broadest possible net into that wide ocean, in an attempt to read

everything published between about 1530 and 1770. In this he is like his prede￾cessor Christopher Hill, who introduced the method of massive “far-reading”

and made the English Civil War one of the most attractive fields of research

for scholars coming of age in the late sixties and early seventies.

It is very hard for us today to convey the excitement generated by the pub￾lication in 1971 of Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic. It was

his first book and he was nearly forty years old, but it was the product of

a long gestation. In those halcyon days, young scholars were not hounded

into premature publication of countable articles or pressured into applying

for unneeded outside grants. Anthropology was all the rage then, and histori￾ans were keen to apply to their work the insights of people like Claude Lévi￾Strauss, Mary Douglas, and Clifford Geertz. The supernatural shadow cast

by conventional religion was understood, and the European witch craze of the

sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was already a subject for discussion. But

Keith Thomas’s book put it all together, not only witchcraft in its distinctive

English form, but also the place of magic—“the bastard sister of science,” as

Frazer called it—and the entire range of occult popular and elite thought

in a land where the gradual adoption of Protestantism left believers helpless

before the forces of evil, abandoned by the comforting saints and rituals of

the Roman Catholic tradition. The phenomenon of witchcraft and popular

culture in general became academic growth industries after the publication

of Keith Thomas’s massive book, which helped establish the historical study

of early modern England as perhaps the most exciting field in English history

for many years.

In Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800,

published in 1983, Keith Thomas argued that there was a major shift in En￾glish attitudes toward nature in the early modern period. In the early sixteenth

century, people assumed that nature existed in order to serve humankind.

Three centuries later, a new stance had emerged, exemplified, for example, by

efforts to preserve the countryside, and to prevent cruelty to animals. Thomas

shows his hand without hesitation, proclaiming that the book is “intended

to do something to reunite the studies of history and of literature in the way

G. M. Trevelyan continually urged.” Again, it is the sheer range of sources that

is so astonishing, the product of years of self-directed reading. Keith Thomas

gave the Ford Lectures in 2000 and expanded them as The Ends of Life: Roads

foreword xi

to Fulfilment in Early Modern England, published by Oxford University Press

nine years later. His subject is a prime example of one created by wide reading

until a pattern emerges, based on the insight that although naturally everyone

hoped to find a place in the world to come, in practice people also wanted to

make something of their time on earth. Thomas looks at six roads to fulfill￾ment in early modern England: military prowess, work, wealth, reputation,

personal relationships, and the afterlife.

Everything Keith Thomas writes inspires admiration, and so too this pres￾ent book on the concept of civility, which is written in his signature serene

style and supported by an array of footnotes, an art form that is the secret love

of professional historians. “I have tried to identify just what it was that the

people of early modern England regarded as distinctive and superior about

their way of living,” Thomas explains, “in other words, what they thought it

meant to be ‘civilized.’” Others have written about civility, but the application

of Thomas’s method of blanket reading gives it much greater depth, and in

itself has provided a rich mine of source materials.

Burckhardt, in the middle of his great book, suddenly confesses to a crisis

of confidence. “No one is more conscious than the author of the defects in his

knowledge,” he admits. “Of the multitude of special works in which the sub￾ject is adequately treated, even the names are but imperfectly known to him.”

With a characteristic modesty that resembles Burckhardt’s, Keith Thomas

once explained his aim: “to immerse myself in the past until I know it well

enough for my judgment of what is or is not representative to seem acceptable

without undue epistemological debate.” A reviewer of one of Keith Thomas’s

books complained about his writing history “with the telling anecdote, the

apt witticism, and the evocative metaphor conveying the wide learning and

cultural urbanity of the author, while the reader is entertained and simulta￾neously informed about a whole society.” As with the Old Testament story of

Balaam, what was intended as a curse can only be seen as a blessing.

Preface

․․․․․․․

This book is a revised and much-expanded version of three Menahem Stern

lectures given in Jerusalem in November 2003. I thank the Israel Historical

Society for inviting me to deliver them; and I am very grateful to my hosts,

particularly the late Michael Heyd, the late Elliott Horowitz, and Yosef Kap￾lan, for their kindness and hospitality. I also thank my alert and critical audi￾ence for listening so attentively and for offering many helpful comments in the

ensuing discussions. I am particularly grateful to Maayan Avineri-Rebhun for

the exceptional patience with which she has waited for the deplorably late

delivery of my manuscript.

Warm thanks are also due to my two publishers, Richard Pult of the Uni￾versity Press of New England and Heather McCallum of Yale University

Press, for their brisk efficiency and generous encouragement. I owe my intro￾duction to Yale to the kindness of Ivon Asquith and Richard Fisher.

When I was invited, it was suggested that I might speak about manners

in early modern England. I was happy to do so, for this enabled me to return

to themes that I had discussed in previous lectures and seminars at British,

North American, Japanese, and Australian universities. It is a tricky topic,

however, for the word “manners” has several different meanings. Today it is

most commonly used as a term for polite social behavior. This is what the

elderly have in mind when they say of some young people that they have very

good manners, of others that they have very bad manners, and of some that

they have no manners at all. The history of manners in this sense of the word

was once regarded as a rather trivial subject, but in recent years it has come to

be recognized as one of considerable social and moral importance, fundamen￾tal, indeed, to understanding the way in which people think of themselves and

their relationship to each other. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu even

claimed that it is possible to infer “a whole cosmology, an ethic, a metaphysic, a

political philosophy, through injunctions as insignificant as ‘Stand up straight’

or ‘Don’t hold your knife in your left hand.’”*

Much of the credit for this enhanced valuation of the topic is due to the

German sociologist Norbert Elias (1897–1990), whose great work, On the

*Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, 1977), 94.

xiv preface

Process of Civilisation, first published in Switzerland in 1939 but largely un￾noticed until its reissue in 1969, followed by translations in French (1973–75)

and English (1978–82), did so much to show that the everyday conventions of

bodily comportment and social behavior are part of a larger process by which

human beings adapt themselves to the demands of living peacefully with each

other. Elias’s interpretation of the history of manners has some well-known

limitations. But it is impossible to discuss the topic without being conscious

of his looming intellectual presence. I am still embarrassed to recall that, on

the only occasion when I met this world authority on the history of table

manners, I managed to disgrace myself by carelessly knocking a jug of water

over the table we were sharing for lunch.

․․․

Since Elias’s day there has been a huge amount of writing about the history

of manners and politeness in many different parts of the world, some of it by

my former undergraduate pupils and graduate students. Outstanding among

recent studies of manners in early modern England is Anna Bryson’s mono￾graph, From Courtesy to Civility (Oxford, 1998), a work so nuanced and as￾sured as to deter anyone from attempting to follow in her footsteps. Valuable

material can also be found in Fenela Childs’s unpublished Oxford doctoral

thesis of 1984, “Prescriptions for Manners in English Courtesy Literature,

1690–1760.” I have learned a great deal from the fine essays contained in Civil

Histories, edited by Peter Burke, Brian Harrison, and Paul Slack (Oxford,

2000). A list of other scholars who have fruitfully explored some aspect of

the subject would run into the hundreds.

The French distinguish manières (social behavior) from moeurs (morals

and customs). But until the nineteenth century the English used the same

word for both. During the sixteenth century “manners” came to mean the con￾ventions governing polite interaction, but long before then the term had been

employed in the much wider sense of mores, a people’s habits, morals, social

conventions, and mode of life. That was what the fourteenth-century bishop

William of Wykeham meant when he prescribed for his school at Winchester

the motto “Manners makyth man.”* For him, “manners” meant a boy’s whole

moral and educational formation, not just his behavior in polite social inter￾course. The Book of Good Manners, published in 1487 and often reprinted,

was William Caxton’s translation of a treatise by the French monk Jacques

Legrand: it was a guide to virtuous living, outlining the duties appropriate to

*See Mark Griffith, “The Language and Meaning of the College Motto,” available on the New

College, Oxford, website.