17th C. Flatware and Persons of Quality

Early table forks had only two tines. Above are 2, two-tined forks. One is a travel fork which fits into a bowl end, creating a spoon.

LIVERPOOL, Feb. 19– Letters and other documents dealing with manners and customs of daily life in the 17th century which came to light recently tend to show that it was customary in those days for “persons of quality” to have sets of their own spoons, knives and forks which they took with them when invited out. These papers were of particular interest just at this time to collectors of antiques in connection with an addition made recently to the British Museum. This was the earliest hallmarked table fork known, engraved with the crest of Manners and Montagu, 1632. 

About the same time a silver spoon of identical hallmark and crest was taken to Haddon Hall. Mention of such a set is made in the will of Mrs. Katherine Ridgeway, dated May 9, 1627, which was among the documents destroyed in a fire some time ago at the Four Courts, Dublin. 

The will says: “I bequeath to the Right Honorable the Lord Chancellor my little seller of crystal bottles item. I give and bequeath to my Ladye of Elye my gilt spoone with the forks and penknife suitable to it.” Mrs. Ridgeway was widow of George Ridgway, secretary of the Irish Council, and the Lord Chancellor was Adam Loftus, Lord Loftus of Ely.

Books on etiquette and table manners were far from being the prerogative of the Victorian age, it is revealed, as in 1663 there was published in London a book entitled “The Accomplished Lady’s Rich Closet of Rarities,” in which the following rules. are laid down: 

“A gentlewoman being at table abroad or at home must observe to keep her body straighte, and lean not by any means upon her elbowes –nor by ravenous gesture discover a voracious appetite. 

“Talke not when you have meate in your mouth, and do not smacke like a pig – nor eat speene-meat so hot that tears stand in your eyes.

“It is very uncourtly to drink so large a draught that your breath is almost gone, and you are forced to blow strongly to recover yourself. Throwing down your liquors as into a funnel is an action fitter for a juggler than a gentlewoman. 

“In carving at your own table distribute the best pieces first, and it will appear very decant and comely to use a fork; so touch no meat without it.”

Reference to the fork was of particular interest to the museum authorities, for those present-day indispensable instruments had not then been long introduced, it appears. 

Forks were first imported from Italy, and their use in England at the time was considered pedantic and laughable. One writer of the time speaks of a silver fork as “being used of late by some of our spruce gallants,” which did not tend to make the fork popular at all among certain sets.– By Associated Press, 1925

 

 🍽Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia

Lord Pleads for Better Manners

“Strange to see how a good dinner and feasting reconciles everybody.” -Samuel Pepys. Famous for his diary and being a 17th century gentleman. – “Why did men of the early seventeenth century emphasize courtesy and good manners? I take it for two reasons. First that they were models of courtesy and good manners themselves. The men of the seventeenth century were, I suspect, the greatest breed of Englishmen that England has ever produced, partly because they poed good manners themselves and partly because they realized the enormous importance of courtesy and good manners in the common transactions of life.”

Lord Rosebery Denounces the Decay of Manners Throughout the World as a Bad Sign

Lord Rosebery recently talked to the boys of the Royal Grammar school at Guildford on the subject of manners. He founded his discourse upon one of the statutes of the school framed 300 years ago, which he believed required much more attention than was usually paid to it. The statute said that assemblies without just cause must be punished. Honesty and clean speech, humility, courtesy and good manners were to be established by all good means. “Now, the point I wish to labor for the moment,” Lord Rosebery proceeded , "is that of courtesy and manners. Why did men of the early seventeenth century emphasize courtesy and good manners? I take it for two reasons. First that they were models of courtesy and good manners themselves. The men of the seventeenth century were, I suspect, the greatest breed of Englishmen that England has ever produced, partly because they possessed good manners themselves and partly because they realized the enormous importance of courtesy and good manners in the common transactions of life. 

“I think there has been a decay of manners in England and Scotland and all over the world. It is not limited to our own people by any means. You see it on the continent just as much —but depend upon it— it is a bad sign. If people have not the spirit of reverence themselves, even if it be only an outward reverence, they are not going the right way, but possibly going the wrong way. “Manners have an enormous commercial value in life. I sometimes wonder why it is not harped on more on these occasions. No one can have lived as long as I have without noticing the weight and value of manners in the ordinary transactions of life, in public life, and having seen men by appearance and manners get such a start of very much abler fellows, that they have been able by appearance and manners to keep their place much higher in public life than their own abilities or service would entitle them to. “Good appearance, you may say, is not at our command. There I do not agree. Good looks are not at our command. They are the gift of the gods and are the possession only of a small percentage, of mankind. But good appearance, straight-forward appearance, manly appearance without self consciousness, which is the most agreeable feature perhaps of all appearance, is within the command of everybody. 

“So much for appearance, but let us take manners, which I think are even more important. I will not put my appeal for manners on the higher consideration, such as sure signs of a noble nature expressed in outward form, though that is true enough. I will only put it today on the question of the commercial value of manners, and I ask every boy who hears me to bear away with him in mind the enormous value of manners from this day onward through his life, and they will give him a value which he will never possess without them, and give him a start over other boys, who neither strive to nor attain good manners.” — Morning Press, 1913

Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia 

Alcohol, Society and Mores

A Depiction of a 16th Century Brewery – “Chaucer, it will be conceded, was an accurate painter of the contemporary manners. With the one exception of Shakespeare, no Englishman has surpassed him. Many of the characters in the “Canterbury Tales” got drunk, and misfortunes happen to them in consequence, but nothing is ever said to indicate that the poet had any sympathy with this gross form of vice. The same may be stated of the Elizabethan dramatists.” – (image source, wikimedia commons)

Drinking in the Middle Ages

We are of opinion that drinking had not in the Middle Ages, reached anything like the disgusting extreme at which we find it in the latter part of the seventeenth century and the whole of the eighteenth century. Chaucer, it will be conceded, was an accurate painter of the contemporary manners. With the one exception of Shakespeare, no Englishman has surpassed him. Many of the characters in the “Canterbury Tales” got drunk, and misfortunes happen to them in consequence, but nothing is ever said to indicate that the poet had any sympathy with this gross form of vice. The same may be stated of the Elizabethan dramatists. It is not until we reach the reign of Charles II that we find writers of repute, speaking of excess in drink as if it were no frailty, but rather a virtue. 

This distorted view of things continued getting worse and worse until the days of our grandfathers. All eighteenth-century literature is full of it. There was a print once so popular that it was found on the walls of cottages, as well as in bar parlors, which represented two compartments. In each was a man sitting. The first was labeled “A Jolly Good Fellow.” He had a tankard of foaming beer beside him. The other had for the inscription “A Muckworm,” and represented a thin and care-worn man, making entries in a ledger. 

The inference to be drawn, of course, was that the man who cast up his accounts was infinitely inferior in the social scale to the boon companion who stupefied himself with beer. We imagine this was the common feeling of the time, and that it continued in many classes down to the beginning of the present reign. We ourselves knew a farmer who had broken his ribs twice and an arm three times by falling off horseback when returning drunk from market. – The Academy, 1884

Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia

Versailles Etiquette

The point about Versailles was that there was no escape: the courtiers had to "make it" where they were. The stage was Louis's, and the roles that could be played were designed by him. It was up to each courtier to fit himself – or herself – into one of the slots provided.  The leaders of all the other towns and villages of France were made, largely through the use of etiquette, and more specifically through rudeness and judicious slighting by the tax-collecting intendants, to feel their subordination, the distance from the court.  Once, the nobility had relied on strength, swagger, and vigor, even violence, personally to make their mark and uphold their honour; at Versailles, the way to success became discretion, observation, cunning, and the dissembling of one's aims and passions. 

"During the 17th century, in France, manners became a political issue. King Louis XIV and his predecessors, in collecting together the nobility of France to live with the sovereign at Versailles, instituted a sort of school of manners. At the palace, the courtiers lived under the despotic surveillance of the king, and upon their good behavior, their deference, and their observance of etiquette their whole careers depended. If you displeased a Louis, he would simply "not see you" the following day; his gaze would pass over you as he surveyed the people before him. And not being "seen" by the king was tantamount to ceasing to count, at Versailles. A whole timetable of ceremonies was followed, much of it revolving around the King's own person. Intimacy with Louis meant power, and power was symbolically expressed in attending to certain of the king's most private and physical needs: handing him his stockings to put on in the morning, being present as he used to chaise percée, rushing when the signal sounded to be present as he got ready for bed. It mattered desperately what closeness the king allowed you - whether he spoke to you, in front of whom, and for how long. 

The point about Versailles was that there was no escape: the courtiers had to "make it" where they were. The stage was Louis's, and the roles that could be played were designed by him. It was up to each courtier to fit himself – or herself – into one of the slots provided. The leaders of all the other towns and villages of France were made, largely through the use of etiquette, and more specifically through rudeness and judicious slighting by the tax-collecting intendants, to feel their subordination, the distance from the court. Once, the nobility had relied on strength, swagger, and vigor, even violence, personally to make their mark and uphold their honour; at Versailles, the way to success became discretion, observation, cunning, and the dissembling of one's aims and passions. At Versailles, and at the courts all over Europe which imitated it - everything was done to make it very clear who was superior to whom; and of course, each time anyone was polite, he or she was simultaneously acknowledging rank and demonstrating who stood where.

The new manners - both the formal rules of protocol and precedence and the unspoken, more profoundly enculturated rules like table manners - were seen increasingly, according to Elias, as ways in which one did not offend other people. You were controlling yourself, so as to prevent other people from being disgusted or "shocked." People lived very closely together at Versailles; everyone was watched by everyone else, and actual physical proximity helped raise some of the new sensitivity to other people's real or imagined susceptibilities. 

Men were expected on the whole to give up physical force as a means of getting their way, and - as always when "the graces" are preferred over brute strength - women begin to count for more. Within the aristocratic court circle, people became, in spite of the obsession with rank, far more equal. Secure in the knowledge that just being at court was the pinnacle of prestige, from which most of society was shut out, courtiers could permit themselves to respect each other.

As the bourgeois became richer and more indispensable even at court, they demanded - and were given, by self appointed experts who wrote manuals for them - instruction in how to behave as people did in "the best circles." In 1672, Antoine de Courtin produced "Nouveau trait' de la civilité' qui se pratique en France parmi les honnestes gens" or The "New Treatise of the Civility Which is Practiced in France Among Honest People." ("Honest" -hônnete- kept its original association with honour and the opposite-but-supporting motion, shame.) De Courtin writes about manners for both hosts and guests, and invite advises his bourgeois readers on how they should address the nobility. The church in France also produced handbooks of manners and talk to precept in schools. Gradually gentility spread down from the court to the bourgeois, and finally trickled further down to the rest of the population.

The bourgeois were even stricter about standards of civility than were the nobility were; having no ever-present King do enforce the rules, they imposed restraints on themselves. Being more anxious to rise, they had more to lose by making slips and gaffes; so their self-inhibiting mechanisms had to be deeper rooted, less obviously the donning of an external personna than the nobility could permit themselves. The policing of emotions became internal, and finally invisible even to themselves: they were able to think that they acted, not in obedience to power and self-interest but for purely moral reasons." –Margaret Visser, in "The Rituals of Dinner"

Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia

Earliest Hallmarked 17th C. Fork

Customs of Bygone Age

                                                           

Above ~2 styles of marrow scoops – By the mid-17th century one etiquette book author advised people stop handling or “mouthing” bones, but to remove bone marrow to eat, with a knife. Within time, marrow scoops and spoons became very popular, as bone marrow was considered a health food.  "Suck no bones… Take them not with two hands… Gnaw them not… Knock no bones upon thy bread, or trencher, to get out the marrow of them, but get out the marrow with a knife… To speake better… it is not fit to handle bones, and much lesse to mouth them. Make not use of a knife to breake bones…also breake them not with thy teeth, or other thing, but let them alone."  From Youth's Behaviour, by Francis Hawkins, 1646

Letters and other documents dealing with manners and customs of daily life in the 17th century which came to light recently, tend to show that it was customary in those days for “persons of quality” to have sets of their own spoons, knives and forks, which they took with them when invited out.

These papers are of particular interest just at this time, to collectors of antiques in connection with an addition made recently to the British Museum. This was the earliest hallmarked table fork known, engraved with the crest of Manners and Montague 1632. About the same time a silver spoon of identical hallmark and crest was taken to Haddon Hall.

Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia