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Abstract
Ritual and gesture were central to medieval political cultures, yet few documents survive which attest to daily comportment in non-royal elite households. This article examines the late fifteenth-century ‘Harleian Ordinances’ (from British Library Harl. MS 6815), which describe in rare detail the ceremonies and servants' gestures used in an unnamed earl's house. It focuses on the para-liturgical elements of the household ceremony (notably the use of ritual kisses), argues that the Burgundian court provided direct inspiration for the ordinance, and suggests a connection to Richard, earl of Warwick (‘the Kingmaker’). More broadly, it explores aspects of the relationship between lord and noble servant in the later fifteenth century and contends that nobility – an essentially invisible quality – was in part conjured up through the gestures and deportment of a nobleman's servants. In their attempts to portray power and prestige, noblemen such as the invisible earl of this ordinance established secular household rites which required that their bodies be attended to with an almost religious reverence.
Notes
1 London, British Library, Harleian MS 6815 (‘Heraldical miscellany’), fols 25r–56v, 16r. The latter folio, which is the final leaf of the first copy, has become detached from the rest and misbound in the manuscript. This discussion will refer to the first copy, bound in folios 25r–41v, 16r. The second copy lacks a final leaf.
2 Christopher Woolgar dates their composition to between c.1470 and c.1500, or possibly c.1460 and c.1510, on the basis of its references to Pre-Reformation liturgy and dietary calendar, types of furniture - especially trestle rather than dormant tables -, the use of spoons and knives but not forks, the large size of the household (all of which place the document more securely in the fifteenth rather than sixteenth century), and the drinking of beer rather than ale (which locates it in the later fifteenth century rather than earlier). The use of trestle tables offers an important clue, as by c.1500 it would have been quite old-fashioned not to have dormant tables in a household of this size and status. Personal Communication, 8 May 2001. The later history of the document, and its interest to sixteenth- and eighteenth-century readers, would make for interesting speculation but lie outside this paper.
3 Mark Girouard, Life in the English country house. A social and architectural history (New Haven, 1978), 47-50, 56, 64, 320; Jonathan Nicholls, The matter of courtesy. Medieval courtesy books and the Gawain Poet (Cambridge, 1985), 196; C. M. Woolgar, The great household in late medieval England (New Haven, 1999), 25, 161.
4 Christopher Dyer, Standards of living in the later middle ages. Social change in England, c. 1200–1520 (Cambridge, 1989), 15–21, 47–8, 108. See also K.B. McFarlane, The nobility of later medieval England. The Ford lectures for 1953 and related studies (Oxford, 1973), 15, 122-5, 268-78; Chris Given-Wilson, The English nobility in the late middle ages. The fourteenth-century political community (London, 1987), 29-83; J.M.W. Bean, From lord to patron. Lordship in late medieval England (Manchester, 1989).
5 The heading has been crossed out at some point. The front leaf, possibly inscribed upon purchase in the eighteenth century, reads ‘An old manuscript of the state of a duke marquess and earle for their own Houses etc’, with a further note, ‘Together with the order and expence of severall Kings and princes & Households’. The latter section has been lost. Folio 25v. has a further heading, in a sixteenth-century hand: ‘Orders of service belonging to the degrees of a duke, a marques and an Ea Erle used in there owne howses as hereafter followeth.’
6 This work has traditionally been linked to Henry VII, but David Starkey has recently argued that it derives from the courts of Henry VI and Edward IV. ‘Henry VI's old blue gown. The English court under the Lancastrians and Yorkists’, The Court Historian, 4 (1999), 1-28. I am indebted to Christopher Woolgar for this reference.
7 For editions of courtesy books see The babees book, etc, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, EETS, o.s. 32 (London, 1868); Caxton's book of courtesy, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, EETS, e.s. 3 (London, 1868); A book of precedence, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, EETS, e.s. 8 (London, 1869); A fifteenth century courtesy book, ed. R.W. Chambers, EETS o.s. 148 (London, 1914). For editions of fifteenth-century household regulations and ordinances see ‘Ceremonies and services at court, in the time of King Henry the Seventh’ [a.k.a The ryalle book], in: The antiquarian repertory, ed. Francis Grose and Thomas Astle, 4 vols (London, 1807), vol. 1; ‘The black book’ in: The household of Edward IV, ed. A. R. Myers (Manchester, 1959); Ordinances for Henry VI, Prince Edward (son of Edward IV), Princess Cecill (mother of Edward IV), Edward IV, George, duke of Clarence, Henry VII, and Henry VIII contained in: A collection of ordinances and regulations for the government of the royal household (London, 1790); The regulations and establishment of the household of Henry Algernon Percy, the fifth earl of Northumberland, at his castles of Wreshill and Likinfield in Yorkshire (a.k.a. Northumberland household book), ed. Thomas Percy (London, 1827). The Harleian regulations fall better into this genre than that of the ‘courtesy book’, as they are composed as a general set of instructions for all household members rather than addressing an (imagined) individual servant as the courtesy books do. It is possible that lengthy descriptions of household protocol such as the Harleian document were meant to provide models to other households.
8 ‘L'Estat de la maison du Duc Charles de Bourgoingne, dit le hardi’, in: Mémoires d'Olivier de la Marche, ed. H. Beaune and J. d'Arbaumont, 4 vols (Paris, 1883–8), vol. 4, cxiv, 1–94. The ‘Second Northumberland household book’ (as identified by D. M. Barratt) is Bodleian Eng.hist. MS b. 208. See D. M. Barratt, ‘A second Northumberland household book’, The Bodleian Library record, 8, 2 (1968), 93-8; and Ian Lancashire, ‘Orders for the Twelfth Day and Night circa 1515 in the Second Northumberland household book’, English literary renaissance, 10 (1980), 6-45. Lancashire includes an edition of folios 34-44. The book fills the whole volume, comprising 23 ordinances dating from 1500 to 1519 (the volume was compiled c. 1519-27). It prescribes rituals for childbirth, churching, weddings, Twelfth Night and Maundy Thursday rituals, and other special occasions. Both the Harleian regulations and the ‘Second Northumberland household book’ deserve full editions.
9 Catherine Belsey, Shakespeare and the loss of Eden. The construction of family values in early modern culture (London, 1999), 6.
10 Only brief mention is made of the foods to be consumed, although the breakfast service lists different menus for meat and fish days, fol. 29r. Christopher Woolgar offers a fascinating study of the meals of the nobility and the vast quantities of food offered to contemporary lords in ‘Fast and feast. Conspicuous consumption and the diet of the nobility in the fifteenth century’, in Revolution and consumption in late medieval England, ed. Michael Hicks (Woodbridge, 2001).
11 Note, this was the dinner service on a flesh day. The routine for a fast day is not described.
12 This analysis will follow the Use of Sarum, which was the dominant liturgical form in this era. The use of Salisbury, ed. Nick Sandon, 6 vols, 2nd ed. (Newton Abbot, 1990). See also Adrian Fortescue and J.B. O'Connell, The ceremonies of the Roman rite described, 10th edn (London, 1958). Of the growing literature on medieval gesture more broadly, particularly useful studies include Jean-Claude Schmitt, La raison des gestes dans l'Occident médiévale (Paris, 1990); A cultural history of gesture. From antiquity to the present day, ed. Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg (Oxford, 1991); J. A. Burrow, Gestures and looks in medieval narrative (Cambridge, 2002).
13 Fortescue and O'Connell, Ceremonies of the Roman rite, 31. Girouard remarks upon this coincidence of dress, English country house, 47.
14 Genuflections and bows are performed frequently throughout the Mass and in ecclesiastical contexts generally, but especially when approaching a superior, facing the altar or the holy sacrament, and (in the case of bowing) when certain holy names or words are uttered. See Use of Salisbury, passim, and Fortescue and O'Connell, Ceremonies of the Roman rite, 40-1. The servants' ‘curtesies’ are either bows or genuflections rather than full kneeling: ‘And herein is to be remembered that they that beare the dishes do not make curtesies but knele downe to discharge their dishes, and so with curtesies departe’, fols 39v-40). Kneeling or genuflection while serving was important. It is ordered of the cupbearer that when he serve the Estate with his cup at breakfast he is always to be ‘kneling or at the least bowing his knees’, see fols 28r and 32r.
15 A manchet, or ‘lord's bread’, is a roll of the finest quality bread; a cheat loaf is bread of the second finest quality. Perhaps the former is meant for the Estate and the latter for his wife.
16 Use of Salisbury, vol. 1, 12, 21, 31.
17 Use of Salisbury, vol. 1, 12, 16, 20, 21, 28, 30, 31, 35.
18 Nicolas James Perella, The kiss sacred and profane. An interpretative history of kiss symbolism and related religio-erotic themes (Berkeley, 1969); Willem Frijhoff, ‘The kiss sacred and profane. Reflections on a cross-cultural confrontation’, in A cultural history of gesture, ed. Bremmer and Roodenburg; Kim M. Phillips, ‘Bodily walls, windows and doors. The politics of gesture in late fifteenth-century English books for women’, in Medieval women. Texts and contexts in late medieval Britain, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al. (Turnhout, 2000), esp. 193-6; Burrow, Gestures and looks, 32-3, 50-7, 150-2; Kiril Petkov, The kiss of peace. Ritual, self, and society in the high and late medieval west (Leiden, 2003), esp. 11-29.
19 New Catholic encyclopedia, s.v. ‘kiss, liturgical’.
20 For a detailed, ethnographically-influenced analysis, see Jacques le Goff, ‘The symbolic ritual of vassalage’, in his Time, work, and culture in the middle ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago, 1980).
21 J. Russell Major, ‘“Bastard feudalism” and the kiss. Changing social mores in late medieval and early modern France’, Journal of interdisciplinary history, 17 (1987), 509-35.
22 See footnote 4, above. On changing use of domestic space see Girouard, English country house, 30-47; Woolgar, Great household, ch. 4; Michael Thompson, The medieval hall. The basis of secular domestic life, 600-1600 AD (Aldershot, 1995), ch. 9.
23 ‘Ordinances and rules of the Princess Cecill’, in Collection of ordinances.
24 ‘Articles ordained by King Henry VII’, in Collection of ordinances,110; J. C. Brooke (ed.), ‘The ceremonial of making the king's bed’, Archaeologia, 4 (1777), 311–14.
25 W. Ffarington, ‘The Derby household books’, ed. F. R. Raines, in The Stanley papers, part 2, Chetham Society, 31 (Manchester, 1853), 8-10, 20-2 (regulations for the household of earl of Derby, 1568 and 1572); G.E.P. Willoughby, Report on the manuscripts of Lord Middleton, Historical Manuscripts Commission 69 (London, 1911), 538-41 (regulations for the household of Sir Francis Willoughby of Wollaton, c. 1572); Cowdray and Easebourne Priory in the County of Sussex, ed. W.H. St John Hope (London, 1919), 119-34 (regulations for second Viscount Montagu, of Cowdray, Sussex, 1595); John Smyth, The Berkeley manuscripts. The lives of the Berkeleys (1618), ed. Sir J. Maclean, 3 vols (Gloucester 1883), vol. 2, 365-7, 418-20 (Regulations for household of Henry, 7th Baron Berkeley, c.1590 and 1601); ‘A breviate touching the order and government of a nobleman's house’ (1605), Archaeologia 13 (1800), 315-89; History and antiquities of the county of Leicester. West Goscote hundred, ed. J. Nichols (London, 1804) (Regulations for the earl of Huntingdon, at Ashby de la Zouche Castle and Donington Park, Leics, 1609); ‘Copy of an original manuscript, containing orders made by Henry Prince of Wales, respecting his household, in 1610’, ed. Francis Douce, Archaeologia, 14 (1803), 249-61. On Tudor royal courts see now Fiona Kisby, ‘Religious ceremonial at the Tudor court. Extracts from royal household regulations’, in I. W. Archer et al. (eds), Religion, politics and society in sixteenth-century England, Camden 5th series, 22 (Cambridge, 2003), 1-33. My thanks to Christopher Woolgar for this final reference.
26 ‘L'Estat de la maison du Duc Charles de Bourgoingne’, cxiv, 1–94. See C. A. J. Armstrong, ‘L’Échange culturel entre les cours d'Angleterre et de Bourgogne à l'epoque de Charles le Témeraire’, reprinted in England, France and Burgundy in the fifteenth century (London, 1983); Christine Weightman, Margaret of York, duchess of Burgundy, 1446–1503 (Gloucester, 1989),94; Charles Ross, Edward IV, 2nd ed. (New Haven, 1997), 220, 260.
27 ‘L'Estat de la maison du Duc Charles de Bourgoingne’, 21–48.
28 Peter Arnade, Realms of ritual. Burgundian ceremony and civic life in late medieval Ghent (Ithaca, 1996), 16–17. Otto Cartellieri made much the same point several decades earlier: The court of Burgundy. Studies in the history of civilization, trans. Malcolm Letts (London, 1929), 64–5.
29 Walter Prevenier and Wim Blockmans, The Burgundian Netherlands, with picture research by An Blackmans-Delva (Cambridge, 1986), 223–5; Wim Blockmans and Walter Prevenier, The promised lands. The Low Countries under Burgundian rule, 1369–1530, trans. Elizabeth Fackelman and Edward Peters (Philadelphia, 1999), 132–40; David Nicolas, ‘In the pit of the Burgundian theater state. Urban traditions and princely ambitions in Ghent 1360-1420’, in City and spectacle in medieval Europe, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt and Kathryn L. Reyerson (Minneapolis, 1994); Andrew Brown, ‘Bruges and the Burgundian “theatre state”. Charles the Bold and Our Lady of the Snow’, History, 84 (1999), 573-89. See also Cartellieri, Court of Burgundy, chs. 4, 7, 8; Gordon Kipling, Enter the king. Theatre, liturgy, and ritual in the medieval civic triumph (Oxford, 1998).
30 Arnade, Realms of ritual, 10–11.
31 See Armstrong, ‘L'Échange culturel’.
32 ‘Le Recit des nopces de monseigneur de Bourgoingne et de madame Marguerite d'Yorch, seur de Roy d'Angleterre’, in Mémoires, ed. Beaune and d'Arbaumont, vol. 3, 101–200; Armstrong, ‘L'Échange culturel’, 406–7; Weightman, Margaret of York, chapter 2; The Paston letters and papers of the fifteenth century, ed. Norman Davis, 2 vols (Oxford, 1971-5), vol. 1, no. 330.
33 Armstrong, ‘L'Échange culturel’, 407, 410–12; Ross, Edward IV, 207, 260.
34 Armstrong, ‘L'Échange culturel’, 410–12; Ross, Edward IV, 264–5. For a contemporary account of Lord Gruythuyse's reception in England see ‘The record of Bluemantle Pursuivant, 1471–1472’, ed. C. L. Kingsford in English historical literature in the fifteenth century (Oxford, 1913).
35 Starkey, however, argues for native, Lancastrian influences - notably the Ryalle book: ‘Henry VI's old blue gown’, 20-24.
36 These three are edited as, respectively, ‘The black book’, ed. Myers; ‘Ordinances for the household of George, duke of Clarence, made the 9th of December, 8 Edw. IV, A.D. 1469’, and ‘Ordinances for the government of Prince Edward, son of King Edward IV. Made 27th Sept. 13 Edw. IV, A.D. 1474’, both in Collection of ordinances. This collection also includes the ordinances for the household of Cecily, the king's mother.
37 Bodleian MS Eng.hist. b. 208, and see footnote 7 above.
38 This is the only instance of a servant kissing his own hand which I have so far encountered outside the Harleian regulations.
39 ‘Out of an old paper roll. The great feast at the intronization of the Reverende Father in God George Nevell […]’, ed. Thomas Hearne in Johannis Lelandi antiquarii de rebus Britannicus collectanea, 2nd edn, 6 vols (London, 1774), vol. 6, 2–14.
40 ‘Intronization’, 8. Cf. Harleian regulations, fol. 32r.
41 ‘Intronization’, 8, 15.
42 ‘Intronization’, 8–9, see also 15.
43 Ross, Edward IV, 55–6; Michael Hicks, Warwick the Kingmaker (Oxford, 1998), 261.
44 Woolgar, Great household, 20; Kate Mertes, The English noble household, 1250-1600. Good governance and politic rule (Oxford, 1988), 58-74.
45 Norbert Elias, The civilising process. Sociogenetic and psychogenetic investigations, trans. Edmund Jephcott, rev. edn (Oxford, 2000), esp. 85–6; Jorge Arditi, A genealogy of manners. Transformations of social relations in France and England from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century (Chicago, 1998), 15; Mark Addison Amos, ‘“For manners maketh man”: Bourdieu, de Certeau, and the common appropriation of noble manners in the Book of courtesy’, in Medieval conduct, ed. Kathleen Ashley and Robert L. A. Clark (Minneapolis, 2001).
46 Catherine Bell, Ritual theory, ritual practice (New York, 1992), 108. My interpretation of ritual follows the arguments of some social anthropologists who contend that one must distinguish between ‘ritual’, which enables transformation and contains a magical element, and ‘ceremony’, which is conservative and celebrates an existing state of affairs. See the discussion in Karl Leyser, ‘Ritual, ceremony and gesture. Ottonian Germany’, in Communications and power in medieval Europe. The Carolingian and Ottonian centuries, ed. Timothy Reuter (London, 1994), esp. 190-1.
47 Bell, Ritual theory, ritual practice, 110.
48 Ernst Kantorowicz, The king's two bodies. A study in medieval political theology, 2nd edn (Princeton, 1997), 4, 7.
49 A recent narrative account of the Percies is Alexander Rose, Kings in the North: The House of Percy in British History (London, 2002).
50 Michael A. Hicks, ‘Warwick, the Kingmaker’, in Who's who in late medieval England (1272–1485) (London, 1991), 303. See also Hicks, Warwick the Kingmaker, esp. 1–6; Paul Murray Kendall, Warwick the Kingmaker (London, 1957).
51 Kendall, Warwick the Kingmaker, 47–8.
52 The book is now Geneva, Bibliothèque publique et universitaire, MS français 166. See plate 19 in Hicks, Warwick the Kingmaker, 206.
53 The great chronicle of London, ed. A. H. Thomas and I. D. Thornley (London, 1938), 207: ‘The which Erle was evyr hadd In grete ffavou of the comonys of thys land, by Reson of the excedyng howsold which he dayly kepid In alle Cuntrees where evyr he sojournyd or laye, and when he cam to London he held such an howse that vj Oxyn were etyn at a Brekeffast, and every tavern was ffull of his mete, ffor whoo that had any acqueyntaunce In that hows, he shuld have hadd as/ much sodyn & Rost as he mygth cary upon a long daggar which those dayes were much usid as now they use murderers.’ The sole surviving bailiff's account for Warwick, from 1451-2, indicates if nothing else that he kept a very large household: Hicks, Warwick the Kingmaker, 53, see also 227.
54 For the burial see ‘Articles ordained by King Henry VII’, 131-2; ‘A book of English court ceremonies’, London, British Library, Additional MS 45131, fols 21-24v; P. W. Hammond, ‘The funeral of Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury’, The Ricardian, 87 (1983), 410-16; Ann Payne, ‘The Salisbury roll of arms, c. 1463’, in: England in the fifteenth century, ed. Daniel Williams (Woodbridge, 1987). For the wedding, of which no detailed account survives, see ‘Ordinances for the household of George Duke of Clarence, 1469’, in Collection of ordinances, 98. For the launch of the Trinity see The chronicle of John Stone, ed. W. G. Searle, Cambridge Antiquarian Society, octavo series 34, (1902), 109-10. Hicks discusses all of these events in Warwick the Kingmaker, 228-34.
55 Hicks, Warwick the Kingmaker, 234.
56 John Weaver, Middleham Castle (London, 1998), 7, 32-3; Anthony Emery, Greater medieval houses of England and Wales, 1300-1500, vol. 1, Northern England (Cambridge, 1996), 368-72. At some point in the mid or later fifteenth century the keep's second-storey roof was removed and a large chamber built above. It is uncertain whether Richard Neville or his son-in-law and successor on the site, Richard, duke of Gloucester, undertook these renovations: Weaver, Middleham Castle, 11, 28. The renovated structure does not fit the Harleian plan so well.
57 Emery, Greater medieval houses I, 123-6.
58 Emery, Greater medieval houses I, 413-19.
59 Emery, Greater medieval houses I, 144-150.
60 Philippe Buc, The dangers of ritual. Between early medieval texts and social scientific theory (Princeton, 2001). Quote at 10.
61 Buc dislikes the use of the term ‘ritual’, although he retains it for convenience: ‘the word “ritual” will be a shorthand for “a practice twentieth-century historians have identified as ritual”’, Dangers of ritual, 2. However, given the resemblance between the Harleian actions and the rites of the Mass, ritual has been found a suitable term for the former and has been used throughout this article without Buc's invisible quotation marks.
62 Many thanks to Chris Given-Wilson, Michael Graves, and Christopher Woolgar for their invaluable assistance and the interest they have shown in this article, and to audiences in Perth, Edinburgh and York.