With one whom “thou knowest of greater state” there should be no easy fellowship, no dining or betting or playing at dice; above all there must be no show of overmuch “meekness” or servility, “for else a fool thou wilt be told.”[10] A practical religion adds its simple obligations.[11] Men ought to pay their tithes, to give to the poor, to be strong and stiff against the devil. The prayer on awaking, the daily mass before working hours, the duties of self-control and submission, must ever be kept in mind. For the trader indeed the way of virtue was a narrow one and straight. Three deaths ever stand menacingly before him. First comes the common lot, the mere severing of soul and body.
“The tother death is death of Shame,
If he die in debt or wicked fame;
The third death, so saith the clerks,
If he hath no good works.”[12]
But side by side with directions about mercy, truth, and fulfilling the law, come other warnings—warnings about carving meat and cutting bread and dividing cheese, about a formal and dignified bearing, how to walk and stand and kneel, how to enter a house or greet a friend in the street—all carefully and laboriously shaped into rhyme. In the new sense of changing customs, of fashions that came and went with the revolutions of society,[13] training and thought and conscious endeavour were called in to replace the simplicity of the old unvarying forms. Manners became a subject of serious anxiety. Throwing aside the mass of tradition handed down from century to century, when every usage was consecrated by custom, and determined by immemorial laws as to the relations of class to class, the burghers, side by side with the professional and middle classes all over the kingdom, were tending towards the realization of a new social order, in which men were no longer obliged as formerly to pass through the door of the Church to find the way of social advancement, but might attain to it along the common high road of secular enterprise. The notion of the worth of the individual man was none the less important for the homely and practical form given to it in their rude and untrained expression. No one, they declared simply, need be shamefaced, of whatever lowly position he might come, for
“In hall or chamber, or where thou gon,
Nurture and good manners maketh man.”
In whatever society he might find himself, the humblest citizen should therefore so order his behaviour that when he left the table men would say “A gentleman was here.”[14] The practical divinity of plain people easily drew the graciousness of outward demeanour within the sphere of religion, and “clerks that knew the seven arts” explained
“That courtesy from heaven came
When Gabriel our Lady grette
And Elizabeth with Mary mette.”[15]
Since “all virtues are closed in courtesy and all vices in villany” or rudeness, the best prayer one could make was to be well-mannered, for the virtues of a fine behaviour reached as far as thought could go.
“In courtesy He make you so expert,
That through your nurture and your governance,
In lasting bliss He may yourself advance.”
These books of courtesy show us one side of the great change that passed over society[16] when the mediæval theory of status was broken down by the increase of riches which trade brought with it, and the new chances of rising in the world through wealth. The yeoman might become a gentleman by getting into a lord’s household, and “spending large and plenty.” The squire who would be a knight without the danger of bearing arms need only go to the king’s court with his purse full of money. The man of letters, the merchant, the seeker after pleasure, whoever and whatever a man might be, he could win neither degree nor worship “but he have the penny ready to take to.”[17] When the acquisition of wealth or the passage from one class to another was practically impossible, poverty and a low estate might still be dignified. But as soon as fortune and position had been brought within the reach of all, the man who remained poor might be looked on as idle or incapable. A new test of superiority was applied, a test of material prosperity, and by this measure the townsman was judged by his neighbours and naturally judged himself. On all sides we find indications of the excited ambition which had begun to stir in every class,