John Evelyn speaks of great ladies suffering themselves to be treated in taverns—
“where a courtesan in other cities would scarcely vouchsafe to be entertain’d; but you will be more astonish’d when I shall assure you that they drink their crowned cups roundly, strain healths through their smocks, daunce after the fiddle, kiss freely and team it an honourable treat.”
And this, he goes on to say, was not confined to the lower or the more “meretricious” circles, but was a common spectacle in good houses where such sports were the afternoon diversion.
The following letter from that lively young lady of fashion, Bridget Noel, to her sister, the Countess of Rutland, in April, 1687, shows what sort of diversions occupied the aristocracy.
“I am extreme sory it is not poseble for us to wat of my deare sister suner than the 28 of May, for hear is a coking and hors matches which we have promesed to be at. My Lord Toumand will be at the great coking, and Barney and Lord Grandson and a great many more lords that I doe not know ther name, it is sade hear that it will be as great a match as ever has been. Barney intends to back our coks with thousands, for he is of our side.... The great coking dos not begin tell the 29 and twenty of June, but we have a letel wan begins of Whesen Monday.”
In 1663, among the rules laid down for the behaviour of men who wish to be considered well-bred, occurs the following recommendation—
“It is not becoming a person of quality when in the company of ladies to handle them roughly ... to kiss them by surprize; to pull off their hoods; to snatch away their handkerchiefs; to rob them of their ribbands and put them in his hat; to force their letters or books from them; to look into their papers, etc. You must be very familiar to use them at that rate; and unless you be so nothing can be more indecent or render you more odious.”
Such admonitions now would be considered an impertinence if addressed to a club of factory hands.
We must give the seventeenth century credit for introducing some refinements which undoubtedly had an influence on the position of women. Social customs are useful indices to national character, and daily habits often give the key to the moral standard. As long as coarse feeding and heavy drinking prevailed, there was a barrier to social intercourse between the sexes. When the ale and wine, which had been habitually drunk at every meal, were replaced by coffee and tea, it was an undoubted gain to both health and manners. The taste became more refined, repasts ceased to be orgies unfit for the presence of women. John Evelyn considered the custom of gentlemen leaving ladies to themselves after dinner, or rather of the ladies quitting the gentlemen, as barbarous, and it certainly had its origin in barbarous manners. He would doubtless have been astonished if he could have foreseen that the custom continued in force for more than two hundred years after his time, when regular drinking-bouts had ceased.
Evelyn’s complaint of the indelicacy of ladies speaking of gentlemen by their Christian names is a little hypercritical. It was the manners that needed alteration more than the speech. He is shocked to hear such talk as—