In sixteenth-century Italy and eighteenth-century France, waning prosperity and increasing social unrest led the ruling families to try to preserve their superiority by withdrawing from the lower and middle classes behind barriers of etiquette. In a prosperous community, on the other hand, polite society soon absorbs the newly rich, and in England there has never been any shortage of books on etiquette for leaching them the manners appropriate to their new way of life.
Every code of etiquette has contained three elements; basic moral duties; practical rules which promote efficiency; and artificial, optional graces such as formal compliments to, say, women on their beauty or superiors on their generosity and importance.
In the first category are considerations for the weak and respect for age. Among the ancient Egyptians the young always stood in the presence of older people. Among the Mponguwe of Tanzania, the young men bow as they pass the huts of the elders. In England, until about a century ago, young children did not sit in their parents’ presence without asking permission.
Practical rules arc helpful in such ordinary occurrences of social life as making proper introductions at parties or other functions so that people can be brought to know each other. Before the invention of the fork, etiquette directed that the fingers should be kept as clean as possible; before the handkerchief came into common use, etiquette suggested that after spitting, a person should rob the spit inconspicuously underfoot.
Extremely refined behavior, however, cultivated as an art of gracious living, has been characteristic only of societies with wealth and leisure, which admitted Women as the social equals of men. After the fall of Rome, the first European society to regulate behavior in private life in accordance with a complicated code of etiquette was twelfth-century Provence, in France. Provence had become wealthy. The lords had returned to their castle from the crusades, and there the ideals of chivalry grew up, which emphasized the virtue and gentleness of women and demanded that a knight should profess a pure and dedicated love to a lady who would be his inspiration, and to whom he would dedicate his valiant deeds, though he would never come physically close to her. This was the introduction of the concept of romantic love, which was to influence literature for many hundreds of years and which still lives on in a debased form in simple popular songs and cheap novels today
In Renaissance Italy too, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a wealthy and leisured society developed an extremely complex code of manners, but the rules of behavior of fashionable society had little influence on the daily life of the lower classes. Indeed many of the rules, such as how to enter a banquet room, or how to use a sword or handkerchief for ceremonial purposes, were irrelevant to the way of life of the average working man, who spent most of his life outdoors or in his own poor hut and most probably did trot have a handkerchief, certainly not a sword, to his name.
Yet the essential basis of all good manners does not vary. Consideration for the old and weak and the avoidance of harming or giving unnecessary offence to others is a feature of all societies everywhere and at all levels from the highest to the lowest.
Which is NOT considered as an element in etiquette