Myth taken

When I was in high school, a substitute teacher told the class something that was an interesting little tidbit of information. I accepted it, and it played a small role in my belief that Christianity is anti-science. It wasn't until several years after I became a Christian that I actually realized that it was not only false but ridiculous. What the teacher told us is that, prior to Modernity, people thought the human heart was located in the lower abdomen because you can feel a heartbeat there. It took modern science, with its discarding of religious sensibilities regarding dead bodies, to actually perform autopsies and discover, to everyone's surprise, that the heart is actually located in the chest.

I'm not sure if this really qualifies as a myth, since I've never heard anyone else say it. But it certainly plays into the conflict myth, and as a teenager, it cemented the general impression I had from society that religion (and Christianity in particular) is at war with science, and so is hopelessly unscientific. When I first started to seriously consider Christianity in my mid-20s, the one thing that stood in the way the most is that I thought becoming a Christian entailed abandoning science entirely. I honestly thought it would require belief that the earth is flat. With that, you can see why it was a long, hard road for me.

This reminds me of the beginning of C. S. Lewis's classic The Abolition of Man, which you can read online here. Lewis critiques a book on English prep for children by two authors (whom he refers to as Gaius and Titius) which essentially assumes the philosophical and highly contentious point that values are illusory. By assuming this rather than arguing for it they have bypassed the child's reasoning faculties and implanted in him a belief that will influence the course of his life -- not to mention the fact that the book was supposed to be about English, not deep philosophical issues. "The very power of Gaius and Titius depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is 'doing' his 'English prep' and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake. It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all."


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Shattering the Christ Myth

Last year, I wrote the introduction to the book Shattering the Christ Myth for its editor, my old friend J. P. Holding. OK, we've never met but I think ten years of correspondence classifies as an old friend. Now, with J. P.'s permission, I've uploaded the introduction to my website so you no longer have to buy the book to read it.

The paper compares the Christ Myth to the equally ridiculous conspiracy theory that Shakespeare did not write his plays, before looking at the authors who have, over the last century, tried to sell the idea that Jesus never existed.

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The Bible of Logical Positivism

In philosophy departments, logical positivism has been ignored, as far as I am aware, for the last few decades. But in the outside world, it has become the de-facto worldview of many materialists. When you boil down the beliefs of the new atheists, you get to the statement that only science can generate reliable knowledge. Since theology is not scientific, it is not worth bothering with.

It’s this return of logic positivism that makes A. J. Ayer’s manifesto Language, Truth and Logic, written in 1936, relevant today. It is the next book I’ve been able to cross off my list of things I should have read ages ago. Ayer’s book is of great value because it is an open-eyed analysis of what logic positivism actually means. It is not just God who gets sucked up by the positivistic vacuum. So to does ethics, other minds, aesthetics and even atheism.

As Ayer says “…in so far as statements of value are significant, they are ordinary ‘scientific’ statements; and that in as in as far as they are not scientific, they are not in the literal sense significant, but simply expressions of emotion which can neither be true or false.” I have yet to see how ethical beliefs can be maintained as true by the new atheist, which is ironic because they spend much of their time labelling things they don’t like as very bad. On what grounds? There might be a non-theistic basis for ethics, but you certainly won’t find it in scientific materialism.

As for atheism, Ayer reminds us, “If the assertion that there is a God is nonsensical, then the atheist’s assertion that there is not a god is equally nonsensical, since it is only a significant proposition that can be significantly contradicted.” This might explain why the argument in chapter four of the God Delusion was laughed at by philosophers of all stripes.

It gets worse for the naïve logical positivists. Ayer admits that we have no reason to believe in other minds except that other people seem to act quite like us. In other word, we are back to the behaviourism that made B. F. Skinner so famous and now so reviled. And, as Alvin Plantinga has often noted, this puts other minds in the same boat as God.

So, Language, Truth and Logic teaches us that new atheist philosophy is incoherent. And that is from the man who wrote the book.

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Summer of Blood by Dan Jones

A new book by an new author, Dan Jones’s Summer of Blood has been released. It is a narrative account of the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381 and being a denizen of Kent, it’s a subject I am very interested in.

I haven’t read the book yet, but I did catch Jones’s article in this week’s Spectator. He amusingly deconstructs the constant fear we medievalists and classicists have of not being ‘relevant’. Although the Spectator, which considers itself a highbrow rag, has a classics column, it is called Ancient and Modern. It’s more “What did the Romans Do For Us?” than “Why did the Romans do that?”

To help remedy this problem, Jones suggests the formation of the Ignatius J. Reilly Society to provide mutual protection to medieval historians. Presumably, members of the society will identify each other by asking the coded question “What did you think of Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror?” The correct answer is to disparage it as only acceptable for non-specialists, although secretly we all rather enjoyed it. Since both Jones and I are in the business of writing for general readers, we have little choice but to both admire and try to emulate Tuchman’s achievement.

And if you see me on a beach this summer, you’ll probably find me reading Jones’s book.



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Science in Four Thousand Years

Cambridge historian of science Patricia Fara has a new book out from OUP called Science: A Four Thousand Year History. I’ve not read it but have had a chance to flip through a copy in my local bookshop. It is one of those history books arranged according to themes rather than a narrative. I think it is hard to make this work, but Fara may surprise me. Certainly, it lends her book an academic quality when she is clearly trying to reach out beyond university walls. I think that general readers do want to read a story, even in the history of science, and if we are to get them to listen to us, we have to provide one.

On a positive note, Fara attacks the traditional positivist story of scientific progress. She seeks to show that science is dependent on the society that hosts it rather than the individual genius of the ‘great scientists’. The book’s title promises us 4,000 years and, sure enough, we get the Babylonians from about 2000BC, ancient Greeks and then quite a big gap. But as a specialist in medieval science, I’m going to find any treatment of the Middle Ages in a general history of science to be inadequate (with the sole exception of the textbook Science and Technology in World History).

One thing did catch my eye. In her acknowledgements, Fara mentions a symposium back in 1991 devoted to the Big Picture in the history of science. The idea of the symposium was to try to rein back the increased level of specialisation in the field. In this respect it failed, but it did give birth to some classic papers and, eventually, Fara’s new book.

One of the papers (they were collected in a special issue of the British Journal for the History of Science in 1993) was presented by Andrew Cunningham who advised me at Cambridge for my PhD. It was called ‘Decentring the Big Picture’ and argued that the scientific revolution did not happen in the seventeenth century as commonly supposed. Instead, Cunningham claimed that modern science was born in the nineteenth century. I name-checked him in the conclusion of God’s Philosophers because I find his ideas very convincing. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say they form an important part of my own thinking. It still seems surprising that the same symposium should crop up in two history of science books released in the same summer seventeen years later. Sadly, I would suggest part of the reason is that the field has not moved on all that far since then.

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Have we acquired 250 years too much prehistory?

Is it possible that 250 extra years have accidentally been inserted into the conventional chronology for the years around 1000BC? This idea has been around for a while but I have only just got around to reading Centuries of Darkness by Peter Jones et al (now out of print). This book gives the most rigorous defence of the idea. You can get a good idea of his ideas from his website.

I should say at the outset that I’m not very convinced, but before explaining why, let me run through Jones’s thesis. The absolute dates applied to almost all archaeological findings prior to 700BC are ultimately derived from the sequence of Egyptian pharaohs and their regal years. During the period between about 750BC and 1250BC, Egypt was a bit of a mess with more than one pharaoh ruling at once. This makes it harder to assign exact dates to them all. Jones believes that the pharaohs who we think ruled in about 1250BC were actually reigning in about 1000BC. Now, when you find a scarab of Ramses II in an archaeological stratum, it means you should date the stratum near to the reign of Ramses II. But if we don’t know when he reigned, we don’t know the absolute date of the stratum either. All we have is a relative sequence that can be stretched, contracted, raised or lowered as we see fit. So the challenge is fixing absolute dates to nail down the relative chronology.

Jones’s schema has a number of advantages. The most important is that there was a ‘dark age’ between about 1250BC and 750BC during which archaeological remains are very slight compared to the previous and subsequent periods. We have no good explanation for this dark age except the traditional theory of invasions by Dorians and Sea Peoples. The trouble is, the evidence for this is close to nil and we don’t even know who the Sea Peoples were. The dark age extends right the way across the Mediterranean basin. And of course, you know what I think about labelling periods as dark ages!

Another advantage is that Jones’s revised chronology aligns much better with the Old Testament than the conventional chronology. Apart from the minimalists, most historians continue to treat David and Solomon as historical for good reasons, but we have difficulty placing them in the extant remains.

The final advantage is that the Jones chronology explains how the Hittites contrived to disappear in one place and reappear somewhere else two hundred years later. These neo-Hittites are a difficult anomaly for archaeologists.

The revised chronology has been kicked around for years (Jones and his team first published their theory back in 1992). David Rohl, whose books I have not read, has given alternative chronologies a bad name by some wacky theories and pot-boiling bestsellers. But Centuries of Darkness, although an excellent and informative read recommended strongly on this ground alone, is a much more scholarly and sober proposition than Rohl.

Ultimately, though, I’m unconvinced. And to Jones’s great credit he lays out the problems with his theory very clearly. You see, we not only have lists of Egyptian pharaohs, we also have contemporaneous lists of Assyrian kings. It seems quite plausible that one list is largely wrong. But the Assyrian evidence, while not watertight, is very hard to explain away (although Jones tries). Ultimately, I was left with the impression that while each bit of evidence for the conventional chronology can be questioned, the scheme as a whole hangs together quite well.

That is not to say that matters are entirely clear cut. A few anomalous carbon 14 samples or tree ring analyses might just open a real can of worms. For the sake of seeing egg liberally splashed over the faces of very many professors of archaeology, let’s hope so.

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God's Philosophers Nears Publication

I am really excited about the upcoming publication of my book God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science. I have just sent the final corrected draft back to Icon’s excellent editor Sarah. Her comments on and changes to my initial effort have massively improved it as well as making it read more consistently. She will put through my last few corrections and send the draft for proofreading and typesetting. Once the book is typeset, it can be indexed and then dispatched for the production of proof copies. These should be out in early June for final checking before the printing of the book itself takes place in July. The release date is 6th August.

Meanwhile, the distributors have been taking orders from bookshops and fixing up promotions. As you can see, we have a new cover that uses a wonderful image of God designing the universe with a pair of compasses. This should appear on Amazon and elsewhere soon. The manuscript illumination comes from the front of a thirteenth century French bible now in the Austrian National Library. It is an excellent illustration of how medieval thinkers imaged God as a rational architect of the universe who used the tools of geometry and mathematics. We are also finalising the pictures and photographs to go inside the book. These will be in-text as I prefer rather than in a separate plates section. I have personally always found the plates in the middle a bit annoying – I want the pictures near the text they refer to.

We are now thinking about marketing and getting the book reviewed in as many places as possible. There will also be an event in London celebrating the launch. If any regular readers would like to come along, please drop me an email and I’ll see what I can do.

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Jesus and Galileo

I just re-acquainted myself with a quote from the Jesus Seminar's book The Five Gospels. In order to defend their rejection of the supernatural, they appeal to the conflict myth. It reminds me of Rudolf Bultmann's famous quote, "It is impossible to use electrical light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles." The Jesus Seminar makes the same point by appealing specifically to geocentrism and Galileo.

The contemporary religious controversy, epitomized in the Scopes trial and the continuing clamor for creationism as a viable alternative to the theory of evolution, turns on whether the worldview reflected in the Bible can be carried forward into this scientific age and retained as an article of faith. Jesus figures prominently in this debate. The Christ of creed and dogma, who had been firmly in place in the Middle Ages, can no longer command the assent of those who have seen the heavens through Galileo’s telescope. The old deities and demons were swept from the skies by that remarkable glass. Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo have dismantled the mythological abodes of the gods and Satan, and bequeathed us secular heavens.

So their understanding of the New Testament presupposes a discarded and demonstrably false theory of the history of science. Someone should tell them to stop focusing so much on Galileo's telescope and look through Hubble's telescope. If they did, they might discover that the universe is expanding outward after having sprung into being, which in turn suggests that something "outside" the universe brought it into existence. That wouldn't fit the narrative of a "secular heavens" though.

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)


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The Demiurge and the Prime Mover

Let me tell you then why the creator made this world of generation. He was good, and the good can never have any jealousy of anything. And being free from jealousy, he desired that all things should be as like himself as they could be. This is in the truest sense the origin of creation and of the world....we may say that the world became a living creature truly endowed with soul and intelligence by the providence of God.

God created man in his own image, the book of Genesis informs us; but it seems to me man has spent much of the last 3,000 years creating God in his own image. For the sternly rational philosopher, God must also be sternly rational and fit neatly inside his philosophical system. One sees this in the God of Spinoza who might be termed the Naomi Campbell of deities; beautiful and mysterious but also aloof, strangely malevolent and utterly lacking in personality. This picture is very close to that of the early religions in Ancient Greece. Here the issue of God was central right from the beginning but the early religions had nothing like a creator or a protector of the Jewish sort. Instead their deity was the ultimate absentee parent who sires his progeny in a rather convoluted and roundabout way before sitting back and watching on with magnificent indifference.

The pre Socratic philosophers approached this issue by asking the oldest of Greek philosophical questions, ‘how did it all come to be?’. The idea which emerged most prominently was that that in the beginning there had been a single kind of stuff (e.g water) from which things were fashioned. Some argued that one could discern from looking at the world that there had been a fashioner of some sort, not a personal being but some kind of remote deity. One reaction against this came from the atomists who supposed an eternal universe in which things had been able to come together by chance from simple corpuscles; a view that would later become Christianised by Gassendi and Descartes and appeared as the mechanical philosophy in which the corpuscles take their orders from God.

Two views were to have an enormous influence in later ages. The first of them came from Plato who looked at the universe around him and saw a world which was intelligible. The intelligibility was somewhat limited and the kind which struck him most was that of mathematics. The fact that configurations of mathematics could establish themselves in the world led him to formulate his idea of forms. The interesting move which he made was to assume that if something is intelligible to mind, it must be the product of mind. The forms which particularly interested him were mathematical and biological and he then set about the task of asking how they are realised.
Plato’s answer to this is that there must be a crafts worker, the demiurge, who has managed to impart form on the world around us. This work is good, it has intelligence and it is as perfect as possible in that light. The demiurge, Plato speculated, has fashioned the universe, imparting form in a way we can perceive. The intelligibility is therefore related to the imparting of a soul to the universe. It’s important to note that the demiurge doesn’t make the matter, he is presented with it and has to work with it the best that he can. Plato writes:

‘Taking thought, therefore, he found that, among things that are by nature visible, no work that is without intelligence will ever be better than one that has intelligence..and moreover that intelligence cannot be present in anything apart from soul. In virtue of this reasoning, when he framed the universe, he fashioned reason within soul and fashioned soul within body, to the end that the work he accomplished might be by nature as excellent and as perfect as possible. This, then, in keeping with our likely account, is how we must say divine providence brought our world into being as a truly living thing, endowed with soul and intelligence’

As Plato looked at the world however, he realised that it was in many way imperfect. The world of sense is changing, and yet the perfect forms he envisaged forms are supposed to be unchanging. Plato therefore supposed that when the Demiurge made the world he put it on a receptacle, but this was not of the God's making. What’s worse, the receptacle has a tendency to resist form; it is like a shifting surface on which form cannot be realised. There is therefore an original source of resistance in the world itself which makes it incapable of acceptance. The sense world itself is like images on the wall of a cave. We have to perceive the best we can with the sense world and find the original perfect forms. In other words, as it was later put, we can see but only ‘through a glass, darkly’.

Therefore in Plato, we have a God, but a remote non-personal one who doesn’t care too much about human kind, presumably having better things to do with his time.

In contrast to Plato, Aristotle had a strong divergence with his teacher and he certainly moved strongly away from him on a great many things. Aristotle also has the notion of form, but unlike the Platonic forms, his are at home in the world and fully realised in its particular place. If you have a sea urchin, for example, it is fully realising some kind of form by the activity of that nature. Change for Aristotle is therefore not a sign of corruption, it is the activity of nature. Each form therefore inhabits a matter with many roles. There can be defects, or ‘chance’, but this is because of the environment. An acorn can turn into a tree, but it can also be eaten by a pig. Therefore the wider world can qualify to thwart the forms.

At the centre of Aristotle’s physics is motion, whatever is in motion is moved by something other than itself. This idea would go on to have a long history, ending thankfully in defeat because it is extremely complicated and difficult to follow; not to mention a little long winded. Aristotle’s long chain of movement requires a constant source of motion which itself requires a cause. Or, as Aristotle succinctly puts it:

‘ [I] have established the fact that everything that is in motion is moved by something, and that the mover is either unmoved or in motion, and that if it is in motion, it is moved at each stage either by itself or by something else; and so we proceeded to the position that of things that are moved, the principle of all things that are in motion is that which moves itself and the principle of the whole series is the unmoved..we now have a series that must come to an end and a point will be reached at which motion is imparted by something that is unmoved.’

As Aristotle traced this motion upwards he followed it to the planets and the fixed stars, and finally to the prime mover itself. This is a complex view with critical problems, but what is important is the only way a God appears is by the activity of the first mover, a necessary being who causes movement by being the object of love and desire.

The deity has no personal relationship with nature, he simply bestows motion. In fact the prime mover strikes me as somewhat narcissistic since, according to Aristotle, it lives the fullest life by thinking of itself as the most worthy object of thought. God only thinks about himself because nothing else is a fit subject. Thus God only knows himself and remains eternally unaware of our existence and the physical world in which we exist. He affects the universe only through the desire for its unattainable perfection it inspires. ‘We may say therefore’, Aristotle concluded, ‘that God is a living being, eternal, most good, so that life and duration continuous and eternal belong to God’. It is assumed that ‘the things nearest the mover are those whose motion is quickest, and in this case it is the motion of the circumference that is the quickest, therefore the mover occupies the circumference.’

Aristotle also makes his universe eternal, provides natures that fit well together, and a cosmic order that is always safeguarded. This order, which causes all the motion and change in the universe, consists of the four causes:

a.) The material cause: the stuff out of which a thing is made (cheap plastic is the material cause of this keyboard);

b.) The formal cause: the pattern, model, or structure upon which a thing is made (the formal cause of me is "Humphrey-shaped");

c.) The efficient cause: the means or agency by which a thing comes into existence (Humphrey is the efficient - some might say the highly inefficient - cause of this blog post);

d.) The final (in Greek, telos ) cause: the goal or purpose of a thing, its function or potential (holding coffee is the final cause of a coffee mug, the final cause of me is presumably to bring the coffee mug to my wife so she can get out bed in the morning).

The idea of telos is the end to which nature tends. When stones are taken from their place they tend to fall back again because there is a natural place to which they return. Natural things will tend to act for the good of their kind. The telos should not be interpreted as a purpose, nor a conscious seeking. Instead the order in the universe will act to restore the place of stones. Each creature is therefore fitted to the niche in which it lives. Their structure and behaviours serves the purpose of that kind and so there is an end relatedness.

These then were the two major views which would come to be incorporated into Christian thought. Both are still relevant today, although ironically it is the atomists who have the upper hand. We are still presented with a set of contingent objects which, to some, might be suggestive of a prime mover or final cause. Science remains haunted by the vision of Plato’s cave, the idea that beneath the world of everyday sense experiences lies the true realm of beauty and order. Thankfully the long discourses on motion have fallen by the wayside.

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Urbanus Magnus – The Civilised Man

'Coram magnificos manifeste scalpere nolis Torquendo digitos nares (1312-1313)

In front of grandees, do not openly excavate your nostril by twisting your fingers'

Daniel of Beccles

As prosperity grew in12th century England there was a renewed focus on etiquette and manners. This was a time of cultural renewal which was based on classical models. Along with the elaboration of monastic rules of behaviour (‘customaries’) and the development of ‘household ordinances and serving manuals’, there also appeared a series of Anglo-Latin courtesy poems which gave advice to young men on appropriate aristocratic and Christian behaviour.

One of these ‘books of manners’ was a 3,000 line work called ‘Urbanus Magnus’. This was written by a Danielis Becclesiensis,(today translated as Daniel of Beccles) and was intended to advise men and boys on how to improve their status in a rapidly changing society. Daniel was described by the Tudor chronicler John Bale as having been in the household of King Henry II for over 30 years. His poem covers such subjects as hierarchy, table manners and sex, with a dizzying array of jumps between topics.

The elegy begins:

To be adorned with morals and manners, if you desire, reader, to be venerated, to be noble among lords and lead a civilized life, to be a provident overseer in administering your own property, read and re-read often and keep for ever in your mind these verses which I have decided to write, clad in the lightness of common language, for boy-clerks.

Daniel’s advice starts with a man’s duty to God. He should obey the law and the Commandments; he should be wary of vices and pursue virtues. He should endeavour to perform pious works, love learning and behave in church. He should think of the inevitability of death, the joys of Heaven and the terrors of Hell.

Sex, Marriage and Children

On sexual practice Daniel of Beccles gives detailed advice and displays a somewhat misogynistic attitude towards women. The civilised man, Daniel opines, should not have sex with holy women, his godmothers or relatives; he should flee from masturbators and those who have sex with animals and boys. As a young lad he should not practice homosexuality:

‘as a boy, don’t become another foul Ganymede the boy who slipped filthily, grown old savours filth’.

He also gives somewhat cheerless advice on visiting prostitutes:

‘If you are overcome with erotic desire when you are young and your penis drives you to go to a prostitute, do not go to a common whore; empty your testicles quickly and depart quickly.’

As the poem develops we can see Daniel re-working the Graeco-Roman anti-feminist tradition in warning the reader against lascivious wives and lustful women. Here he may have taken inspiration from the works of Juvenal. One scene of the poem describes a woman lying in bed with her husband, with her thoughts on to her secret lover:

‘The lascivious woman throws herself around the neck of her lover, her fingers give him those secret touches that she denies to her husband in bed; one wicked act with her lover pleases the lascivious adulteress more than a hundred with her husband; women's minds always burn for the forbidden’

Like many of his contemporaries Daniel of Beccles appears convinced that women are naturally sexually voracious. In his words

‘when tempted by sweet words, even a chaste, good, dutiful, devout and kindly woman will resist scarcely anyone’.

He says she is always ready to fornicate "with a cook or a half-wit, a peasant or a ploughman, or a chaplain... what she longs for is a thick, leaping, robust piece of equipment, long, smooth and stiff... such are the things that charm and delight women".

Despite this he says "Whatever your wife does, do not damage your marriage" and he goes on to say "if you are am cuckold, do not whisper a word about it... when you are a cuckold, learn to look up at the ceiling."

He also offers a piece of timeless wisdom when he says:

When there is something you do not want people to know, do not let your wife know it.

Daniel also expertly details how to avoid an awkward and embarrassing situation; a sexual proposition from the lady of the house:

If the wife of your lord turns her eyes on you too often and wantonly looses shameful fires against you, letting you know that she wants to have intercourse with you; if she says, “The whole household and your lord, my husband, shall serve you for ever, you alone shall be my darling, you shall rule everything, everything which belongs to you lord shall be open to you”... consult me, my son; what I counsel is planted in your heart; between two evils, choose the lesser evil; your safer plan is to feign illness, nerve-racking diseases, to go away sensibly and prudently.

Daniel then ends this topic with the subject of children, on whom he seems none too keen:

They cover their clothes with ashes, they make them dirty, they dribble on them; they wipe their noses flowing with filth on their sleeves.

He advises keeping them out of sight when guests are around.

The Household

In the poem Daniel is very concerned with social hierarchy, how one should behave towards ones lord and patron and the way in which you should conduct youself in the household. The first few lines deal with the use of animals:

Let not a brute beast be stabled in the hall, let not a pig or a cat be seen in it; the animals which can be seen in it are the charger and the palfrey, hounds entered to hare, mastiff pups, hawks, sparrow-hawks, falcons and merlins.

Daniel then turns to the stabling of horses in the hallway:

When you are about to leave, let your cob be at the door. Do not mount him in the hall.

All dealings with the Lord of the Manor are covered by Daniel, including how you should conduct yourself when he goes to the privy.

“… Eventually, it would be time for the inferior to wait on the lord as he went to bed.... When he sits on the privy in the usual way, take in your hands hay or straw, pick up two bigs wads of hay in your fingers and press them well together. You should prepare to give them to your patron when he wants them. Let the wads be given to him as you stand, not bending the knee. If two together are sitting on a privy, one should not get up while the other is emptying himself."

When the Lord goes to bed, Daniel advises that:

If you are acting as a servant, stand by the bedside; cover your lord’s naked body

Eating and Table Manners

Table manners is another preoccupation of Daniel, in particular the exercise of decorum and delicacy in front of your superiors and guests. Daniel begins

If a fat morsel lies in the dish in front of your companion, do not touch it with your finger, for fear that fingers will be pointed at you as a boor....When your fellow drains his cups, cease eating. Beware of shouting ‘Wassail’ unless you are bidden to do so. While food is visible in your mouth, let your mouth savour no drink; while food is hidden in your mouth, let your tongue not minister to words. The morsel placed in an eater’s mouth should not be so big that he cannot speak properly if he needs to do so. Beware of drinking wine greedily like Bacchus….Sitting at table as a guest, you should not put your elbows on the table. You can put your elbows on your own table but not on someone else’s

Daniel then says that you should not talk with your mouth full of food ('While food is hidden in your mouth, let your tongue not minister to words') and advises against the theft of cutlery:

Spoons which are used for eating do not become your property.

Among his principle concerns is what comes out of the body, as well as what goes into it. He advises:

Do not be a nose-blower at dinner nor a spitter; if a cough attacks you defeat the cough...If you want to belch, be mindful to look at the ceiling.… Do not say ‘Drink first’ when the butler offers you drink. If he says ‘Wassail (Weisheil)’, let your response be ‘Drink hail (Drincheil)’. But if by chance you have a girl as butler, you may properly say ‘Drink first to me, taking an equal share’

According to Daniel only the host himself can urinate in the hall after dinner. The rest, it is clear, should go outside. A man who defecates should find a hidden place in a wood or field and face into the wind. He should then use his left hand to wipe himself. Daniel then adds that it is shameful to attack an enemy who was in this position (‘Do not attack your enemy while he is squatting to defecate’). It was generally wrong to fart indoors.

Daniel also advises doing certain bodily activities in private:

Do not hunt for fleas on your arms or bosom in front of the patron or in front of the servants in the hall....In front of grandees, do not openly evacuate your nostril by twisting your fingers

The book finally ends by attributing the teachings to ‘old king Henry’ and asking for blessings on the author.

Old Henry first taught people lacking style
These courtly lessons set forth in this book
Here ends the ‘Book of the Urbane Man’ by Daniel of Beccles
Now Strike the Sail! And may God that blesses
Elisha give to Daniel heavenly rest

Although perhaps a little dated, much of Daniel’s advice is applicable today. I would especially advise against stabling a horse in your host’s hallway and defecating in it after dinner; find a nice spot in the woods instead.

Further Reading

Please see this 'Urbanus Magnus' article by A.D Frith on my Dad's local history site
The Beccles and District Museum

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