How to get on in Society in Angevin England

Medievalists. net has an interesting piece about the Book of the Civilised Man by Daniel of Beccles. This is linked to the publication of a new translation of the text.

Dated to about 1200 this 3000 line poem is the first ( or first to survive ) of what later centuries were to know by the later middle ages as Books of Courtesy. The suggestion is that Daniel, of whom very little is known as an individual, was writing in response to the changing society of the twelfth century. This may be true, but the significant shift and emergence of “new men”  had happened a century or so earlier, as indeed had the “rise of the individual”, if that argument is accepted. So Daniel, who is apparently citing the norms he had seen in the court of King Henry II, but says in his conclusion that “Old King Henry first gave to the uncourtly the teaching written in this book”. I am inclined to see that as referring to King Henry I, whose reign did, in the view of Sir Richard Southern, see the rise of the “new men”. So I think Daniel would not been writing to deal not to deal with a whole generation but with those who were individually new to polite society- or indeed Society - and restating the obvious and accepted for an ever more complex social world.

The article from Medievalist. net is illustrated with a selection of quotations, which challenge both the behaviour of the original readership, and the modern mindset that sees everything medieval as scruffy and dirt. It can be seen at Medieval Life Hacks: Hygiene and Manners from the 12th Century

Wikipedia has an article about the poem at Book of the Civilized Man

This article has a useful bibliography to help place the text in its historical context. It also brings out in its quotations from the text of the poem what today might be termed the distinctly robust ideas of the author, who would also certainly fall foul of modern attitudes to perceived mysogyny, and his text denounced no doubt as a “hate crime’

That apart what really is hateful and uncivilised is that the publishers of the new translation are asking £135 for a 198 page book. Even more shocking this is not one of the uber expensive Benelux firms but Routledge here in the UK. So how are the ‘untrained boy-clerks’ , or their modern equivalents, that Daniel of Beccles wrote for to afford that?