Wassail, drinchail et savoir-vivre, ou la disqualification culturelle d’une élite

Abstract

In the writings of Norman and Anglo-Norman authors of the twelfth century, the pre-Conquest English aristocracy are often depicted as boisterous drunkards, and their table manners are pictured as unfit for a civilized people. On the other hand, the study of late Anglo-Saxon sociability practices shows that nobles’ table manners were more similar than not on both sides of the Channel. This article argues that Anglo Norman clerical authors, moralists first and foremost, built such an image of the pre-Conquest English in order to stigmatise the vices of their own times: first those of the common people, who still practiced cries and gestures most certainly rooted in ancient drinking customs, and those of the Anglo-Norman aristocracy, whose manners they found unacceptable. A good way of condemning those manners was thus to attribute them to “the English”, that is to a former ruling class that had been displaced and scorned by the ancestors of those very aristocrats they were trying to reform.