Conviviality and charity in medieval and early modern England - response to Judith M. Bennett, Past and Present, no. 134, February 1992

(27) How the Good Wijf Tauzte hir Douztir, a poem of c.1430, in Early English Meals and Manners, ed. F. J. Furnivall (Early Eng. Text Soc., ord. ser., xxxii, London 1931), 11. 168-72, 44. A similar difference can be observed in monastic customs relating to hospitality (at the guest-house, according to status) and almsgiving to the poor (at the gate).

(28) T. Tusser, Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry (Oxford, 1984), 132, 160, 197.

(29) Walter of Henley and Other Treatises, ed. Oschinsky, 310-11, c. 13.

(30) Tusser, Good Husbandry, 19.

(31) Studies on functioning and membership of drinking groups include: N. Dennis, F. Henriques and C. Slaughter, Coal is our Life (London, 1969), on Yorkshire; T. Brass, `Beer Drinking Groups in a Peruvian Agrarian Co-operative', Bull. Latin Amer. Research, vii (1989); L. Magnusson, `Proto-industrialisation, culture et tavernes en Suede (1800-1850)', in Annales E.S.C., xlv (1990-1); M. Douglas and B. Isherwood, The World of Goods (Harmondsworth, 1980); further studies in M. Douglas (ed.), Constructive Drinking: Perspectives on Drink from Anthropology (Paris and Cambridge, 1987). The quote is from Douglas and Isherwood, World of Goods, 169. Their findings on group membership through consumption are confirmed by the thirteenth-century Potatores exquisiti, one of the Carmina Burana, in Medieval Latin Lyrics, ed. H. Waddell (Harmondsworth, 1952), 196: `If anyone happens to be hiding here / who is not interested in strong wine / let him be shown the door / and leave this crowd ...' (si quis latitat hic forte / qui non curat vinum forte / ostendatur ilk porte / exeat ab hac cohorte ...).

(32) M. Mauss, `Essai sur le don', in Sociologie et anthropologic, 4th edn (Paris, 1991), passim; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, iv; for John Chrysostom's sermons, see St John Chrysostom, Commentary on St. John the Apostle, 2 vole., trans. T. A. Goggin (Washington, 1969); C. A. Gregory, `Gifts to Men and Gifts to God: Gift Exchange and Capital Accumulation in Contemporary Papua', Man, new ser., xv (1980-4), applies criteria similar to Aristotelian-patristic ones.

(33) `Charity' also referred to gifts to the clergy, who could, but would not, reciprocate in this world, except in exchanges of presents with kin or between prelates and the aristocracy.

(34) Bennett, `Conviviality and Charity', 33. `Communes potationes quos scotallas mutato nomine caritatis appellant'; `compotationes que ficto caritates vero nomine scot-ales dicuntur': the first is a text attributed to Stephen Langton, in Councils and Synods with Other Documents Relating to the English Church, A.D. 871-1313, ed. D. Whitelock et al., 2 vols. in 4 (Oxford, 1964-81), ii, 560 n. e.; the second is from the Statutes of Wells [1258?], ibid., 604-5.

(35) The word `charity', of course, can be translated as `love', and as such could be used to mean anything, like the Yorkshire `love' nowadays. The semantic muddle may have started with the Vulgate, which simplified the many nuances of the Greek version, but was made worse in the modern versions by further simplifications which mixed up charity as brotherly love (agape or philadelphia) with charity as sharing (kainonia) and charity as doing good (eupoiia).