ABSTRACT
This chapter will be concerned with table manners, those sets of codes and conventions, both written and unwritten, which govern the forms of social and physical conduct expected of us when we eat. In Debrett’s Etiquette and Modern Manners, the most prominent text in the British market currently purporting to provide a definitive guide to the codes of etiquette, we find the following aphorism from a fifteenth-century book of manners:
In halle, in chamber, ore where thou gon, Nurtur and good manners makyth man.
