In 1939 Norbert Elias published a book called On the Civilising Process, with a strange and unlikely thesis: that the gradual introduction of courtly manners from eating with a knife and fork and using a handkerchief to not spitting or urinating in public had played a major part in transforming a violent medieval society into a more peaceful modern one.
Counting indictments and comparing them with estimated population levels, historians on the Continent and in England found that murder was much more common in the Middle Ages than it is now and that it dropped precipitously in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.
That the decrease in crime appears to have happened independently of industrialisation or economic growth seemed to suggest that an internal, psychological shift had taken place in attitudes toward crime:
“Both the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation put a lot of emphasis on individual conscience,” says Tom Cohen, a history professor at York University in Toronto. “The conscience becomes the internal gyroscope. There is the growth of introspection — the diary, the novel, the personal essay. Along with the kind of personal self-control that Norbert Elias describes.”
Source: Alexander Stille, Did Knives and Forks Cut Murders?,/I> New York Times, May 3, 2003.
For text http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/03/arts/03MURD.html
For more on Crime http://www.ncpa.org/iss/cri/
FMF Policy Bulletin\13 May 2003
