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This chapter examines debates about the dangers of fairs. In late-Stuart England, some notable and polite London men fashioned themselves into urban patriarchs. Reform movements, such as societies for reformation of manners, provided middling London reformers incentive to observe the city around them from a moral high ground. From this perspective, London’s fairs seemed dangerous – they threatened social order particularly because they encouraged behaviours contrary to reformers’ own notions of polite masculinity. Middling men had available to them two discourses that motivated their urban reform attempts: religious sermons and tracts and satirical periodical literature. Men who heard sermons or read pamphlets regarding the dangers of vice and public immorality looked around them at London’s post-fire urban landscape in disarray. Sermons calling for religious renewal or cleaning up social ills and avoiding ‘lewd’ behaviour took on a specific meaning as they were preached, printed and disseminated in a city undergoing the constant flux of post-Fire reconstruction. Men who participated in urban reform movements considered London’s fairs disorderly events that threatened their gendered ideals. Becoming ‘Heroick’ Christian informers and policing urban amusements, middling men made themselves essential to the urban environment and propagated a new style of masculinity.

This chapter discusses a prominent secular example of ethical codes, the early modern manuals of civil behaviour made famous by Norbert Elias’s notion of a ‘civilising process’ on the road to modernity. Focusing on early modern England, it describes how the new ideal of civility was taught primarily as a series of printed instructions on how those aspiring to gentility should conduct themselves. These rules were set out as precepts to be rigorously followed, but were not enforced by any authority. Rather they were upheld partly by social pressure and the emotions it triggered (embarrassment, shame, a sense of exclusion), partly by the voluntary actions of individuals who chose these modes of conduct for themselves and for their children. In this pedagogical and aspirational aspect, codes of civility fit well the Foucauldian concept of the care of the self. The growing prominence of civility facilitated a major shift in eighteenth-century English society: the decreasing use of legal means to regulate personal behaviour and an increasing emphasis on internal restraints inculcated through education and self-discipline. Ideas of civility meshed with the disciplinary activities of ecclesiastical and secular courts as they sought to raise standards of personal (especially sexual) morality and restrain behaviour among neighbours, at a time when political and religious divisions were undermining the ecclesiastical courts as agents of everyday social discipline.