"In preindustrial England virtually all the actors in this social drama [the rank-ordered society] knew their places and the parts assigned to them. They enacted them in their clothes and deportment, their word and gesture, houses and furnishings, food and drink. Each actor always remained mindful of his relation to his immediate 'superiors' and 'inferiors', and of the ties of patronage and obligation that linked members up and down the social scale."
-- Rudeness
and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America, John F. Kasson, 1990, p. 19.
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