Since at least the early twelfth century, ‘host’ held its more common association with someone ‘who lodges and entertains another in his house’ or ‘a place of lodging or entertainment’.[1] ‘Host’ was also, until the mid-seventeenth century, a noun used to identify those who, in imitation of Jesus Christ, were ‘victims for sacrifice’.[2] This usage was greatly influenced by the sacramental bread in Christian liturgy, known as the host (a derivative of the Latin hostia, ‘victim’), which symbolizes the body of Christ.[3] Host’ also had the now-archaic meaning of an army or a crowd.[4] English translations of the Bible, for example, included ‘Lord of Hosts’ as one of the names of God, a title based on the Hebrew sabaoth (armies) which referred to the divine army of angels who served to exalt the kingship and power of God.[5] The military meanings of ‘host’ derived from the Latin hostis, a noun used to identify foreign or public enemies.[6] Hostis was also cognate with the Germanic gaztiz, or guest, and gradually became associated with foreigners, strangers, and notions of hospitality.[7] This evolution was influenced by two Latin words: hospes, a word that meant both host and guest, and hospit, a fusion of hostis (stranger, guest) and pet (master, lord). The word ‘hospitality’ thus emerged from the hospit, the master of guests who manages the presence of strangers.[8] The oxymoronic nature of the etymological roots of ‘host’ as a derivative from the dual meanings of hostis, the enemy or the guest/stranger, reveals the ambivalent nature of hospitality as an act or gesture that, to paraphrase Jacques Derrida, defined strangers as friends or enemies.[9] As the provider of hospitality, the host was someone who invited or rejected strangers, possessing the power to impose limits on their presence. The thin line between hospitality and hostility towards strangers tended to be associated with expectations about decorum and customs along national lines, as well as ideas of generosity and magnanimity. Hospitality towards strangers, in other words, often reflected, protected or defined national identities.
In A health to the gentlemanly profession of servingmen (1598), Gervase Markham argued that hospitality ‘is the harbourer of two hopes, prayse, & prayers’.[10] Like many other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century discourses on the topic, Markham’s text presented hospitality as a sign of superiority and excellence in a gentleman’s household. Some years earlier, in 1573, Thomas Tusser associated hospitality to the moral and social reputation of a household: ‘What good to get riches, by breaking of sleepe, / but (having the same) a good house for to keep...Of all other doings, housekeeping is chiefe, / for daily it helpeth, the poore with relief. / The neighbor, the stranger, & all that have need, / which causeth thy doings, the better to speede’.[11] The reference to the ‘stranger’ is telling. Travel did not just involve mobility, but rest, and the figure of the host became an important facilitator in a traveller’s geographical advancement and socio-cultural experience.
These ideas echoed the classical works of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, who argued that generosity and liberality were the quintessential virtues of a good host. In epics such as The Odyssey, too, first translated into English by George Chapman in 1615, hosts played an important role in the fates and fortunes of travellers. Xenia, or hospitality, bound hosts and their guests together in bonds of duty and aid. Aristocrats and wealthy individuals were ethically obliged to be generous to strangers and guests by offering the best that their household could offer. One’s inner nobility was demonstrated by such munificent and liberal behaviour towards visitors. Good hospitality was also a demonstration of piety and devotion. In a Treaty of Christian Beneficence (1600), Robert Allen mentioned that St. Paul in the Epistle to the Hebrews instigated Christians to ‘not be forgetful to lodge strangers’ since the first followers of Christ ‘for a fruit and blessing of their hospitality received Angels into their houses at unawares in steede of men’.[12]
Another important characteristic of a host was trustworthiness. Those who were strangers or guests in unknown places were often unsure of the true intentions of their hosts. While discussing the virtues of charity and wisdom, John Dod, in A plaine and familiar exposition (1608), provided an example of the doubts surrounding hosts: ‘We are not willing to be blindfolded at our meat, nor to eate our supper without a light, especially in strange places where we neither know well the fidelity of our host, nor what dishes are set before us’.[13] In 1615, a pamphlet entitled Certaine wholesome observations and rules fo [sic] inne-keepers, and also for their guests evoked Matthew 25:34-36, advising innkeepers that ‘in serving and loving your guests, remember you do serve and love God, who takes all as done to himself, which for his sake is done to his’.[14] The association between Christian virtue and hospitality allowed William Camden to explain Elizabeth I’s decision to shelter Dutch Protestant refugees as an act of royal and English magnanimity and piety. According to Camden, the queen, compassionate towards this ‘poore miserable people of no note’, believed that ‘she should commit a great inhumanity, and violate the lawes of Hospitality’ had she not extended her sovereign care.[15]
English writers often praised good hospitality as one of the defining characteristics of the English nation in particular. ‘The use and auncient custome of this Realme of England’, wrote the anonymous author of Cyvile and uncyvile life (1579), was that ‘all Noblemen and Gentlemen…from age to age, and from Auncester, to auncesters’ offered their hospitality ‘which got them great love among their Neighbours, relieved many poor wretches, and wrought also diverse other good effects’.[16] Country houses, the author maintained, could ‘be frequented as honourable hostries’.[17] The widely-travelled Fynes Moryson, while comparing the quality of the inns he encountered across Europe, commented that the ‘prodigalitie’ of the Elizabethan and Jacobean elites and ‘the old custom of the English, make our tables plentifully furnished, whereupon other Nations esteem us gluttons and devourers of flesh, yet the English tables are not furnished with many dishes, all for one man's diner, but severally for many mens appetite, and not onely prepared for the family, but for strangers and relief of the poor’.[18] In his Elements of Architecture (1624), a treatise that aimed to introduce in England the architectural styles developed in Italy, Henry Wotton mentioned that ‘the natural hospitality of England’ could make the adoption of some Italianate elements difficult to integrate. In southern Europe, the service rooms, storerooms, and kitchens were usually hidden or located in the basements. In England, Wotton observed, ‘the Buttery must be more visible; and we need perchance for our Ranges, a more spacious and luminous Kitchen’.[19]
That same idea of hospitality as a precious, if elusive, national characteristic was powerful enough to shape a distinct literary genre, the country-house poem. Its earliest example, Geoffrey Whitney’s ‘To Richard Cotton, Esq.’ accompanies Whitney’s Choice of Emblemes (1586). The poem opens with a Latin motto, Patria cuique chara (‘Every man's native land is dear to him’), emphasizing the attraction of this idea for the stranger and the English traveller alike. Whitney praised Robert Cotton's Combermere Abbey as a microcosm of a perfect commonwealth, comparing it to a thriving beehive which tempts wandering bees to return. Later examples include Ben Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’ (1616), Thomas Carew’s ‘To Saxham’ (1640), and Andrew Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’ (1681), where the hospitality of the country house and its host become interchangeable tropes that allow the English interrogate concepts of state and nature.[20]
The English expressed an understanding of other nations’ distinct notions of hospitality. The traveller Jerome Turler published recommendations for those who wished to travel across Europe, warning his readers that ‘towards strangers the Germans are rogue and inhospitable, the Frenchmen gentle, the Spaniards courteous, and the Italians diligent’.[21] Inspired by the success of Thomas Coryate’s travel accounts, the London boatman and poet, John Taylor, travelled to Germany in August 1616 in the hope of publishing an account of his travels between London and Hamburg. Exhausted by the onslaught of new sights and experiences en route, Taylor welcomed the hospitality of the so-called English House of Hamburg, where he found ‘a kind Host, an honest hostess, good company, store of meat, more of drink, a true Tapster, and sweet lodging’.[22]
Yet English reliance on the hospitality of others in their European travels also revealed anxieties over the potential influence that hosts might have on their lodgers. In a deposition by one Jacques Hermishaw against Andrew Smale in 1603, Hermishaw accused Smale of being a Catholic, perhaps a priest, who had spoken treasonous words against King James. Hermishaw reported that when embarking back to England from France, his companion Smale realized he still carried a rosary on his person. Fearful of carrying it into England, Smale desperately asked Hermishaw to bring the beads ‘unto his hosts dwelling at the sign of the Pyne Aple in Callais’.[23] This offers a glimpse into the material world of Catholics travelling into Protestant England, and also into the comfort they must have received when staying with hosts in Catholic countries. Smale ‘desired [Hermishaw] to deliver the said beades to his hoste’, asking that she pray against the plague and for charity for the souls of the dead, which ‘is the manner of all Catholiques when they travayle, or feare any danger’.[24] Months later, authorities reported to Robert Cecil that Hermishaw continued to stand by his accusations, while Smale still denied that his Catholicism had led him to denounce the king as a heretic. Smale admitted only that ‘he desired his hoste should cause certain masses to be said for him at his dep[ar]ture out of France’.[25] The corrupting potential of bad hosts were manifest in the company they kept. The ‘bawdy [h]oste’ William Winston, Paul de la Haye complained, offered ‘sinister counsel’ to his sister.[26] In other cases, hosts served as go-betweens, delivering goods and letters between travellers. ‘[M]y Host sent the Holland cheese’, Thomas Nichols reported in 1596 from London, while Bartholomew Biston reported from Saint-Malo in France to the Earl of Essex in 1598 that his host had safely kept a packet of letters for him.[27]
In spite of the different visions of hospitality instigated by the religious polemic of the seventeenth century, or the growing exposure of English society to European cultural trends through travel, natural law provided a shared perception of hospitality as necessary and good. According to Christopher Wandesford, the ‘Law of Nature’ required individuals to be bonded by a ‘common Rule of Hospitality’ which enforced them ‘to Bounty, and all kinds of fair Treatment of Stranger’.[28] Although hospitality was generally perceived as an essential trait of the English nation, this idea that natural law impelled all individuals to be good hosts or to be inclined to hospitable behaviour influenced English perceptions of foreign societies, especially those beyond Europe and Christendom. By evaluating the hospitality of foreign peoples, one could measure their levels of civility. Sir Thomas Roe, despite his diatribes against Jahangir and his court in Mughal India, praised the hospitality of Mir Jamal-ud-Din Husain, the governor (subahdar) of Patna. Roe, who frequently complained about the little courtesy granted to him at Jahangir’s court, eulogized the subahdar for possessing ‘more understanding and curtesy than all his Countrymen, and to be esteemed hospitable and receiver of strangers’. Mir Jamal-ud-Din Husain received the English ambassador ‘with extraordinary familiarity and kindness’ which included a gift of a ‘leeck [sic] of rupias [sic] and such other Courtesies so great that they beespoke their own refusal’.[29] As Roe told his readers, after his experiences at the Mughal court he ‘resolved’ that Mir Jamal-ud-Din ‘was a good natured and right hearted old man’, words that could be used to describe an English civil, magnanimous, and gentlemanly host.[30]
Hospitality was not only an act of courtesy, piety or generosity, but also a way to establish relations of dependence or establish a difference of power. ‘[A] stranger’, wrote Caleb Dalechamp, ‘must be thankful to his public hoste, that is, to the Prince or Magistrate in whose Dominions he sojourns’.[31] The English agents of the East India Company (EIC) in Japan, for example, used the term ‘host’ to identify the brokers and mediators appointed by the local rulers to monitor and spy their activities. Indeed, the Japanese authorities regarded the English tradesmen as guests who had to follow specific and highly reclusive norms. EIC servants in Japan were usually lodged in buildings supervised by these Japanese gentlemen, and all their contacts with local merchants and other members of the population were uniquely mediated by these ‘hosts’. The need to accept the demands of local authorities led John Sarris to believe that Japan was a ‘place exceedingly peopled, very Civill and courteous’ and inclined to hospitality.[32] While inherent tensions remained in ideas of the ‘host’ as a provider or a victim, and connotations of armies or multitudes remained in literary usage, the activities of company agents expose their dependence on their hosts in many places around the globe. A good host, as Sarris acknowledged, demanded a gracious guest.
