Words: Honour

ANNA PASTERNAK, in her naughty little novel about James Hewitt and the Princess of Wales, raised some indignant laughter by describing its hero as 'entrenched in an old-fashioned code of honour'. Kissing and telling is the reverse of honourable. But the real Captain Hewitt's behaviour might not have caused such popular outrage if he hadn't been an officer in the Brigade of Guards. For though honour suggests several things, it still keeps its first meaning, which had as much to do with rank as with anything else.

The medieval Courts of Honour were not set up to see that people behaved decently towards each other. They were there to decide disputed matters of precedence between Sir This and Sir That. 'Respect, esteem or deference paid to, or received by, a person in consideration of his character, worth or position' is how the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica begins its definition of the word; but it was probably the position, rather than the character or worth, that weighed heaviest in the Middle Ages when anyone spoke of honour. And so it can do now, or we should not be so silly as to address all too fallible county court judges as Your Honour, or to feel we have to put 'The Hon' on envelopes addressed to idiot sons of earls.

How had this unctuous word so rapidly acquired its bright associations with probity and fair dealing - how, to quote the Britannica again, had it come to mean a standard of conduct 'laid down not only by a scrupulous sense of what is due to lofty personal character but also by the conventional usages of society'? In more deferent times, this was not a question, position and worth being natural companions (consider the two main meanings of noble). The OED has a passage from Lord George Lyttelton, who in the 1760s wrote of honour as something that 'supposes in gentlemen a stronger abhorrence of perfidy, falsehood and cowardice . . . than are usually found in vulgar (lower-class) minds'. Such pomposity sounds ridiculous, but a little of it sticks.