Life's Pleasures Quote by Robert Grosseteste

Power, in Grosseteste's world, is something you perform with your body before anyone else performs it for you. Telling a ruler to eat in the hall "before your people" sounds like etiquette, even modesty. It's actually governance: a public meal as a daily referendum on legitimacy.

The phrasing gives away the game. "Constrain yourself" frames visibility as discipline, not vanity. A statesman who can be seen eating calmly signals order, routine, and self-command. Even "as far as possible for sickness or fatigue" is doing political work: the author grants a loophole, then tightens it, implying that absence will be noticed and interpreted. In a court culture where rumor travels faster than policy, not showing up isn't neutral; it's an opening for competitors to narrate your weakness, your indulgence, your fear.

The "benefit and honour" promised isn't spiritual reward so much as social technology. Eating publicly reduces the distance between ruler and ruled while reminding everyone that distance still exists. The hall is a stage: your people witness access to you, but on your terms. It also quietly answers medieval anxieties about hidden excess and hidden poisoning. A public table makes the ruler look accountable and, paradoxically, safer; it crowds out the shadows where conspiracies breed.

Grosseteste, a churchman steeped in moral instruction and administrative reality, is prescribing a politics of presence. The subtext is blunt: if you don't control the spectacle, the spectacle will control you.