In transcribing texts, ȝ has been typed as ‘y’; þ as ‘th’; and, ß as ‘s’. However, in How the Good Wife Taught her Daughter, ȝ more often stands for ‘th’ or ‘gh’ (and may be the result of occasional corruptions in the manuscript from þ).

In Caxton's editions, the final flourish on some words (signalling ‘e’) has been left off.

Expanded letters appear in square brackets.

A young boy sits alone reading a courtesy poem, or sits with his peers hearing it read aloud by an older male of the household. He reads, or hears, that he must show courtesy if he wishes to be considered a gentleman, possibly that he must even be of royal blood truly to appreciate the lessons he is about to discover in these pages of manuscript. He will walk with his lord in the great hall of an elite household estate, he will show care when he eats and he will not stare or gawp at those he meets in the household.

What did a young boy make of this? According to the poems, he was already a young man occupying a high status position in an elite household, serving the lord in a highly ritualised, personal and, above all, elite role. This may well have been true. The motif of youthful service, and particularly in what manner young boys were to serve courteously in households, reflected the organisational structure of the establishments of the nobility which, in the thirteenth century, could be as much as ninety per cent male. Some of these households did in fact own courtesy books; for instance, the duke of Buckingham's household purchased courtesy books, primers and grammars at the beginning of the sixteenth century for the children.

This chapter provides a comparative examination of the earlier and later courtesy material. In particular, there were continuities and discontinuities between the courtesy poems discussed previously and sixteenth-century material. The changes are viewed in the context of shifting household politics and aristocratic power. By 1500 there were only sixty peers remaining in England, a decline from 200 in c. 1250. At the same time, those who were associated, or were attempting to associate themselves, with the gentry were rapidly increasing in number. In the sixteenth century, the pull towards the Tudor royal court instead of individual elite houses changed the role of the elite household and its social and status-driven meaning. As magnates and lords spent more time at the royal court and at Westminster, the need for on-call household staff lessened. This did not stop the nobility from maintaining large and elaborate seats, nor does it suggest that elite socialisation based on courtesy and manners was no longer of interest to people. It continued to be present in these poems. However, elite socialisation was stable only as long as it related to the elite household and where the concerns of public conduct, hospitality and noble hierarchies remained priorities.

The manner in which printed books established new moral and virtuous impulses as part of the rhetoric of upbringing reflects increasing complexity in how courtesy, morality and socialisation were understood in the late fifteenth century. Courtesy manuscripts, while still available and circulating within and around households, were now matched by the London-based distribution of printed books. The extent to which texts from the existing body of English vernacular work were chosen for print and circulated outwards from London's printing trade is evidence that the readership for literature concerned with children's behaviour was changing.

The role of printers in determining reading choices was a development in England's reading culture which was almost entirely new, and from it emerges a different sense of the history of the printed book in relation to scribal activities. William Caxton's productivity at his Westminster workshop extended the reach and breadth of courtesy and instructional literature by manipulating it for the new dynamic printing press. Socialising literature would eventually become an integral part of the printed reading and literary networks in England. Comparing courtesy themes as they appeared in extant manuscripts and those printed by Caxton becomes a way of seeing how early printers developed authority in preserving and altering ideologies in the socialising process.

By the late fifteenth century there was a growing ideal within literature that boys and girls should be subject to moral, virtuous and courteous guidance. Caxton's publications told of young people being ‘fed with virtue’ and ‘removed from vice’. These books defined their responsibilities towards socialising both sexes as the instilling of courteous and virtuous manners. Before this the common theme in courtesy literature for boys had represented socialisation in multi-directional class lines, although it always began with an explicit focus on elite behaviour. Quite distinct differences between poems for boys and those for girls show that there had been a well-developed sense of moral female behaviour prior to this. By the close of the fifteenth century the archetype accentuating moral characteristics was emerging more strongly in material for boys. In the previous chapter Caxton's publications, with their parallel accounts of virtue and sin, were shown as substantially contributing to this development in response to social and political turmoil in England. What, then, of the literature in the century after Caxton, which circulated at a time when disruption to the social and political order was attributable to religious turbulence? Bryson has argued that manners are evidence of changing social strategies. This chapter addresses the nature of sixteenth-century strategies in the light of childhood upbringing, domestic household policy and religious values.

Parents and adults, the State and the Church were obsessively preoccupied with the behaviour and conduct of children in medieval and early modern England. They saw childhood not as a spontaneous and natural time of life, but rather one to be structured, developed and moulded. At the core of their beliefs was the staple that the process of socialisation was necessary to produce a well-behaved child and then eventually a well-adjusted adult who had thoroughly absorbed the current conventions of society and could meet its demands.

This book's chronology, moving from the late medieval to the early modern period, shows this fundamental belief was never shaken. Rather, it was the manner in which socialisation was achieved and perceptions of what was important that were subject to revision and amendment. A shift in expectations is suggested by the evidence rather than radical new approaches to the socialisation of children. Key issues in upbringing, such as obedience, meekness and duty, remained consistent. More compellingly, the evidence examined in this book suggests a cyclical tendency in social norms; courtesy appears to lose ground to morality in the late fifteenth century but is then reinvented in sixteenth-century books. These books reminded people that observable conduct and the appearance of good behaviour still held social value and importance. Schools also continued to emphasise basic courtesy and hygiene while at the same time calling attention to higher moral and religious values.

In 1502–3, Sir John Percyvale's will revealed the manner in which the endowment of the grammar school in Macclesfield, Cheshire, was to have a longterm socialising effect on scholars ‘whose lernyng and bryngyng forth in Conyng and vertue right fewe Techers and scolemaisters been in that Contre whereby many Children for lak of such techyng & draught in conyng fall to Idlenes And so consequently live disolately all their daies’. His sentiments reflect a commonplace desire among pedagogues, moralising adults and parents that the educational curriculum instil social, moral as well as educational skills in young people.

These sentiments are found in educational institutions elsewhere in pre- Reformation England. The almoner of the almonry and grammar school of St Albans, Hertfordshire, perceived his duties as including the promotion of appropriate table manners: ‘He usually also, for the sake of good manners, not because he is obliged to do so, maintains table-cloths and napkins for the boys' and servants' table there.’ The similarity of these rules to the lessons found in courtesy poems reflects the importance of fashioning an environment, and particularly an elite environment, where good manners, refined behaviour and the exclusive trappings of wealth created material differences in the behaviour of young people.