On the other hand there arose in the cities a fresh and vigorous life, and from the fourteenth century, the citizens became the best representatives of German cultivation and manners, as once the ecclesiastics had been, and afterwards the nobles. Owing to the close proximity of the dwellings in the city, and the smallness of their houses, the intercourse between man and woman became more strictly defined, and on the whole a practical sound conception of life took the place of chivalrous fancies; citizen habits followed courtly manners; ladies were won by cautious wooing instead of by daring heroic deeds; maidenly modesty attracted more than haughty assumption; instead of the wild knightly life of the nobles, which frequently separated man and wife, and violently severed the marriage tie, the woman now obtained a quiet sway in the well-regulated house, and the bold courtesy of the knight was replaced by a considerate, though strictly regulated and sometimes rather formal, expression of heartfelt esteem. The conception of propriety and purity was different, however, from what it is now. At the time of the Council of Constance, the refined Poggio relates with great satisfaction how at Baden near Zurich, the most fashionable bath of the fifteenth century, he had seen German men and women bathing together, and how delightfully naive their familiarity was. And even a century later Hutten praises this German custom in contradistinction to the Italian morals, which would have made this practice impossible. So tolerant still were the German Humanitarians.