In some of its forms the student manual touches on territory already occupied by another type of mediaeval handbook, the manual of manners, which under such titles as “The Book of Urbanity,” “The Courtesies of the Table,” etc., enjoyed much popularity from the thirteenth century onward. Such manuals have, however, none of the polish of Castiglione’s _Courtier_ or the elaborateness of the modern book of etiquette. Those who have not mastered the use of knife and fork have little use for the finer points of social intercourse, and the readers of the mediaeval manuals were still at their a b c’s in the matter of behavior. Wash your hands in the morning and, if you have time, your face; use your napkin and handkerchief; eat with three fingers, and don’t gorge; don’t be boisterous or quarrelsome at table; don’t stare at your neighbor or his plate; don’t criticise the food; don’t pick your teeth with your knife--such, with others still more elementary, are the maxims which meet us in this period, in Latin and French, in English, German, and Italian, but regularly in verse. Now and then there is a further touch of the age: scrape bones with your knife but don’t gnaw them; when you have done with them, put them in a bowl or on the floor! * * * * * If the correspondence of mediaeval students were preserved for us in casual and unaffected detail, nothing could give a more vivid picture of university conditions. Unfortunately in some respects for us, the Middle Ages were a period of forms and types in letter-writing as in other things; and for most men the writing of a letter was less an expression of individual feeling and experience than it was the laborious copying of a letter of some one else, altered where necessary to suit the new conditions. And if something fresh or individual was produced, there was small chance of preserving it, since it was on that account all the less likely to be useful to a future letter-writer--“so careful of the type, so careless of the single” letter, history seems. The result is that the hundreds of student letters which have reached us in the manuscripts of the Middle Ages have come down through the medium of collections of forms or complete letter-writers, shorn of most of their individuality but for that very reason reflecting the more faithfully the fundamental and universal phases of university life.