the condition of the people, the local theories of trade by which its conduct of business was guided, the popular views of citizenship and government under the influence of which the burghers regulated their civic policy—all these things must be kept in view if we would gain a clear idea of the growth of the borough from within. The way of thinking and acting of the new world of traders and shopkeepers and artizans lives again for us in a wholly new literature which first sprang up in England about the middle of the fifteenth century—in Books of Courtesy and popular rhymes as to the conduct of daily life. The first English manual of etiquette appeared about 1430. Germany had had its book of courtesy more than two hundred years before, a set of rules composed for a distinguished society by equally fastidious writers, one of whom laments that his pen had been made “common” by writing about masters and servants, and explains that it was never happy save in describing knights and ladies. In northern Italy a similar book drawn up in the thirteenth century had taken a very different character. There the merchants and shopkeepers of the towns, impatient of “new ceremonies” brought in from over the mountains which they deemed contrary to all the traditions of the traders of Lucca and Florence and only fit for the degenerate Neapolitans, framed rules to suit their own needs and aspirations. The French followed rather later, at the end of the fourteenth century; and then last of all came the English experiment.[3]