Argues that to see the contrasts between late medieval `courtesy books' and early modern manuals of manners as markers of changing ideals of social conduct in England is an interpretation too narrowly based on works written in English. Examination of Latin and Anglo-Norman literature shows that the ideal of the urbane gentleman can be traced back at least as far as the most comprehensive of all courtesy books, the twelfth-centuryLiber Urbaniof Daniel of Beccles, and was itself underpinned by the commonplace secular morality of the much olderDistichs of Cato.