Bringing up well behaved youngsters in the fifteenth century

I came across an article from last year in The Guardian about a British Library project that had digitised books written for children or, in the case the article featured, about raising them with good manners in the fifteenth century. That was what particularly caught my eye. The article highlights a book of manners for the young from about 1480 and can be read at 'Pyke notte thy nostrellys': 15th-century guide on children's manners digitised for first time

This late medieval guide to resting polite children - and hence adults - is another reminder that polite society, and those who aspired to join its ranks, was indeed concerned to be just that, polite. Table manners and such like were deemed important, and a medieval meal was not a free-for-all exercise in gluttony and coarse behaviour. Too often one finds this has not got through to modern popular perception, and, one must admit the fact, it comes as something of a surprise to oneself to see such texts, even if one instinctively knows that such was indeed the social ideal of the past.