Advice on conduct had been given for centuries. ‘Social prescriptions concerning cleanliness, sobriety of dress and demeanour, ritual at table, and respectful conduct to superiors’, writes Anna Bryson, ‘were written into monastic Rules’ from the twelfth century. More detailed lists, she adds, survive in vernacular treatises in England from at least the fifteenth century. Treatises such as Urbanitatis (c. 1460) advise their readers to keep themselves ‘Fro spettying & snetyng’ and to ‘Be privy of voydance’ (or discreet when farting). Much of this advice found its way into sixteenth-century Italian treatises, for example, Giovanni della Casa's Galateo. Some sixteenth-century English books of manners are clearly modelled on medieval conduct books, suggesting, as Bryson argues, that there was ‘no sharp chronological break’. Thus, Hugh Rhodes, a Gentleman of the Chapel under Edward VI – and a ‘regular sobersides’ according to his Victorian editor – is the author of the compilation The Boke of Nurture, or Schoole of Good Maners: for Men, Servants, and Children, with Stans puer ad mensam. Its first text is reminiscent of John Russell's Boke of Nurture (c. 1450); it also expands the popular Stans puer ad mensam, attributed to John Lydgate. Rhodes's treatise is of uncertain date; it was probably written as early as 1530, and it was reprinted several times, including in 1577. In it, Rhodes predictably reminds the reader not to scratch his head at the table, not to spit across the table and to ‘Belche thou neare to no mans face/with a corrupt fumosytye’.