This essay focuses on the interrelationship of the romances and the conduct poems contained in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 61 (ca. 1500). Drawing on the work of Felicity Riddy, it examines the contrasting ways in which these texts articu- late a particular bourgeois ethos. Tensions that arise from their different approaches to this phenomenon are read as evidence of an attitude towards the matter of good conduct that is at once more searching and more provisional than that which has typically been attributed to the milieu in which Ashmole 61 was copied and read.