Altogether there seems to have been in the fifteenth century good provision for higher education.  The people of the Middle Ages were not illiterate.  The outstanding age of illiteracy (not to mention a host of other evils) in England was the age that began with the Industrial Revolution, when statesmen failed to make the public services keep pace with the rapidly increasing population and the rapid development of new conditions.  That there was as large a public ready and eager to buy the books that printing from type made possible has been regarded as a disproof of general illiteracy.  The books were published in the vernacular:  the people read them.  It was in 1476 that Caxton set up his press at Westminster.  The first printing press established in York was set up in 1509.

Nevertheless the general state of education and scholarship in England in the fifteenth century was at a low level, mainly owing to lack of enthusiasm and to the limited subjects of study.  Natural science was unable yet to flourish.  Mediaeval education was humanistic, but the old springs of this form of study were nearly dried up.  The Greek classics were entirely lost.  Even the few Latin classics that the mediaevals possessed, they did not understand aright.  To Virgil’s AEneid they gave a Christian interpretation!  Grammar was the basis of study, which dealt mainly with such works as those of Cicero, Virgil, Boethius.

The fifteenth century, the last century of an age, was a backwater in education as in literature.  The great revival was to come.  The fifteenth century was indeed a century of revolution in so far as under the almost placid surface of continuity and conformity, there were forces of revolt at work, probing, accumulating knowledge and experience, perhaps unconsciously, for the day of liberation and change.  The Bible was not yet popularly available.  Wiclif had been a pioneer in the work of translation and publication, but Tyndale and Coverdale in the sixteenth century supplied what he had aimed at doing in the fourteenth.  The fifteenth century was the quiet dark hour before the dawn.  As Coleridge expressed it:  No sooner had the Revival of learning “sounded through Europe like the blast of an archangel’s trumpet than from king to peasant there arose an enthusiasm for knowledge, the discovery of a manuscript became the subject of an embassy:  Erasmus read by moonlight because he could not afford a torch, and begged a penny, not for the love of charity, but for the love of learning.”  But even then, when the enthusiasm and the will were there, such was the dearth of material for learning that, as in the case of Erasmus, the pioneers had practically nothing to work at but the classical texts and a few meagre vocabularies with etymologies of mediaeval scholarship.  In 1491 Grocyn began to teach Greek at Oxford.  In 1499 Erasmus first visited England.  Referring to his visit to this country in 1505-6 he wrote:  “There are in London five or six men who are thorough masters of both Latin and Greek; even in Italy I doubt that you would find their equals.”  England’s position was, therefore, in this respect a good one.