70 A MEDIEVAL CITY

and information also from the pulpit and from
guild and parochial meetings, and from the bell-
man. The only authoritative news he received at
first hand he got by listening to the public reading of
proclamations.

In the Middle Ages educated men who had no
inclination for the life of the Church, monastic or
secular, nor for landed proprietorship, with which
was combined hunting and soldiering, became clerks.
The clerks in the royal sendee helped in the work
of administration of national affairs. Tradesmen's
sons of ability and opportunity succeeded in gaining
good positions in this service. Nobles also employed
clerks.

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 states-
men 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 West-
minster. The first printing press established in
Yprk 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 tinable yet to flourish. Mediaeval
education was humanistic, but the old springs of this