During the fourteenth century and the first half of the fifteenth, the Brothers took an active part in the production and distribution of manuscripts. Their work was distinct in various respects from that which was carried on in monastery or in university towns, but particularly in this that their books were, for the most part, produced in the tongue of the common folk, and their service as instructors and booksellers was probably one of the most important influences in helping to educate the lower classes of North Germany to read and to think for themselves. They thus prepared the way for the work of Luther and Melanchthon. As has been noted in another chapter, the activity of the Brothers in the distribution of literature did not cease when books in manuscripts were replaced by the productions of the printing-press. They made immediate use of the invention of Gutenberg, and in many parts of Germany, the first printed books that were brought before the people came from the printing-presses of the Brothers. Some general system of public schools seems to have taken shape in the larger cities at least of North Germany as early as the first half of the thirteenth century. The teachers in these schools themselves added to their work and to their earnings by transcribing text-books and sometimes works of worship. Later, there came to be some extended interest in certain classes of literature among a few of the princes and noblemen, but this appears to have been much less the case in Germany than in Italy or even than in France. In the castles or palaces where there was a chaplain, the chaplain took upon himself the work of a scribe, caring not only for the correspondence of his patron, but occasionally also preparing manuscripts for the library, so called, of the castle. There is also record of certain _stadtschreiber_, or public scribes, licensed as such in the cities of North Germany, and in some cases the post was held by the instructors of the schools. Ulrich Friese, a citizen of Augsburg, writing in the latter half of the fourteenth century, speaks of attending the Nordlingen Fair with parchment and books. Nordlingen Church was, it appears, used for the purpose of this fair, and in Lübeck, in the Church of S. Mary, booths were opened in which, together with devotional books, school-books and writing materials were offered for sale. In Hamburg also, the courts in the immediate neighbourhood of the churches were the places selected by the earlier booksellers and manuscript-dealers for their trade. In Metz, a book-shop stood immediately in front of the cathedral, and in Vienna, the first book-shop was placed in the court adjoining the cathedral of S. Stephen. Nicolaus, who was possibly the earliest bookseller in Erfurt, had his shop, in 1460, in the court of the Church of the Blessed Virgin.