A great deal of the current misconception of the origin and purpose of these schools may be removed if we reconstruct for ourselves the special ecclesiastical and educational features of the time. Our starting point in this connection must be the Black Death which, as we have shown,[593] caused so great a scarcity of priests and of candidates for the priesthood. William of Wykeham, desiring to give thanks to Almighty God because He had "enriched us, though unworthy, with ample honours and beyond our deserts raised us to divers degrees and dignities,"[594] founded "a perpetual college of seventy poor scholars, clerks, to study theology, canon and civil law and arts in the university of Oxford."[595] In erecting this college, Wykeham was only following the example which was already well established at the universities, since several colleges had previously been established both at Oxford and at Cambridge. Experience soon convinced him that to found a college was one thing; to obtain a supply of students, who were qualified to profit by the proposed course was quite another; especially as, "through default of good teaching and sufficient learning in grammar, (they) often fall into the danger of failing, where they had set before themselves the desire of success."[596] Nor was a lack of knowledge of Latin the only difficulty. A greater obstacle was the poverty of the prospective student of the period. Wykeham refers to this, "There are and will be, hereafter, many poor scholars suffering from want of money and poverty, whose means barely suffice or will suffice in the future to allow them to continue and profit in the aforesaid art of Grammar." Neither was this poverty a relative poverty, a mere "facon de parler," as some would maintain. The university itself was poor, and had scarcely any funds available for general purposes.[597] "The university students of the Middle Ages were drawn from every class of society, excluding probably as a rule the very lowest, though not excluding the very poorest."[598] We also note that poor students received from the chancellor a licence to beg.[599] The writer of _Piers Plowman_ illustrates the contemporary opinion of the social standing of many of those who proceeded to the priesthood. "Now might each sowter his son setten to schole, And each beggar's brat in the book learne, And worth to a writer and with a lorde dwell, Or falsely to a frere the fiend for to serven, So of that beggar's brat a Bishop that worthen, Among the peers of the land presse to sythen; And lordes sons lowly to the lorde's loute, Knyghtes crooked hem to, and coucheth ful lowe, And his sire a sowtor y-soiled with grees, His teeth with toyling of lether battered as a sawe."