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 service 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 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. Mediæval 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 mediævals possessed, they did not understand aright. To Virgil's Æneid they gave a Christian interpretation! Grammar was the basis of study, which dealt mainly with such works as those of Cicero, Virgil, Boethius.