The decay of the London schools and of learning in general, which undoubtedly began in the fifteenth century and continued until far into the following century, is difficult to understand. One can only form theories and make guesses. The fact cannot be disputed. There were forces at work which have not been recorded. The Lollardry of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries seems to have been in great measure forgotten. Yet, as I have pointed out and proved, the custom of making bequests to the Religious Houses declined and decayed until it quite died away, long before the Reformation. The old spirit of revolt left behind it a steady and persistent and growing spirit of dissatisfaction. Perhaps this spirit was shown in the decay of the monastic schools. We have seen how, in 1477, four of the London clergy asked, and obtained, permission to found additional schools in four parishes. The new schools could do little; the Reformation accelerated the decay of learning partly by the abolition of the monastic schools; partly by the vast reduction in the number of ecclesiastics; partly by the loss of the endowments by which learning had been encouraged and maintained: an increased trade, with foreign enterprise, also attracted the younger men in numbers continually increasing. So few were the undergraduates of Oxford that in Queen Mary’s reign only three took a degree in Divinity during the space of six years; in Civil Law only eleven; in Physic six; in Arts an average of about twenty-three. Anthony à Wood writes: “There were none that had any heart to put their children to any school, any farther than to learn to write—to make them Apprentices or Lawyers.” [Illustration: _Spooner & Co._ HOLBEIN (1497–1543) From the portrait by himself at Hampton Court.] I would enumerate among the causes of the general decay in learning: (1) the unsettled nature of religious opinions; (2) the changed ideas concerning education; (3) the destruction of the Houses, which, if they turned out few scholars, offered a quiet home for the studious; (4) the advance in trade and enterprise, which attracted the youth of London far more than study; (5) the contempt into which the mass of the Protestant clergy had fallen; (6) a feeling of uneasiness about scholarship, lest it should bring one to the stake, of which there had been presented many terrifying examples.