The practice of introducing into the body of the clergy even those sprung from the lower ranks of life was not altogether popular, and the author of _The Vision of Piers Plowman_ has left a record of the existing prejudice on the subject. He thinks that “bondmen and beggars’ children belong to labour, and should serve lords’ sons,” and that things are much amiss when every cobbler sends “his son to schole” and “each beggar’s brat” learns his book, “so that beggar’s brat a Bishop that worthen among the peers of the land prese to sytten ... and his sire a sowter (cobbler) y-soiled with grees, his teeth with toyling of leather battered as a saw.” In 1406 the more liberal spirit of encouraging learning wherever it was found to exist asserted itself, and by a statute of the English Parliament of that date it was enacted that “every man or woman, of what state or condition he be, shall be free to set their son or daughter to take learning at any school that pleaseth them within the realm.” That such schools existed in the past in greater numbers than has been thought likely does not now appear open to doubt. Besides the teaching to be obtained at the cathedrals, religious houses, and well-known grammar schools, the foundations of education were furnished by numerous other smaller places, taught by priests up and down the country. This is proved by the numbers of students who came up to the Universities for their higher work at the age of fourteen or so, after they had been prepared elsewhere, and the numbers of whom fell off almost to a vanishing point on the destruction of the religious houses, and the demolition of the smaller schools, under cover of the Act for dissolving Chantries, etc. In the Chantry certificates mention is made of numerous parochial schools taught by priests, who also served the parish in other ways, or by clerks supported by money left for the purpose of giving free education. These proofs appear on the face of the certificates, in order that a plea might be made for their exemption from the operation of the general dissolution of chantries and guilds; it is needless to add that the plea had no effect. In some places, too, as for example at Morpeth and Alnwick and Durham, a second school of music, called the “song school,” was kept. At the latter place a chantry was founded in the cathedral for two priests “to pray and to keep free schools, one of grammar and one of song, in the city of Durham, for all manner of children that should repair to the said schools, and also to distribute yearly alms to poor people.” At Lavenham, in Suffolk, a priest was paid by the parish to “teach the children of the town” and to act as “secondary” to the curate. By the will of Archbishop Rotheram, in 1500, the foundation of a college in his native place was laid. In this will the archbishop, after saying that he had been born at Rotheram, gives an interesting biographical note about his early years--