“To this place a teacher of grammar coming, by what chance, but I believe it was God’s grace that brought him thither, taught me and other youths, by which others with me attained to higher (paths of life). Wherefore wishing to show my gratitude to our Saviour, and to celebrate the cause of my (success in life), and lest I should seem to be ungrateful and forgetful of God’s benefits and from whence I came, I have determined in the first place to establish there a teacher of grammar to instruct all without charge.” Archbishop Rotheram’s case was not singular. Bishop Latimer, in one of his sermons before Edward VI., gives an account of his early life. “My father,” he says, “was a yeoman, and had no lands of his own; only he had a farm of three or four pounds by the year at the uttermost, and hereupon he tilled so much as kept half a dozen men. He had a walk for a hundred sheep, and my mother milked thirty kine. He was able and did find the king a harness and his horse. I remember that I buckled on his harness when he went to Blackheath field. He kept me to school, or else I had not been able to have preached before the King’s majesty now.” An ordinance of the diocese of Exeter in the synod of Bishop Quevil seems also to suggest that schools of some kind existed in most cities and towns. He had always understood, he says, that the benefice of the “Holy Water bearer” was in the beginning instituted in order to give poor clerks something to help them to school, “that they might become more fit and prepared for higher posts.” In this belief the bishop directs that in all churches, not more than ten miles distant from the schools of the cities and towns of his diocese, the “benefices” of the “Holy Water bearers” should always be held by scholars. Seager’s _Schoole of Virtue_, although written in Queen Mary’s reign, refers, no doubt, to a previous state of things. The author seems to take for granted that attendance at school is a very common, if not the ordinary thing, and that it is in the power of most youths to make their future by study and perseverance. “Experience doth teche, and shewe to the playne That many to honour, by learninge attayne That were of byrthe but simple and bace Such is the goodness of God’s speciale grace. For he that to honour by vertue doth ryse Is doubly happy, and counted more wyse.” The writer then warns the boys he is addressing to behave themselves when leaving school. On their way home they would do well to walk two and two, and “not in heaps, like a swarm of bees.” Another educator, Old Symon, in his “Lesson of Wysedom for all maner chyldryn,” urges diligence and plodding upon his pupils, with a jest as to possible positions to which the student may in time attain. “And lerne as faste as thou can, For our byshop is an old man, And therfor thou must lerne faste If thou wilt be byshop when he is past.”