SCHOOLS AND LEARNING BEFORE THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. After the rise of the universities, as we have seen, many Latin secondary schools were founded in western Europe, and a more extensive development of the cathedral and other larger church schools took place. Rashdall (R. 154) thinks that by 1400 the opportunity to attend a Latin grammar school was rather common, an opinion in which Leach and Nohle concur. After the humanistic learning had spread to northern lands these opportunities were increased and improved. In England, for example, some two hundred and fifty Latin grammar schools are known to have been in existence by 1500. In Germany, as we have seen (chapter xi), many such schools were founded before the time of Luther. These offered a form of advanced education, in the language of the educated classes of the time, for those intending to go to the universities to prepare for service in either Church or State, and for teaching. The Church had also for long maintained or exercised control over a number of types of more elementary schools--parish, song, chantry, hospital (chapter VII)--the chief purpose of which was to prepare for certain phases of the church service, or to enter the secondary schools. These schools, too, were taught partly or wholly in Latin. In consequence, while Latin schools came to be rather widely diffused, schools in the vernacular hardly existed outside of a few of the larger commercial cities of the north. Even the burgh and guild schools (p. 205), established in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, were essentially Latin schools. [Illustration: PLATE 6. EDUCATIONAL LEADERS IN PROTESTANT GERMANY (From a painting dated 1543, by Lucas Cranach, a German contemporary of both men, and now in the Uffizi Gallery, at Florence) MARTIN LUTHER (1483-1546) Professor of Theology at Wittenberg PHILIPP MELANCHTHON (1497-1560) Professor of Greek at Wittenberg]