All this general activity in education goes to prove that the men of the later Middle Ages were not the illiterate boors historians have loved to imagine. The knowledge of reading, writing and Latin, or, as they called it, grammar, was surely very widely diffused, when not only a multitude of scribes, but farm bailiffs could make, audit and balance accounts in that language.[596] Not only were the citizens called on to support by their charity almshouses and schools, and to furnish loans for youthful enterprise, but the poor made a constant demand on their bounty, and in the sixteenth century poverty was greatly on the increase. The town rulers were confronted with a problem which, then and subsequently, has been found incapable of solution--the problem of the "unemployed." In the reign of Henry VIII. a terrible influx of vagabonds from the country set in, well-nigh driving the local rulers to distraction. Here we first gain some glimpses of a surplus population of shiftless, landless, moneyless folk, driven by the decay of tillage to seek work in the towns. These families, together with the whole labouring class, were later reduced to unspeakable poverty by the debasement of the coinage and depreciation of silver, circumstances which, while affecting wages but little, greatly increased the price of food. This difficulty was at first unfamiliar to men's minds. Society had been hitherto somewhat stationary. Individuals lived and worked where their fathers had lived and worked before them, or at least remained in a town where they had been able by a seven years' appenticeship or by purchase to obtain civic rights. But townspeople were jealous of granting freedom to any but the well-to-do, who would be able to share the burden of taxation, and the wanderer, who by quitting home had dropped out of the framework of local society, became one of a herd of vagabonds liable to be punished according to the utmost rigour of the law. The town rulers did not attempt to solve this question, they shelved it. This wretched population was perpetually ordered to "pass on." "And those bygge beggers," says an order of leet passed in 1518, "that wilnot worke well to gete their levyng, but lye in the felds and breke hedges and stele mannys fruyte ... let theym be banysshed the town, or els punysshe theym so without favor, that they shalbe wery to byde therin."[597] And again and again aldermen were exhorted to cause "lusty beggars and vagabonds" to "voyde out of their ward" upon pain of imprisonment.[598] Only such impotent and needy beggars as were licensed, and had the city seal, the sign of the elephant, on their bags, were allowed to remain and demand charity.[599] But the worthy men of the leet did not refuse to aid those who suffered undeservedly from the acutest misery. "If any by infirmity or multitude of children be not able by his labour to sustain his family," the aldermen were ordered to provide for their sustenance out of the town chest. FOOTNOTES: