Replies

Tottel, correct. Sorry for slipping into the common spelling, I came by my knowledge through the back door, genealogy.

Richard Tothill (Tuttle, Tuttell, Tottel, Tuthill, Toothill, Totehille, Totehyll and etcetera, back to the Frenchified de Tottehale of the 10th century, they were a little too impressed with the Normans, I think, lol) acquired his printing concern from a Smyth, whose business "at the signe of the Hand and Star in Fleet Street, within Temple Bar," (always loved that old rhyming ditty) dated to the late 1400's. Their primary business was the compilation and printing of law books, possessing an exclusive patent from the Crown to do so, but there were numerous literary tomes published as well.

This just does not jibe with near total illiteracy. If we were to find middle ground here, you and I, would you say it's fair to credit Wycliffe and Tyndale with a great increase in the general literacy of the English populace, due to a desire to read The Word themselves?

Tying it all together, I'll cite Wycliffe's translation of Isaiah 21:8:

"... Vpon the toothil of the Lord I am stondende"

Contrast to the King James Version, " ... My lord, I stand continually upon the watchtower."

For the curious, the entire Wycliffe Bible is available online in PDF format, click here.

Of course not, it was the middle of the sixteenth century. By the sixteenth century there was a very large middle class in London. Including lawyers, whose tribe really started taking hold in the late 14th century. And I would say that the numbers of the literate increased right along with the middle class.

But I was talking about earlier times. If you want to point to a great watershed in England history, it was the Black Death in the 1340s. Everything changed then. It was the first great migration into the cities and it broke the back of the feudal system.

But we're still talking about very small numbers of literate persons, even in London. I don't think of the 16th century as medieval at all, but at the start of that century the literacy rate in England was somewhere south of one percent. Even after the Protestant Reformation the rate was only approaching 50 percent.