because they could read, the general public were hardly the better. A
beginning of reform in this direction had been made when Henry VII.
obtained a Bull diminishing the rights of Sanctuary in cases of treason;
and again in 1511 when the rights both of Sanctuary and Benefit of Clergy
were withdrawn from murderers. It was noteworthy however that there was a
protest against even this made by the Clergy in 1515; when one Dr.
Standish, for justifying the measure, was attacked by the Bishops in
Convocation. Warham and Fox both supported the old privileges. The temporal
lords on a commission appointed to enquire into the matter sided with
Standish, and declared that the Bishops had incurred the penalties of
praemunire. Wolsey tried to persuade the King to refer the question to the
Pope, but the King asserted the rights of the Crown in uncompromising
terms. The Bishops had to submit to a sharp rebuke, and Standish was made a
Dean not long after. The episode was a premonition of future events.

[Sidenote: The Educational Movement]

It does not appear that the writings or the preaching of the scholars had
any marked effect on the conduct of the clergy, or aroused any general
reforming zeal. But in one direction, that of education, they exercised a
very material influence on the intellectual attitude of the younger
generation. Dean Colet is known to-day to many even of those who take
little interest in his times, as the founder of St. Paul's School, where he
endeavoured to make the teaching of the young a real training instead of a
drill in pedagogic formulae. And as he set the example which was by degrees
followed in other grammar schools, so the example he had already set at
Oxford was followed both there and at Cambridge by his disciples. To him,
more than to any other man, was due the practical application of the new
knowledge of Greek to the study of the New Testament, resulting primarily
in the treatment of the Pauline Epistles as organic structures; as