So in one way or another the work of education went on throughout the fifteenth century—a work whose magnitude and importance have been too long obscured by the busy organizers of the Reformation days, who, for the giving of a new charter or adapting the school to the new system established by law, clothed themselves with the glory of founders and bore away from their silent predecessors the honour of inaugurating a new world. Not only in the busy centres of commerce, but in the obscure villages that lay hidden in forest or waste or clung to the slopes of the northern moors, the children of the later middle ages were gathered into schools. Apparently, reading and writing were everywhere common among the people,[27] and as early as the reign of Richard the Second the word “townsmen” had come to mean people instructed and trained, and no longer ignorant rustics.[28] But the most remarkable thing about the growth of the new grammar schools was the part taken in their foundation by laymen—by the traders and merchants of the towns. The great benefactor of Sandwich, Thomas Elys, left provision in 1392 for one of the chaplains of his chantry to serve as schoolmaster for the town boys; and the son of a draper who had had his education in this school afterwards founded a grammar school. Sir Edmund Shaa, goldsmith and once Lord Mayor of London, established a school at Stockport by will in 1457, and appointed a chantry priest of the parish church, who, being “cunning in grammar,” should “freely without any wages or salary asking or taking of any person, except only any salary hereunder specified, shall teach all manner persons, children and other, that will come to him to learn as well of the said town of Stopford as of other towns thereabouts, the science of grammar as far as lieth in him for to do.” And another London mayor, Sir John Percyvale, who had been born close to Macclesfield, left money in 1502 to endow a free grammar school there, because there were few schoolmasters in that country and the children for lack of teaching “fall to idleness and so consequently live dissolutely all their days.”[29] It seems also that the Manchester Grammar School was first planned by a Manchester clothier, who at his death left money for its foundation; and was completed in 1524 by Hugh Oldham, Bishop of Exeter, a native of Oldham;[30] the children were to be taught “after the manner of the school of Banbury,” and inhabitants of the town were compelled to contribute to its support by being forced to grind their corn at the school mills—a custom which was kept up till 1759.