Three were, it has often been said, two cultures in medieval England, that of the small and predominantly clerical élite and that of the mass of the mainly rural population. The latter had once been the culture of all the people. It was made up of their ‘values, beliefs, customs, rituals and associations’. It was traditional and it changed only very slowly. An élite culture gradually differentiated itself from the traditional. It was restricted to a small aristocratic or priestly group. It was, from an early date which varied from one society to another, both literate and leisured. It had a ‘vocabulary of sophisticated analytical terms’; it possessed notions of causality, and an appreciation of time, spatial relationships and quantities. When the Middle Ages began, the two cultures stood in opposition to one another. Elite culture strove to suppress popular; it was able to perpetuate itself through the schools, writing and, at a later date, the printed word.