One of the most central questions surrounding the medieval transmission of heretical and possibly political knowledge and opinions is the extent to which literacy had spread into the middling and lower orders of lay society by the fifteenth century. That access to written works, either directly by reading or indirectly through the intermediation of readers who transmitted the written word orally to the non-reading, was intimately bound up with Lollardy has of course long been recognised. But the quantitative dimensions of lay literacy in this era have been quite difficult to estimate, and in the absence of detailed information on this score historians have fallen back upon certain conjectures about the relationships between economic or social developments, literacy, and nonconformist opinion.

The statements of Davis may be taken as typical of arguments of this kind. Proclivities to heretical opinion, in this view, were at least partly a by-product (in economically advanced regions like Essex and East Anglia) of social changes, and specifically the presence of large numbers of clothworkers and other artisans. Such workers were geographically mobile, somewhat divorced from the old manorial regime, and, critically, more likely to have acquired at least rudimentary literacy as a practical adjunct to their occupations. ‘Literate craftsmen … had a more independent stance towards society and Church than did labourers … The textile artisan could migrate with greater freedom than the labourer, infecting other districts with heresy …’.