Supply

Writing in 1581, the pedagogue Richard Mulcaster describes the oversupply of educated men that was among the consequences of the “educational revolution” of the sixteenth century.

To[o] many [learned men] burdens any state to[o] farre: for want of provision. For the rowmes which are to be supplyed by learning being within number, if they that are to supply them, grow on beyound number, how can it be but too great a burden for any state to beare? To have so many gaping for preferment, as no goulfe hath stoore enough to suffise, and to let them rome helples, whom nothing else can helpe, how can it be but that such shifters must needes shake the verie strongest piller in that state where they live, and loyter without living? (Positions, 139)

The problem, as he formulates it, arises in a sociopolitical order that allocates learning to limited sites, and yet, in allowing an expanded high literacy, creates the possibility, if not the inevitability, of sedition. Though Mulcaster's comment can be read as prescient, both in its prediction of an oversupply that was only beginning to be evident when he wrote, and in relation to the sociopolitical ferment that lead to the Civil War, I invoke it because he so clearly associates “learning” with its instrumental deployment and that deployment with a specific sense of space, “rowmes.”