That preaching was not an invention of the Reformation is hardly an original observation. Yet it cannot be made too often. The Reformers' polemic against ‘dumb dogs’ and ‘mass mumblers’ continues to exercise a regrettable fascination over some elements of the historiographical tradition. Yet such rhetoric was in many ways little more than a continuation of an educated clerical critique of the Church which had been in circulation for more than a century before Luther came on the scene. The fact that it was to remain a common complaint of both Catholic and Protestant reformers for a further century should warn us against assuming too readily that Reformation or Counter-Reformation offered instant solutions. More importantly, the ulterior motives by which such rhetoric was often impelled should warn us against assuming too readily that the situation was as bad as enthusiastic reformers wished to make out. In fact there was considerable demand for sermons in the century preceding the Reformation, not only in England but also on the Continent. Popular revivalists such as Bernardino of Siena, Johann Geiler von Keysersberg, Olivier Maillard and Girolamo Savonarola are the most outstanding representatives of a movement whose effects are most easily measured by the printing of sermons and the spread of the pulpit in the later fifteenth century. The prerequisite of an increasing provision of sermons was a better educated clergy, and this objective was pursued from the early fifteenth century in a wave of new educational foundations, both of colleges in the universities and of grammar schools in the country at large. The role of clerical benefactors in these new foundations has long been recognised.