A Social History of English Handwriting

The invention and spread of printing in the mid-fifteenth century may have curtailed the employment of the copyist; but the consequent multiplicity of books brought learning, and the desire for learning, to a far wider variety of people than the laboriously hand-copied book could ever do. In England, during the next century, the dissolution of the monasteries had a similar effect, as the monks scattered and their libraries were broken up.

The general stability of life under the Tudors gave rise to conditions in which trade could prosper and the importance and wealth of the middle-class increase. These factors, together with the arrival of humanist learning, all stimulated an increasing awareness of the benefits of literacy. The Elizabethan period abounds in diaries, letters, accounts, literary works and similar products of the non-professional writer.