#english_history 

## The growth of literacy
During the Renaissance time schools of learning were established in many towns and cities, with all of them teaching Latin.
In England two schools of higher learning were established , the first - Oxford (first evidence of teaching - **1096**), the second - Cambridge (**1209**).
Few people could go to the universities, let alone speak foreign languages or read, especially the couldn't speak French, the language of law and of the Norman rulers. Soon the Normans started replacing the old [[Saxon Invaders|Anglo-Saxon]] words with more polite Norman ones (stool-chair, belly-stomach)