England was still an agricultural rather than a manufacturing country. Imported were cloth, silks, linen, velvets, furs, glass, wines, candles, millstones, amber, iron, and mercury. Exported were wool, leather, lead, tin, and alabaster for sculpturing. Merchant adventurers came to manufacture cloth good enough for export and began to buy up raw wool in such quantity that its export declined. They took their cloth abroad to sell, personally or by agents.
An Oxford theologian and preacher, John Wyclif, voiced the popular resentment of the materialism of the church, benefit of clergy, immorality of priests, and the selling of indulgences and pardons. Encouraged by the king, he argued against the supremacy of the papal law over the King's courts and against payments to the papacy. He opined that the church had no power to excommunicate. The friars had become mere beggars and the church was still wealthy. He proposed that all goods should be held in common by the righteous and that the church should hold no property but be entirely spiritual. He believed that people should rely on their individual consciences. He thought that the Bible should be available to people who could read English so that the people could have a direct access to God without priests or the pope. Towards this end, he translated it from Latin into English in 1384. His preachers spread his views throughout the country. The church then possessed about one-third of the land of the nation.
William of Ockham, an Englishman educated at Oxford and teaching theology in Paris, taught that the primary form of knowledge came from experience gained through the senses and that God might cause a person to think that he has intuitive knowledge of an existent object when there is in fact no such object.
Most great lords were literate. Many stories described good men, who set an example to be followed, and bad men, whose habits were to be avoided. Stories were written about pilgrimage vacations of ordinary people to religious sites in England. Will Langland's poem "The Vision of William Concerning Piers Plowman" portrays a pilgrimage of common people to the shrine of Truth led by a virtuous laborer. Mystics wrote practical advice with transcendental teaching, for instance "Scale of Perfection" attributed to Walter Hilton and "Cloud of Unknowing". Richard Rolle wrote about spiritual matters, probably the "Prick of Conscience". Richard de Bury wrote "Philobiblon" about book lovers. Jean Froissart wrote the "Chronicles" on knights. Courtly ideals were expressed in "Sir Gawaine and the Grene Knyght", wherein the adventures of the hero, an Arthur knight, are allegorical in the struggle against the world, the flesh, and the devil (1370). "Pearl" eulogized all that is pure and innocent on the event of the death of a two year old child.
Geoffrey Chaucer was a squire and diplomat of the king. His "Tales of the Canterbury Pilgrims" portrayed characters of every social class, including the knight with his squire, abbot, prioress, nun, priest, monk, friar, poor parson of the country, summoner (who enforced the jurisdiction and levied the dues of the church courts), pardoner (sold pardons from the pope), scholar, attorney, doctor, merchant, sailor, franklin, yeoman, haberdasher, tapestry- maker, ploughman, cook, weaver, dyer, upholsterer, miller, reeve, carpenter.
There were Chaucer stories about a beautiful and virtuous wife disliked by her mother-in-law, the difficulty of marriage between people of different religions, the hatred of a poor person by his brother and his neighbor, rich merchants who visited other kingdoms, the importance of a man himself following the rules he sets for other people's behavior, the spite of a man for a woman who rejected him, the relative lack of enthusiasm of a wife for sex as compared to her husband, a mother giving up her own comfort for that of her child, the revenge killing of a murderer by the dead man's friends, the joy of seeing a loved one after years of separation, that life is more sad than happy, that lost money can be retrieved, but time lost is lost forever.
Other stories in the Canterbury Tales were about two men who did not remain friends after they fell in love with the same woman, about a child who preferred to learn from an older child than from his school-teacher, about a wife who convinced her husband not to avenge her beating for the sake of peace, about a man who woke up from bad dreams full of fear, about a man wanting to marry a beautiful woman but later realizing a plain wife would not be pursued by other men, about a man who drank so much wine that he lost his mental and physical powers, about a woman who married for money instead of love, about a man who said something in frustration which he didn't mean, about a person brought up in poverty who endured adversity better than one brought up in wealth, about a wife who was loving and wise, about a good marriage being more valuable than money, about a virgin who committed suicide rather than be raped, about a wife persuaded to adultery by a man who said he would otherwise kill himself, about three men who found a pile of gold and murdered each other to take it all, about an angry man who wanted to kill, about a malicious man who had joy in seeing other men in trouble and misfortune, about a man whose face turned red in shame, about a wife expecting to have half of what her husband owned. Paper supplemented parchment, so there were more books.
Political songs and poems were written about the evil times of King Edward II, the military triumphs of King Edward III, and the complaints of the poor against their oppressors, such as "Song of the Husbandman". John Gower wrote moralizing poems on the villein's revolt, the sins of the clergy and attorneys, and the bad rule of King Richard II, who in 1377 succeeded Edward III. Robin Hood ballads were popular. The minstrel, who was a honorable person, replaced the troubadour of older times.
There were many colleges at Oxford and Cambridge due to the prohibition of gifts to the church. Laymen instead of ecclesiastics were appointed as Chancellor. The Masters at Oxford got rid of ecclesiastical supervision by a bishop and archdeacon by 1368. One could be admitted as a student at age thirteen. The rate of maintenance for a student was 10d. weekly.
A Bachelor of Arts degree was granted after four years of study and an oral exam. Required reading in 1340 for the Bachelor's Degree was the new logic of Aristotle ("Prior and Posterior Analytics" e.g. on syllogistic logic and deduction, the "Topics", or the "Sophistical Refutations", e.g. logical fallacies such as from 'All A are B' to 'All B are A'), and a selection from these Aristotle works on physics: "Of Heaven and Earth", "On the Soul", "Of meteors", "Of Birth and Decay", or "Of Feeling and What is Felt" with "Of Memory and Recollection" and "Of Sleep and Waking", or "Of the Movement of Animals" with "Of Minor Points in Natural History".