ABSTRACT
SO far we have been concerned either with the education of the professions, the clerics, the teachers, the lawyers, or with the education of men at the top of the social hierarchy, men like Sir Philip Sidney, courtier, diplomat, scholar, poet, patron and traveller, and of 'the many gentlemen excellently learned among us (who) . . . effected to row and steer their course in his wake'. 1 We have briefly mentioned, too, another type of 'man of affairs', the merchant, whose education was to be quite different. Of growing importance in Renaissance England the merchants were not only becoming very rich but also politically and socially ambitious. Their social ambitions led them to invest their profits in land, the ownership of which was essential if they were to achieve their ambition of rising in the social scale. But such investment led them also into the intricacies of estate management in an age when land values were soaring and when traditional methods of management were no longer satisfactory. Their horizons were widening, and as a consequence, too, their skills and expertise. We turn now, then, to study the ways in which they prepared themselves both for their 'craft and mysterie' and for their new rôle as landowners and estate managers.
