Alexandra Halasz (1997), 'The Patrimony of Learning', in The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 17, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 82–113.

To[o] many [learned men] burdens any state to[o] farre: for want of provision. For the rowmes which are to be supplyed by learning being within number, if they that are to supply them, grow on beyound number, how can it be but too great a burden for any state to beare? To have so many gaping for preferment, as no goulfe hath stoore enough to suffise, and to let them rome helples, whom nothing else can helpe, how can it be but that such shifters must needes shake the verie strongest piller in that state where they live, and loyter without living? (Positions, 139)

The problem, as he formulates it, arises in a sociopolitical order that allocates learning to limited sites, and yet, in allowing an expanded high literacy, creates the possibility, if not the inevitability, of sedition. Though Mulcaster's comment can be read as prescient, both in its prediction of an oversupply that was only beginning to be evident when he wrote, and in relation to the sociopolitical ferment that lead to the Civil War, I invoke it because he so clearly associates "learning" with its instrumental deployment and that deployment with a specific sense of space, "rowmes." Neither association is unusual in sixteenth-century pedagogical theory or practice.