A Spanish schoolmaster at this time knew less of the outside world than many a shepherd in the days of Columbus. Now it was hoped that there might be some lifting of this intolerable darkness, some freedom to read and write and talk. Men hoped that their wives might be freed of the triple trivialities of the Church – credulity, guilt, and confession; that their sons might be craftsmen rather than serfs, their daughters citizens rather than domestic whores, and that they might hear the children in the evening coming home from fresh-built schools to astonish them with new facts of learning.