In 1562 the Book of Homilies was issued for universal 
public reading from every pulpit. Their content is not our 
concern, but rather their being uniformly imposed on the entire 
public. By making the vernacular a mass medium, print created 
a new instrument of political centralism previously unavailable. 
And at the same time, as personal and political conformity 
became matters of sharp formulation, scholars and teachers 
began a concerted drive for correct spelling and grammar.

Nobody ever made a grammatical error in a nonliterate society.

*     The intensity of the ferment concerning orthography is 
only a useful index to the novelty of print and its effects of 
central conformity. Charles Carpenter Fries, in his American  
English Grammar , studies the question of the clash between 
written and oral discourse: “Only the sixty-six most common