From English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, by C. S. Lewis:

"But against what seems to us this fantastic artificiality in their [Tudor-era] education we must set the fact that every boy, out of school, without noticing it, then acquired a range of knowledge such as no boy has today; farriery, forestry, archery, hawking, sowing, ditching, thatching, brewing, baking, weaving, and practical astronomy. This concrete knowledge, mixed with their law, rhetoric, theology, and mythology, bred an outlook very different from our own. Highest abstractions and rarified artifices jostled the earthiest particulars. They would have found it very hard to understand the modern educated man who, though 'interested in astronomy', knows neither who the Pleiades were nor where to look for them in the sky. They talked more readily than we about large universals such as death, change, fortune, friendship, or salvation; but also about pigs, loaves, boots and boats. The mind darted more easily to and fro between heaven and earth: the cloud of middle generalizations, hanging between the two, was then much smaller. Hence, as it seems to us, both the naivety and energy of their writing ... They talk something like angels and something like sailors and stable-boys; never like civil servants or writers of leading articles."