Most people couldn’t read and even if they could most literature was either in Latin or not readily available to the less educated classes of society. The ecclesiastical authority of the church was absolute and much of social life revolved around the institution of Catholicism. People’s minds were controlled by the clergy, who were, by and large, the only class that had access to the bible and told the people what they needed to know about God and truth. The church dictated every aspect of life from birth to death and the level of intellectual control exercised by it, over the minds of the people was enormous. The concepts of independent thought and inquiry were foreign. Added to this was the fact that, in the event that you did want to study the Bible for yourself, bibles were nearly impossible to come by.  It took 300 sheep skins or 170 calf skins to produce a handwritten copy of the Bible; a long, arduous and expensive process and even then it was most likely to be in Latin, a language only understood by the educated classes. Into this melting pot of European social life was thrown the work of Wycliffe and Huss. Their teachings caused ripples across Europe leading people to question the authority of the church and embrace the importance of being able to access the Bible in their own language. But this movement couldn’t gain much momentum because it took too long and cost too much to produce copies of the Bible or even copies of the writings of these reformers.