Thor's Day: On the Church's repositories of learning

Portrait of Thomas Cromwell,
by Hans Holbein the Younger

From Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel

By Morris Dean

After enjoying PBS's Masterpiece Wolf Hall, which was based on the first two novels of Hilary Mantel's trilogy¹ about Thomas Cromwell's rise to power in the court of Henry VIII, I started reading the first novel, Wolf Hall, in which I came upon an interesting statement by the fictional Cromwell bearing on the value of the Church's "repositories of learning."