Wren's limited formal education has been divined and conjectured by his many biographers, but for our purpose it is best simply to consider the known relevant influences. These begin with members of his immediate family: his father, Dean Christopher Wren, and his brother-in-law, William Holder. His father's influence came while the family was at Windsor and was supplemented by Holder's after the Civil War had forced the Dean's retirement to Holder's rectory at Bletchingdon, near Oxford, in 1646. For some years, as the Dean's son became gradually more involved with the life of the University, Bletchingdon remained, in Aubrey's words, his ‘home, and retiring-place’ (Clark, 1898, vol. 1, p. 403). Its society must indeed have become more and more a secure, and at the same time outmoded, element in the intellectual life of a young man caught up in new and exciting currents of thought.

Wren's son, Christopher Wren, Jnr, whose Parentalia is the fundamental source on Wren, was to write in 1740: ‘My Grandfather was a Learned Man, skillful in all the Branches of Mathematicks’ (C. Wren Jnr to John Ward, 11 August 1740, British Library MS Add. 6209, fo. 209), and in Parentalia he quoted a number of the Dean's annotations to works of scientific interest (see C. Wren, 1750, pp. 142–8).