The peasants did not share the culture of the elites; or, to put it more precisely, their culture remained rooted in a base which was once common to all and which the elites in the Western world had abandoned at least as early as the eighteenth century. According to the answers to the questionnaires, 60 per cent of the Cristeros had never been to school, which did not mean that they were complete strangers to the written word; the author knows of many who learned to read by themselves, and devoured devotional books, legal textbooks, and works on astronomy. The archives of the combatants reveal the problem only too clearly; in illustration, a letter is reproduced below: