Grocyn's legacy lives on in his namesake, the University of Oxford's chief lecturer on classical languages.

In about 1488, he left England for Italy, and before his return in 1491 he had visited Florence, Rome and Padua, and studied Greek and Latin under Demetrius Chalcondyles and Poliziano.

The Warden of New College, Thomas Chaundler, invited Cornelius Vitelli, then on a visit to Oxford, to act as praelector.

Having at first denounced those who impugned the authenticity of the Hierarchia ecclesiastica ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite, he was led to modify his views by further investigation, and openly declared that he had been mistaken.

With the exception of a few lines of Latin verse on a lady who snubbed him, and a letter to Aldus Manutius at the head of Linacre's translation of Proclus's Sphaera (Venice, 1499), Grocyn left no literary proof of his scholarship.

By Erasmus, he has been described as "vir severissimae castissimae vitae, ecclesiasticarum constitutionum observantissimus pene usque ad superstitionem, scholasticae theologiae ad unguem doctus ac natura etiam acerrimi judicii, demum in omni disciplinarum genere exacte versatus", "A man of a most stern and moral life; most observant of the decrees of the Church almost to the point of superstition; learned to his very fingertips in scholastic theology; and also by nature of the keenest judgment; finally, exactly versed in every kind of learning" (Declarationes ad censures facultatis theoiogiae Parisianae, 1522).