The Life of Thomas More Page 4

  But it would be mistaken to over-emphasise the pains and privations of fifteenth-century schoolchildren. There were the ordinary pleasures of childhood, with the mention and memory of schoolboys chewing ‘suckets’, or dried oranges, and ‘marchpane’, or marzipan. There was also the ordinary spiritedness of the young scholar. When one of them was late for school he explained that he had ‘Milked dukkes, my moder badde’.22 One schoolmaster complained that ‘As sone as I am cum into the scole, this fellow goith to make water … Some after another as-kith licence that he may go drynke. Another calleth upon me that he may have licence to go home.’23 Some aspects of human behaviour, like the proverbs the schoolboys chanted, seem to persist unchanged through time.

  Their hours were long, but there were holidays on the ‘holy days’ of the many religious festivals. Shrove Tuesday was the occasion for cockfighting, for example, when the boys would bring in their own prize birds and set them against each other; it was customary for the schoolmaster to be given all the dead animals. On the Feast of the Innocents a ‘boy-bishop’ was ritually enthroned in the principal churches of London; this was only tangentially an occasion of ‘misrule’ of a late medieval kind, and was pre-eminently a solemn church ceremony with processions as well as enthronement. As one of the statutes of the Sarum rite puts it, ‘no man whatsoever, under the pain of Anathema, should interrupt or press upon these Children at the Procession’.24 The child bishop, fully apparelled in ecclesiastical robes with mitre and crozier, delivered a sermon (which often touched upon the misdemeanours of the adult clergy) before walking through the streets of his district, blessing the people and collecting money for his churchwardens. This was one of the many popular festivals destroyed at the time of the Tudor Reformation. There is also a reference in one grammar book to a particular occasion when garlands of roses were made in honour of St Anthony’s day, and this festival has customarily been attached to St Anthony’s School itself.

  More remained there for approximately five years. The pattern of his later career suggests that he must have been a quick and docile pupil; one of his early biographers, who had the benefit of a family connection, wrote that ‘he had rather greedily deuoured then leasurely chewed his Grammar rules, he out stripped farre both in towardnesse of witt, and diligence of endeauors all his schoole fellowes, with whome he was matched’.25 So he proceeded quickly from his early lessons in Donatus to more difficult textbooks such as the Doctrinale and the Grecismus. His later years at St Anthony’s were also directed to the study of classical writers (Virgil and Cicero were obvious favourites) as well as to the arts of composition. He would have been expected to be able to write Latin verse and to prepare various rhetorical topics in prose. The importance of this training in rhetoric is emphasised by an account in Stow’s Survey of London, where the boys of St Anthony’s are noted for their prowess in public disputation and deliberation. On the eve of the feast of St Bartholomew the Apostle, the scholars of the various London grammar schools met in the churchyard of St Bartholomew, a few yards from Smithfield. They set up a makeshift wooden stage upon a bank of earth and here in Latin would dispute a chosen topic; ‘some one scholar hath stepped up, and there hath opposed and answered, till he were by some better scholar overcome and put down; and then the overcomer taking the place, did like as the first’.26 The eventual winners of these oratorical contests were awarded a prize (in a time after that of Thomas More, they were presented with silver bows and arrows), and according to Stow St Anthony’s ‘commonly presented the best scholars’.27

  It was no game but, rather, an important practical training for their later lives. The ability to speak and to understand Latin was the first requirement for any career in the Church, in the Inns of Court, or at the Court itself. The adult More, for example, would have conversed in Latin as often as he ever spoke in English; the majority of his extant letters are also composed in the older language. His most important prose works are written in Latin, as well, but its use has a more private aspect; he and Erasmus were for a while intimate friends but they could communicate only in that language. It was, in other words, a living tongue. But this instruction in Latin, and the deliberations of the schoolboys beside St Bartholomew’s, had a more particular point. More and his contemporaries at St Anthony’s were also instructed in the essential Ciceronian distinctions of inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria and pronuntiatio. When the young orators disputed on their wooden stage in the churchyard, they had been already trained to recognise and reproduce the elements of exordium, narratio, divisio, confirmatio, refutatio and peroratio. There would also be occasion to learn ‘topics’ and conventional formulae which could be applied as the subject required. This was not some antique discipline, equivalent to the learning of ‘classics’ in contemporary schools; in the late fifteenth century, the purpose of this education was to create a group of skilled lawyers and administrators. It was the perfect training for ambitious boys, or at least for the families who were ambitious on their behalf.

  It ought to be remembered that, for more than two thousand years, rhetoric had been the central element in preparation for public service. In the classical world it had generally been taught as a formal alternative to philosophy; the pursuit of philosophical truth was supposed to lead to wisdom while rhetoric was concerned with a practical interpretation of, and intervention in, the world. The gifts of subtle invention and eloquent persuasion were indispensable for the right ordering of the ‘commonwelth’, and More himself is a fine example of that early training. His subsequent public career was essentially that of an orator, and his published works bear the unmistakable marks of a rhetorical education. He did not write, or wish to write, ‘literature’ in any sense we now care to think of it. He wrote polemics, refutations, confutations and dialogues in which ‘the case is put’ and challenged in true deliberative fashion; there have been essays written on the prevalence of rhetorical punctuation in More’s prose compositions, but that is only one aspect of a style largely derived from rhetorical figures and devices. When we come to look at his open-air dialogues, of which Utopia is the most celebrated example, we should remember that his conduct of debate was exactly that which the schoolboys of St Anthony’s practised—something to be argued outdoors and in the public domain. There was no such thing as private truth.

  When the boys recited tenses and declensions by rote, when they grasped the commonplaces or topics of rhetorical discourse, when they learned by heart simple syllogisms, when they grew skilled in the memory and repetition of oral formulae, they were being made aware of the presence of external authority while at the same time becoming familiarised with implicit demands of order and stability. The same kind of lessons had been taught for several hundreds of years, and the schoolroom offered the first and perhaps best example.of those virtues of permanence and continuity which the adult More was to esteem so highly. The disciplined arrangement of knowledge, evinced in the elaborate lexicographical works of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, impressed upon the young pupil that image of hierarchy and taxonomy which was so central to the medieval imagination. Beyond all this, too, was the image of God.

  And so the boys disputed on a summer evening near Smithfield. The pupils of More’s school were known as ‘Anthonie pigs’, because the figure of that saint was customarily accompanied by one of those animals; the pig was once a symbol of the devil, but it had now been domesticated and St Anthony himself was the patron saint of hogs as well as butchers. Little is known about London pigs in the fifteenth century, except that they were smaller than the present variety, but the connection between them and the hospital brothers of St Anthony’s was well established. Those pigs which were too unhealthy or unwholesome to be fit for market were taken from the Stocks and were slit in the ear as a sign of their inedibility; it was customary for the proctor of St Anthony’s to tie a bell around the necks of such animals before letting them roam among the refuse and dunghills of the London streets. John Stow reports that ‘no man would hurt or ta
ke them up’.28 Instead they were fed by hand, much as Londoners would feed the kites and ravens; they were, like the birds, consumers of noisome waste. And so the proverb was soon current, ‘Such an one will follow such an one, and whine as it were an Anthony pig’,29 which duly became attached to the schoolboys themselves. There was, however, one important difference. If the pigs grew fat and healthy on their London diet, they were taken up by the authorities of St Anthony’s in order to be cooked and eaten.

  At the end of the day, after his release from school, it was a short journey from Threadneedle Street to Milk Street. The city surrounded More once again, and he noticed everything: his prose works are filled with brief but vivid intimations of London life, from the sight of someone squatting against a wall in order to ‘ease hym selfe in the open strete’30 to the beggars who display their cancerous or cankered legs on ‘frydays aboute saynt sauyour and at ye Sauygate’,31 from the ‘meretrix’ and her ‘leno’ or procurer32 to the wrestlers at Clerkenwell who take ‘so great fallys’.33 He made his way among the pumps and springs and water conduits, past the gardens and the markets and the almshouses, along small lanes and even smaller footways, between the stables and the carpenters’ yards and the mills, past brothels and taverns and bathhouses and street privies, under archways adorned with the images of saints or coats of arms, into courtyards filled with shops, beneath tenements crammed with the families of artisans, moving from the grand houses of the rich to the thatched hovels of mud walls frequented by the poor, hearing the cries of ‘God spede’ and ‘Good morrow!’, past nunneries and priories and churches. It has been suggested that the image of God shone behind the harmonious order and authority impressed upon the schoolchildren of St Anthony’s; the same image, together with that of Christ crucified upon the fallen world, rose up from the streets of London. At a distant vantage the traveller would see the towers of almost a hundred parish churches rising above the rooftops of thatch and timber; it is testimony to the piety of Londoners that no other western European city could boast so many sacred places. As the young More made his way along the lanes and thoroughfares, there was the continual sound of bells.

  CHAPTER IV

  COUGH NOT, NOR SPIT

  T was customary for the boys of St Anthony’s to move on to Eton for the remainder of their school years, but the young More took a more distinguished course. At the age of twelve, he became a page in the household of John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor of England. All the evidence suggests that Archbishop Morton was John More’s ‘lord’ and that Thomas More joined the prelate’s household as a singular mark of favour and privilege. It had been the tradition of many centuries that children of gentle and even noble birth should be given the station of servants in a great household; it predates the age of chivalry and is described in the pages of Beowulf, but by the late medieval period it had become a standard practice in the quest for preferment and valuable service. An Italian observer noted that ‘every one, however rich he may be, sends away his children into the houses of others’.1 Although this was an exaggeration, he touched upon an important principle of fifteenth-century training; patronage was still more important than formal education. With the exception of Henry VII, John Morton was the most influential man in the kingdom, and the young More would have entered the archbishop’s service together with the sons of earls and other noblemen. It has often been remarked how quickly and how easily Thomas More became associated with the magnates and rulers of England; the beginning of that invaluable connection lies with his service at Lambeth Palace. He entered a world of retainers and officials, clerks and councillors, through which at a later date he would effortlessly rise.

  So in 1490, after his five years of schooling, More crossed the river to Lambeth—if he had taken the wherry, among the cockle boats and sixoared barges, it would have cost him a penny. He came up by the gateway of red brick which was still being finished, together with its three-light perpendicular window above the arch itself and two great square towers of five storeys on either side. Until recent years there hung outside the arch a leaden water-pipe with Morton’s rebus, a pictorial pun on his surname, embossed upon it. Many of the young More’s most important duties were to take place in the Great Hall, which was to the right of the courtyard as he entered through the arch. The boy had already passed a winding stone staircase in the eastern tower that led to the place of imprisonment; forty-four years later he would cross the Thames again and climb that staircase as a free man for the last time in his life. It might be said that his public career began and ended on this small spot of Lambeth ground.

  He had become a member of a large permanent staff which included ushers, yeomen of the chamber, grooms, butlers and others under the administration of a steward and a treasurer. More was one of the ‘Children for household offices’,2 whose duties were multifarious but well defined. He lived according to a simple but not harsh regimen; the pages slept on straw mattresses or truckle beds within one chamber; cleanliness was an important consideration for those who served food in the Great Hall, and on one side of the room was a long and low stone sink with pitchers of water beside it. It is sometimes assumed that the late medieval body remained entirely unwashed (if on occasions anointed with perfume), but sweet grey soap and white soap known as ‘Castell’ were widely available. The apparel of the fashionable page included hose and a doublet edged with fur, and on ceremonial occasions he would don Archbishop Morton’s livery.

  Morton seems to have been so impressed by the cleverness and quickness of the boy, according to William Roper, More’s son-in-law and earliest biographer, that it is possible he soon ‘attended’ the archbishop in his sanctum in the western tower of the palace, or in the audience chamber of polished oak adjacent to it. But his primary duties were of a more basic kind. The pages were obliged to act as ‘principall servitours’3 at the great feasts in the Hall, and as a result More became part of an elaborate ceremonial which began when the ‘ewerer’ brought in the table cloths upon his left shoulder and the ‘panter’ carried the ‘principall salte’ and loaves of bread (each one two inches broad and seven inches long) with a towel partly draped over his left arm. The prime duty of the page was to serve, and stand, and wait, ready to pass a pewter plate or a silver goblet; he was ready, also, to take a whispered message from one guest to another or to run an errand within the palace. The feasts were remarkable for their order and variety, with each item being served to guests according to their rank. There was a first course of beef and mutton, swan or geese, followed by a second course which might contain no less than thirty differernt kinds of meat, among them crane, heron and curlews; eventually came the cheese, ‘scraped with sugar and sauge levis’,4 together with the various fruits of the season.

  At the end of the meal More helped to place a double towel along the whole length of the tablecloth, so that after grace each guest might wash in the bowls of hot and cold water which had been put upon it. The tables and trestles were then ‘voyded’ of any remaining food, with the broken pieces of bread and meat collected for the ‘alms vessel’, and the pages escorted the guests to their chambers, where they ensured that the bed was covered ‘with pylowes and hed shetys, in case they wolle rest’,5 as well as such ‘neweltees’ as cherries, green ginger and sweet wine. Only then were they given their own supper, together with that weak beer which was the staple beverage for children and invalids.

  But if Thomas More was a ‘servitour’, he was also still a scholar. At Lambeth Palace there was at least one chaplain or clerk in minor orders who acted as a schoolmaster and supervised the domestica schola or private school for the boys within Morton’s household. A contemporary of More’s who had also been enrolled as a page, within the less influential household of the Bishop of Winchester, recalled how the prelate ‘delighted in hearing the boys repeat to him in the evening what they had learned that day from the schoolmaster. And in this examination he who did well was nicely complimented, and given something he wanted.’6 It
is not known if Morton had time to play so benevolent a role, but such an early recognition of More’s intelligence would explain his praise for the boy, ‘In whose witt and towardenes’ he much delighted. ‘The Cardinal …’, wrote William Roper, forgetting for the moment that Morton was given the red hat after More’s departure from Lambeth, ‘would often say of him [More] vnto the nobles that divers tymes dined with him: “This child here wayting at the table, whosoeuer shall liue to see it, will proue a mervailous man”.’7 How much credence can be given to this anecdote is open to question, but it exemplifies the archbishop’s reputation for shrewdness as well as More’s own evident cleverness.

  In a household such as this, among boys of gentle and noble birth, the education would take certain prescribed forms. More soon acquired a reputation for skill in theatrical oration and disputation, and there is no reason to doubt that his formal education in rhetoric continued at Lambeth. He would by now also be instructed in the arts of suasoriae and prosopopoeia. One was concerned with the construction of convincing arguments for both sides of a debating topic, the other with the assumption of a character—fictional or real—to create a fluent and persuasive discourse.

  There were more particular lessons in the Lambeth household, however. Books ‘of Curteyse’ or ‘Books of Nurture’ were texts for juvenile training in the manners of courtly and social life. These included practical, and often intricate, lessons in etiquette and general decorum. It was of primary importance, for example, that the page should know by heart the differences of estate and degree among the guests (one book lists thirty-six ranks), how to seat them and how to address them appropriately. The page must not pick his nose or teeth, ‘cough not, ner spitte’;8 he must not lean against the wall, nor scratch himself. At all times he must remain mild and cheerful, replying to any remarks ‘wyth softe speche’,9 and always bow to his lord when answering him. It is significant that some manuals then conclude with the need to serve the principal ‘Lord’ in Heaven. Questions of manners were also involved in the larger duty to ‘reverence, honour and obey’10 lawful superiors—this was the advice given by the Earl of Arundel to his son who had just entered the household of the Bishop of Norwich. Another obligation imposed upon a boy of respectable birth was for him, in the phrase of the period, to ‘keep countenance’. It was his duty to preserve the dignity and demeanour proper to his rank and degree, to be civil to his inferiors and respectful to his superiors, to retain his ‘temper’ in every sense—the term suggesting not only moderation, calmness and a middle course, but also, according to one dictionary, the ‘due mixture of contrary qualities’.11