The Life of Thomas More Read online

  In the Bodleian Library at Oxford there is a Latin ‘commonplace book’ that contains the signature ‘Thomas Mor’ and the initials ‘T.M’ on three separate folios;5 it includes one of the books of etiquette which More studied as a page in the Morton household, Stans puer ad men-sam, as well as a Latin dictionary and a glossary. In his later writing, there are other intimations of his Oxford studies. His memories of morning disputation are to be found in his references to solving a question ‘after an Oxforde fashyon’,6 and to a ‘yonge sophyster … at Oxforde at a peruise’.7 More’s training in logic and dialectic as well as grammar is rehearsed in his casual employment of such terms as ‘thantecedent’ and ‘symylytude’, ‘profe’ and ‘contradyccyon’.8 He is a little more formal in his invocation of ‘preposycyon aduersatyue’ and ‘coniunccyon copulatyue’9 in an attack upon an opponent’s logic. So it was that in Oxford, according to his great-grandson Cresacre More, he ‘profitted exceedingly in Rhetorick, Logick and Philosophie’.10

  In the summer of 1493 there was a sudden and unwelcome interruption to this course of work when a ‘sore plague’,11 one of six visitations between 1485 and 1507, came upon Oxford; More and other contemporaries retired to the village of Culnam (or Culham) five miles south of the city—‘for deth’ as it was known, or prevention—and in one of his prose works he recalls the ‘scholers of Oxenforde’ passing the time by making riddles in the house of ‘an olde wyfe of Culnam’12 with whom they were lodged for the duration. Yet although More’s studies were not necessarily continuous, his general conscientiousness and self-discipline are apparent in Cresacre More’s report that ‘his whole mind was set on his booke’.13

  Erasmus sets the appropriate context when he remarks that at Cambridge, in the same period as More was a scholar at Oxford, the curriculum was dominated by Alexander and the Scotists.14 William Tyndale was at Oxford twenty years after More, but the nature of the studies there had not changed. The scholars were corrupted with ‘sophistry’, ‘alleging unto them texts of logic … of metaphysic, and moral philosophy, and all manner of books of Aristotle, and of all manner doctors which they never yet saw … What wonderful dreams have they of their predicaments, universals, second intentions, quiddities, haecceities and relatives.’15 It is rare that More ever endorses any point made by the ‘heretic’ Tyndale, but he mounts much the same attack in his own prose writings. In one long and satirical letter to a lecturer in theology at the University of Louvain, he ridiculed the scholastic preoccupation with ‘ampliationibus, restrictionibus, appellationibus’,16 which were all names for the properties or ‘supposition’ of terms within a formalised logical structure. He also attacked the basic training of university scholars, just as Erasmus had done, and described the learning derived from it as ‘stultissima solertia’17 or the most foolish kind of ingenuity. Martin Luther also scorned the fatuity and mischief of ‘an unreformed university’.18 But the fact that these four dissimilar men of learning—More and Luther, Tyndale and Erasmus—felt it necessary to launch a prolonged assault upon ‘scholasticism’ (to give this set of disciplines its most general name) suggests the power and authority which it still commanded. It was at the very centre of medieval education and practice; it had helped to fashion and instruct More, as well as Tyndale and Erasmus, to the extent that we cannot fully understand him without first understanding the precepts and demands of a system of learning which had already lasted for more than three hundred years.

  In the late twentieth century, cosmologists and physicists have been trying to produce what has been called the ‘theory of everything’,19 a ‘grand unified theory’ complete and self-consistent which would in particular unite ‘quantum theory and general relativity’.20 Medieval theologians and philosophers knew nothing of relativity theory (at least not under that name) but there is no doubt that they pursued the same goal with as much ardour and with more success than modern scientists. One twentieth-century physicist, Stephen Hawking, has suggested that this general theory would then in turn allow us to know ‘the mind of God’.21 No scholastic would have dared to presume so much, but his beliefs and aspirations would have been similar.

  It was a question of authority—or, rather, that need for authority which encouraged the elaborate and voluminous organisation of knowledge. Scholasticism is in that sense a methodology rather than a specific discipline, an immense, powerful and persuasive form of organisation which was considered to be a token of the divine dispensation. The concern was with the arrangement of distinct parts which could be in turn divided and subdivided into discrete but inter-related elements. The ornate structures of late fifteenth-century polyphony (of which English composers provided the finest examples) have sometimes been used to suggest the nature of scholasticism, where the need for elaboration is matched only by the passion for lucidity, where clarity and complexity are not considered to be irreconcilable virtues. But all these partes and quaestiones and distinctiones are built upon the single sustaining belief in the presence of absolute and objective authority. It was not the duty of the philosopher or artist to ‘add to’ knowledge, only to reveal it. In late polyphonic music the central aspect is the delicate interplay of voices without any single one of them taking precedence. In music of a century later we find the dramatic use of a powerful individual voice, but in fifteenth-century English polyphony the emphasis rests upon the intricate melody of many voices. The character and abilities of the individual are only of consequence as an element within the harmonious organisation of parts; we do not know the names of the masons who created the bell towers and fan-vaults of the great fifteenth-century English churches. This is not the world of Luther or of what has become known as post-Reformation culture, but it remained the world of Thomas More.

  It would be a misinterpretation of More to believe that he attacked the inheritance and authority of scholasticism in general. He would have found it difficult to argue with the central proposition of scholastic philosophers, lawyers and theologians that ‘Truth is one and indivisible’ and that their task lay ‘in reconciling all existing knowledge logically with the One Truth’ by means of ‘laws or formulae’.22 That truth was pre-eminently to be found in the Bible, which, along with the books of Aristotle and the texts of canon law as promulgated by Justinian, made up the core teaching of the scholastics. These represented the bounds of true knowledge beyond which it was neither necessary nor desirable to stray. All human effort must, instead, be devoted to exploring and expounding the material which they contained. For Anselm, and other great scholastics, the fundamental purpose of education lay in realigning classical learning with Christian revelation. The methods of interpreting that knowledge were of a piece with a culture established upon an intricate system of rights and duties, as well as an elaborate hierarchy and order devolving from a central authority within western Christendom. The manifold texts of the Bible were subjected to a profound and subtle exegesis, and the scholastic divines composed analogical and anagogical glosses upon each phrase, word and even syllable. For how long and in what manner did Christ lie in the womb of the Virgin Mary? Could Christ have taken on himself the likeness of a woman, or a mule? If so, could a mule be crucified? Will there be food and drink after the general Resurrection? These are some of the examples adduced by Erasmus, who took no time in denouncing them as ‘Formalities, Quiddities, Ecceities’,23 but the scholastic theologians also considered the provenance of original sin, the formal substance of the Eucharist, and the nature of the Trinity. In a similar fashion the scholastics of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with the universities of Europe as their home, treated the works of Aristotle and Justinian as summations of true knowledge to be elicited by syllogism, deduction, inference and all those techniques of formal and logical word play distrusted by More and Tyndale. For Francis Bacon, writing The Advancement of Learning in the early seventeenth century, all this was no more than a dark web of words without substance or profit; but it can also be seen as representing one of the glories of the human imaginati
on.

  The Summulae Logicales or Parva Logicalia, compiled by Peter of Spain, was the basic and essential work to be studied, repeated and recalled by the young More. It is prefaced by the statement that ‘Dialectic is the art of arts and the science of sciences’,24 a declaration followed by a digest of the ‘logic of the ancients’, pre-eminently that of Aristotle, as well as of medieval variants known as logica moderna. It was to the latter which More objected, since Peter of Spain’s additions to the corpus of classical logic were of a highly technical and specialised kind which did not appeal to More’s sense of practicality or usefulness. Medieval logic came close to the enclosed and self-referential qualities of modern mathematics; the formal conditions of truth were established but, in that space, there was room for highly intricate and subtle elaboration. In later life More mocked the kind of questions which university scholars were supposed to debate, with examples taken from the standard text-books. What is the difference between ‘Vinum bibi bis’, ‘Wine I drank twice’, and ‘bis uinum bibi’, ‘twice wine I drank’? Is there a differently implied set of probable circumstances in the statements ‘Papam uerberaui’ and ‘uerberaui papam’—‘Pope I have scourged’ and ‘I have scourged the Pope’?25 And so it goes on, as More multiplies examples of supposed scholastic folly. It ought to be pointed out that certain modern theorists consider scholastic logic of this kind to be an interesting and successful discipline, close to symbolic logic of the present century, but it is easy to understand why it should seem remote and impractical to young men who, like More, were intent upon a worldly career in London. He himself realised, of course, the importance of studying the essential elements of ‘dialectica’, in order to reckon the truth of propositions or the plausibility of certain arguments; such skills were essential for a lawyer. It was also the necessary training for any citizen or officer, who would need to detect specious reasoning or ordinary fallacies in public discourse. The scholasticism to which More and Erasmus acknowledged their debt, therefore, was that which was concerned with the right employment and understanding of rhetoric. That is why More employs scholastic methods in his later writings; in many respects his polemical texts take on a scholastic form, since it was the only viable kind of argument available to him and his contemporaries.

  There are, of course, always contrary forces working within any advanced culture—which suggests that terms like ‘humanism’ and ‘scholasticism’, ‘Renaissance’ and ‘Reformation’, should be used with the greatest caution. But More’s objections to the elaborations of medieval logic were based upon two fundamental tenets which he maintained until the end of his life. He refers on various occasions to the principles of sensus communis and consuetudo; he deployed them against the scholastics but he also used them against those who supported the supremacy of Henry VIII. Sensus communis may mean in its most obvious signification what we call ‘common sense’, able to cut through the persiflage of the dialecticians, but in More’s later writings it takes on the further emphasis of common or universal understanding, which in turn implies a shared and traditional inheritance of belief. It is significant, too, that in scholastic psychology sensus communis was the faculty through which instinct and memory were able to make random sense-impressions cohere. It is one of the great metaphors of the age. Consuetudo is the Latin noun for custom or habit; it can be taken as a reproof to those scholastics who twist language beyond the range of its ordinary meaning but, again, in More’s subsequent writings it acquires larger authority as the term denoting the body of inherited practice and behaviour. When at the close of his life More, faced with his accusers, declared that he would ‘conforme my consciens’ only to ‘the generall Councell of Christendome’,26 he was reinforcing the same general principle. It is impossible to over-emphasise the authority which custom and tradition exercised upon More; he was, in that sense (as in others), one of the last great exemplars of the medieval imagination.

  He made one other observation of his time at Oxford, not long before he was arrested and brought in front of his judges. After he had resigned from his office as Lord Chancellor, he is supposed to have gathered his family around him for one of those dramatic recitations at which he excelled. The domestic income was about to be reduced, and he informed them that they might fall to the level of ‘Oxford fare, where many grave and ancient fathers be continually conversant; which of our power stretch not to maintain, then may we, like poor scholars of Oxford, go a-begging with our bags and wallets, and sing Salve Regina at rich men’s doors’.27 It is unlikely that the young More ever needed to go begging from door to door, but the general privations of Oxford life are suggested by a contemporary who recalled that dinner consisted only of a ‘penye pece of byefe amongest iiii, hauying a few porage made of the brothe of the same byefe with salte and otemell’. After their evening studies were completed they had ‘to walk or runne up and downe halfe an houre, to get a heate on their feet’ before they retired to their chambers.28

  It is an affecting picture, but it may in part be ironically conceived. There was a convention for complaining about the hardships and difficulties of university education—literally a convention since in the teaching of the art of letter-writing, or ars dictamen, there were ‘model’ letters which provided standard rhetorical tropes for laments on the life of the student. Among the principal complaints was lack of money, of course, which in turn meant lack of food and material for heating as well as more general discomforts. It is generally reckoned by economic historians, however, that students lived above the level of a minimum ‘decent subsistence’,29 and it is likely that their cost of living actually fell in the last decades of the fifteenth century. As one of Morton’s own scholars More would have received an annual sum for his maintenance, and payments by Morton range from ten to twenty shillings.30 It is in this context that we should take a remark by one of More’s early biographers that ‘in his allowance his father kept him verie short, suffering him scarcelie to have so much monie in his own custodie, as would pay for the mending of his apparell’. The same stock repertoire of images, deriving in part from sermons and fabliaux, may also be glimpsed in Chaucer’s description of the clerk of Oxford who was ‘nat right fat, I undertake’ but ‘looked holwe, and therto sobrely’.31

  A more accurate description of student life in More’s days at Oxford can be gathered from diligent reading of the various statutes, codes and inventories of the period. Among the items which are taken to be normal accoutrements of the student are blankets and a ‘matteresse’ (if not necessarily sheets), proper clothing and a ‘cofer’ for storing them, knives and spoons and possibly even candlesticks. His shared chambers would have included a table, together with stools or chairs, as well as a bowl and pitcher for washing. Many students would have brought with them a musical instrument, the staple means of entertainment during the period, while others would not have left behind the bows and arrows which were the favourite form of sport. The more scholarly or wealthy students might even possess a ‘presse’ for their few and prized books.

  It ought to be repeated here that the younger scholars of Oxford, unlike their modern counterparts, were only fourteen or fifteen years of age, and that they were entering halls or colleges which, like monasteries and guilds, considered themselves to be formal communities based on the by then traditional idea of the household. That is why elaborate codes of discipline were established to curb individual disruption or general disorder. No student, for example, was to make unkind comparisons between ‘one country, or one people, or one class of the community and another’ and there were heavy fines for those who struck a colleague or brought the hall into disrepute; some of the heaviest fines were levied against those who maintained ‘erroneous’ religious principles, or who neglected to attend High Mass at times of religious festival. They were not allowed to frequent taverns or brothels, of course, and the playing of dice and chess was expressly forbidden; chess, in particular, was considered an unsuitable pastime. They could be fined a farthing if they sang o
r played a musical instrument too loudly, and they were prohibited from keeping hawks, dogs or ferrets. No arms were to be carried, except on the occasions when a scholar was compelled to travel. If healthful recreation was considered necessary, then all the students of the Hall would leave together and afterwards return together. It is possible to learn something of the natural propensities of scholars, even from these strict codes of conduct, and it is hard to believe that the atmosphere of the small halls (perhaps even of the colleges) was as restrained as it was supposed to be. It is only necessary to look at the vignettes of urban and rural life depicted in the margins, or within the very letters, of sacred texts to understand how a vigorous and joyful natural life could flourish within the customs of a ceremonial and hierarchical society.