The Life of Thomas More

by Ackroyd, Peter

  There is an account of England in this period, written by a Venetian diplomat, which is of particular interest for its depiction of London manners during Thomas More’s earlier years; certainly it helps to put in context More’s own distinctive and developing temperament. The English are ‘handsome and well-proportioned’ but are also ‘great lovers of themselves … whenever they see a handsome foreigner they say that he looks like an Englishman … they all from time immemorial wear very fine clothes.’27 We will find More to be lacking in personal vanity of that kind, and indeed sometimes emphasising the carelessness of his dress and deportment. ‘They take great pleasure in having a quantity of excellent victuals … when they mean to drink a great deal, they go to the tavern, and this is done not only by the men but by ladies of distinction.’28 In later life, More was notoriously abstemious with his food and drink. But it is appropriate to end a chapter concerning More’s childhood in London with the description of an encounter in a hall or street: ‘they have the incredible courtesy of remaining with their heads uncovered, with an admirable grace, whilst they talk to each other’.29 He mentions Cheapside, too, where ‘there are fifty-two goldsmiths’ shops, so rich and full of silver vessels’.30 This, as we shall see, is the street down which the young Thomas More made his way to school.

  CHAPTER III

  ST ANTHONY’S PIGS

  HOMAS More was enrolled at St Anthony’s, in Thread-needle Street. Lessons began at six in the morning, and in winter he would have taken his own candle-light with him. He has a description of a mother telling her son also to ‘take thy brede & butter with the’.1 The schoolboy was dressed in hose and doublet, since he was considered to be a smaller version of the adult male, and he carried a leather satchel upon his back, which contained ‘a pennar and an ynke horne … a penn knyff … a payre of tabullys’;2 the ‘pennar’ was a quill-holder and ‘tabullys’ were writing boards. While the child is being kissed upon the threshold there is the opportunity to leave the candle-lights and rush lanterns of a London winter for the brightness of a spring morning.

  On his customary journey of a few hundred yards from Milk Street to Threadneedle Street the young More passed the church of St Mary Magdalen near the corner of Milk Street and Cheapside; there was a cross in its churchyard which was ‘worshipped by the parishioners there as crosses be commonly worshipped in other churchyards’.3 When he walked into Cheapside itself, or more accurately ‘West Chepe’, there stood in the middle of the thoroughfare a tall water fountain made of stone and known as the ‘Standard’; here for two hundred years the citizens had filled their basins and pitchers with water, lately being taken from the River Tybourn. It was also a place of execution, and in More’s childhood sentences of beheading and burning were exacted on this spot only a few feet from his house. Violent death was not hidden from the gaze of children. On the other side of West Chepe, beyond the Standard, stood the church of St Mary-le-Bow. The famous Bow Bell was rung each evening for curfew; this was the time for the shutting of the city gates and, to the delight of the apprentices, the closing of the shops. In More’s childhood the tower was actually being rebuilt and was not completed until 1512 but still the bell tolled, according to season, at eight or nine o’clock. The tower had been brought forward to front ‘West Chepe’, and beside it stood a stone building with a gallery on its first floor known as the Seldam or the ‘Crown slid’. It had been erected at the command of Edward III as a convenient site from which royal guests might watch the various pageants and triumphs that proceeded down Cheapside on ritual occasions. But by More’s time it had been leased out as business premises and was itself surrounded by other ‘slids’, sheds or shops. These were owned principally by mercers and haberdashers, together with the goldsmiths mentioned by the Venetian diplomat. The old ‘Chepe’ had been crowded with street-stalls and street-sellers, but much of its atmosphere still survived in the late fifteenth century. With the ancient and familiar cries of ‘satin!’, ‘silks!’, ‘foreign cloth!’ and ‘courchiefs!’, it is appropriate to imagine the surroundings of an eastern bazaar or souk; the fifteenth-century city was closer to contemporary Marrakesh than to any version of post-Restoration London.

  Thomas More turned left and walked down this relatively wide thoroughfare of mud and cobbles towards Poultry and Threadneedle Street. On his left hand he passed St Laurence Lane and Ironmonger Lane, among stone buildings with figures placed in niches, gilded and painted signs, timbers decorated with carved fruits or flowers, painted walls and gables, roofs of red tile, wrought iron poles bearing lamps, piles of dung and chips from firewood which had been chopped in the street before being taken indoors. In St Laurence Lane there was a large inn for travellers, known as Blossoms Inn, and in Ironmonger Lane there was a small church named St Martin Pomary on account of the apple trees which had grown in the vicinity. The whole quarter had once been the home of saddlers, tanners and tallow chandlers, but mercers had displaced them in one of those changes of commercial activity which are explicable only in terms of the city’s own organic and instinctive growth.

  There was, however, one other important former inhabitant. On the corner of Ironmonger Lane and Cheapside had stood the site of Thomas Becket’s birthplace, now his church of St Thomas of Acre or Acon. So the young More passed each morning the memorial to the most famous of all London saints and martyrs. He proceeded east, past the Mitre tavern and the church of St Mary Colechurch which was ‘built upon a wall above ground, so that men are forced to go to ascend up thereunto by certain steps’;4 it took its name from the coal and charcoal trades, like that of the smiths and ironmongers themselves, which had grown up around it. As he passed Old Jewry (from which the Jews had been expelled two hundred years before) he would have seen on his right hand, in the middle of Cheapside, the Great Conduit which had been erected in 1240 to provide sweet water from Paddington, carried in pipes of lead. In a contemporary map, it is possible to see the vessels of the water-carriers lying on the ground beside it.

  Thomas More then took the left-hand turning towards Poultry and the Stocks Market; the poultry of Poultry are self-evident, but the ‘Stocks’ was actually a covered market-house for fishmongers and butchers. It took its name from a pair of stocks, for punishment, standing in the open space beside it. These were the streets and alleys among which More would spend most of his working life; he attended sessions, as under-sheriff of London, in the Compter or prison by Poultry and was also a member of Doctors’ Commons, which met within the Court of Arches in the crypt of Bow Church. So the young Thomas More walked by Poultry and the ‘pissing conduit’ at the south end of Thread-needle or Three-needle Street, passing several more parish churches and many ‘fair and large’ houses,5 until he came to a well at the meeting of Broad and Threadneedle Streets; just behind it, on the corner, stood St Anthony’s School.

  It was customary for boys to begin their elementary schooling at the age of seven—this was the age of the schoolboy martyr in Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale, ‘A litel clergeon, seven yeer of age’, who was being taught ‘to syngen and to rede’6—and there is every reason to believe that More’s parents would have wished him to enjoy the benefits of this neighbourhood school as early as possible. St Anthony’s was considered to be the finest of the four or five ‘grammar schools’ in London and had the distinction of being a ‘free school’, while others charged between eight pence and sixteen pence a week. It had been founded forty years before More’s arrival, out of the revenues of the nearby church of St Benet Fink, and was attached to St Anthony’s Church and Hospital. The ‘hospital’ was not one in any contemporary sense but, rather, an almshouse providing lodgings and sustenance for the deserving poor. The school itself stood on the corner between the church and the hospital, with a courtyard behind the school building. It is unlikely that this yard was designed for schoolboy ‘play’ or exercise, however, especially since it was shared by the master and chaplains as well as the almshouse. There was, in any case, little time for such activities in a sch
ool regimen as disciplined as it was prolonged. The day lasted from six in the morning until six in the evening, winter and summer, with two intermissions of an hour (sometimes two hours) for a morning breakfast and a dinner at noon. There were prayers in the morning and evening, of course, when psalms imploring God’s mercy were succeeded by psalms for the dead. On his first admission to the school the seven-year-old Thomas More would have been granted some privileged status as a ‘clerk’ or ‘cleric’, since by enrolling at St Anthony’s he had come within the aegis of the ecclesiastical authorities. One of the remarkable aspects of the late medieval period lies in the evidence of boys or young men becoming associated with what we might now call the Church ‘establishment’.

  St Anthony’s was known as a grammar school for the simple reason that its primary purpose was to teach young Londoners Latin grammar, which included both language and literature. In such schools the children were required to converse in Latin with each other and certainly the young More was, as his son-in-law put it, ‘brought up in the Latin tounge’.7 But, for the youngest pupils, this was not necessarily the only form of instruction. It was important that they knew how to read and write in their native language, for example, if only because the most basic prayers and devotional manuals were in English. Early grammatical instruction was often compared to the milk which infants need to survive, and it was well known that the nurse’s milk would contain various ‘humours’ that had to be carefully scrutinised. At a slightly later date the vernacular was treated altogether more seriously as a medium for pious or rhetorical exposition. One grammarian, Nicholas Grimald, noted that there were certain clerks ‘that could also speake latine redyly, and well fauordly: who to haue done as much in our language, & to haue handled the same mater, would haue bin half blank’.8 There was also a national and bureaucratic reason for the early study of English, since it was considered to promote ‘a great aduantage to waxe vniforme’.9 Lessons and exercises in handwriting, still to be found pressed between the leaves of old grammars, can be seen as part of that tendency towards uniformity which the printing press helped to create.

  The younger scholars of St Anthony’s had to apply themselves to another and, at this relatively early date, perhaps more important discipline. The ‘art of song’ was part of the curriculum of the grammar schools and, since the church of St Anthony’s maintained a number of choristers, it was natural for the younger boys to be taught the art of plainsong and prick song in their most elementary forms. They were instructed in what one contemporary described as the art of ‘sure and cleanly singing … good and crafty descant’.10 (The schoolboy of Chaucer’s tale was murdered precisely because of his prowess as a scholar of music; he ‘lerned’ the ‘antiphoner’, or book of plainsong chants, ‘And herkned ay the wordes and the noote’.)11 Children were also taught to play such musical instruments as the viol and the lute, ‘to get the use of our small ioyntes, before they be knitte’.12 The study would have been practical in intent—musica practica as opposed to musica speculativa—and yet it was associated with the understanding of rhetoric, mathematics and philosophy. The boys of St Anthony’s were taught the art of public deliberation at a later stage in their education, but there was always a formal connection between oratory and musical harmony; similarly, the examination of notational value and metrical proportion provided a basic introduction to mathematics. We cannot expect these young children to have appreciated Plato’s argument that the study of music marked the first stage of enlightenment, in the pursuit of ideal beauty and eternal order, but the understanding of musical harmony was part of a general education which emphasised the paramount importance of order and hierarchy.

  There are only one or two accounts of Thomas More as a schoolboy—the early stages of life were not considered distinctive enough (except in the hagiographical tradition of saints’ lives) to be worthy of separate examination—but we know enough of the adult More to make some well-informed guesses. He was an exceptionally intelligent, as well as clever, man; as the adult, so the child. When one contemporary, then, describes More’s ‘genius’ at understanding the meaning of words from their position in sentences—especially in translating from the Greek—it can be assumed that the young schoolboy had little difficulty with his early lessons. He is hardly likely to have needed to study his ‘ABC’, set up in red and black letters on a parchment or board. ‘More’s intelligence,’ the same contemporary wrote, ‘is more than human.’13 More’s love for music is mentioned on several occasions—there is a vignette of his playing the lute with his second wife—but, according to Erasmus, he was always a poor singer. So we might assume that his study of plainsong was not without practical difficulties. No doubt he coped well enough, particularly since the descriptions of him always mention his quickness and humour.

  After the preliminary studies at St Anthony’s, in which More had learned to appreciate English ‘congrewe’,14 or grammatical accuracy, he proceeded to the study of the Latin language. Ever since the middle of the fourteenth century this had been achieved partly by means of vulgaria, clauses or sentences in English which then had to be translated into Latin. Many of these useful phrases were proverbial in nature, and through such tags or apothegms it is possible to glimpse a true permanence or continuity within English culture: ‘O good turne asket another’; ‘When the hors is stolen, steyke the stabul dore’; ‘Where is no fyre ther is no smoke’; ‘Brende childe fyre dredes’; ‘Many hondes maken lite werke’; ‘Maner makes man’; ‘The more haste, the werse spede’; ‘Bettur ys late thanne never’.15 These proverbs were old when they were collected in manuscript form, which suggests a tradition of speech enduring for almost a thousand years. It might be termed folk wisdom, but some of that wisdom has now fallen into disuse; ‘It is no shame to fall, but to lye longe’ and ‘Thou shalt do as the preste says, but not as the preste dothe’ are unfortunate casualties of time and for-getfulness.

  The schoolboys also translated the classical into the vernacular and, by means of this process, came to understand the principles of syntax or accidence which they had already begun to learn. ‘What shalt thou do whan thou haste an englisshe to be made in latyn?’ begins one of the earliest textbooks, Parvula;16 the question is answered in another grammar, ‘seuen thynges must be consythered thre in casuale wordis: nomber, case, and gender and foure in verbis: mode, tens, nomber and persone’.17

  The boys of St Anthony’s were taught in the same timbered and raftered hall, divided into groups according to their ability or progress. They would sit on the floor or on stools, while the oldest of them might have wooden desks or ‘forms’. It is hard to estimate the number of pupils involved—the figures for various schools range between forty and approximately one hundred and fifty. St Anthony’s was a popular and prized free school, however, so that we might suggest the presence of about a hundred pupils at various stages of their education. They were taught by a principal master and probably more than one teaching assistant. In the age before the ready distribution of printed books—More was born the year after the first printed book was produced in England—the teaching was primarily of an oral kind, based upon memory and repetition. The master would dictate an example out loud, which the pupils would then in turn recite and repeat until it had been committed to memory. Some of these grammatical examples would take the form of couplets, longer rhyming verses or simple syllogisms such as that which More remembered in his later life as pertaining to ‘yonge chyldren vse in grammer scholes. Asinus meus habet aures, & tu habes aures, ergo tu es asinus meus. Myne asse hath eares, and thou hast eares, ergo thou arte my asse.’18 The pupils picked up the chant, perhaps beating time with their fingers, and the hall was filled with the voices of children enunciating one of the oldest of schoolboy jokes.

  School life could be severe, however, and chastisement or the threat of chastisement was a permanent aspect of a child’s education. There are rough woodcuts of the interior of schoolrooms, in some of which the master holds an open book while in others he
wields a birch; in Utopia More writes of bad teachers who would rather beat than educate their pupils. One textbook repeats a familiar complaint: ‘I played my mayster a mery pranke or playe yesterdaye and therfore he hathe thought me to synge a newe songe to daye. He hath made me to renne a case that my buttokkes doeth swette a blody sweat … What maketh the loke so sad? I am thus sadde for fere of the rodde.’19 In Piers the Plowman, Langland translates the appropriate Latin tag Qui parcit virge, odit filium into his own distinctive metre: ‘Who-so spareth the sprynge, spilleth his children.’20 One of the biographers of Thomas More’s greatest opponent, Martin Luther, has suggested that Luther’s preoccupation with images of farting, excrement and buttocks may in part be related to the beatings he received as a child. It may also be the case that More’s similar interest in the ‘anal zone’21—his ability to find Latin terms for excrement is extraordinary—has a similar source.