The Life of Thomas More (19 page)

HOMAS More’s first biographer asserts that More ‘gave himselfe to devotion and prayer in the Charterhouse of London, religiously lyvinge there, without vowe, about iiii yeares’.
¹
Another chronicler, Cresacre More, believed that his famous relative only lived ‘nere the Charterhouse, frequenting daily their spirituall excercises without any vowe’.
²
The more general aspect of his faith is emphasised by Erasmus, who has an account of the young More applying his whole mind to the study of piety,
³
by means of vigils, fasting and prayer. Yet another narrative suggests that More also consulted a friend in holy orders, William Lily, about the possibility of being ordained as a priest. Everything at this time, then, points in the direction of the monastery.

It survives still, largely restored or rebuilt, to the north of Smithfield. In the sixteenth century it was beyond the western gates of the city, between Smithfield itself and the unhappy Pardon Churchyard where the bodies of plague victims and executed felons were indiscriminately buried. The cells of the monks had been erected upon another old burial ground, and a chapel of St Mary the Virgin had once stood upon the area in spiritual commemoration of ‘above one hundred thousand bodies of Christian people’
⁴
who were interred there. Perhaps the vast concourse of the dead may account for the visions and miracles that occurred in the Charterhouse during More’s lifetime. The Carthusian ‘House of the Salutation of the Blessed Virgin Mary’ was established in the 1370s by a wealthy foreign patron, Sir Walter de Mauny, who had been knighted for services to Edward III. In this combination of money, royal affinity and European connection, we can discern the more secular aspects of the Carthusian order; from its foundation by St Bruno at
the end of the eleventh century, its regimen of seclusion, labour and perpetual prayer had attracted the beneficence of powerful patrons as well as the spiritual ardour of rich merchants or noblemen who desired to find a place where ‘springs not fail’. Certainly the austerity of the monks formed a suggestive contrast to the lives of the regular clergy; it was said that they had never been reformed because they had never been corrupted. By the time of More’s association with the London Charterhouse its twenty-four cells (with a different letter of the alphabet upon each door) had been built and financed with the aid of individual patrons, while many of the monks themselves came from rich or noble families. Nor was it unusual for ‘guests’ to stay in special accommodation, for an appropriate fee, and the Charterhouse was one of the two or three Carthusian foundations where young men of spiritual tendency could lodge while at the same time pursuing a secular career—in the Inns of Court, for example. Many did eventually choose the holier profession, however, and in More’s lifetime there were at least three former lawyers and one royal courtier who donned the white robes and cowl.

More’s own position, within or beside the Charterhouse, is not entirely clear. It is possible that he remained in its guest quarters for four years; the rules limiting the stay of these secular sojourners had not yet been enacted. Under ordinary circumstances he would have remained a resident of Lincoln’s Inn, to which he was formally connected; although such a requirement was less important than his regular attendance in chapel or in hall. But it is most likely that Cresacre More has passed on a reliable item of family information—having attained the rank of ‘utter barrister’ at the Inn, but still unable to attend the courts at Westminster, he can be supposed to have taken temporary lodgings near the Charterhouse. It would not have been difficult to find accommodation; there were houses in Aldersgate Street, St John Street and Charterhouse Lane, while Smithfield was ‘compassed about with buildings’.
⁵
He was also close to his chambers in Lincoln’s Inn; it was no more than a five minute ride away, down Cow Lane and across Holborn Bridge, past Ely Place and through Holborn before turning left into Chancery Lane.

More, then, was an expected and familiar ‘guest’. He never took vows and never entered the less exalted ranks of either the oblates or the lay-brothers, known also as ‘converses’ because of their choice irrevocably
to turn away from the world. Yet even if More had not taken that extreme decision, the great oak doorways into the courtyard of the Charterhouse admitted him to a world of discipline and devotion that affected him profoundly. The spirit of the place was reflected in its buildings, which followed the standard plan of a Carthusian foundation. There was a
‘parvum cloistrum’
, where there were guest cells on the upper floor; the monks used the arcade and quadrangle below, but the guests had a private staircase to their rooms so that they would not disturb the meditative privacy of the inmates. To the north was the ‘guesten hall’ or dining-room for visitors, while a ‘slype’ or passage on the west side led to the ‘Wash House Court’. This was the area reserved for the accommodation of the lay-brothers; their cells were on the first floor, their workshops on the ground floor beneath them. Here were installed the brewery house, kitchen, buttery, larders, wine cellar and the ‘wash house’ itself. The cells of the monks were built individually around the great cloister, to the north-east of these smaller courts. A ‘cell’ comprised three wainscoted rooms on the first floor—a study, bedroom and oratory—with a work-room and wood-house on the ground floor looking out upon a small garden. There was a hatch beside each cell through which food was dispensed to the resident monk. These were austere but not penitential surroundings, appropriate enough for inmates from wealthy families. The Charterhouse itself was not entirely deprived of the more luxurious examples of religious observance; at the time of its dissolution it was stripped of much plate, gilt ornament and rich cloth. There were bay trees, ponds of carp, rosebushes and small falcons known as merlin birds, all of them adding to that air of
sancta simplicissitas
on the edge of the city. The church was ‘semi-public’, with several chapels, rich alabaster tombs and more than fifteen altars complete with intricately carved statues and painted images.

Yet here also was the centre of great spiritual devotion. At eleven in the evening the monks would be woken from a short sleep and would proceed into the fathers’ choir for the recitation of Matins, Lauds and the Office of the Dead; in a darkness attenuated only by the lights they carried with them, and by the gleam of the sanctuary lamp, they sang, chanted and prayed for three hours. Their robes were of undyed wool and descended to their ankles; they wore white leathern girdles around
the waist, and much of the body was covered by a great white cowl and hood. They chanted slowly, as if engaged in meditation rather than song. Guests were permitted to attend these services, watching from a gallery in the smaller brothers’ choir, and there are accounts of the ‘night-slippers’ and lights that they were given by the kitchener as they left their plain lodgings. It is a scene which Thomas More recalled in
Utopia
; the citizens of that insular community also wear white robes in their temple, while all is veiled in semi-darkness.
⁶
The monks returned to their cells in the early hours of the morning and, after reciting part of Our Lady’s Office, retired to their narrow beds before being awoken again at five or six in order to attend Mass followed by prayers and spiritual meditation. Their hours between ten and two were devoted to intellectual or manual labour, in their cells, and then at a quarter to three they went back to church for Vespers; they remained at their devotions until half-past six or seven when once more they returned to their solitude in preparation for the ‘night vigil’. In solitude, too, in those hours of the day not dedicated to work or communal devotion, the monks recited the Divine Office, the Office of the Blessed Virgin, and certain prayers for the restoration of the Holy Land. It was an echo-chamber of prayer, this small London community interceding for the living and pleading for the dead. We might see Thomas More watching from the stone gallery above, as the white-robed monks continued their perpetual chant of psalms, canticles, antiphons, responsoria, prayers and hymns.

He became thoroughly conversant, too, with a precisely regulated life of prayer and study. There was a moderate, almost paternal, discipline on such matters as the occasions for bowing in greeting or kneeling to ask pardon. Silence was generally observed, and the Carthusian diet was unique in its absolute prohibition of meat. The monks left the Charterhouse only once a week, for a Sunday afternoon walk together, known as
Spatiamentum.
Whether they chose to venture down the notorious Turnmill Lane towards Clerkenwell and the fields beside the village of Islington, or whether they walked down Ludgate and past the Black Friars towards the Thames, is not recorded. One or two members of the community needed to have more elaborate contact with the external world; the procurator, for example, was obliged to administer the estates owned by the Charterhouse in Bloomsbury and Edmonton,
Tottenham, Kent, Hertfordshire and elsewhere. It is not difficult to imagine More, as a constant guest and friend, advising on the legal and financial matters attendant upon these worldly possessions.

The calling of the Carthusian, according to one history of the order, ‘is far more to weep than to sing’,
⁷
and the solitude of the monastic life did on occasions lead to emotional or even histrionic scenes. The monks were indeed particularly prone to weeping, in the exercise of what was known as ‘the gift of tears’; tears were, after all, according to St Bernard, the wine of angels. There is an extravagance and intensity within late medieval life which are revealed at sudden moments of ardour, or crisis, and which cannot be separated from the general love of spectacle and display. Of course the ardour may take strange forms, and in the records of the early sixteenth-century Charterhouse there are accounts of visitations and apparitions. The crucified figure of Jesus turned its back upon one recalcitrant monk, in sight of the community, while another was always struck with blindness on entering the church. One wastrel who declared that he would rather eat toads than fish (Erasmus noted that the meat-free Carthusians generally smelled like otters) found that his cell was instantly filled with the creatures ‘crawling and leaping after him’.
⁸
In the uncertain period before the Reformation, the brothers saw in the air ‘a globe as of blood, of great size’,
⁹
and in the same period swarms of flies covered the entire surface of the monastery, ‘all which things we feared were the signs and forecasts of other events’.
¹⁰
There were more fortunate visitations, too, and among these reports of bloody omens are records of strange sweet scents and music infiltrating the church at times of prayer. Such accounts come from intelligent and well-educated contemporaries of More himself; his was still a world of marvels and apparitions.

But there was another aspect of medieval piety which led him towards the gates of Charterhouse. The Carthusians were as well known for their learning as for their devotion, and one of the monks’ principal occupations lay in the copying of manuscripts; the more artistic or erudite of them were given parchment, pen and ink for the transcription of pious works. We have the names of individual monks such as William Tregoose and William Exmew who copied versions of that great mystical treatise
The Cloud of Unknowing
, and there are records of other texts being sent from the monastery to religious centres throughout the
country. In 1500, for example, some thirty-two volumes were lent by the prior of the Charterhouse, Richard Roche, to a monastery in Coventry. At the time More himself frequented Charterhouse, a copy of
The Cloud of Unknowing
was being produced, but, perhaps more pertinently, in its library were to be found Walter Hilton’s
Scale of Perfection
and
The Imitation of Christ
by Thomas à Kempis. Such was the significance of these works to More that he mentions them specifically as ones to ‘norysshe and encrease deuocyon’,
¹¹
and alludes to them throughout his own writings. The
Imitation
, which More believed to be composed by Jean Gerson, is perhaps the finest expression of a renovated piety, based upon austere communal living and prayer. To imitate Christ is to bear all the humiliations and the indignities of the world; there are wonderfully elaborate meditations on the passion of Christ for the world, and the necessity of discipline and suffering to be worthy of his love. Each man must find his own cross and bear it willingly into what à Kempis calls ‘the valley of my nothingness’,
¹²
where it is necessary only to ‘write, read, chant, mourn, keep silence, pray’.
¹³
More discovered in à Kempis an account of the worthlessness of this world and its rewards, together with the desire for solitude, prayer, and that longing for death as the gate to eternity. The simplicity and purity of these themes are taken up in More’s writings with a fervour which suggests the intensity of his own nature, and there can be no doubt that the library of the Charterhouse helped to shape his own spiritual temperament.