The Life of Thomas More (8 page)

It is in many respects the direct heir to the academic and legal disputations of the period, since two characters known respectively as ‘A’
and ‘B’ begin by outlining a plot in which the rival claims of nobility and virtue are to be tested. Cornelius is a wastrel patrician and Flaminius a virtuous plebeian; they vie for the hand of the lovely Lucrece, and the drama of their contest is suitably adorned with legalistic and oratorical terms. It is not hard to imagine More, as a graduate of the St Bartholomew disputations, taking some part in these entertainments. The elevated cadences of the argument (couched in rhyme royal) are, however, in contrast to the scatological aspect of certain passages. There is, for example, a reference to one character who ‘For a medsyn must ete his wyves torde’ and a request that ‘ye had be taken up behynde’.
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Similar jokes will be found in the work of Thomas More. The ‘frankness’ of fifteenth-century people about the body and its functions has often been observed; if you believe human nature to be fallen from grace, and irredeemably flawed, then there is no reason to be discreet or fastidious about its natural properties. It might be useful, even beneficial, to exploit and to parody them. But there was also a positive delight in the material world; in the sacrifice of the Mass, for example, Christ’s actual body was believed to animate the bread and wine. If the natural order might act as a visible token of an invisible sign, then the sacramental and the excremental can be seen in tacit partnership. We know from the babooneries in the margins of certain sacred manuscripts that a sense of ritual and a sense of ribaldry are not unrelated; they can be seen as part of the same instinct for game and for play.

And so the young Thomas More stepped in among the players. William Roper’s story has an air of authenticity for the manner in which, at the beginning of his biographical narrative, the element of theatricality in More’s character is revealed. He, along with everyone else, acted his part. The discovery of the world as a stage goes back beyond Shakespeare to Lucian and other classical satirists. Yet the apothegm had a particular resonance in the religious culture of the late medieval period; in a world where the truths of divine authority were fixed and established, the fallen world of human nature could be seen in part as a game of little consequence. It is merely the antechamber of eternity. There is no abiding city, as More emphasised in all of his devotional works. So the guests in the Great Hall play their roles according to the divinely ordained hierarchy, dressing (and being addressed) in accordance with
their precise degree and estate. But it soon became time for More to play another part. When Archbishop Morton ‘sawe, that he could not profitt so much in his house, as he desired, where there were manie distractions of publick affairs, having great care of his bringing up, he sent him to the Universitie, and placed him in Canterbury Colledge at Oxford’.
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CHAPTER V
SET ON HIS BOOK

HOMAS More entered Oxford University as a scholarship boy, most probably as one of the
collegii pueri
(‘college boys’) nominated by Archbishop Morton for a place at Canterbury College. At the time of his arrival, in the autumn of 1492, the university contained approximately one thousand young scholars scattered among the colleges of regular and secular clergy as well as the various halls. More was in his fourteenth year, the average age on first coming to the university. His stay at Oxford, and his reasons for being despatched there in the first place, have been the subject of endless conjecture. Since he remained only for two years before moving on to New Inn, in London, it has been suggested that he was the unfortunate object of his father’s ambition; according to this theory John More insisted upon his son following a legal career like his own, thereby forsaking the academic delights of the college library and the dangerous ‘new learning’.

But there are more convincing explanations for his relatively brief university career. There can be little doubt that Archbishop Morton understood the boy’s potential for public service, and an education at Canterbury College in the charge of Benedictine monks would have been the ideal preparation for a successful career within the ecclesiastical establishment. Morton’s connection with Oxford was a strong one; in 1494 he was elected as its chancellor. The young More would have been able to study civil as well as canon law, as Morton did, before taking holy orders and joining the professional administrative class of church and state. It is possible, on the other hand, that More’s progress from an Oxford college to a London Inn was planned in advance. It was not unusual for young men to spend a year or two at the university,
without taking a degree, before moving on to more serious study at an Inn of Court. Several of his contemporaries made precisely that journey; a preliminary grounding in logic and dialectic offered an ideal preparation for the intensive study of common law. It would be of a piece with More’s later career to see his progress from Lambeth Palace to Oxford, from university to Inn, as a carefully managed and willingly undertaken process of advancement.

There are two extant illustrations of Canterbury College, Oxford, both of them showing it close to demolition in the middle of the eighteenth century. The college had been established in the fourteenth century for a small community of student monks from Canterbury itself—Benedictines or, as they were known, ‘black monks’—but was suppressed with its parent monastery at the time of the Henrician Reformation. It was neither the largest nor the most distinguished of the monastic colleges, but by the 1490s it had already acquired an interesting history. Its warden in 1365 had been John Wycliffe, a little over a decade before he began his more widely known career as a reformer. A recent influence was William de Selling, the prior of Christ Church in Canterbury, who had fostered the teaching of Greek and increased the number of monk-fellows at Canterbury College itself. Selling had brought back Greek manuscripts from two visits to Italy and is believed to have translated a work of St John Chrysostom; he takes his place, then, as one of the first of those pious Christian ‘humanists’ who were to affect More so strongly at a later date.

The college itself took the shape of a small quadrangle surrounded by hall, chapel, kitchen and chambers for scholars and fellows. The buildings were of two storeys, the ground floor constructed of Headington stone and the upper storey built with timber and ‘covered with plaster impressed with fantastic designs’.
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A library had been completed some forty years before More’s arrival, and within it the books were still fastened upon chains in the old medieval style; this was an understandable precaution, since scholars had been known to remove the more attractive volumes. Surviving lists and catalogues refer to works of biblical and patristic literature, as well as to cupboards containing books of grammar and law. It is difficult to be precise about the number of collegians. There are likely to have been approximately six monk-fellows, together with a warden, and five or six secular scholars like More
himself. There were also a number of
commorantes
—lodgers or ‘sojourners’ who paid for their accommodation. Each chamber was generally shared by two fellows or scholars, with one end of the room partitioned into separate studies.

So More had entered a small community, organised upon a quasi-monastic pattern. His role as a secular scholar, one of Morton’s
collegii pueri
, was similar to that of a monastic oblate; he was required to assist during the services in the chapel and to wait upon the fellows in the hall. He was of course accustomed to such service in Lambeth, but the Great Hall of the palace was now exchanged for a smaller room with a central hearth, a high table, a woollen tapestry picked out with images of animals as well as ‘an old hanging with ostrich feathers’
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—the feathers no doubt part of some tribute to a Prince of Wales. It was declared, however, that such menial service was not to be so arduous that it interfered with the studies of the
collegii pueri
; they would have been free, for example, to attend the college lectures or disputations in grammar and philosophy.

But this may not have been the only institution where the young More received his education. There are persistent reports that he was also a member of St Mary’s Hall in Oxford. One early seventeenth-century account of the university states that he was educated ‘in aula S. Mariae’, and a late history proclaims More as one of the eminent men of that place.
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There is no real contradiction here, since it was possible for More to be formally attached to Canterbury College, while residing (and even being instructed) in St Mary’s Hall; the college and hostel were situated close together in the same street.

The halls were different in character from the colleges; they were not closed monastic institutions but, instead, were self-governing and for a long period self-regulatory. Each one held less than twenty students, with a central hall for meals and disputations as well as a small number of shared chambers. The image of the family, or household, had a firm hold upon most medieval institutions; the terms
aula
(‘hall’) or
hospicium
(‘hostel’) were sometimes exchanged for
domus
(‘house’). The hours for any ‘yonge scoler’ were long, with his rising at five for divine service before the morning lecture (with perhaps a second lecture at nine) to face a day which included studies between dinner and supper followed by further studies until retiring to his hall at eight or nine in
the evening. The students ate together in ‘commons’, with a bell or horn announcing dinner at ten or eleven in the morning and supper at five; only Latin was permitted in conversation, and of course they were expected to attend Mass each day. After their studies were over, and before they retired to bed, the community of the hall chanted the
Salve Regina
or some other antiphon to the Virgin Mary. ‘To thee do we cry,’ they sang together, ‘poor banished children of Eve.’ Such were the institutions during More’s short period as an undergraduate.