The Life of Thomas More (4 page)

The young Thomas More, then, was raised in a prosperous and comfortable household. The prose of his maturity contains allusions to infant games and childhood ballads. Even in the anxious and bitter period of his polemical writing, he invokes a ‘good chylde’ playing such ‘prety playes … as chyrystone mary bone, bokyll pyt, spurne poynt, cobnutte or quaytyng’.
¹⁷
‘Cobnutte’ remains as the children’s game of ‘conkers’, and the game of quoits or ‘quaytyng’ still flourishes. It is clear that little children also played with cherrystones and used marrow
bones as bats or markers. In another place he writes of children shooting arrows high into the air
¹⁸
and in fact quite young boys were given bows and arrows with which to practise their skills. There are metaphors of archery throughout More’s writings, with his references to ‘a full shotte’, the ‘but’ and the ‘prycke’.
¹⁹
It is hard to imagine his ever being a good archer, however, let alone an enthusiastic player of ‘foteball’, with an inflated pig’s bladder used as a ball, or of ‘cokesteel’ with a cock buried up to its neck in the ground and used as a target for missiles. It is easier to see him playing less ferocious games in the courtyard, ‘as chyldren make castelles of tyle shardes’.
²⁰

There is a charming reminiscence of a late fifteenth-century childhood written by a twelve-year-old schoolboy, in which he recalls how ‘I was wont to lye styll abedde tyll it was forth dais, delitynge myselfe in slepe and ease. The sone sent in his beamys at the wyndowes that gave me lyght instede of a candle.’ And what did the young boy see around him, on these mornings five hundred years ago? He used ‘to beholde the rofe, the beamys, and the rafters of my chambre, and loke on the clothes that the chambre was hanged with!’ Then he ‘callede whom me list to lay my gere redy to me’ and ‘my brekefaste was brought to my beddys side’.
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This pampered childhood is enough to dispel quaint illusions about the necessary hardship of fifteenth-century life. There are other memories, too. John Colet, who became More’s religious mentor, remembered the painted dolls and rocking-horses of his infancy. In John Heywood’s interlude
Wytty and Wyttles
, a child remarks that ‘All my pleasure is in catchynge of byrdes/And makynge of snowballys and throwyng the same’;
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he failed to mention skating, using the bones of sheep for skates, which was another popular winter pastime.

More had his own reminiscences, which are expressed by a protagonist in his
Dialogue of Comfort
: ‘My mother had whan I was a litell boye, a good old woman that toke hede to her children, they callid her mother mawd.’ One can imagine her in close cap and stuff gown. ‘She was wont whan she sat by the fier with vs, to tell vs that were children many childish tales.’
²³
He then recounts one of the fireside stories in which a fox, Father Raynard, hears the confessions of a wolf and an ass. The moral is concerned with the problems of an over-scrupulous conscience, but includes the recognisable details of city life—the pigs sleeping in ‘new straw’ and the goose in ‘the powlters shop’ with its
feathers ‘redy pluckyd’.
²⁴
It is not a tale out of Aesop, since the Greek fabulist could hardly have anticipated priests or rosary beads ‘almost as bigg as bolles’,
²⁵
but it is an animal narrative of the same stable. Mother Mawd was clearly devout, also, and the devotion of More’s own nature may have first sprung from such close childhood influence.

During More’s childhood, in 1479 and again in 1485, there was ‘an hugh mortalyte & deth of people’ in London; it was the ‘sweating sickness’ or ‘English sweat’, which, in the autumn of the latter year, may have claimed the lives of his mother and of two siblings. Two years later the plague visited Westminster and caused ‘grete deth’.
²⁶
Certainly his abiding and central preoccupation with death was shared by his contemporaries. The reports of these epidemics come from the London chronicles of the period, and in the pages of these long forgotten memorials the customary life of the city around the young More is also restored—men hanged and then burned for robbing a church and despoiling the blessed sacrament, bills fastened upon church doors, the gates being shut against riotous assemblies outside the walls, new towers and conduits and weathercocks being erected, a world of portents and providential signs, lavish spectacle and continual urban improvement. It was also the period that witnessed the short reign of the supposed ‘crippleback’, Richard III, who is presumed to have murdered the young heirs of Edward IV in Thomas More’s own fifth year.

Henry Tudor was in turn the victor on Bosworth Field in 1485, More’s seventh year, but those dynastic struggles or ‘Wars of the Roses’ did not necessarily play any formative role in City trade and politics. It has been variously estimated that the amount of actual warfare in the years between 1455 and 1487 was twelve or fourteen months, and fifteenth-century London was a relatively peaceful and increasingly prosperous city. The authorities generally ensured that they were seen to be on the ‘right side’ on the appropriate occasions, and supported whichever monarch emerged from the processes of fate, time and faction. John More himself is an interesting example of the alliance which might be formed between the City and the royal court; it is clear, from his will and other evidence, that he had an especial loyalty towards Edward IV, in whose reign the young lawyer rose to prominence. It was in Edward’s reign, too, that the heralds bestowed on More a coat of arms. It is also clear that he had a particular connection with Archbishop
Morton, who served Edward IV and, subsequently, Henry VII. The precise nature of their relationship cannot now be uncovered, and might well have resisted analysis at the time; it remained a matter of mutual services and obligations, the filaments of which over the years created a network of amity and trust. Indeed, it is much easier to chart John More’s legal career in the years of Thomas More’s childhood. He was involved for some years on a City body concerned with the maintenance and development of London Bridge but, while specialising in London affairs, he was also ascending the hierarchy of Lincoln’s Inn. He was in turn master of the revels, butler and marshal; these posts may sound absurd or servile, but they were of paramount importance in the good administration and reputation of the Inn. The ‘master of the revels’, for example, was not some figure out of Rabelais but an official in charge of its most elaborate and prestigious annual ceremonies. Thomas More himself accepted the post even when he was serving as Lord Chancellor of England.

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.’
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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.’
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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’.
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He mentions Cheapside, too, where ‘there are fifty-two goldsmiths’ shops, so rich and full of silver vessels’.
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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’.
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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.