The Life of Thomas More (10 page)

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’.
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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.
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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’,
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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.
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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’.
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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 or 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.

On feasts such as that of Epiphany or All Saints, entertainment was provided after the religious observances had been fulfilled. Some scholars furnished their own form of ‘misrule’ at the festival of the Holy Innocents, three days after Christmas, and in one Oxford college there was a
rex fabarum
or king of beans.
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There were also occasions when minstrels and players would be introduced into the normally sober precincts of hall or college, among them the
fistulatos
and the
tubicens.
By the time that More had come to Oxford, comedies and other plays were also acceptable entertainment; there are records of the works of Plautus and Aristophanes, two of the favourites of student comedy, being performed on just such occasions. The young More had ‘stepped in’ among the players in the hall of Lambeth Palace, but his dramatic skills were greatly extended after his arrival at Oxford. Erasmus mentions in one letter that, while he was still an
adolescens
(a youth of fifteen years or upwards), More wrote, and performed in, short comedies or comic sketches.
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There is confirmation of the fact in the first sentence of More’s earliest extant letter, when he mentions the composition of ‘partes’ or a role in a comedy about Solomon.
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Comic episodes of this kind were often employed in the teaching of grammar. Scholars were sometimes also required to compose short plays in order to furnish proof of their grammatical and rhetorical abilities. We cannot divorce More the scholar from More the dramatist, therefore, and any modern idea of ‘creative literature’ must give way to a proper understanding of rhetoric as the basis of all his work. His wit, his ingenuity as a writer, his skill as an actor, and his public roles, were all part of the same dispensation.

More had also begun to write poetry, of a highly accomplished kind. We must turn again to Erasmus for the information that in his youth More wrote verses—‘carmine … exercuit’
³⁵
is the phrase, which might mean either songs or lyric poems. Recent scholars have suggested that certain epigrams and comic English verses might be attributed to
More, but the evidence is at best only conjectural. It would be inconceivable that he did not compose in verse, however, especially since it was one of the requirements of the curriculum. There is in any case no doubt about his first elaborate poem, ‘Nyne pageauntes’, which appeared in the English edition of his works some twenty years after his death. The publisher of his verse and prose ‘in the Englysh tonge’, his nephew William Rastell, states that More ‘in his youth deuysed in hys Fathers house in London, a goodly hangyng of fyne paynted clothe, with nyne pageaunts’, complete with verses.
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Another story suggests that John More was so delighted by the proficiency of his son’s poetry that he had cloths painted and hung upon the walls in order to display it to best advantage. Over the first image, of a boy playing with a whip and top, More has written a verse of iambic pentameters in the form of rhyme royal. It begins,

Eight other painted scenes follow, to display the passing ‘pageant’ of the world from youth to age, accompanied by images of death crushed under the feet of Lady Fame and of time prostrate before ‘Eternitie’ sitting in a great chariot like some figure out of Petrarch’s
Trionfi.
It is all highly theatrical, and might even have set the stage for dramatic recitations by the More family. The powerfully assured verses of ‘Nyne pageauntes’ emerge from a technical mastery of grammatical and rhetorical devices which seems almost unprecedented in a young scholar. This was no doubt one of the skills which appealed to Samuel Johnson, that great classicist and composer of Latin verse, who in his
History of the English Language
devoted more than twice as much space to More’s poetry as he did to Chaucer’s. He praised its ‘pure and elegant style’,
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and indeed all of More’s English verse is characterised by great purity of diction and simplicity of cadence. It represents in the very finest form what was known as ‘discrecion’ in the apt arrangement of parts. That is why ‘Nyne pageauntes’ should be read and understood in terms of its use of metonymy and metaphor, asyndeton and metathesis, peristasis and paralepsis. It is necessary to expel any notion of poetry as
self-expression and to consider it instead as a particularly affecting form of grammar.

But it should not therefore be assumed that it was some theoretical exercise; grammar was the companion of rhetoric and oratory, which in turn are implicated in drama. More might equally well step among the pageants as among the players, since the very scheme and cadence of the poem associate it with the guild pageant plays and the mysteries which he saw performed on the streets of London. It has been suggested that More owes his central debt to the verse of Petrarch, but we may find his inspiration closer to home. In Clerkenwell or in Cheapside, figures from classical and biblical legend would be displayed upon chariots, or would step down and address the crowd in the same spirit as More’s emblems of time and fatality. On the afternoon of Corpus Christi thirty-six painted pageants passed through the streets of London with these verses of explanation hung among them:

The pageant wagons for the procession of the Midsummer Watch were constructed and stored in Leadenhall; they were painted, gilded, and carried in procession upon the shoulders of porters. In the morality plays performed at Skinners’ Well, and elsewhere, the rise and fall of humankind were plotted in much the same terms as More’s rendition of youth and age. ‘I gynne to waxyn hory and olde,’ declares Mankind in one such play, ‘My bake gynnyth to bowe and bende’.
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A pageant was literally, in the words of one contemporary, ‘a house of wainscot painted and builded on a cart with four wheels’
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and upon these wagons allegorical figures would address each other just like Fame and Eternity in More’s own poem. When a prominent member of the Spanish royal family entered London, she was greeted by six pageants constructed at various points along her route from London Bridge into the City. Painted wooden castles built upon stone foundations, columns and statues, fountains and artificial mountains, mechanical zodiacs and battlements, were all arranged before her as Virtue spoke:

The verse is not as skilful as that of More, but the general form of address and meaning is very similar. It has been necessary to multiply these examples of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century theatrical rituals to suggest the urban tradition and inheritance from which Thomas More drew. He might have derived inspiration, also, from the allegorical figures of illuminated manuscripts, from the stock types and situations to be found in sermons and fabliaux, from the richly painted verses and pictures upon the walls of the cloister of Paul’s Pardon Churchyard close to his house in Milk Street. All these images and words were around him since the young More was part of a culture which was still oral, communal, spectacular and ritualistic. His ‘Nyne pageauntes’ harbours a medieval voice in which the cadences of the liturgy and the plays, of debate and disputation, as well as a whole wealth of sounds and signs and emblems, are still to be recognised. It was his genius, as we shall see, to put his rhetorical and grammatical skills at the service of this popular culture; but, at this point, we may return with him to that city which, according to John Lydgate in ‘London Lykpeny’, ‘of all the land … beareth the pryse’.
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CHAPTER VI
DUTY IS THE LOVE OF LAW