The Life of Thomas More (6 page)

Their hours were long, but there were holidays on the ‘holy days’ of the many religious festivals. Shrove Tuesday was the occasion for cockfighting, for example, when the boys would bring in their own prize birds and set them against each other; it was customary for the schoolmaster to be given all the dead animals. On the Feast of the Innocents a ‘boy-bishop’ was ritually enthroned in the principal churches of London; this was only tangentially an occasion of ‘misrule’ of a late medieval kind, and was pre-eminently a solemn church ceremony with processions as well as enthronement. As one of the statutes of the Sarum rite puts it, ‘no man whatsoever, under the pain of
Anathema
, should interrupt or press upon these Children at the Procession’.
²⁴
The child bishop, fully apparelled in ecclesiastical robes with mitre and crozier, delivered a sermon (which often touched upon the misdemeanours of the adult clergy) before walking through the streets of his district, blessing the people and collecting money for his churchwardens. This was one of the many popular festivals destroyed at the time of the Tudor Reformation. There is also a reference in one grammar book to a particular occasion when garlands of roses were made in honour of St Anthony’s day, and this festival has customarily been attached to St Anthony’s School itself.

More remained there for approximately five years. The pattern of his later career suggests that he must have been a quick and docile pupil; one of his early biographers, who had the benefit of a family connection,
wrote that ‘he had rather greedily deuoured then leasurely chewed his Grammar rules, he out stripped farre both in towardnesse of witt, and diligence of endeauors all his schoole fellowes, with whome he was matched’.
²⁵
So he proceeded quickly from his early lessons in Donatus to more difficult textbooks such as the
Doctrinale
and the
Grecismus.
His later years at St Anthony’s were also directed to the study of classical writers (Virgil and Cicero were obvious favourites) as well as to the arts of composition. He would have been expected to be able to write Latin verse and to prepare various rhetorical topics in prose. The importance of this training in rhetoric is emphasised by an account in Stow’s
Survey of London
, where the boys of St Anthony’s are noted for their prowess in public disputation and deliberation. On the eve of the feast of St Bartholomew the Apostle, the scholars of the various London grammar schools met in the churchyard of St Bartholomew, a few yards from Smithfield. They set up a makeshift wooden stage upon a bank of earth and here in Latin would dispute a chosen topic; ‘some one scholar hath stepped up, and there hath opposed and answered, till he were by some better scholar overcome and put down; and then the overcomer taking the place, did like as the first’.
²⁶
The eventual winners of these oratorical contests were awarded a prize (in a time after that of Thomas More, they were presented with silver bows and arrows), and according to Stow St Anthony’s ‘commonly presented the best scholars’.
²⁷

It was no game but, rather, an important practical training for their later lives. The ability to speak and to understand Latin was the first requirement for any career in the Church, in the Inns of Court, or at the Court itself. The adult More, for example, would have conversed in Latin as often as he ever spoke in English; the majority of his extant letters are also composed in the older language. His most important prose works are written in Latin, as well, but its use has a more private aspect; he and Erasmus were for a while intimate friends but they could communicate only in that language. It was, in other words, a living tongue. But this instruction in Latin, and the deliberations of the schoolboys beside St Bartholomew’s, had a more particular point. More and his contemporaries at St Anthony’s were also instructed in the essential Ciceronian distinctions of
inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria
and
pronuntiatio.
When the young orators disputed on their wooden stage in the churchyard, they had been already trained to recognise
and reproduce the elements of
exordium, narratio, divisio, confirmatio, refutatio and peroratio.
There would also be occasion to learn ‘topics’ and conventional formulae which could be applied as the subject required. This was not some antique discipline, equivalent to the learning of ‘classics’ in contemporary schools; in the late fifteenth century, the purpose of this education was to create a group of skilled lawyers and administrators. It was the perfect training for ambitious boys, or at least for the families who were ambitious on their behalf.

It ought to be remembered that, for more than two thousand years, rhetoric had been the central element in preparation for public service. In the classical world it had generally been taught as a formal alternative to philosophy; the pursuit of philosophical truth was supposed to lead to wisdom while rhetoric was concerned with a practical interpretation of, and intervention in, the world. The gifts of subtle invention and eloquent persuasion were indispensable for the right ordering of the ‘commonwelth’, and More himself is a fine example of that early training. His subsequent public career was essentially that of an orator, and his published works bear the unmistakable marks of a rhetorical education. He did not write, or wish to write, ‘literature’ in any sense we now care to think of it. He wrote polemics, refutations, confutations and dialogues in which ‘the case is put’ and challenged in true deliberative fashion; there have been essays written on the prevalence of rhetorical punctuation in More’s prose compositions, but that is only one aspect of a style largely derived from rhetorical figures and devices. When we come to look at his open-air dialogues, of which
Utopia
is the most celebrated example, we should remember that his conduct of debate was exactly that which the schoolboys of St Anthony’s practised—something to be argued outdoors and in the public domain. There was no such thing as private truth.

When the boys recited tenses and declensions by rote, when they grasped the commonplaces or topics of rhetorical discourse, when they learned by heart simple syllogisms, when they grew skilled in the memory and repetition of oral formulae, they were being made aware of the presence of external authority while at the same time becoming familiarised with implicit demands of order and stability. The same kind of lessons had been taught for several hundreds of years, and the schoolroom offered the first and perhaps best example.of those virtues
of permanence and continuity which the adult More was to esteem so highly. The disciplined arrangement of knowledge, evinced in the elaborate lexicographical works of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, impressed upon the young pupil that image of hierarchy and taxonomy which was so central to the medieval imagination. Beyond all this, too, was the image of God.

And so the boys disputed on a summer evening near Smithfield. The pupils of More’s school were known as ‘Anthonie pigs’, because the figure of that saint was customarily accompanied by one of those animals; the pig was once a symbol of the devil, but it had now been domesticated and St Anthony himself was the patron saint of hogs as well as butchers. Little is known about London pigs in the fifteenth century, except that they were smaller than the present variety, but the connection between them and the hospital brothers of St Anthony’s was well established. Those pigs which were too unhealthy or unwholesome to be fit for market were taken from the Stocks and were slit in the ear as a sign of their inedibility; it was customary for the proctor of St Anthony’s to tie a bell around the necks of such animals before letting them roam among the refuse and dunghills of the London streets. John Stow reports that ‘no man would hurt or take them up’.
²⁸
Instead they were fed by hand, much as Londoners would feed the kites and ravens; they were, like the birds, consumers of noisome waste. And so the proverb was soon current, ‘Such an one will follow such an one, and whine as it were an Anthony pig’,
²⁹
which duly became attached to the schoolboys themselves. There was, however, one important difference. If the pigs grew fat and healthy on their London diet, they were taken up by the authorities of St Anthony’s in order to be cooked and eaten.

At the end of the day, after his release from school, it was a short journey from Threadneedle Street to Milk Street. The city surrounded More once again, and he noticed everything: his prose works are filled with brief but vivid intimations of London life, from the sight of someone squatting against a wall in order to ‘ease hym selfe in the open strete’
³⁰
to the beggars who display their cancerous or cankered legs on ‘frydays aboute saynt sauyour and at ye Sauygate’,
³¹
from the ‘meretrix’ and her ‘leno’ or procurer
³²
to the wrestlers at Clerkenwell who take ‘so great fallys’.
³³
He made his way among the pumps and springs and water conduits, past the gardens and the markets and the almshouses,
along small lanes and even smaller footways, between the stables and the carpenters’ yards and the mills, past brothels and taverns and bathhouses and street privies, under archways adorned with the images of saints or coats of arms, into courtyards filled with shops, beneath tenements crammed with the families of artisans, moving from the grand houses of the rich to the thatched hovels of mud walls frequented by the poor, hearing the cries of ‘God spede’ and ‘Good morrow!’, past nunneries and priories and churches. It has been suggested that the image of God shone behind the harmonious order and authority impressed upon the schoolchildren of St Anthony’s; the same image, together with that of Christ crucified upon the fallen world, rose up from the streets of London. At a distant vantage the traveller would see the towers of almost a hundred parish churches rising above the rooftops of thatch and timber; it is testimony to the piety of Londoners that no other western European city could boast so many sacred places. As the young More made his way along the lanes and thoroughfares, there was the continual sound of bells.

CHAPTER IV
COUGH NOT, NOR SPIT

T was customary for the boys of St Anthony’s to move on to Eton for the remainder of their school years, but the young More took a more distinguished course. At the age of twelve, he became a page in the household of John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor of England. All the evidence suggests that Archbishop Morton was John More’s ‘lord’ and that Thomas More joined the prelate’s household as a singular mark of favour and privilege. It had been the tradition of many centuries that children of gentle and even noble birth should be given the station of servants in a great household; it predates the age of chivalry and is described in the pages of
Beowulf
, but by the late medieval period it had become a standard practice in the quest for preferment and valuable service. An Italian observer noted that ‘every one, however rich he may be, sends away his children into the houses of others’.
¹
Although this was an exaggeration, he touched upon an important principle of fifteenth-century training; patronage was still more important than formal education. With the exception of Henry VII, John Morton was the most influential man in the kingdom, and the young More would have entered the archbishop’s service together with the sons of earls and other noblemen. It has often been remarked how quickly and how easily Thomas More became associated with the magnates and rulers of England; the beginning of that invaluable connection lies with his service at Lambeth Palace. He entered a world of retainers and officials, clerks and councillors, through which at a later date he would effortlessly rise.