George M. Logan

The making of a London citizen

Thomas More, like everyone else, had thirty immediate ancestors stretching back to the generation of his great-great-grandparents: we know the names of only eight of these thirty men and women, but, even so, that is probably more than is known about the forebears of most middle-ranking Londoners in the late fifteenth century.We might think, perhaps, of these thirty ancestors forming a chorus line on a stage, each lit by a spotlight and all equally important. But twenty-two of the spotlights have broken and so only eight of the chorus are visible. In the epitaph which he composed for himself, More wrote that he was born ‘urbe Londinensi, familia non celebri sed honesta’ ( EE 10:260). And, indeed, those members of his family whom we can trace bear out this modest claim. Both his parents were Londoners, and so were his known grandparents, great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents. Such a long London pedigree is very unusual in the fifteenth century. The population of the City in this period – numbering about 50,000 – was replenished, indeed maintained, by a flow of immigrants from the surrounding countryside; so the thick London blood that coursed through Thomas’s veins was distinctive. Thomas’s father, John More, was the son of a citizen and baker, William More, who died in 1467, a decade before the birth of his famous grandson. John More’s mother, William’s wife, was Johanna, the daughter of a London brewer, John Joye, and his wife Johanna Leycester, the ‘graunt mother’ whom John More remembered specifically in his will. And he had good reason to remember his grandmother, because it was from her that he received a considerable inheritance, including the manor of Gobions in North Mimms in Hertfordshire and also substantial tenements in London itself.

Thomas More as humanist

In 1439 the first books from the bequest of Humfrey, duke of Gloucester, arrived at Oxford, seeding the outlook of Italian humanism in the scholastic bower of the English medieval university. It is a date that will serve as well as any to announce the arrival in England of the new priorities associated with the subtle cultural stimulus that we now call ‘northern humanism’. In the subsequent unfolding of that influence its most celebrated exponent and disciple, in his own day and after, was Thomas More. Indeed, although his celebrity extends far beyond that of the humanist enterprise of the early Tudors, his achievement in that literary milieu of itself would have ensured his lasting reputation. His early intellectual formation also defines the period and manner in which northern humanism took root in England. By the time More arrived at Oxford around 1492, being some fourteen years of age, his privileged education had begun to prepare him to participate fully in the cultural sea-change foreshadowed by the reception of this new outlook on learning and civil life. We must therefore begin with a brief discussion of what is implied in the term ‘humanism’ as well as what is not. The humanism of the European Renaissance was subtle precisely because it was not an ideology or philosophy. Its adherents could indeed be passionate in pursuit of aims that could be widely varied, but in their origins, the central texts of their enterprise were the same as those of the medieval university: the magisterial legacy of Greece and Rome, of antique grammar and rhetoric, of Aristotle and, especially in the north, of the foundational texts of Christian antiquity, notably those of scripture and the Church Fathers. This was the bedrock of European culture, revisited from time to time in a ‘classical revival’ marked by a fresh resort to antiquity and a new period of intellectual achievement.