London makes St. Thomas More judge of its everyday quarrels

CITY OF LONDON, September 3, 1510 AD — The Common Council of London has made Saint Thomas More one of the City’s two under-sheriffs. The office is a judicial one: the under-sheriff sits in the sheriff’s place as judge over the civil cases Londoners bring against one another, and he advises the senior officers of the City corporation on points of law. St. Thomas More is thirty-two, a barrister of Lincoln’s Inn, and he takes the place of a lawyer named Broke. It is the first public office he has held.

The court sits at the Compter in the Poultry, part of Cheapside. It sits on Thursday mornings, and on no other morning. Each side lays down three groats before the case is opened — twelve pence — and nothing further may be asked of either of them. St. Thomas More often waives even that.

The Council does not fill the place lightly, and it does not change hands often; the custom is to choose a learned lawyer and then keep him, renominating him year after year. In the last reign the office belonged to Edmund Dudley, one of Henry VII’s revenue men. Dudley was Speaker of the Commons in 1504 AD, when St. Thomas More, newly elected and twenty-six, argued against the King’s demand for an aid of three-fifteenths — some 113,000 pounds — until it was thrown out. Dudley told him afterwards that if the attack had been made on the King in person, St. Thomas More would have lost his head. Henry VII took his revenge on the father instead. John More, then a barrister at Lincoln’s Inn, was held until he had paid a fine of a hundred pounds.

The man the Council has chosen was born a few minutes’ walk from the court he will now sit in. Milk Street runs north off Cheapside, and St. Thomas More was born there in February 1478 AD, in the house of his father. He went to Oxford and then to Lincoln’s Inn. For about four years around the turn of the century he lived beside the London Charterhouse, keeping the Carthusians’ hours and exercises with them, under no vow. Then he settled for the law and marriage. He wore a hair shirt against the skin in those years and wears it still.

He married Jane Colt, the eldest daughter of John Colt of Newhall in Essex, in 1505 AD, and they have four children: Margaret, Elizabeth, Cecily and John. The house is in Bucklersbury, just south of the Poultry, and it is called the Old Barge. It is big enough to keep a flow of guests. Erasmus has stayed there more than once. The two of them turned dialogues of Lucian into Latin together, published at Paris in 1506 AD. Erasmus also wrote the Moriae Encomium (The Praise of Folly) under that roof and dedicated the book to him. The title is a pun on his host’s name.

London already knows St. Thomas More as a barrister. He is counsel to one side or the other in nearly every case of importance in the King’s courts, and the office and the practice together bring him about four hundred pounds a year. He will not take a cause until he has been through it and found out the whole truth of it, and he tells clients — family, friends and strangers alike — not to shade the facts by even a little. When he judges a suit unjust or frivolous he says so and presses the client to drop it, and if the client will not listen he sends them to find another advocate. Where a settlement would cost less than a suit he argues for the settlement; where the client insists on going on, he shows them the least expensive way through.

He is also, this year, in print in English. Wynkyn de Worde has brought out his translation of the life of Pico della Mirandola. The title page calls the book the Life of John Picus, Earl of Mirandula, a great Lord of Italy. It describes Pico as “an excellent cunning man in all sciences, and virtuous of living”, and it promises “divers Epistles and other works of the said John Picus”. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Count of Concordia, was an Italian nobleman and scholar who died in 1494 AD at thirty-two, having made over his lands to his nephew Gianfrancesco so cheaply that it looked less like a sale than a gift. St. Thomas More took the Venice edition of 1498 AD and picked out of it the life the nephew had written, four letters, and a commentary on the sixteenth psalm. In St. Thomas More’s English, Pico set out at the end of his life to go “fencing himself with the crucifix, barefoot walking about the world, in every town and castle to preach Christ”.

The book went out as a New Year’s gift, dedicated to “his right entirely beloved sister in Christ, Joyeuse Leigh”.