mother. If he was son of “a soldier,” there were thousands in England’s wars against Spain until the Armada’s defeat in 1588. Morton’s father might also have served in attempts to subjugate Ireland (see Canny), where many future American colonizers inflicted “progress” and won social status at home.
It appears that the family had the resources to make sure Morton received a good education, with schooling from Classical works to The Bible. Ruth Kelso’s Doctrine of the English Gentleman suggests its main points. A youth was raised to be ready for service of king and country in a complicated world. As Stefano Guazzo, author of a “conduct book” advised, wise parents “in their children’s infancy, begin to embolden them before their betters, and to make them talk with them: whereby they come to have a good audacity, and to be resolute in their behavior” (81).
We might imagine young Morton, fishing with his kinsmen, handed a social guide-book by an uncle:
“A skillful Angler ought to be a general Scholar, and seen in all the liberal sciences as a Grammarian, to know how to write out discourse of his Art in true terms, without affectation or rudeness. He should have sweetness of speech, to persuade….He should have strength of arguments, to defend and maintain his profession against envy or slander. He should have knowledge in the Sun, Moon, and Stars….
He would not be unskillful in Music, that whensoever either Melancholy, heaviness of thought, or the perturbations of his own fancy stirreth up sadness in him, he may remove the same….He must be full of love, both to his pleasure and to his neighbor….Then he must be liberal, and not working only for his own belly, as if it could never be satisfied: he must with much cheerfulness bestow the fruits of his skill amongst his honest neighbors, who being partners of his gain, will doubly renown his triumph….”
(Gervase Markham, The Pleasure of Princes, or, Good Men’s Recreations, 1613)
Apparently, Thomas had an older brother (his will mentions a “niece”). Under laws of primogeniture, family property went to the first-born male. Thomas had to make a living. That is likely part of why he went to “law school” at the Inns of Court in London. The associated Inns and courts made up England’s great “finishing school” for all kinds of ambitious men (Prest’s book treats levels of Inns activities and connections). New students usually stayed at an Inn shared by home-county fellows: in Morton’s Devon case, it was Clifford’s Inn. Famous Inns men ranged from Humphrey Gilbert and John Smith to John Donne, Ben Jonson and young Shakespeare.
London in Morton’s times. Overcrowding and appalling sanitation kept bubonic plague sporadically alive, and sent other diseases into North America.
England’s population almost doubled in Morton’s generation. And, while the country still had 100,000 men under arms in its share of The Thirty Years War, the land and cities saw more and more displaced people, in the ongoing transition from Late Medieval to Early Modern economics. The Oxford English Dictionary relates two of the earliest English usages of the word profit: “A singular profit hurts and harms a commonwealth” (1466), and “They think no sin, where profit comes between [people]” (1500-1520). See Patricia Fumerton on how a new “separation” informed everything from common meals to the architecture and rituals of power. As early as 1516, Thomas More had written in Book I of Utopia:
“Your sheep...that used to be so gentle and eat so little. Now they are becoming so greedy and so fierce that they devour the men themselves, so to speak....For...the nobility and gentlemen...are not content with the old rents which their lands yielded....They leave no land for cultivation, they enclose all the land for pastures....As though forests and game preserves were not already taking up too much land....The tenants are turned out, and by trickery or main force....And if they beg, they are thrown into prison as idle vagabonds….”
Yet another social and cultural tension informed these times: whether one favored the Renaissance (the 