revival of ancient “pagan” learning from the Greeks and Romans, begun in Italy), or the Reformation --- meaning the freedom to read The Bible in English, and the goal of “reforming” England, for starters, based upon it. While new King James’ Book of Sports tried to declare what old “pastimes” were still permissible, most people, “in-between” to different degrees, sensed that England’s (and America’s) future depended on what they themselves made of it.
Look at Morton through these lenses, including his Anglican or Church of England sympathies, and we see a man not much-given to literal and legally-binding constructions of “God’s Word” as a basis for community or an answer to “idleness” and “disorder.” An avid “sportsman” all his days, Morton stood not for “counter-culture” (as he was read in the 1960s), but for England’s oldest traditional ways, both official and non-Christian.
He understood too what “freedom to read The Bible” often meant --- very little freedom (or need) to read anything else. When a reformist or then-countercultural Englishman like future nemesis John Winthrop charged that “The fountains of learning …are corrupted, perverted and utterly overthrown” (Reasons, Ford ed. Papers 2: 139), Morton probably laughed, with more in common with a 1623 Wiltshire girl --- who complained that, whenever her new village minister “takes his green book in hand, we shall have such a deal of bibble-babble that I am weary to hear it…and take a good nap…for he speaks against us for our dancing….We had a good parson here before, but now we have a puritan” (qtd. in Johnson 295).
And that was how Puritan came into Morton’s English --- denoting “precise Separatists, that keep much ado about the tithe of mint and cumin, troubling their brains more than reason would require about things that are indifferent” (i.e., “contingent” or “alterable”: Canaan 139). The “Brownists” or “Pilgrims” of Plimoth, just coming of age at this time, would become the cutting edge of Separation.
Morton’s satires derided extreme principles. His watchwords: “Moderation, and discretion” (8). More importantly, his life enacted the Renaissance in England and early America, a new training for the mind impressed on him at the Inns of Court. “I will go the surest way to work first, and see how others are answered in the like kind.”
Ancient texts and Early Modern teachers made Morton, first, an observer, rather than a believer. Almost every chapter of Canaan is a kind of experiment into the nature of the New World’s human and natural condition(s). Sir Francis Bacon was then laying bare “the idols of the tribe” that stood in the way of new knowledge, following resurrected Aristotle. For Morton there was, third, the all-importance of comparison (as he read of many different ways of life in Greek Herodotus, Roman Tacitus) --- all of these, primary means of gauging fact, truth and morality in an increasingly relative universe. Those were the Renaissance roots of The Enlightenment, the seeds of a secular American order among many peoples, points of views and interests.
Morton’s New English Canaan speaks back to Puritan plans for America based in Exodus and The Old Testament --- with the unblinkable human presence of “Canaanite” or Native American civilizations. At the Inns of Court, Thomas Morton grew prepared to become a many-sided man: a “passionate moderate.”
The crackling social and cultural atmosphere expanded his being. Students bantered mountains of law-books and literature in legal “moots” and on flimsy stages: you learned to write and speak persuasively, wherever you were going. As a group, “common lawyers” stood against the new would-be powers of The Crown, such as The Star Chamber and enforcement of royal proclamation as a statutory law. Their students absorbed the true relevance of learning and created vibrant, liberating 3-D entertainments full of “solemn foolery” that camouflaged much mockery of Power. “Pastoral Realism” was for Morton, its feeling for nature and merciless humor. And he was there when the country Maypole and “Indians” shared the court m