atchwords: “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 masque stage with “Proteus” in the greatest of shows for Elizabeth in 1594---Gesta Grayorum. See “Reading the Revels” for a look at how much Morton learned there.
Without land of his own, Thomas took up horseback-lawyering between West Country circuit-courts and London. One brief later record mentions “Axbridge” as some kind of refuge. Morton was angered by the sufferings of displaced countrymen who filled new tent-cities, “furnished” prisons and gallows, and learned himself that “Hell is in Westminster under the Exchequer Office.”
Merchants of the West Country ports like Bristol ran a “permissive frontier” (Canny), and kept shipping transatlantic guns into Puritan times. Gosnold (another Inns man) marked a year in New England by 1603. Sir Ferdinando Gorges, governor of nearby Plymouth, was learning to seek out “landsmen” to take his business into America in some lasting way, as Morton reached his late thirties.
The rise of the middle-class foreign investor connected Morton’s abilities to American enterprises. Late in life he had the skills to be arguing for Gorges in England’s high courts: evidently early-on he proved himself. By these years he had one eye on an interest recorded, with his name, in a later history of patent-affairs that also lists Gorges’ and Plimoth’s (Gardener 1660). He had also taken up with a widow, Alice Miller, whose home lay between the West and London. After June 1623, when Morton’s chances for a family life were ruined by household conflict with her Puritan stepson, he looked seriously toward America.
What I had resolved on, I have really performed; and I have endeavored...to be the means to communicate the knowledge which I have gathered...unto my Countrymen; to the end that they may the better perceive their error who cannot imagine that there is any country in the universal world that may be compared unto our native soil….
Middle Years, 1624-1630
Listen below to Thomas Morton’s words on the beauty he found in New England:
Click to read the full text of New English Canaan, Book II ,
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