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MEET THOMAS MORTON
“When they find any man like to prove an enemy to their Church and State…the first precept in their Politics is to defame the man at whom they aim. And then he is an holy Israelite in their opinion who can spread that fame broadest. Like butter upon a loaf, no matter how thin, it will serve….” (New English Canaan, Book III)
Early Life: 1570s-1624
Thomas Morton (born c. 1576) grew up in England’s wild West Country, most likely in Devonshire during Elizabeth I’s long reign. Devon denotes “people of the land” with life-ways different from those of the urbanized East. Morton grew up a lover of nature, animals and the field sports (fishing, hunting, falconry) enjoyed by middle-class “gentle” families there. At times families mixed these with raucous “roving feasts” across a landscape rich with pre-English ruins, from barrow-tombs to Roman stones. Anglican rites and Maypole Revels hallowed and celebrated people’s relations with nature and each other. “Brawling Bristol” had its markets, street-fairs and ship-quays busy with the first English sailors of the Newfoundland. From his youth, then, Morton was immersed in nature and surrounded by many kinds of culture.
Listen to Jessica Lupien sing the old traditionals,
“Now Is The Month of Maying”
Devonshire men and women liked their traditional independent ways: they had shared Cornwall’s 1549 Western Rebellion during England’s separation from the Roman Catholic Church. Two of their most important social values were a code of neighborliness that shared hospitality across social and other differences; and a code of quietness, which meant that general peace was more important than most reasons for conflict. You might, for example, skip going to church (and not be penalized) if you thought that meeting a certain neighbor there would bring a fist-fight. As time passed, frustrated Protestant “reformers” called the West Country a “dark corner of the land,” but Morton his life-long was for “Old England’s” social ways.
Nothing is known of Morton’s 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 primogenitu