re, 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 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 w