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Common Knowledge 10.2 (2004) 252-272



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Neo-Stoic Alternatives, c.1200-2004:
Essays on Folly and Detachment

Profiles In Sanity

Colin Richmond


I   Patience Pudding

Imprisonment, exile, drinking poison, loss of wife, leaving orphaned children. These were the context of his game, but none the less he deftly played and handled the ball. So too, we should deploy the ballplayer's consummate skill, but also his indifference as to its object, a mere ball.
—Epictetus, Discourses 2.5.19-20

The obituary roll of John Islip with its remarkable drawings was the justification I needed to revisit an archive I have always found congenial, that of Westminster Abbey, where the courtesy of the staff complements the charm of one's surroundings. On arrival I learned that the roll itself has become too fragile to be handled. I was, therefore, obliged to examine photographs of it: this took only a matter of minutes. Not wanting to vacate so soon a haven of ordered sanity for a disorderly world, I needed other documents to consult. Abbot Islip's books of household expenditure were obvious candidates.

One of these (WAM 33324) is for 1509-10. In a handful of cases, no more than six in all, there is, in the margin of the main text—which is an account of what was consumed each day—a notation of guests who came to dinner. All six cases fall between March and August, 1510. The first entry is of March 19: "This day dyned all kyng hery the vijth Executors." The last is of August 29: "This day here schulde a dyned Maister Lovell and dyd note." What pressing business, I wondered, had made a model Tudor bureaucrat like Sir Thomas Lovell miss a good dinner? However: it is the guest list for Saturday, April 27, 1510, that concerns [End Page 252] us. At the head of it, named before the master of the rolls and other important gentlemen, was "Maister More."

Questions naturally arise. First, what was Thomas More doing at the abbey on April 27, 1510? Secondly, what had he done that entitled him to his preeminent position on the abbot's list of distinguished dinner guests? Answers are not far to seek. Nonetheless, I have to confess that at first I sought them in the wrong place. I was misled by my preoccupation with the fate of the princes in the Tower and by the existence in the British Library of a Westminster Abbey tomb list put into final shape, according to Barbara Harvey, about 1530. This manuscript (BL Egerton MS 2642) contains an intriguing comment about the murder of the princes. In the entry (folio 323) concerning the burial of Anne Mowbray, the child wife of Richard, duke of York, in the chapel of St. Erasmus, it is said that her husband and his elder brother, Edward V, were suffocated in the Tower of London by their uncle Richard, duke of Gloucester. Perhaps, I thought, Thomas More, about to begin composing if not writing his drama-history of Richard III, had picked up that piece of information at dinner in the abbey; hence its inclusion in his unfinished story of a tyrannical ruler. But a considered second thought was that it was More who, already knowing the truth and prone to speaking freely after the sort of bibulous dinner provided by the monks of Westminster, had himself revealed the secret of the manner in which the two boys had met their deaths. I had, therefore and with reluctance, to discard a red herring.

A new approach presented itself. Whose feast day is April 27? It is that of a thirteenth-century saint of marked popularity in late medieval Western Europe. St. Zita, or St. Sitha as she was called in England, might be thought a household name, were that not so terrible a pun on so household a saint. April 27 turning out to be the festival of such a popular saint brought another idea to mind. The most important match of the year for the Eton Wall Game—the match between the Oppidans, those boys who...

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