Sir Thomas More, Humanist and Lawyer
- Sir Thomas More, Humanist and Lawyer
R. J. Schoeck
Professor of English, St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto; co-editor of Chaucer Criticism, Vol. 1 (1960) and Vol. 11 (1961). and Voices of Literature (1964), and editor of H. Delehaye, The Lives of the Saints (1961), and St. Thomas More, Debellation (Yale edition, 1963–4)
NOTES
1. Opus Epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, ed. P. S. Allen, IV, 1519–21, no. 999, 17. I quote from the translation in R. W. Chambers, Thomas More (1935), 85.
2. J. H. Hexter, More’s Utopia: The Biography of an Idea (Princeton, 1952), 108.
3. In the General Preface (“The Age of Littleton and Fortescue: its significance in the history of English law and its literature”) to S. B. Chrimes’s edition of Sir John Fortescue, De Laudibus Legum Anglie (Cambridge, 1942), xii.
4. See “Fortescue and the Renaissance: a Study in Transition,” Studies in the Renaissance, VI (1959), 175–94. I have touched on Fortescue’s knowledge of canon law in “Canon Law in England on the Eve of the Reformation,” Mediaeval Studies, XXV (1963), 132.
5. Ibid., 189. See my discussion of common lawyers’ attitude towards antiquity in “Early Anglo-Saxon Studies and Legal Scholarship in the Renaissance,” Studies in the Renaissance, V (1958), 102–10.
6. Ibid., 190. Younger than Fortescue but about fifteen years older than More, Edmund Dudley carried forward Fortescue’s appraisal of society, although still in the mediaeval framework of the allegory of the commonwealth as a tree. Like Fortescue’s The Governaunce of England, a manual written for the education of an English prince, Dudley’s Tree of Commonwealth—written while imprisoned in the Tower in 1509–10—suggests the concern of common lawyers with the welfare of their society and with the role of the common law within it.
7. Samuel E. Thome in “The Early History of the Inns of Court with Special Reference to Gray’s Inn,” Craya, no. 50 (Michaelmas Term, 1959), 79–97; Sir Ronald Roxburgh, The Origins of Lincoln’s Inn (Cambridge, 1963)—for discussion of which see my forthcoming review in Speculum.
8. English Law and the Renaissance, the Rede Lecture for 1901 (Cambridge, 1901); reprinted in Selected Historical Essays of F. W. Maitland, ed. Helen M. Cam (Cambridge, 1957), 135.
9. See “The Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries and Men of Law,” Notes & Queries, n. s. I (1954), 417–21, and “Early Anglo-Saxon Studies and Legal Scholarship.”
10. In Manuscripta, VI (1962), 155–67; see also “Early English Legal Literature,” Natural Law Forum, IV (1959), 182–9.
11. Maitland, Selected Historical Essays, 136–7.
12. See Guido Kisch, Humanismus und Jurisprudenz: Der Kampf zwischen mos italicus und mos gallicus an der Universität Basel (Basel, 1955), and Bartolus und Basel (Basel, 1960). The work of Kisch is fully discussed by Myron P. Gilmore in “The Jurisprudence of Humanism,” Traditio, XVII (1961), 493–501, and by myself (more briefly) in “Canon Law in England,” 136. Unfortunately, M. P. Gilmore’s important study Humanists and Jurists (Harvard, 1963), was not available to me.
13. In “The Contribution of French Jurists to the Humanism of the Renaissance,” Studies in the Renaissance, I (1954), 92–105.
14. J. D. M. Derrett, “Withernam: A Legal Practical Joke of Sir Thomas More,” Catholic Lawyer, VII (1961), 211 ff., citing Harpsfield’s Life (EETS ed.), 140–2; see also Peter R. Alien, “Utopia and European Humanism: the Function of the Prefatory Letters and Verses,” Studies in the Renaissance, X (1963), 91–107; and “Canon Law in England,” 132 ff., 136.
15. Margaret Hastings, The Court of Common Pleas in Fifteenth-Century England (Ithaca, N.Y., 1947), 66.
16. I am here drawing from “Rhetoric and Law in Sixteenth-Century England,” SP, L (1953), 113.
17. See “Sir Thomas More and Lincoln’s Inn Revels,” PQ, XXIX (1950), 428.
18. See “Rhetoric and Law,” 118. Maitland has noted that Smith was a civilian and that this is the higher praise coming from a civilian: see Maitland, Selected Historical Essays, 138–9, 145–6. The range and profundity of legal learning can be seen in Plowden, most recently and...
