Thomas More and the Legal Imagination

Abstract

IN both principle and practice, Sir Thomas More's commitment to the law was profound. It did not, however, come easily. Although More entered Lincoln's Inn as a student as early as 1496 and was called to the bar by 1501 or 1502, during the early stages of his legal career the claims of the law were countered by other interests and de sires. More was strongly tempted in two other directions?toward the monastic life and toward the life of a humanist scholar. For several years, William Roper tells us, he lived without taking vows as a Car thusian monk at the London Charterhouse; both Desiderius Erasmus and Thomas Stapleton state that he was seriously drawn to the priest hood.1 During the same period he also studied Greek, met Erasmus, and joined the circle of England's leading humanists: William Grocyn, Thomas Linacre, William Lily, and John Colet. More's eventual decision to devote himself to law did not please Erasmus. In his remarkable epistolary portrait of his friend, Erasmus tells Ulrich von Hutton that More was born for better things, that the profession of law, although held in high regard in England, was re mote from learning, and that More had turned away from his true scholarly inclinations only because his father, an eminent lawyer, had threatened to withdraw his allowance and almost disowned him, because he thought he was deserting his hereditary study.2 Even dur