THE WORLD’S CLASSICS

THOMAS MORE

Utopia
FRANCIS BACON

New Atlantis
HENRY NEVILLE

The Isle of Pines

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by

SUSAN BRUCE
 Introduction
‘unrivalled power to formulate, and to explain, a set of problems that
are central to early modern experience’, the utopia is also grappling
with some of the same problems, and, if not explaining them,
encouraging its readers to attempt to understand them.

II

Utopia
Thomas More’s was a life of paradoxes, even of contradictions,
which find their continued expression in the conflicting views of
those who write about the man and his work even today. No histor-
ical consensus has emerged on More. Some revere him as a saint (he
was canonized in 1935); others condemn him as a religious fanatic
who persecuted heretics and condemned several of them to death.
He has been understood as a medieval traditionalist, unshaken in his
defence of the Catholic church against the Protestant onslaught of
Luther and his peers; and as a modern reformist, a prominent mem-
ber of the humanist circle which was at the time the seat of liberal
learning in Europe. He was both public statesman (famous as a
counsellor to Henry VIII and responsible for enacting some of the
severest of Tudor legal punishments), and private man (his house-
hold held up as a model of domestic happiness, his daughters edu-
cated to a degree extraordinary for the time, beyond the level of
many men). All of these aspects of his personality and life have at
various times been brought to bear on interpretations of Utopia,
More’s most famous work, and perhaps his only literary masterpiece.
More began writing Utopia whilst serving on a state delegation to
the Low Countries in 1515. According to his great friend, the Dutch
humanist Erasmus, he first composed Book 2 of Utopia (concerning
the island of Utopia itself), writing Book 1 (a dialogue about the
ills of England) later, when Book 2 was substantially complete.
Quite why he chose to compose the books in this order; whether he
conceived the bipartite structure of Utopia from the outset; what
consequences this division into two books and the order of their
composition have for our understanding of the work: all these have
been matters of debate. It is certain that More was, at the time of
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 Introduction
composition, debating within himself the advisability of acting as a
statesman to Henry VIII, and likely, therefore, that the conversation
in Book 1 regarding the same matter had for More at the time a very
personal resonance. It is also self-evident that More’s visit to the
Low Countries directly influenced Utopia: More mentions that visit,
as well as Peter Giles (one of the humanists he met whilst serving on
this delegation) explicitly in his narrative. But other, deeper con-
sequences of the addition of Book 1 to Book 2 remain enigmatic, and
the relation of the two books is still one of Utopia’s many teasing
problems. Does the criticism of England in Book 1 act to impress
upon readers the ideal nature of the country described in Book 2,
for instance? Or does it do the opposite, subverting the apparent
ideal by making explicit criticisms of its untenability? To attempt
to provide definitive answers to questions such as these is beyond the
scope of this Introduction. But I hope that in the pages that follow
I will at least be able to indicate why they remain so pressing.
Like More’s life, Utopia itself is a tissue of paradox and contradic-
tion, and since its first publication in 1516, More’s purpose in its
creation has been a perennial problem for its readers. Utopia is the
most slippery of texts: in no other literary work is the question of
authorial intention at once more pressing and more unanswerable.
Its playful juxtaposition of the real with the imaginary; the nature of
Utopian society itself; the incongruence between ‘ideal’ Utopian
practices and what we know of More’s own life and beliefs; the
relation between Books 1 and 2 of the text: all these things encourage
Utopia’s readers to ask themselves what More meant by this text,
and simultaneously preclude attempts to answer that question with
any certainty. The text has generated diametrically opposed inter-
pretations from its critics, ranging from the dubious claim that
Utopia describes a real historical community to the assertion that it
is only a literary game; and from readings which maintain that it is a
vision of an ideal Catholic society to those which see it as a proto-
Communist text. More recent are the interpretations of those who
have attempted with the help of literary theory to find ways of fusing
the text’s ludic qualities with the seam of social critique that also
runs through it, but before these contributions, most readings of the
text essentially fell into two camps. On the one side were those who
saw it as a grand joke at the expense of its readers; on the other stood
xix
 Introduction
those who claimed that the discourse of social critique within Utopia
is at some level seriously intended. To what degree does Utopia offer
ammunition for these variant strands of interpretation?
A summary of the manifest content of the text is sufficient to
illustrate why the impulse to read Utopia as a serious critique is so
tempting. The book purports to relate the story of More’s meeting
in Antwerp with a traveller, Raphael Hythloday, to whom he is
introduced by his friend Peter Giles. The three men start talking,
and enter into the prolonged debate on the social evils of sixteenth-
century England which is the content of Book 1. In the course of this
debate, Hythloday launches an impassioned attack on a number of
abuses, especially on the English use of the death penalty and on the
desperate poverty and degradation which was the lot of so many at
the time. He is most concerned with the plight of the peasants.
Dispossessed of their livelihoods through the enclosure of common
land by rapacious landlords eager to profit from the wool trade,
sixteenth-century English peasants had become economic refugees
from their places of origin, and were driven into destitution. The
unemployment created by this agricultural upheaval was swelled by
the disbanding of private feudal armies, whose soldiers were released
from their duties without alternative occupations to maintain them.
In this context, Hythloday argues, theft and beggary are neither a
matter of choice nor a consequence of innate immorality within the
individual, but the necessary recourse of those from whom all choice
has been taken away. To sentence petty thieves to death, he argues, is
wrong, capital punishment being both impractical (because fear of it
encourages a thief to kill his victim in order to preclude the threat of
exposure to the law), and unethical (in that it transgresses God’s
commandment not to kill).
In the course of this debate, Hythloday invokes Plato’s Republic
(one of the main literary inspirations for Utopia) to argue that the
only way to overcome these problems is to eradicate what he claims
is their fundamental cause: private property. ‘[S]o long as [property]
shall continue,’ he claims, ‘so long shall remain among the most and
best part of men the heavy and inevitable burden of poverty and
wretchedness’ (p. 45). Thus is introduced the description of Utopia
itself, invoked by Hythloday as the ‘answer’ to the problems raised in
the preceding dialogues. The three men break for dinner, and Book 2
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 Introduction
of Utopia then begins. With the exception of a brief intervention
by More at the conclusion of the text, Book 2 consists entirely of
Hythloday’s description of the commonwealth of Utopia: its social
organization, the daily life of its people, its governors, laws, and
religions. And on the surface at least, Utopia stands as the opposite
of the England Hythloday has attacked. Where England has crime,
Utopia has order; where England has injustice, Utopia has equity;
where England has hugely rich and desperately poor, Utopia has
neither riches nor poverty. Instead, it has communist equality, in
which ‘all things be common to every man’, and where no individual
lacks anything so long as the larger community has enough (p. 119).
At the close of Hythloday’s description of Utopia, More concludes
the text by leading Hythloday into supper, and ‘thus endeth the
afternoon’s talk of Raphael Hythloday concerning the . . . Island of
Utopia’ (p. 123).
It is important to recognize that the eradication of private prop-
erty is the single most important aspect of Utopia. Utopian com-
munism is ‘the principal foundation of all [Utopian] ordinances’ (p.
123), from which all else in Utopian society follows. And it is in part
because of the absolute centrality to the text of this debate about the
ethics and consequences of property ownership that critics have felt
it imperative to decide for their own audiences the ‘meaning’ of
Utopia. For critics of the right it is irksome that one of the most
canonical texts in English literature appears to express so profound
and explicit a critique of the economic system underlying all West-
ern societies. Critics of the left have traditionally experienced the
opposite impulse: the German Marxist and one-time secretary to
Karl Marx, Karl Kautsky, for example, celebrated Utopia as a com-
munist manifesto avant la lettre. From what we have said so far it is
clear how Utopia might lend itself to such an interpretation. What,
though, limits this reading, and makes it dubious that More intended
Utopia to be read simply as a manifesto?
There are many answers to that question, but we might start with
the most obvious: the warning to the naive reader that Utopia offers
in its names. ‘Utopia’ itself, of course, derived from the Greek ‘ou’
(‘non-’) and ‘topos’ (‘place’), means ‘no-place’ (with a possible pun
on ‘eu’ (‘good’): good-place’), and almost all the names in the text
play similar kinds of jokes on the reader. ‘Anyder’ (‘waterless’) is the
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 Introduction
principal river of Utopia’s main town Amaurote (‘dim city’), for
instance; like the Utopians, the Achorians are the people of no-place,
and the Polylerites inhabit the land of much nonsense. Most signifi-
cant of all, Hythloday’s name signifies ‘peddlar of nonsense’, ‘expert
in trifles’, or perhaps, according to Richard Halpern (who believes
that traditional translations of ‘Hythloday’ exaggerate the irony of
his discourse), ‘skilled in pleasant speech’.8
This salutary warning to those who would read the text as a
straightforward critique of More’s England and as an unproblem-
atically serious proposal for an alternative social organization is not
confined only to the names in Utopia. The text is punctuated with
similar jokes, littered with traps into which the unwary reader may
fall. To take just one example, let us examine the discussion of the
Polylerites in Book 1. The Polylerites, Hythloday maintains, have
devised the best alternative to the death penalty, using bonded
labour to punish their criminals instead of capital punishment. The
bondmen (or ‘serving-men’, as Robinson calls them) are marked by
their clothing, which is of a particular colour worn by no one else, by
their short haircuts, and by the excision of the tip of one ear (p. 29).
Consider the following passage, where Hythloday relates what would
happen should a bondman escape:
Neither they can have any hope at all to scape away by fleeing. For how
should a man that in no part of his apparel is like other men fly privily
and unknown, unless he would run away naked? Howbeit, so also fleeing
he should be descried by the rounding of his head and his ear mark.
(p. 30)
If the Polylerites saw a naked man running across the countryside,
would they really need to pay attention to his haircut, or stop him in
order to examine his ears?
Hythloday’s discussion of the Polylerites can also be used to illus-
trate another way in which the apparently serious proposals
communicated by Utopia are not all that they might at first seem.
Ostensibly, as we have said, the Polylerites are invoked by Hythloday
to exemplify a society which has developed a successful alternative to
the death penalty. But the conclusion of the anecdote about them
8
See Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance
Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 142–3.

xxii
 Introduction
renders dubious that claim. For the bondmen to receive money,
recounts Hythloday,
is death, as well to the giver as to the receiver. And no less jeopardy it is
for a free man to receive money of a serving man . . . and likewise for
serving men to touch weapons. The serving men . . . be . . . known . . . by
their . . . badges which to cast away is death, as it is also to be seen out of
. . . their own shire, or to talk with a serving man of another shire. And
it is no less danger to them for to intend to run away than to do it indeed.
Yea, and to conceal such an enterprise in a serving man it is death, in a
free man servitude. (p. 29)
In contradiction to what Hythloday implies in opening the discus-
sion, the Polylerites have not eradicated the death penalty. All that
they have done is displace it, rendering it less visible.
It could be argued that whatever the relation of the conclusion of
the example to Hythloday’s original claim, the Polylerite practice is
still vastly more humane than the profligate use of the death penalty
which obtained in More’s England. Such an argument is valid, but it
cannot eradicate the inconsistency at the heart of the anecdote. This
kind of inconsistency, moreover, wherein an initial claim to liberty is
curtailed by its subsequent elaboration in the text, is a recurrent
feature of Utopia. It was Stephen Greenblatt who first drew atten-
tion to this characteristic of the text. Greenblatt examines the way in
which the Utopian workday (supposedly only six hours) expands, on
closer attention to the text, to fill most daylight hours, thus ending
up very similar to the labouring day of the English peasantry in the
early sixteenth century. He notes too that a similar movement
inhabits the text’s account of Utopian travel, which ‘begins with
almost unlimited license and ends with almost total restriction’,
since the Utopians who do not attend lectures in their ‘free’ time
work at their ‘own occupations’ instead. This move, he argues, is
ubiquitous in the text: ‘freedoms’, Greenblatt claims, ‘are heralded,
only to shrink in the course of the description.’9 Indeed, this
uncertainty about how far liberties in the text actually extend is
replayed even on the level of the text’s sentences: as Elizabeth
McCutcheon has pointed out, More’s Latin original makes

9
See Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1980), 40–1.

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 Introduction
repeated use of litotes, a figure of speech which affirms something
by denying its opposite, as in the phrases, ‘not uncommon’ and ‘not
unlike’.10
In its jokes, in ‘the steady constriction of an initially limitless
freedom’, as Greenblatt puts it, in a rhetoric which frequently con-
stitutes Utopian practices not so much by what they are as by what
they are not, Utopia makes it very difficult for a reader to say with
any certainty how seriously Utopian practices are intended to be
taken. Yet another way in which More undermines our security in
the idealism of the text is in the relation which obtains between
Utopia and the ‘real world’. Utopia and England, for example, osten-
sibly invoked in the text as each other’s opposite, are in many ways
very similar: like the British Isles, Utopia is an island; its main town
and river resemble London and the Thames, as contemporary
commentators were quick to note. On closer investigation Utopia
becomes more a distorted reflection of the ‘real’ England than its
antithesis; the relation between the two more obscure than an initial
reading might suggest. Similar instabilities inhabit the representa-
tion of individuals in the text. Hythloday, of course, is invented, but
Peter Giles, like More himself, was an actual person, as were the
writers and recipients––Erasmus and Busleyden, for example––of
the dedicatory letters that surround the text itself. (For more infor-
mation on the apparatus surrounding Utopia, see the Note on the
Texts.) Yet recognition of the distinction between the fictional
Hythloday and the ‘real’ More can, if we are not careful, lead the
unwary reader into another of the text’s traps, for the opposition
which More constructs between ‘himself ’ and Hythloday becomes
increasingly unstable the more knowledge about More one brings to
Utopia. Hythloday, for example, claims to have worked as a page in
the household of Cardinal Morton (also a real historical figure); in
fact, More himself had held this position. Hythloday expresses his
unwillingness to work as a counsellor to princes; More too, although
he served as a statesman and counsellor to Henry VIII, had had his
own doubts about the advisability of pursuing such a career.
Perhaps the ‘More-within-the-text’ and Hythloday are not
10
See Elizabeth McCutcheon, ‘Denying the Contrary: More’s Use of Litotes in the
Utopia’, in R. S. Sylvester and G. P. Marc’hadour (eds.), Essential Articles for the Study of
Thomas More (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1977).

xxiv
 Introduction
‘different’ characters, then, but both representations of different
aspects of More-the-author? This claim, however, is equally conten-
tious. Hythloday extols the virtues of a society which (for example)
banishes lawyers, allows women priests, tolerates the expression of
pagan beliefs, encourages euthanasia, and permits not only divorce
but subsequent remarriage. It is hard to square admiration for
such practices as these with the beliefs of the real-life More, a lawyer
himself, as well as a devout Catholic who wrote furiously against the
reformist tracts of Luther and his fellow Protestants, who parti-
cipated in the burning of heretics, and who eventually lost his life
through his conviction that the King’s divorce from Catherine of
Aragon was wrong. But perhaps the text’s ultimate jest is embedded
in its conclusion, when ‘More’ (the textual character) intervenes
to undermine all that More (the actual person) has offered us as
food for thought through the discourse of Hythloday. ‘Thus when
Raphael had made an end of his tale,’ says More, ‘. . . many things
came to my mind which in the manners and laws of that people
seemed to be . . . founded of no good reason’; these unreasonable
customs and laws, he says, include ‘their chivalry’, ‘their sacrifices
and their religions’, and other Utopian laws and ordinances; ‘yea and
chiefly,’ he goes on:
in . . . the principal foundation of all their ordinances, that is to say, in
the community of their . . . living without any . . . money (by the which
thing only all nobility, magnificence, worship, honour, and majesty, the
true ornaments and honours . . . of a commonwealth, utterly be over-
thrown . . . ) (p. 123).

What ‘More’ admires in Utopian customs is left uncertain at the

book’s conclusion; what is made explicit is that he finds the most
radical aspect of Utopia, and the base on which all of its qualities
depend, Utopian communism, to be the most unreasonable of all of
the social correctives which Hythloday has proposed in the course of
his discourse. The argument initiated in Book 1 about the short-
comings of English society and the best possible solution to them is
only exacerbated by the text’s conclusion; Utopia preserves, even to
its last lines, an ambivalence which it never resolves.
Utopian ambivalence has by now been extensively documented in
literary criticism, and today it would be an ill-informed reader who
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 Introduction
would propose that Utopia is presented as a serious or straight-
forward representation of a better world. Yet that said, it seems
important to insist that it is equally mistaken to understand the text
solely as a joke. It is not self-evidently true that Utopia’s subor-
dination of individual choice and happiness to the good of the
community is a misguided ideal, even if it is one transparently not
pursued by late-twentieth-century Western societies. And although
Utopia may appear authoritarian, perhaps even totalitarian, it is
worth remembering that it is not nearly so repressive as early mod-
ern England was, where there was little freedom of speech; where
poverty severely delimited any choice for the vast majority of the
population; where torture of suspected traitors was commonly prac-
tised by the state; and where one might be hanged for petty theft, or
hanged, drawn and quartered for offences against the crown. I am in
agreement with Richard Halpern here, who maintains that, although
there is some truth in C. S. Lewis’s account of Utopia as a jeu
d’esprit, to read the text purely as a game is to attempt to depolitize
the work, to ‘trivialize [it] and stifle debate’.11 It is hard, even with the
knowledge of all the text’s myriad forms of playfulness in mind, to
ignore the impassioned sense of injustice with which Hythloday
denounces English poverty in Book 1; or the equally impassioned
sense of conviction with which the concluding paragraphs of his
description of Utopia in Book 2 are infused; hard too to read Utopia
and believe that the author of the text was immune to the sense of
social injustice which he communicates so effectively through the
words of his fictitious traveller.
Perhaps the most convincing answers to the perennial question of
the relation in Utopia between social critique and the playful, or
pleasurable qualities of the text have been offered by critics who
utilize the insights of literary theory to inform the kinds of question
that they ask of the text. Such insights allow Greenblatt, for
example, in comparing Utopia with Holbein’s painting The Ambas-
sadors, to argue that the book’s ‘subtle displacements, distortions, and
shifts of perspective are the closest equivalent in Renaissance prose
to the anamorphic virtuosity of Holbein’s art’: Utopia, Greenblatt
claims, presents two distinct worlds that occupy the same space

11
Halpern, Poetics of Primitive Accumulation, 141.

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 Introduction
while insisting on the impossibility of their doing so’.12 They allow
Halpern to argue that ‘England occupies the position of the
unconscious with respect to Utopia’,13 and to analyse the text in terms
of the logic of its desires and repressions. But even sophisticated
analyses such as these cannot hope to provide answers to all the
enigmas in the text regarding More’s intentions, nor can they pro-
vide definitive solutions to the more general problems about social
rights and wrongs that Utopia so seriously, if so ludicly, plays out.
And this, ultimately, may be part of the text’s point. As More leads
Hythloday in to supper for the second and the last time he tells him
that they ‘would choose another time to weigh and examine the same
matters and to talk with him more at large therein’ (p. 123). Perhaps
one thing that More wished Utopia to do is to invite us into the
debate which the book so self-consciously fails to conclude,
encouraging us to do as More and Hythloday do, beyond the con-
fines of the text’s enigmatic ending, in the future to which its final
lines direct us. It may be that we too are being asked to weigh and
examine the questions which Utopia raises, many of which are as
pressing today as they were for More in 1516; to continue to talk
about the possibilities of other, and perhaps better, worlds; and in so
doing to acknowledge, perhaps, the shortcomings of our own.

New Atlantis
Like Thomas More, Francis Bacon was a lawyer, a statesman, and an
intellectual. In the early 1580s he became a barrister and an MP,
and over the next three decades experienced a rapid rise to power,
becoming Lord Chancellor (the highest position in the land) in
1618. Shortly afterwards, in 1621, his public life ended when he was
accused of (and admitted) taking bribes, committed briefly to the
Tower of London, expelled from the court, and fined £40,000.
This ignominious end to his public career blighted his reputation for
centuries after, at least so far as Bacon the man was concerned. But it
should not influence our reception of Bacon the intellectual, who
produced, over the course of his life, a vast body of work. Much
of this work (such as The Advancement of Learning, the Novum
12
Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 22.
13
Halpern, Poetics of Primitive Accumulation, 144.

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 Thomas More
them, they do sometimes bring forth an innumerable company
of people to amend the highways if any be broken. Many times
also, when they have no such work to be occupied about, an
open proclamation is made that they shall bestow fewer hours
in work. For the magistrates do not exercise their citizens
against their wills in unneedful labours. For why, in the institu-
tion of that weal-public this end is only and chiefly pretended
and minded, that what time may possibly be spared from the
necessary occupations and affairs of the commonwealth, all
that, the citizens should withdraw from the bodily service to
the free liberty of the mind and garnishing of the same. For
herein they suppose the felicity of this life to consist.

of their living and mutual

conversation together

But now will I declare how the citizens use themselves one
towards another, what familiar occupying and entertainment
there is among the people, and what fashion they use in the
distribution of everything. First, the city consisteth of fam-
ilies; the families most commonly be made of kindreds. For the
women, when they be married at a lawful age, they go into
their husbands’ houses. But the male children, with all the
whole male offspring, continue still in their own family and be
governed of the eldest and ancientest father, unless he dote for
age, for then the next to him in age is placed in his room. But
The number to the intent the prescript number of the citizens should nei-
of citizens. ther decrease nor above measure increase, it is ordained that no
family (which in every city be six thousand in the whole
besides them of the country,) shall at once have fewer children
of the age of fourteen years or thereabout than ten, or more
than sixteen, for of children under this age no number can be
prescribed or appointed. This measure or number is easily
observed and kept by putting them that in fuller families be
above the number into families of smaller increase. But if
chance be that in the whole city the store increase above the
just number, therewith they fill up the lack of other cities. But
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 Utopia
if so be that the multitude throughout the whole island pass
and exceed the due number, then they choose out of every city
certain citizens, and build up a town under their own laws in
the next land where the inhabitants have much waste and
unoccupied ground, receiving also of the same country people
to them, if they will join and dwell with them. They thus
joining and dwelling together do easily agree in one fashion of
living, and that to the great wealth of both the peoples. For
they so bring the matter about by their laws, that the ground
which before was neither good nor profitable for the one nor
for the other is now sufficient and fruitful enough for them
both. But if the inhabitants of that land will not dwell with
them to be ordered by their laws, then they drive them out of
those bounds which they have limited and appointed out for
themselves. And if they resist and rebel, then they make war
against them. For they count this the most just cause of war,
when any people holdeth a piece of ground void and vacant to
no good nor profitable use, keeping others from the use and
possession of it which notwithstanding by the law of nature
ought thereof to be nourished and relieved. If any chance do so
much diminish the number of any of their cities that it cannot
be filled up again without the diminishing of the just number
of the other cities (which they say chanced but twice since the
beginning of the land through a great pestilent plague), then
they fulfil and make up the number with citizens fetched out
of their own foreign towns; for they had rather suffer their
foreign towns to decay and perish than any city of their own
island to be diminished.
But now again to the conversation of the citizens among
themselves. The eldest (as I said) ruleth the family. The wives So might we
be ministers to their husbands, the children to their parents, well be
discharged
and, to be short, the younger to their elders. Every city is and eased of
divided into four equal parts or quarters. In the midst of every the whole
quarter there is a market-place of all manner of things. Thither company of
serving men.
the works of every family be brought into certain houses. And
every kind of thing is laid up several in barns or storehouses.
From hence the father of every family or every householder
fetcheth whatsoever he and his have need of, and carrieth it
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 Thomas More
away with him without money, without exchange, without any
gage, pawn, or pledge. For why should anything be denied
unto him, seeing there is abundance of all things, and that it is
not to be feared lest any man will ask more than he needeth?
For why should it be thought that that man would ask more
than enough which is sure never to lack? Certainly in all kinds
The cause of of living creatures either fear of lack doth cause covetousness
covetous and and ravin, or in man only pride, which counteth it a glorious
extortion.
thing to pass and excel other in the superfluous and vain osten-
tation of things. The which kind of vice among the Utopians
can have no place.
Next to the market-places that I spake of stand meat mar-
kets,* whither be brought not only all sorts of herbs and the
fruits of trees, with bread, but also fish, and all manner of four-
footed beasts and wild fowl that be man’s meat. But first the
filthiness and ordure thereof is clean washed away in the run-
ning river without the city in places appointed meet for the
Of the same purpose. From thence the beasts be brought in, killed,
slaughter of and clean washed by the hands of their bondmen. For they
beasts we
have learned permit not their free citizens to accustom themselves to the
man- killing of beasts, through the use whereof they think clemency,
slaughter. the gentlest affection of our nature, by little and little to decay
and perish. Neither they suffer anything that is filthy, loath-
Filth and some, or uncleanly to be brought into the city, lest the air, by
ordure bring the stench thereof infected and corrupt, should cause pestilent
the infection
of pestilence diseases. Moreover, every street hath certain great large halls
into cities. set in equal distance one from another, every one known by a
several name. In these halls dwell the Syphogrants. And to
every one of the same halls be appointed thirty families, on
either side fifteen. The stewards of every hall at a certain
hour come in to the meat markets, where they receive meat
according to the number of their halls.*
Care, But first and chiefly of all, respect is had to the sick, that be
diligence, and cured in the hospitals.* For in the circuit of the city, a little
attendance
about the sick.
without the walls, they have four hospitals, so big, so wide, so
ample, and so large, that they may seem four little towns,
which were devised of that bigness partly to the intent the sick,
be they never so many in number, should not lie too throng
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 Utopia
or strait, and therefore uneasily and incommodiously; and
partly that they which were taken and holden with contagious
diseases, such as be wont by infection to creep from one to
another, might be laid apart far from the company of the resi-
due. These hospitals be so well appointed, and with all things
necessary to health so furnished, and, moreover, so diligent
attendance through the continual presence of cunning phy-
sicians is given, that though no man be sent thither against his
will, yet notwithstanding there is no sick person in all the city
that had not rather lie there than at home in his own house.
When the steward of the sick hath received such meat as the
physicians have prescribed, then the best is equally divided
among the halls, according to the company of every one, saving
that there is had a respect to the prince, the bishop, the Trani-
bores, and to ambassadors and all strangers, if there be any,
which be very few and seldom. But they also, when they be
there, have certain several houses appointed and prepared for
them. To these halls at the set hours of dinner and supper
cometh all the whole Syphogranty or ward, warned by the
noise of a brazen trumpet, except such as be sick in the hos-
pitals, or else in their own houses. Howbeit, no man is pro- Every man is
hibited or forbid, after the halls be served, to fetch home meat at his liberty,
so that
out of the market to his own house. For they know that no man nothing is
will do it without a cause reasonable. For though no man be done by
prohibited to dine at home, yet no man doth it willingly compulsion.
because it is counted a point of small honesty. And also it were
a folly to take the pain to dress a bad dinner at home, when
they may be welcome to good and fine fare so nigh hand at
the hall.
In this hall all vile service, all slavery and drudgery, with all
laboursome toil and base business, is done by bondmen. But
the women of every family, by course, have the office and Women both
charge of cookery for seething and dressing the meat and dress and
serve the
ordering all things thereto belonging. They sit at three tables meat.
or more, according to the number of their company. The men
sit upon the bench next the wall, and the women against them
on the other side of the table, that if any sudden evil should
chance to them, as many times happeneth to women with
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 Thomas More
child, they may rise without trouble or disturbance of anybody,
Nurses. and go thence into the nursery. The nurses sit several alone
with their young sucklings in a certain parlour appointed and
deputed to the same purpose, never without fire and clean
water, nor yet without cradles, that when they will they may
lay down the young infants, and at their pleasure take them out
of their swathing clothes, and hold them to the fire, and refresh
them with play. Every mother is nurse to her own child unless
either death or sickness be the let. When that chanceth, the
wives of the Syphogrants quickly provide a nurse. And that is
Nothing not hard to be done. For they that can do it proffer themselves
sooner to no service so gladly as to that, because that there this kind of
provoketh
men to well pity is much praised, and the child that is nourished ever after
doing than taketh his nurse for his own natural mother. Also among the
praise and nurses sit all the children that be under the age of five years.
commenda-
tion. All the other children of both kinds as well boys as girls, that
be under the age of marriage, do either serve at the tables or
The education else, if they be too young thereto, yet they stand by with mar-
of young vellous silence. That which is given to them from the table
children.
they eat, and other several dinner time they have none.
The Syphogrant and his wife sit in the midst of the high
table, forasmuch as that is counted the honourablest place, and
because from thence all the whole company is in their sight.
For that table standeth overthwart the over end of the hall. To
them be joined two of the ancientest and eldest, for at every
table they sit four at a mess. But if there be a church standing
in that Syphogranty or ward, then the priest and his wife
sitteth with the Syphogrant, as chief in the company. On both
The young sides of them sit young men, and next unto them again old
mixed with men. And thus throughout all the house equal of age be set
their elders.
together, and yet be mixed and matched with unequal ages.
This, they say, was ordained to the intent that the sage gravity
and reverence of the elders should keep the youngers from
wanton licence of words and behaviour. Forasmuch as nothing
can be so secretly spoken or done at the table, but either they
that sit on the one side or on the other must needs perceive it.
Old men
regarded and The dishes be not set down in order from the first place, but all
reverenced. the old men (whose places be marked with some special token
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 Utopia
to be known) be first served of their meat, and then the resi-
due equally. The old men divide their dainties as they think
best to the younger on each side of them. Thus the elders be
not defrauded of their due honour, and nevertheless equal
commodity cometh to every one.
They begin every dinner and supper of reading something
that pertaineth to good manners and virtue.* But it is short, This
because no man shall be grieved therewith. Hereof the elders nowadays is
observed in
take occasion of honest communication, but neither sad nor our
unpleasant. Howbeit, they do not spend all the whole dinner universities.
time themselves with long and tedious talks, but they gladly
hear also the young men, yea, and purposely provoke them to
talk, to the intent that they may have a proof of every man’s wit Talk at the
and towardness or disposition to virtue, which commonly in table.
the liberty of feasting doth show and utter itself. Their dinners
be very short, but their suppers be somewhat longer, because This is
that after dinner followeth labour, after supper sleep and nat- repugnant to
the opinion of
ural rest, which they think to be of more strength and efficacy our
to wholesome and healthful digestion. No supper is passed physicians.
without music. Nor their banquets lack no conceits nor Music at the
junkets. They burn sweet gums and spices or perfumes and table.
pleasant smells, and sprinkle about sweet ointments and waters,
yea, they leave nothing undone that maketh for the cheering
of the company. For they be much inclined to this opinion: to Pleasure
think no kind of pleasure forbidden whereof cometh no harm. without harm
not
Thus, therefore, and after this sort they live together in the discommendable.
city; but in the country they that dwell alone far from any
neighbours do dine and sup at home in their own houses. For
no family there lacketh any kind of victuals, as from whom
cometh all that the citizens eat and live by.

of their journeying or travelling abroad, with

divers other matters cunningly reasoned and
wittily discussed

But if any be desirous to visit either their friends dwelling in

another city, or to see the place itself, they easily obtain licence
67