“Studious Retirement” 1632–1638green and a fine church, Saint Michael’s, with a magnificent Norman doorway and
other parts dating from 1160. Henry Bulstrode owned the manor house and leased to
Milton senior a property called Berkin Manor, which stood in its own small wooded
park at the east of the village.^52 Sometime in 1635 Milton was incorporated Master of
Arts at Oxford, a pro forma courtesy to Cambridge degree holders which allowed
him access to the Bodleian Library, about 45 miles from Horton.^53
Horton provided a peaceful setting for Milton’s rigorous program of reading and
study in these years, much of which was in early church history and the history of
the Western Empire through the thirteenth century. Milton’s Apology (1642) states
that after spending “some years” on the stories of the Greeks and Romans (at Ham-
mersmith) he came “in the method of time to that age wherein the Church had
obtain’d a Christian Emperor,” i.e. to the history of the church before and in the
reign of Constantine. Looking back on that cycle of studies, he reports that he
expected to find in the Fathers and the early church examples of “wisdom and
goodnesse” but instead found “nothing but ambition, corruption, contention, com-
bustion.” The reports of the Councils he found “so tedious and unprofitable” that
to do more than sample them would be “losse of time irrecoverable” (CPW I, 943–
4). In Of Reformation (1641) he complains that the crabbed, abstruse style of the
Fathers undermines both doctrinal clarity and good language: “the knotty Africanisms,
the pamper’d metafors; the intricat, and involv’d sentences... besides the fantastick,
and declamatory flashes; the crosse-jingling periods” (CPW I, 568). Milton may
not have drawn all these conclusions at Horton, but he dates his moral and aesthetic
distaste for the patristic texts to that period. If he undertook such studies in part to
prepare for the ministry he had not yet consciously rejected, his distaste for such
reading would make that office less and less attractive.
His reading in secular history he summarized in a letter to Diodati (November
23, 1637):
By continued reading I have brought the affairs of the Greeks to the time when they
ceased to be Greeks. I have been occupied for a long time by the obscure history of
the Italians under the Longobards, Franks, and Germans, to the time when liberty was
granted them by Rudolph, King of Germany [c. 1273]. From there it will be better to
read separately about what each State did by its own Effort.... If you conveniently
can, please send me Giustiniani, Historian of the Veneti. On my word I shall see
either that he is well cared for until your arrival, or, if you prefer, that he is returned
to you shortly. (CPW I, 327)^54He also bought books: William Ames’s important book of Protestant casuistry, Conscientia
(1635), perhaps shortly after its publication; John Chrysostom’s Orationes LXXX in
1636 ; and Allegoriae in Homeri fabulas de diis of Heraclides of Pontus in 1637.^55
Milton probably began his Commonplace Book in 1635 or 1636,^56 organizing it
into three broad categories, Ethical, Economic, and Political; entries are chiefly in