August 14, 2026

Guard The Common Good

Your sheep that were wont to be so meek and tame, and so small eaters, now, as I hear say, be become so great devourers and so wild, that they eat up, and swallow down the very men themselves.

Thomas More wrote this in 1516 while serving as a lawyer and rising diplomat in Henry VIII's England, watching the enclosure movement reshape the countryside as landowners fenced off shared fields to raise sheep for the profitable wool trade. Through the traveler Raphael Hythloday, who has just returned from years abroad, More describes farmland once worked by tenant families turned into pasture, leaving those same families homeless and hungry so that a few could profit. More spent his own life moving between royal service and personal conscience, and this line captures his belief that any pursuit worth calling useful must feed the people around it rather than consume them. It speaks to contribution today because it asks a plain question that has outlasted Tudor England: does the work fill up the community around it, or does it quietly feed only itself.