14 THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO HOBBES

"research" so much as entering a republic of letters that was inhab-

ited equally by churchmen, physicians, noblemen, officers of state,
schoolmasters, and even, in the case of Hobbes's friend Sir Kenelm
Digby, a one-time amateur pirate. With the proliferation of printing
houses in seventeenth-century England, it was not difficult to get
published. The modern system of royalties did not exist, but the
code of patronage ensured that a well-chosen dedication might be
handsomely rewarded. Books were expensive to buy, however; for
example, Leviathan, when it was first published, cost eight shil-
lings, which was more than most ordinary laborers earned in a
week. Any writer who wanted to keep up with what was being
published on philosophical subjects needed one of four things: a
private income, a well-paid job, membership of a circle of book-
lending friends, or access to a well-funded library. Hobbes's career
as tutor and secretary to the Cavendish family gave him the last of
these four in full; over the years he enjoyed the other three in
smaller measure. He was content to remain the employee or re-
tainer of a great noble household - a somewhat old-fashioned ca-
reer pattern that gave him access to a higher social world without
making him a member of it, and which kept him for months at a
time in physical seclusion from the metropolitan intellectual
scene. But it also gave him security, time to write a large quantity
of works on a huge range of subjects, and powerful political protec-
tion against the public hostility to some of those works during the
last three decades of his life.

I
Hobbes was born on April 15, 1588, in Westport, a parish on the
northwestern side of the small town of Malmesbury, in north Wilt-
shire. His father, an ill-educated country clergyman, was curate of the
small neighboring parish of Brokenborough, which was one of the
poorest livings in the area.1 Some members of the family had grown
prosperous in the cloth-making business. These included Edmund
Hobbes (probably Hobbes's great-uncle), who became Alderman, i.e.
Mayor, of Malmesbury in i6oo ; an even richer cousin, William
Hobbes, who was a "great clothier"; and Francis, the elder brother of
Hobbes's father, who was a prosperous glover and became Alderman
of Malmesbury in 1625.2 Other Hobbeses in and around Malmesbury

Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006