 Thomas Hobbes was born on 5 April 1588. His home town was Malmesbury, which is in Wiltshire, England, about 30 miles east of Bristol. Very little is known about Hobbes’s mother. His father, also called Thomas Hobbes, was a somewhat disreputable local clergyman. Hobbes’s seventeenth-century biographer John Aubrey tells the story of how “The old vicar Hobs was a good fellow and had been at cards Saturday all night, and at church in his sleep he cries out ‘Trafells is troumps’” [i.e., clubs are trumps] (Aubrey 1696, 1.387). The older Thomas Hobbes eventually (in 1604) left Malmesbury, when a dispute with another clergyman, Richard Jeane, escalated to the point of a fight in a churchyard. In Aubrey’s words: “Hobs stroke him and was forced to fly for it” (Aubrey 1696, 1.387).