Written in his relative youth, long before the Chancellor business, or the messy question of who was the legitimate queen of England. In Latin, for a select audience of educated men.

More created a fantastical land, governed by a strange new communal system. Perhaps he was hearkening back to the early Christian church, where the believers held all their possessions in common while they waited for Christ to return. Maybe he started with a hard look at Tudor England and pulled everything that disgusted him out of it, just to see what sort of world would be revealed.

He came up with a world unlike anything that anyone had seen before. But there were some things that he could not imagine. He couldn't imagine a land without religion, so devised a vague sort of proto-Unitarianism. He couldn't envision a classless society, and gave the Utopians slaves to do the truly dirty work. He never dreamed that equality between the sexes might be possible. Also, he had a thing about adultery and premarital sex. In his Utopia they were strictly outlawed. It seems like a trivial thing for him to have gotten so worked up about that he lost his head over it. Which, come to think of it, is what he did.