In episode 52 of the History of England podcast, the host, David Crowther, mentioned that someone was faced with a “Morton’s fork”. This made me wonder what a Morton’s fork was.

Crowther then followed with “You’re probably wondering what a Morton’s fork is.” Crowther explained that a Hobson’s Choice was one where you didn’t really have a choice but a Morton’s Fork was where you have 2 choices but they’re both unpleasant. In this case, folks had to choose between evil King John or an underage nephew of somebody else.

That seems simple enough: you’re given a choice between 2 awful choices. This seemed to be what most folks have in mind when they say that they’re faced with a choice between 2 or more unpleasant alternatives.

Then I looked it up in Wikipedia:

A Morton’s fork is a specious piece of reasoning in which contradictory observations lead to the same conclusion. It is said to have originated with the collecting of taxes by John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury in the late fifteenth century, who held that a someone living modestly must be saving money and therefore, could afford taxes, whereas those living extravagantly obviously were rich and could afford them as well.

In other words, no matter what you do, you’re going to get stuck with the same answer. This is different from Crowther’s interpretation in that he thought that the alternatives were different but unpleasant and Wiki is saying that there are 2 different paths to the same conclusion.

Brittanica and Oxford came up with the same answer as Wiki.

Crowther had also explained that he was initially going to refer to the choice of evil King John and his underage nephew as a “Hobson’s Choice” but he’d recently found out about Morton’s Fork and Crowther thought that the fork fit better.

Wiki said this about Hobson’s Choice:

The phrase is said to have originated with Thomas Hobson (1544–1631), a livery stable owner in Cambridge, England, who offered customers the choice of either taking the horse in his stall nearest to the door or taking none at all

Most other google hits agreed with this.

I’m left thinking that neither Hobson’s Choice nor Morton’s Fork fit for describing a choice between 2 unfit rulers. 

Maybe I’ll invent my own term for it: “Steve’s Quandary” or “Squire’s Sh1tty Choices”.