Learning to Die in London, 1380-1540. Amy Appleford
the name of Priests and Levites, and of all the orders of the Catholic church. Amen.66
The soul gone, there are prayers to offer to speed it on its way and the body to tend to. Thus follows the commendation, the last part of the rite to take place in the house, after which the body is removed, the rite ends, and the new rites of requiem and burial in due time begin.
This decorous ideal ritual, complete with psalms, antiphons, versicles, and responses, must always have been particularly susceptible to interruption and adaptation in practice, from the moment it enters the domestic space where the person who occasions the ritual lies dying. Death may be too sudden for the ritual to be performed in its entirety; the dying person may not be able to say the “amens” required in the benedictions that follow anointing; confession may not be possible to perform, unction and communion to bestow. Or death may be delayed, interrupting the ritual to the point that it must be resumed or repeated later; this appears to have happened to Julian in her own brush with death, when, after taking “alle my rightinges of haly kyrke,” she remained ill for three more days, until she and “thaye that were with me” believed her death had come and summoned the priest again.67 Either way, the dying person will need comfort and may need instruction and exhortation until the very end. What is more, unction and communion both ritually require the sick person to be in an appropriate spiritual state, at peace with God and neighbor. The St. John’s 47 version of the rite acknowledges this requirement with the rubric: “These things [the prayers for recovery] once said, before the sick person is anointed or given communion the priest should question him as to the manner of his belief in God and if he acknowledges the body and blood of our lord Jesus Christ; after that, he should confess and be absolved of his sins. This done, let him kiss the cross, then the priest, and then every one else, in order.”68 Before the sacramental part of the ceremony begins, the rite thus calls for affirmation of the state of the dying person’s faith. However, neither in this nor in the other, less formal areas implied or mentioned in the rite does this version of the Ordo offer any script for the priest’s words or actions.
Visitation A fills these gaps in the Ordo’s representation of the deathbed at a time when the parts of the rite related to them were coming to seem especially significant. The work is not explicitly organized around the Ordo, and it is not always clear at what points in the rite the four exhortations and interrogations of which Visitation A consists are to be said. This may be deliberate, given the fluidity of the rite itself. However, in three of its six manuscripts Visitation A is interleaved with the Ordo (in Oxford, Bodleian Library Ashmole MS 750), immediately follows it (in Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College MS 209), or is appended to a collection of occasional offices that include it (in St. John’s 47). Such arrangements leave no doubt that it was actually used in conjunction with the rite. Indeed, it is possible, at least in general terms, to reconstruct how this might have worked in practice.
The opening exhortation, which assumes the possibility that the sick person may live and is largely an invitation to confession and penance (“And therfor I counsail the þat þu schrive the clene [make a clean confession] & make the redi”), is presumably to be said “before the sick person is anointed or given communion,” as the rubric in St. John’s 47 has it, although Visitation A makes no mention of the Eucharist and delays enquiring into “the manner of his belief in God” until a later moment. The note struck here and sustained throughout is of humane confidence. The exhortation takes up Baudri’s image of the stone in the wall of Jerusalem to offer the dying person an image of spiritual stability and heavenly reward as though both are all but certain:
My dere sone in God, þou hiest [are going] fast thi wai to Godward [towards God]. There thou shalt see alle thi former faderis, apostils, martiris, confessoris, virginis, & alle men & wommen that be savid. And þerfor be of gode confort in God. And thou must leyn [lay] a ston in the wal of cite of hevene witouten ani noise or strif. And therfor, ar [before] thou wenden out of this world, thou must make thi ston redi, & than shalt þu nouȝt be lette [hindered]. The ston is thi soule wiche thou makest clene. The noise that þu must make here is the thinking [recollection] of thi sinne wyche thou must telle the prest. The stroke is penaunce that thou shalt be sori for thi sinne & smithe [smite] thiself on thi brest & whan thou hast made redi thus thi ston, than may thou go thi wai in God & lai thi ston sykerlic [securely] withoute noise in the cite of hevene & therfor I counsail the þat þou schrive the clene & make the redi.69
Confession may lead to healing, since sickness can be caused by sin. Whether or not it does, the time to confess is now, both for the dying person and for the “even-cristen” around the bed, who are included in the exhortation as they prepare their own deaths by watching another’s: “And this is nouȝt only to seke men, but also to hole, for everi dai a man nehieth [nears] his deth ner [nearer] & ner.”70
Once it is clear that “his sekenes aslake nouȝt,” the sick person receives one or both of two further exhortations, both expansions of passages of Baudri: one so that “he grucche nouȝt whan he is seke,” the other, to be given “ȝif a man be nie [near] the dethe,” to urge him to embrace his death, longing for it with all his soul.71 The first offers a standard array of verbal “confort” for those in tribulation, noting that “sekenes of God is hele to the soule” if, and only if, it is endured patiently, when it serves to lessen time in purgatory.72 In passages added to the source and appropriate to the ritual’s lay, domestic setting, Visitation A emphasizes that, in “chastising” his “child,” God does what “a man” who sees “anotheris child do schreudeli [behaving naughtily] in his fader presence” would expect any father to do, if “he were his child or ellis loved him.”73 God’s “chastising” is, in any, case, merciful, as though a “king to whom thou hast be tretour [traitor]” should decide to punish not with death but with a brief spell in the “esi prison” of “a litul sekenes here.”74 Sickness and death are directly analogous to the instruments of household and political discipline. The second attempts to activate the dying person’s contemptus mundi—quoting Cato and “these olde filosophurs” on the “wickidnes of this world”—and to create an identification with the dying words of Paul and Augustine: “A thou deth, end of alle wickidnes, thou deth, end of travail, beginning of ese & alle joie, what man mai bethenke [consider] the profitis & the blisses that thou bringest with the. Thou are desireful to me, for a Cristin man may nouȝt evil die, but wel die, and lif wit Criste.”75 Although the Ordo leaves no very obvious space for them, these two exhortations perhaps ideally take place after the sacramental part of the rite and before the litany: a period of indefinite extension, when later versions of the Ordo offer optional prayers to be said by or for the sick person.76
The final exhortation, initially based on the Anselmian Admonitio, also fits into this open-ended moment, said either after the third exhortation is complete, “whan thou hast told him alle this,” or if need be, “ȝif thou have no time to sai alle for hast of death,” interrupting it “whan thou seest that he neiheth the death.”77 Here the examination deferred from earlier (the Anselm questions) is inserted at the very moment the ability of the sick person to answer is failing, allowing credal affirmation and prayer to be the last rational responses that the person makes:
Brother, art thou glad that thou shalt die in Cristin feith?
Responsio. ȝe.
Knowleche that thou has nouȝt wel lived as thou shuldest?
Responsio. ȝe.
Art thou sori therfor?
Responsio. ȝe.
Hast thou wil to amend the ȝif [if] thou haddist space of lif?
Responsio. ȝe.
Levist thou in God, Fader Almighti, maker of heuene & of erthe?
Responsio. ȝe.78
Working through only the most important articles of the faith in the shortest possible form—using a series of questions adapted from baptism rites—the examination quickly moves on to its most urgent topic: the need to surrender the self to the