Learning to Die in London, 1380-1540. Amy Appleford
God principaly after þe counceyl of þe wyse man, seyynge þus: Diligenter considera vultum pecoris tui. “Bysyly byholde þe chiere or þe vysage of þy best [beast]” (Proverbs 27:23). Þat is: tak goed hede how þy servantes and þy subjectes lyveþ, þat þey be nouȝt vicious. Yf þou be a curat and hast spiritual governayle and charge of mennes soules, þou art bounde opon peyne of þyn owen dampnacioun for to take hede to þulke þat þou hast in cure…. Iff þou have temporal governayle, þou art bounde and helde, upon payne of þyn owen dampnacioun, to loke and byhalde þat þy subjectȝ kepe þe lawe of God, þat ben þy wyf, þy childe, þy hured hyne [hired servant], þy bounde servaunt and þy tenaunt, and alle oþer þat þou hast a warde [under your protection].133
The curate has to perform differently with different kinds of parishioners, learning to preach and teach in the way most likely to bring each to God. Yet the secular lord also has to think in flexible ways, since his rule over the six categories of dependents listed here differs. It is necessary to “teche þy childe in his ȝouþe for to love Crist and his lawe,” like any parent; equally to “teche” “þy hured hyne” and “þy tenaunt,” often through discipline, warning them if they “surfete” and expelling them “fro þy companye” if they are “incorrigible and wol nouȝt amende hem”; and to punish a “bounde servaunt,” not possible to expel, “for brekynge of Cristes byddynge” more swiftly than for trespass against one’s “persone.”134 The lord’s duties even extend to policing the teaching of religion in his territories, where he is to exercise a similar mix of discipline and discretion toward the itinerant preachers often called “heretykes or lollardes,” whose vulnerable informality he should, unless they prove false, protect in the name of the prophetic truths they deliver.135 At the same time, he must also be to his tenants “as þe hurde [shepherd] his schep,” sharing the same pastoral duty and living under the same threat of divine punishment “oppon þulke þat [those who] rechelesly rewleþ ther subgettȝ or serveþ hem nouȝt of competent necessaries” as do priests with care of souls.136 For in the words of 1 Timothy, the biblical book on pastoral care, “Who þat rekkeþ nouȝt of his [does not take care of his own], and namely [especially] of þo þat ben of his housholde, how þey lyve ne how þey be governed, he haþ forsake his feyþ and ys wors þan a paynem [pagan].”137
Fyve Wyttes thus suggests a set of social contexts in which a lay householder might make actual pastoral use of a text like the Visitation of the Sick E as part of his wider temporal and spiritual responsibilities toward his subjects, and also as part of his exercise of lordship over them. In the process, it does not quite merge lay and religious forms of spiritual governance, demanding of the “curate” a level of rhetorical skill, psychological expertise, and self-awareness that the lord is not taken to possess. Although the priest’s role, like the lord’s, is to teach divine law, the work’s professional pride in the cura animarum comes through in its depictions of the subtlety of the true priest, to whom the reader owes a duty of spiritual obedience as part of his wider duty to behave as a member of the ordinary laity. However, within the framework of secular duties the work sketches for the lord, the practice of visiting sick subjects—a practice that could readily extend to teaching them and those with them, and to helping them to die—is represented on a continuum both with the lord’s temporal duty to see that his subjects “have here necessaries competently to here bodylye nede” and with the curate’s spiritual responsibility to save the souls of his parishioners.138 A mix of firm discipline and comfort these special qualities that those who carry out the visitation of the sick must bring to the households they enter, according to the Visitation texts—is the key to the governance of others in both cases.
The devolution of spiritual responsibility and governance at work in Visitation A and E, and in the household books within which the latter circulates, are thus complex. They demand a new level of alertness to the nonritual elements of the deathbed rite on the part of the priest, who must look to the deathbed as a pastoral opportunity as well as a liturgical duty. But because the sacraments are no longer necessarily at the center of the death rite, they also invite a new concern to manage the process of dying on the part of the lay sick person, who must exercise spiritual self-governance in order to respond to the new demands for spiritual preparation that the rite, as supplemented by the Visitation of the Sick, makes on the dying. Since this dying figure is part of a lay community who is included in the work’s exhortations, these responsibilities spill over to the deathbed attendants, who in Visitation E are in turn charged with a more nuanced relationship to the duty of comfort and counsel than was explicitly so earlier. Finally, when the attendant is a household paterfamilias, this role takes on an almost priestly level of responsibility, since the lord must answer before God for the souls of those under his temporal subjection. As a public space, the medieval lay deathbed must always have been finely and socially articulated. Responding to developments in late medieval civic and religious culture, the Visitation texts in their manuscript contexts show these articulations in newly self-conscious use.
The multiplication of layers of governance over oneself and others within the institution of the household that lies behind the Visitation of the Sick is part of the wider multiplication of jurisdictions James Simpson has argued was characteristic of fifteenth-century culture in general and that was so of the period’s religious reform in particular.139 In the rest of this book, we see this same multiplication of responsibility repeatedly in action, as all the roles in play around the deathbed intensify through the course of the century and the cultural meanings of dying well ramify in response. In this first chapter, we have encountered these processes only distantly, through books whose early use must mostly be inferred from their contents. Despite suggestive links between the metropolis and three household books in play here, Westminster School 3, Bodley 938, and University College 97 and the strong possibility that London was a center of copying and exchange for other books of the same type, we know too little of the circumstances in which these books were first used to localize them with much social specificity. In the materials to which we turn now, we are more fortunate: most texts discussed in the rest of this book attach to specific London biographies, institutions, and places. The chapter that follows introduces us in particular to an urban religiosity deeply invested in clerical education and increasingly secularized, in which the spiritual authority that accrues to the lay paterfamilias over his household in the Visitation E can be seen writ large at the civic level.
CHAPTER 2
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Dying Generations
The Dance of Death
The Good Death of Richard Whittington
An image of the deathbed of Richard Whittington, wealthy merchant, important creditor to the Crown, and three times mayor of London, forms the frontispiece of the earliest copy of an English translation of the ordinances governing the Whittington almshouse, one of the institutions funded by his massive bequest (Figure 1). The ordinances were written in Latin and sealed by three of Whittington’s executors—John Coventry, William Grove, and John Carpenter—in December 1424, twenty months after the merchant’s death in March 1423 and shortly after work had been finished on the building both of the almshouse and of a closely related institution nearby.1 This was the college of priests, dedicated to the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, at St. Michael’s Paternoster, Whittington’s parish church, whose refurnishing and expansion he had supported during his lifetime and where he and his wife were buried. Along with a library at the Guildhall, the building complex where the city administration was located, these two institutions constituted the most spectacular manifestations of the series of high-profile death projects associated with Whittington’s name.
The English translation of the ordinances dates from 1442–43, almost two decades later than its Latin original and shortly after the death of the final executor, Carpenter, who, as the “common clerk” of the city from 1417 on, was by far the most important administrator of Whittington’s estate. The translation thus coincides with the moment, long anticipated by the Latin ordinances, when oversight of the entirety of the estate, including the college of priests and the almshouse, passed into the hands of the Mercers’ Company.