Learning to Die in London, 1380-1540. Amy Appleford
daily prayers said at the services in St. Michael’s and at the Whittington tombstone enfold “the soules of alle cristen people”—a broader formulation than the Lollard “alle þo þat God wolde have savid”—and by enriching the city’s liturgical round, more generally “augment the divine cult” to the same end.49 But a key feature of all the Whittington death projects as articulated by Carpenter and his fellow executors is their repeated linkage of works of charity with his exemplary and singular name. During the 1420s and 1430s, the Whittington arms appeared as a sign of his charity in buildings all across the city, from the almshouse and college themselves to various locations at the Guildhall, to a chantry chapel at St. Paul’s, to the south gate of St. Bartholomew’s hospital, where they were placed near a stained glass window representing the seven works of bodily mercy.50 These emblems serve a hortatory function, as signs of the enduring, virtuous presence of a figure who was represented as effectively London’s new founding father. But they also appeal, mutely, for the prayers of London’s citizens, turning the entire community, from one perspective, into a giant chantry or almshouse dedicated to the salvation of a single individual.
However, the third and most innovative feature of the Whittington almshouse, its close ties to an ambitious college of secular priests, goes a long way toward addressing Lollard attacks on private charity, even as it associates the institution with what became one of London’s most powerful engines of reformist orthodoxy. Whittington college, which was run under the same general structure of lay oversight as the almshouse, was envisaged partly as a place of prayer for the souls of Whittington and his wife, composed like a large chantry chapel of “five or six perpetual chaplains” under a master, partly as an adjunct and spiritual support to the almshouse as it carried out its fundamentally similar purpose.51 But it was stipulated from the start that the priests be highly educated as well as virtuous (“viris bene literatis et virtuosis”) and that the master, ex officio rector of the parish and obliged to be resident, be a doctor of divinity (“in sacra theologia graduatum”), thus adding St. Michael’s Paternoster to the growing group of London parishes in the spiritual care of advanced graduates of Oxford or Cambridge, who, especially from the 1430s on, formed part of the church’s first line of defense against Lollardy in the nation’s capital.52
It appears to have taken some time to find a master who met this qualification.53 A few years after its foundation, however, the college was fortunate enough to attract—perhaps through Carpenter’s well-connected relative also called John Carpenter, master of the hospital of St. Anthony’s of Vienne on Threadneedle Street, later bishop of Worcester54—the first in a tightly knit series of three brilliant masters, all from outside London, who successively positioned themselves at the center of efforts to promote the religious education of lay Londoners, not just in their immediate environs but throughout the city.55 This was the vigorously evangelical Reginald Pecock, always anxious (as he states in his Donet) to be “a profitable procutoure to lay men” by communicating religious truth through his own vernacular books, some of which may have been written while he was at the college and which are shot through with references to the spaces and rituals of London and to the Mercers themselves.56 Pecock’s defense of orthodoxy against the biblicism of the Lollards, with their seductive claim (as he puts it in The Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy) that “whate ever Cristen man or womman be meke in spirit … schal without fail and defaut fynde the trewe undirstonding of Holi Scripture,” worked by promulgating a carefully stepped program of education aimed at the universal human faculty of the reason and thus in principle accessible to the laity, as to others.57 Although Pecock does not specify its intended readership in detail, the title of one of his books, the Pore Men’s Mirror, written for “þe persone poorist in haver [possession] and in witt,” exploits his public position as the curate of poor bedesmen and could have been designed for reading at the almshouse.58 Whether or not this is so, the premise of his entire vernacular oeuvre, that individual laypeople at all levels of wealth and education need to be equipped to understand church doctrine and ethics for themselves, is congruent with the principle of lay spiritual self-governance represented by the almshouse’s architecture, regime, and institutional arrangements. The theological controversies that finally brought him down derive from his later years as a bishop in the 1450s, by which time his emphasis on lay spiritual self-care may have been coming to seem radical.59 But in much of his surviving work Pecock writes as a Londoner and master of the college, working within the nexus of the alliance between civic authority and priestly learning that Whittington’s project enabled.
Both Pecock’s successors, Thomas Eborall (Eyburhale), master from 1444, and William Ive, master from 1464, were also concerned with the defense of orthodoxy. Eborall was a member of a 1452 commission to examine for heresy works belonging to Andrew Teye; according to a note in one manuscript of the Wycliffite New Testament, “doctor Thomas Ebborall and doctor Yve” were both asked to “oversee and read” the book “or þat [before] my modir bought hit.” Eborall also defended himself and other London rectors against the attacks his predecessor, Pecock, launched against the powerful civic preaching culture of the 1440s: the first of a number of incidents, shortly after Carpenter’s death, in which the anti-Lollard orthodoxy embodied by the college and, more generally, the city’s educated secular clergy turned on itself.60 Ive was involved in the later investigation of Pecock’s theology that led to the latter’s condemnation for heresy, as well as in the defense, with Eborall and others, of the orthodox view of Church custodianship of Christian possessions against a strong challenge from the London Carmelites.61 Surviving items from Eborall’s library show his self-understanding as an upholder of civic orthodoxy and interest in the craft of preaching and in vernacular instruction, two other concerns shared by both men.62 Eborall owned a copy of the fourteenth-century compilation Pore Caitif, as did Carpenter’s friend John Colop: the devout stationer at the heart of the scheme to circulate books of vernacular theology among the laity for “common profit” through deathbed bequests, who lived his last years on Whittington’s properties next to the college. Like the Pore Men’s Mirror, Pore Caitif, which offers to “teche simple men and wymmen of gode wille the right way to hevene … withouten multiplicacion of many bokes” by providing a stepped spiritual education beginning “atte grounde of helthe, that is Cristen mennes bileve,” is of clear relevance to the officially poor almshouse bedesmen.63
Through its sister foundation, the college of priests, the spiritual reach of the almshouse was thus broader than its private focus on Whittington’s soul would suggest, reaching out beyond the carefully selected group of poor folk in the almshouse and the parish of St. Michael’s Paternoster to become a spiritual resource for the entire city. Its members supposedly especially learned and chaste, the college became part of a larger movement, headed by substantial lay Londoners such as Carpenter and the other Whittington executors, to nurture and reform pastoral care in the city, to affirm orthodoxy, and to combat heresy by sustaining the “trewe preestis” the author of the E Visitation imagines as worthy to hear a dying person’s confession. The heart of the reformist religious and literary culture of the city from its inception into the second half of the century, Whittington college represents an extraordinary public answer to the charge of spiritual selfishness leveled against “wikkidly i-groundid” almshouses by the “Twelve Conclusions,” to the call for a disinterested, “parfyth charite” that accompanied the charge, and to Wycliffite radicalism itself. Here, the legitimate but perilous financial surplus at the heart of the merchant enterprise finds its ambitious charitable outlet not in the bodily works of mercy but the spiritual ones, not only in prayers but in preaching. Whittington’s money is poured out not prudently, for the benefit of his own soul and the souls of his bedesmen, but evangelically and in “parfyth charite,” to enrich the intellectual and spiritual fabric of the whole of London.
The London Guildhall
The Whittington almshouse and its neighboring college thus offer one careful answer to the question of how a London citizen should die. The answer is grounded in traditional theology and institutions in ways that had come under fierce reformist criticism a generation earlier: in Whittington’s responsibilities to enrich his parish church; his responsibility to recirculate his wealth to the poor from whom, ethically speaking, it had been borrowed;