Learning to Die in London, 1380-1540. Amy Appleford
no respit” but brings us “wiþouten dalay” to our reckoning.7 This is also the sin that must soon—perhaps as soon as 1400, “not fully twelve ȝeer and an half lackynge,” according to one learned reader of “Abot Joachym” and “mayde Hildegare”—draw the world to its close.8 The opening of the Seven Seals is almost done; the opening of the great book of life that follows is at hand. “Loke þerfor now what þyng is writen in þe bok of þy conscience whyle þou art here. And ȝif þou fyndest out [anything] contrarie to Cristis lif oþer to his techynge, wiþ þe knyf of penaunce and repentaunce scrape it awey and write it beterer [better], evermore hertily þynkynge þat þou schalt ȝelde rekenynge of þy baylie.”9 “For in what state so evere a mannes laste day fyndeþ hym whan he goþ out of þis world, in þe same state he bryngeþ hym to his dom.”10
With its apocalyptic account of a city and a culture gone astray and its pointed criticism of the clergy in particular, “Wimbledon’s Sermon” was popular well into the early modern period, printed in a series of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century editions as evidence for the existence of an “enlightened but beleagured minority” of “proto-reformers” whom Protestants claimed had withstood the Church of Rome, prominent among them Thomas Wimbledon’s contemporary John Wyclif.11 And indeed, although its theology has nothing distinctively Wycliffite about it, the sermon does speak in a powerful reformist voice to a city that felt itself beleaguered, not only by the ongoing debates over Wyclif’s radical proposals for church reform and the eschatological crisis of the schism but more locally by the factionalism, civic violence, and open revolt of the previous decade and the disciplinary actions Richard II had taken in response.12 Wimbledon’s “men of o craft shulde neiþer hate ne despise men of anoþer crafte” evokes years of interguild competition and street fighting: a darker period for many of London’s citizens, including its governors, than they would see for another hundred years. Wimbledon’s apocalyptic language is biblical, of a piece with calls to reform and attacks on avarice all over Europe, while his social vocabulary is feudal, working within a communitarian ethics familiar from the great London poem of the previous decades, William Langland’s Piers Plowman, with its similar call to the estates to perform their duties, “ech lif to knowe his owene.”13 But the sermon’s prophetic judgment of a city engulfed by a desire for riches it can neither keep nor consume—”as þe licour in þe pot profiteþ not to þe pot [is of no use to the pot] but to men þat drawen and drynkeþ þerof, so worldly goodis ofte profiteþ not to chynchis [misers] but to oþere þat comeþ aftir”14—at once speaks to the disturbances of the time and goes to the heart of the moral anxieties of a community to which profit, however suspect, was not only desirable but vital.
“Wimbledon’s Sermon” was also popular in the fifteenth century, surviving in two copies in Latin and seventeen English copies,15 including two of the “household miscellanies,” Oxford, University College MS 97 and London, British Library Harley MS 2398, that concern me later in this chapter.16 Produced in numbers during the first half of the fifteenth century and with contents that overlap in regular enough ways that Ralph Hanna has been able to outline a loose copying and distribution network, with London as its most likely axis,17 these books have attracted notice in the last few years for the evidence they offer of a devout lay-oriented reading culture—mainly focused around literate residents of London and other cities and members of the regional gentry, although also including secular priests—and more specifically, for this culture’s interest in themes and texts linked to Wycliffism.18 The inclusion in many of these books of texts of more or less Wycliffite emphasis, often rewritten in small ways to suit particular views—occasionally, as Stephen Kelly and Ryan Perry have shown, lightly censored19—are among the signs of how intensely such interest survived the suppression of organized Wycliffism by Archbishop Thomas Arundel and his successor, Henry Chichele, blending with the new kinds of reformism, imbued by the Council of Constance, at work in what Vincent Gillespie calls “Chichele’s Church.”20
These lay books are typically organized around rather elaborate presentations of standard catechetical items, commentaries on the Paternoster, the Ten Commandments, and so on, but also include a varied array of other instructional and devotional materials. These latter might be spiritual treatises such as Richard Rolle’s Ego dormio, originally written for an anchoress, or the Speculum ecclesie by Edmund of Canterbury, originally written for professional religious, but also instructional works more closely applicable to the elite laity, such as parts of the treatise on lay Christian living, Pore Caitif, or the Schort Reule of Lif, which outlines a daily regime for Christian living to members of the three estates, but pays most detailed attention to lords: those in authority over “wif … childre … homli meyne [household servants]” and “tenauntis,” that is, substantial property owners.21 All four works, along with a number of others addressed to “lords” or householders in this broad same sense, are found in London, Westminster School MS 3: a book that can be speculatively linked to the famous “common profit” scheme for the lay circulation of religious materials associated with the early fifteenth-century London stationer John Colop and that was owned in the 1470s by Richard Close, church warden in the parish of St. Mary at Hill, London.22 The Schort Reule in particular is a popular item, found in six other books, including two more with close London connections, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS 938, another book perhaps related to the “common profit” project, and University College 97, as well as Harley 2398.23 With their mixed devotional, homiletic, and practical contents and their emphatic tilt toward the pastoral, lay books like these are expressive of the interests, aspirations, and spiritual responsibilities of two generations of privileged English laypeople.
Given its opening depiction of Christ as a “housholdynge man” and its direct appeals to those who exercise secular, as well as clerical, power, “Wimbledon’s Sermon” is in many ways a natural traveling companion of texts like the Schort Reule; indeed, many works included in the lay miscellanies may also date from the 1380s. All the same, to read the sermon from the viewpoint of the 1420s or 1430s, when many of these miscellanies were first circulating, and from a London viewpoint in particular, is to experience a certain disconnect, for a great deal had changed since the tense moment the sermon evokes so vividly. The apocalyptic year, 1400, had come and gone without the promised destruction, along with the worst of the religious and civic unrest that made Wimbledon’s sense of an imminent ending seem widely plausible. After weathering a royal regime change, a small but well-publicized series of heresy burnings, and more, London itself was not only in the midst of a building boom and cultural renaissance—some of its public spaces almost literally “overgilt wiþ gold and precious stones and perles”—but also, thanks to a financially weak and otherwise preoccupied monarchy, in a position of relative political independence that allowed its governors to think, if only for a few decades, in semirepublican terms of the city’s autonomy. This state of confidence, indeed, lies behind the civic context of all the materials discussed in this and the following two chapters of this book.24
Most interestingly, from the viewpoint of the early fifteenth century, the sermon seems old-fashioned in its understanding of reform, which it hopes to effect through public controversy and change at a political and societal level, relying on its prophetic evocation of imminent apocalypse to induce its audience to repent more than it does on its account of the “special rekenynge” that follows each individual’s death,25 and using the tactic of criticism of the clergy in the laity’s hearing that was soon to be outlawed; such criticism was explicitly forbidden in Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409.26 Even though “Wimbledon’s Sermon” is itself found in two early fifteenth-century lay miscellanies, the contents of books such as University College 97 and Harley 2398 in general view reform differently: as a matter of individual moral education at all societal levels, beginning with deep lay study and practical implementation of catechesis, and demanding the energetic cooperation of educated laymen in particular. Polemic about the state of society or the clergy is not uncommon in these books. But reform here is usually less dramatic and more pastorally specific, its eschatological assumptions not so close to the surface, confined to general accounts of the separation of good and evil at the Last Judgment. The end times have receded and the