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
_______________
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. This was the guild to which the former mayor and one of the executors, Coventry, belonged. As Anne Sutton argues, with its acquisition of the massive Whittington charity, the Mercers’ guild became the most powerful organization in London. The professionally written copy that contains the frontispiece image is likely to have been made for the new overseers in the mid-1440s as soon as the translation itself was complete. The frontispiece, a fine pen drawing by the prominent London “lymner” William Abell, confirms the book’s quasi-official status.2
FIGURE 1. Richard Whittington on his deathbed.
Ordinances for Whittington’s Almshouse, folio 1r. Courtesy of the Mercers’ Company.
Photograph by Louis Sinclair.
The drawing represents a dying Whittington in the act of commissioning the foundation of the almshouse. He is attended by his physician, in the background, who is confirming the imminence of his bodily dissolution by checking his urine; by his priest, possibly William Brooke, rector of St. Michael’s Paternoster and first master of Whittington college, who is standing composedly at his head on the bed’s farther side; and by various lay members of his household and local London community.3 These include thirteen bedesmen, representatives of the almshouse, clustering in rows toward and behind the bed foot; and two of the executors, Carpenter and Coventry, identified by names on their tunics and standing at the head of the bed across from the priest. However, the most prominent lay figure in the drawing, tall, bearded, and likewise identified by name, is the third executor, William Grove, a professional scribe active in London in the early part of the century. Grove, whose role here derives from the fact that he made the authoritative copy of the Latin ordinances, is pictured in silent colloquy with the dying man, the first in a chain of figures who successively mediate, implement, and benefit from Whittington’s charity. His hands for now devoid of writing instruments, Grove makes a gesture of acquiescence to Whittington’s gesture of command, looking sternly across the bed at Carpenter and Coventry, whose own hands in turn eagerly direct our (and perhaps Whittington’s) gaze toward the bedesmen and their first head tutor, Robert Chesterton. 4 With these bedesmen—their diminutive bodies partly hidden, their eyes turned gratefully toward their benefactor, their intercessions for his soul evoked by the rosary held in Chesterton’s right hand—the energetic foundation narrative represented by the scene reaches its denouement.
In certain ways, the scene depicted in the frontispiece to the English ordinances seems in tune with the shifts in the understanding and representation of death during the decades before and after 1400 described in the last chapter. Written in the 1380s as a vernacular supplement to the liturgical rite, the Ordo ad visitandum infirmorum, and based on two well-established Latin death texts, the A version of the Middle English Visitation of the Sick made possible a new level of informed participation by the non-Latinate dying person in the church’s last rites, at a moment when such participation was coming to seem theologically necessary. Produced at very nearly the same time, and still in circulation in early fifteenth-century London alongside other reformist texts, the more radically lay-oriented longer version of this text, Visitation E, went further, encouraging the idea that lay people could not only make an informed good death but help others to do so, too: even, if necessary, in the absence of the morally upright “trewe preest” it describes.
Like the deathbed rooms that had for centuries been the destination of solemn processions such as the one described in the Sarum rite, Whittington’s deathbed thus transforms the private room in which it is situated into a public space, crowded with the dying person’s “even-cristen.” Yet as is differently the case in both versions of The Visitation of the Sick, the center of gravity here has once again, in Abell’s representation, become emphatically lay. The priest is present, indeed ready at hand, and takes proper priority over the doctor, in accord with the ecclesiastical principle noted in the A version: “it is ordeined be the lawe that ther shal no leche ȝiven no bodily medicine to a seke man til he be helid gostli [spiritually healed], & that he have take gostli medicine, that is to sai, shrift & housel [confession and absolution].”5 But although the priest is at the bed, he is almost marginal, his eyes and hands
