the recorder of Whittington’s dying wishes. As is the case in Visitation A and more emphatically in Visitation E, much of the priest’s sacral authority has thus passed to the dying person, on this occasion the same paterfamilias whose role in the conduct of the deathbed is affirmed in the latter’s text and manuscript companions. In consequence, despite the drawing’s investment in the communitarian, the laicized space around the deathbed has become hierarchic, affirming both the householder’s authority over his “meynee [household]” and the fierce responsibilities that go with it. Though he is no longer able to help them personally to die, as does the householder in the Fyve Wyttes, and though he needs their prayers, Whittington still looks to their good from the throne of this deathbed, in part by requiring their submission to a unifying disciplinary regime.
In other respects, though, the frontispiece depiction of the famous dying merchant differs sharply from the model deathbeds considered so far. This is partly a matter of scale. Whittington’s well-governed household is massive, incorporating the almshouse, the college of priests, the Guildhall Library, and the London metropolis itself, and extending indefinitely through time as well as space. To exercise the mix of temporal and spiritual governance represented by the almshouse and its companion institution requires the energies of others over generations, not years. But there is also a qualitative difference. This deathbed belongs to a substantial urban merchant: a man whose worldly importance is wholly the result of his success in creating wealth. As a result, the drawing is necessarily deeply concerned with wealth and its relation to the soul’s salvation. The iconography of the drawing recalls that of the death of a monarch or a saint, surrounded not by royal kin or monastic brethren but by the aldermen and bureaucrats who carry out the dying man’s spectacular charitable work. Yet despite the drawing’s aura of sanctity, the dying man at its center is not depicted as focused on the next world, “nouȝt thenkynge … on thy richesse, but oonliche and stedefastliche on the passioun of owre lord Jhesu Crist,” as Visitation E enjoins, gazing at a cross held before his eyes or rehearsing the colloquy with God that goes with this gaze.6 Instead, his interests are all in this world: in an urban institution, its charitable mandate, its perpetuation, and its money.
From the perspective of this new deathbed, Visitation E appears idealistic, stripped down to its urgent focus on the moment of death and the mixture of penitence, control, and abandonment to the crucified Christ it requires. Instead of preparing affectively to face eternity, Whittington is practically focused on two temporal futures: his time in the intermediate realm of purgatory and the charitable foundations, starting with the almshouse itself, that will help shorten this time. The Visitation is silent on the matter of purgatory and specifically counsels the dying not to think on “on thy richesse.” But Whittington must above all else think on his riches: partly because, as a former civic leader and substantial business owner, he has an obligation to dispose of them well; partly because these riches, acquired through mercantile trade, put his salvation in peril if he does not think about them. “As in the myddel of a joynyng of stones a paele [staff], or a stake, ficchid [fixed] is, so bitwen the myddel of biyng and silling he shall ben anguysht with synnes,” declares Ecclesiasticus 27:2.7 If Whittington is finally to “legge” the “stoon” of his soul “in þe walle of þe citee of heven slighliche [carefully], with-owte eny noyse or stryf,” as Visitation E puts it,8 his preparation of this stone demands that he continue, until the last minute, to engage with the world.
In relation to the book of almshouse ordinances the frontispiece prefaces, the mixed religious, social, civic, and financial concerns signified by Whittington’s urgently pointing hand take us most obviously to the text of the ordinances themselves. Greeting “alle the trewe people of Cryste,” the ordinances indeed open with a kind of gloss on the image, in the form of a sententious statement of the devout pragmatism that brought the almshouse into existence:
The fervent desire and besy intension of a prudent, wise, and devoute man shold be to cast before [plan in advance] & make seure the state and th’ende of his short lyff with dedes of mercy and pite. And namely to provide for suche pouer persones whiche grevous penurie and cruelle fortune have oppressed and be not of power to gete their lyvyng, either by craft or by eny other bodily labour. Whereby that, at þe day of the last Jugement, he may take his part with hem [those] that shalle be saved. This considering devoutly, þe forsaid worthy & notable marchant Richard Whityngon, the whiche, while he leved, had right lyberalle and large handes to þe nedy and pouer people, charged streitly in his deth bed … to ordeyne an house of Almes after his deth, for perpetuell sustentacion of suche pouer people.9
Here Carpenter and his fellow executors, who voice the entire document as the fulfillment of Whittington’s “comendable wille and holsom desire,” represent the almshouse in the exemplary terms often used of the Whittington charity.10 The ordinances then go on to spell out, among other things, the almshouse’s physical extent and design, the moneys to be spent in the maintenance of the bedesmen, the prayers they must say each day for Whittington and his wife, and the behavior required of them as they live in Whittington’s foundation, in order that they may be worthy “after the ende of this liff” of the “hous of the kyngdom of heven whiche to pore folk is promist.”11 Following an old solution to the problem of merchant salvation, the ordinances show Whittington “slighliche” preparing his own soul-stone by preparing those of his poor beneficiaries, so that “at þe day of the last Jugement he may take his part with hem that shalle be saved,” smuggling himself into heaven with the “pore folk” who are its most legitimate heirs.
But simply because of the position of Abell’s elegant and thoughtful deathbed scene at the front of this apparently utilitarian text, Whittington’s pointing hand also directs us toward the other half of the frame, at the end of the book. Here the translator has written a brief envoy, in the form of a Chaucerian rhyme royal stanza, dedicating the translation and the book that contains it to the trustees of the Whittington estate and wardens of the Mercers’ guild for whom it was made, who in 1442–43 were John Olney, Geoffrey Feldyng, Geoffrey Boleyne, and John Burton (Figure 2):
FIGURE 2. Envoy.
Ordinances for Whittington’s almshouse, folio 15r. Courtesy of the Mercers’ Company.
Photograph by Louis Sinclair.
Go litel boke, go litel tregedie,
The[e] lowly submitting to al correccion
Of theym beyng maistres now of the Mercery,
Olney, Feldyng, Boleyne, and of Burton,
Hertily theym besekyng [beseeching], with humble salutacion,
The[e] to accepte and thus to take in gre [look with favor],
For ever to be a servant within þeire cominalte [community].12
The stanza’s points of literary reference are, of course, the envoy to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, which has the same first line and directs the “bok” to be a humble “subgit” to “Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace,” before asking John Gower and Ralph Strode “to vouchen sauf, ther nede is, to correcte” the poem; and that of John Lydgate’s Troy Book, whose author tells his book to “submitte to … correccioun” and “put þe in þe grace” of its dedicatee, Henry V.13
As they close, the English ordinances may seem to move outside the discourse of theology, drawing on a secular poetics as they submit their account of the almshouse to the foundation’s new “conservatours” and inviting the reader to view Whittington’s charity through an overtly Trojan lens.14 However courtly their settings, Chaucer and Lydgate’s glittering cities offer ready parallels to fifteenth-century London: a city ruled by
