his executors, and Mercers build the new: “Troynovaunt,” the name by which late medieval Londoners proudly called their city.15 Together, the frontispiece and the envoy direct themselves toward the future as they memorialize the past, using image and word to preserve in cultural memory the protecting aura of the receding charismatic presence of the founder, Whittington, by enrolling him perpetually in a house of fame.16 More, this house of fame is not built, as in a literary text, with words but with solidly supported mortar and stone.
But in describing the ordinances as a “tregedie,” the envoy also does something more searching, by acknowledging the indissoluble connection between Whittington’s deathbed and Fortune: a theme Maura Nolan shows was a central preoccupation of fifteenth-century vernacular public culture and that we will see had important theological, as well as ethical, resonances in a city given over to trade.17 Richard Whittington is memorialized as a tragic hero, a great but imitable man who through his charitable bequests countered “the dedes of Fortune, that with an unwar [unanticipated] strook overtorneth realmes of grete noblye,” as Chaucer, scion of a London merchant family, puts it in his Boece.18 Merchants had a special relationship with the concept of fortune, both practically in the day-to-day business of speculation and in coping with the vagaries of a market economy. Theorized as “risk,” the concept that differentiates legitimate trade from sinful usury, fortune was also central to the theological justification of their business. It is fortune that entitles merchants to profit from objects bought and later sold unaltered, because the act of storing these goods is “accompanied by the risk” of damage, fire, or robbery, subjecting them to the general “uncertainty about what may happen in the future,” as the Franciscan theologian Alexander of Hales puts it in his discussion of the temporal dimension of mercantile activity.19
Ending on its elegiac Trojan note, the envoy invites us to imagine Whittington staring down from heaven, with Chaucer’s hero Troilus, at “this litel spot of erthe that with the se / Embraced is,” learning to “despise / This wrecched world” as “vanite / To respect of the pleyn felicite / That is in hevene above,” and so completing the realignment of his interests from the earthly to the heavenly, the fortunate (“wrecched world”) to the felicitous (“pleyn felicite”), in a manner not possible while he was still alive. But where Troilus, representative of a different theological economy, can “lough right at the wo / Of hem that wepten for his deth so faste,” 20 Whittington needs the tears that Troilus despises, and the vigorous continuance of mercantile activity that the names of the “maistres now of the Mercery, / Olney, Feldyng, Boleyne, and of Burton” represent. At least in the minds and prayers of its living inhabitants, Whittington’s soul remains perpetually connected with the ever-changing fortunes of his institutions and of his city.
In a world more complicated by trade, profit, and the temporal rewards and spiritual dangers they bring than the Visitation of the Sick can acknowledge, how does a merchant die a good death? In early fifteenth-century London, a city built and constantly rebuilt on the profits of trade, this was a question not only for the superrich like Whittington but for inhabitants from almost all the diversity of professions necessitated and sustained by urban living: a question indeed pressing enough to be a matter of institutional concern to governors of the city itself. As this chapter argues, it was also a question whose answers had developed as fast as the cityscape, and in conjunction with it. According to Piers Plowman, a late fourteenth-century poem with close ties to London, a merchant who would be saved must use his winnings to “amende mesondieux” (hospitals) and repair broken roads and bridges, and assist in maintaining Christian community by providing several categories of the needy with the means to prosper:
Marien maydenes or maken hem nonnes;
Povere peple and prisons fynden hem hir [them their] foode,
And sette scolers to scole, or to som oþere craftes;
Releve Religion and renten [endow] hem bettre.21
Helping young women, the poor, prisoners, students, and monks to live as they ought, merchants exercise the corporal works of mercy discussed in the last chapter in specifically financial ways.
Fifty years later this solution was still relevant, as the Whittington almshouse shows. But just as the role of the layperson on and around the deathbed changed as spiritual responsibility passed into the hands of the laity, so answers to the problem of merchant salvation changed also. In its investments in a purgatorial economy, the almshouse, which is discussed in the next section of this chapter, is a traditional mercantile death project, although with contemporary updates and the conscious exemplarity that is a feature of all the Whittington projects. But this is not true of other institutions developed in Whittington’s name, including the college of priests founded next to the almshouse: an institution only loosely related to “Religion” in the monastic sense in which Langland uses this term. Langland imagines merchants “in þe margyne” of Christian society.22 Under what was almost certainly the careful moral and intellectual as well as legal guidance of John Carpenter, who as common clerk amassed a private library of theology, ethics, and advice literature that Caroline Barron calls “one of the most extensive … to be found in fifteenth-century London,” the Whittington institutions place merchants and their associates at the center, taking charge of their own and others’ religious education in just the way that Visitation E suggests a privileged layman should.23
Yet if reformed religiosity provided part of the backdrop to the merchant “good death,” it had too little to say about the immersion in fortune that was merchant life, or about the temporal in general, to provide a comprehensive guide to the concerns raised by wealth for dying merchants like Whittington, for whom Carpenter had spiritual responsibility as executor. Nor, in particular, could it address many of Carpenter’s wider concerns as a professional and deeply devout common clerk, responsible for the good governance of a city whose corporate survival depended on its ability to outlive the individual bodies of its members, “dying generations” all.24 The third section of the chapter thus considers some other possibilities enabled by the intimate relationship between mortality and temporal and spiritual government I am arguing to be a strong thread of late medieval death discourse, linked to Carpenter and the seat of city government, the Guildhall, with its cadre of legally trained lay clerics. These possibilities include the purely administrative solution Carpenter offers to the problem of death in the Liber albus and the formal concern shown in his will for the decorous ritual commemoration of London’s wealthy dead: part of a strong ethical commitment to the city’s past balanced by the will’s equal commitment to its future. They also include a Christian humanist strand of thinking about living and dying well, known to Carpenter through his personal copy of Petrarch’s De remediis utriusque fortunae and somewhat distinct from the “reformist” discourse that has held center stage to this point.
The great early fifteenth-century London manifestation of this second strand of death discourse, the subject of the final section of the chapter, was the Daunce of Poulys or Dance of Death, a civic art project for which Carpenter, probably acting in his capacity as common clerk, seems to have been responsible. An idealized image of Christian London, the sequence of individualized deaths of which the work consists takes us back generically to the tragic and thematically to the fortunate. For while the Daunce of Poulys is in some ways aligned with the laicized reformist religiosity of Visitation E, its reach is not only toward the transcendent but also toward the living, the social, the corporeal, and the material—with what dies in a death, as well as what was believed to survive it. Through this dual purpose, the work can engage more closely than other kinds of reformist religiosity with the issues surrounding worldly engagement itself. In the process, it provides a tool not only of self-government and the government of the household but of civic government, reinforcing a view of the city as a dance in which all the estates of society join together even as their carefully articulated professional identities remain separate. Opening with the good death of a privileged man and its institutional and literary consequences, the chapter ends
