ȝe, the blessid of my fadir, take ȝe in possessioun the kyngdoom maad redi to ȝou fro the makyng of the world. For Y hungride, and ȝe ȝaven [gave] me to ete; Y thristide, and ȝe ȝaven me to drynke; Y was herboreles [shelterless], and ȝe herboriden me; nakid, and ȝe hiliden me; siik, and ȝe visitiden me; Y was in prisoun, and ȝe camen to me.
(Matthew 25:35–36)25
The almshouse, the late medieval successor of the hospital, Langland’s “mesondieux,” has links to almost all the deeds Christ describes as criteria for salvation and, perhaps for this reason, had special attraction for late medieval English merchants. As R. M. Clay demonstrates in her classic study of medieval hospitals, it was the “old merchant princes” or prominent townsfolk who were responsible for most of the houses for the poor built in the late medieval period.26 The Whittington almshouse has been evoked in discussions of changing attitudes toward the poor in late medieval England, as evidence of an increased desire for social control inherent in alms being given only to the “deserving” poor; and, indeed, the ordinances emphasize that only “discrete and humble” poor should be admitted to the house.27 But more significantly, the ordinances’ main emphasis is that the community should be made up primarily of those Londoners who have been brought low through no fault of their own but by fortune’s whim. The house is “namely [especially] 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,” whose difficult lives might be described through the language of “tregedie” used in the ordinances envoy.28 Working daily in a culture of exchange, competition, and speculation, London merchants knew well the ups and downs of fortune. As was also true of the gifts of money and food to those who got behind on their payments serving time in Ludgate, the debtors’ jail, another popular civic choice of almsgiving, there is a significant element of recognition between the “merchant prince” founders of almshouses and their inmates.
The efficiency of the almshouse form as a way of fulfilling the corporal works of mercy may in part explain its attraction for London merchants and merchant guilds. But almshouses also have a specific relationship to issues of mercantile profit and Christian morality. As the anxiety expressed by Piers Plowman about mercantile salvation suggests, the figure of the merchant had long been disruptive of traditional estate models of medieval society, not least because he was associated with the sin of usury: the sin of “selling time” or “making gold breed” through buying goods and selling them at a profit. Providing for the poor was a particularly effective means by which merchants could raise their moral profile. In order to be both just and merciful, the successful merchant, such as Whittington, needed to recirculate his enormous wealth back into the common good, because, as theologians such as Aquinas argued, “according to natural law goods that are held in superabundance by some people should be used for the maintenance of the poor.” Riches not put back into public circulation are tantamount to stolen goods: “It is the bread of the poor which you are holding back; it is the clothes of the naked which you are hoarding; it is the relief and liberation of the wretched which you are thwarting by burying your money away,” he adds.29 The institution of the almshouse by Whittington’s executors gave concrete form to the idea that the wealthy merchant is a mere steward of his property and riches in the same way bishops, abbots, and monks are stewards of the collective Christian wealth of the great monastic and secular religious foundations. As the author of the early fifteenth-century Dives and Pauper has the Pauper figure explain, “alle þat þe ryche man hat pasynge hys honest lyvynge aftir þe degre of hys dispensacioun [disposable wealth], it is oþir mennys & nout hese [not his], & he schal ȝevyn wol harde rekenyng [a very strict accounting] þerof at þe dom [Judgment]…. For riche men and lordys in þis world ben Godys balyys [bailiffs] & Godys revys [reeves] to ordeynyn [provide] for þe pore folc & for to susteynyn þe pore folc.”30 The almshouse foundation redistributes Whittington’s surplus wealth back into the London community by means of “visible participation in an economic logic … that had both a sense of civic solidarity and mystic unification.”31 The Whittington almshouse thus fits into a traditional pattern, one with its origins in patristic and scholastic work on the “problem” of excess wealth, private property, and mercantile exchange.
However, although much of the theological logic expressed by the Whittington almshouse had been worked out in full by the thirteenth century, in several respects it remains a consciously innovative project: one indeed typical of Whittington projects in the thoroughness with which it rearticulates existing institutional and ethical models along specifically fifteenth-century lines. According to the ordinances this is true, first, of how it understands and treats its beneficiaries. On the one hand, the inhabitants of “goddeshowse or Almeshous or the Hospitall of Richard Whittington”—”of men alonly [only] or of men or wommen to giddre after the sadde discrecion & good conscience of Th’overseers”32—are enjoined to behave as traditional recipients of charity, living like members of any semireligious community and praying often for their founders. “Nedye, devowte and honeste in Conversation and Lyvinge,”33 they are to reside in the house, wear its uniform, eat meals together, submit to fines if they misbehave, attend several services a day, and say prayers, alone and together, for their benefactors—including Whittington and his parents, his wife, Alice, and her parents, and Whittington’s own early patrons, Richard II and Thomas of Woodstock.34 After compline, the whole community must gather at the tomb of Whittington and his wife in the church to “sey for the soules of alle cristen people” the De profundis and other prayers, ending with “God have mercy on oure founders soules and alle cristen,” said “openly in Englissh.”35 Besides being under the pastoral care of the college and its master, the bedesmen are under the moral, as well as practical, control of their own tutor, chosen by the “conservatours,” first the executors, later the “maistres,” of the Mercers’ guild. Exercising the quasi-sacerdotal role of teacher by word and example, the tutor is charged to be zealous “to edifie and norissh charite & peas amonge his felawes and also to shew, with alle besinesse bothe in word and deed, ensamples of clennesse and vertue.”36 A good deal is done, that is, to ensure that these “pouer persones” on whose prayers Whittington’s soul depends and for whose own souls he still shares responsibility from beyond the grave act the role of the patient poor as they should.
On the other hand, the detailed arrangements made for the bedesmen are also suggestive of a concern to emphasize their personal spiritual responsibility, to treat them as agents, not patients. Not only do they have freedom to move around the city and spend most of their time as they please, their individual living arrangements are not monastic or semireligious but collegiate or, perhaps, Carthusian. While it is the duty of any bedesmen “myghty and hole of body” to minister to the “seke and feble” in any way that may be necessary, each bedesman lives alone, with a fireplace, latrine, and other domestic appurtenances. Moreover, the almshouse is expected to provide various kinds of space for contemplative retirement: “Also, we woll and ordeyn that every persone of hem now Tutor and pouer folk and successours have a place by him self within the seid Almeshous. That is to sey a Celle or a litell house with a chymene and a pryvey and other necessaries in the whiche he shalle lyegge and rest…. Whan they be in hir forseid houses or Celles aforeseid and also in the cloistres and other places of the seid almeshouse have hem self quietly and pesably, without noise or disturbance of his felawes, and that they occupie hem self in prayer or reding or in labor of hir hondes or in som other honest occupacion.”37 Apart from enjoining them to use the very simple Psalter of Our Lady (“thries L [three times fifty] Ave maria with xv pater noster and iij Credes”)38 in praying for their patrons, the ordinances do not lay out any spiritual regime for the bedesmen, who in practice included “pouer folk” from a range of social backgrounds, unsuccessful members of the Mercers’ guild, retired choristers and lay clerks from St. Michael’s, and others, some of them with very limited literacy.39 But alongside the well-established arrangements for a traditional, disciplined lay community of the poor, these more novel arrangements build into the institution a set of assumptions about the need for individual spiritual
