is not only to care for their temporal and eternal needs but to give them the chance to exercise care over their own souls, to take responsibility not only for maintaining the communitarian values of peace, love, and “cheritee,” but for themselves.
The second innovative feature of the Whittington almshouse also concerns laicization, for the institution is well known among historians of philanthropy as one of England’s earliest “secular” charitable institutions, whose creation and administration remained in lay, not ecclesiastic, hands.40 The ordinances give various roles to the nearby college of priests and its master, who say daily services in St. Michael’s Paternoster, lead the prayers for the souls of the benefactors, and have the right to fill every seventh vacancy at the almshouse.41 But whereas before the fifteenth century most hospitals for the poor were under direct supervision by clergy or Augustinian canons,42 here full control of the almshouse remains, first, with John Carpenter as lead executor, later with the “conservatours” (the Mercers’ guild).43 Ecclesiastical involvement in the day-to-day running of the almshouse is kept to a minimum.
As with most projects connected to the Whittington estate, the specific arrangements that allowed the almhouse to retain its lay status were the business of John Carpenter, whose prompt pursuance of a charter of incorporation for the almshouse provided one of the legal instruments by which Whittington’s private riches were translated, as the theology of almsgiving demanded, into communal wealth. In 1432, soon after finally settling its endowment, Carpenter obtained a foundation charter for the almshouse from the Crown, making it into a legal “person,” empowered to hold property in perpetual succession: one of the first nonreligious institutions in England to use this juridical tool.44 Carpenter’s incorporation protected the almshouse from the possibility that the Mercers might one day seek to sell it piecemeal, or that its moneys might be alienated by a sovereign strapped for funds. Allowing the almshouse to dispense with the expensive need for the license usually required when wealth passed from private individuals into the hands of a perpetual body, this “mortmain” arrangement also allowed the almshouse to profit from the good deaths of future merchants, duly dispersing their own winnings to the poor through this institutionalized form of the works of mercy.45 Finally, it allowed Carpenter to invest the bedesmen with a measure of formal control over the institution’s legal status, as expressed by the keeping of the charter of incorporation and the common seal within the house itself: “We wille and ordeyne also that the seid Tutor and pour folke have a comyn chest and a Comyn seale in whiche chest thei shalle putte the said Seal. Also their chartres, lettres, privilegis, Escrites, and Tresour of theire seid house and other thinges whiche shalle seme to the seid Tutor and pouer folk expedient for the commyn profit of the seid place; whiche chest we wille be put in a secreet and a sekir [secure] place with ynne the boundes of the seid hous.” The chest was to have three keys: one held by the tutor, one by the eldest member of the house, the third by “oon of the othir felawes of the seid Almeshous every yere to be new chosen by us while we lyve, and after our discesse by the maisters of the Mercerie.”46 This system parallels similar arrangements not only at the London Guildhall and at Oxford and Cambridge colleges but also at the Whittington college of priests, emphasizing the separateness of the two institutions from a jurisdictional point of view, and thus the exclusively spiritual nature of the care exercised by the members of the college over the bedesmen next door. In 1410, only a little over a decade before the almshouse was founded, a set of polemical Lollard petitions had been presented in the House of Commons arguing that almshouses should be placed under the “oversiht of goode and trewe sekulers,” since “preestes and clerkes … have full nyh [very nearly] distroyed all the houses off almesse withinne the rewne.”47 Although the Whittington almshouse was created with private money, not through the ecclesiastical disendowment advocated by the Lollard petitions, and although it is far from expressing their virulent anticlericalism, Carpenter’s careful legal arrangements appear to reflect a similar view of how institutions of this kind should be managed.
As an engine of prayer and exclusive mausoleum for London’s richest citizen, the Whittington almshouse is in another sense an explicitly anti-Lollard project, for the Lollard understanding of how almshouses should work is aggressively antihierarchic and communitarian. According to the seventh of the “Twelve Conclusions,” presented to Parliament and nailed to the door of St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey in 1395, in contemporary England “special preyeris for dede men soulis mad in oure chirche preferryng on be name [one by name] more þan anothir”—a system on which “alle almes houses of Ingelond ben wikkidly i-groundid”—represents a “false ground of almesse dede.” Instead of being the economic product of a private arrangement founded in mutual self-interest, “þe preyere of value” should spring “out of perfyth charite” and “enbrace in general alle þo [those] þat God wolde have savid,” not small groups of privileged individuals.48 The daily prayers said at the services in St. Michael’s and at the Whittington tombstone enfold “the soules of alle cristen people”—a broader formulation than the Lollard “alle þo þat God wolde have savid”—and by enriching the city’s liturgical round, more generally “augment the divine cult” to the same end.49 But a key feature of all the Whittington death projects as articulated by Carpenter and his fellow executors is their repeated linkage of works of charity with his exemplary and singular name. During the 1420s and 1430s, the Whittington arms appeared as a sign of his charity in buildings all across the city, from the almshouse and college themselves to various locations at the Guildhall, to a chantry chapel at St. Paul’s, to the south gate of St. Bartholomew’s hospital, where they were placed near a stained glass window representing the seven works of bodily mercy.50 These emblems serve a hortatory function, as signs of the enduring, virtuous presence of a figure who was represented as effectively London’s new founding father. But they also appeal, mutely, for the prayers of London’s citizens, turning the entire community, from one perspective, into a giant chantry or almshouse dedicated to the salvation of a single individual.
However, the third and most innovative feature of the Whittington almshouse, its close ties to an ambitious college of secular priests, goes a long way toward addressing Lollard attacks on private charity, even as it associates the institution with what became one of London’s most powerful engines of reformist orthodoxy. Whittington college, which was run under the same general structure of lay oversight as the almshouse, was envisaged partly as a place of prayer for the souls of Whittington and his wife, composed like a large chantry chapel of “five or six perpetual chaplains” under a master, partly as an adjunct and spiritual support to the almshouse as it carried out its fundamentally similar purpose.51 But it was stipulated from the start that the priests be highly educated as well as virtuous (“viris bene literatis et virtuosis”) and that the master, ex officio rector of the parish and obliged to be resident, be a doctor of divinity (“in sacra theologia graduatum”), thus adding St. Michael’s Paternoster to the growing group of London parishes in the spiritual care of advanced graduates of Oxford or Cambridge, who, especially from the 1430s on, formed part of the church’s first line of defense against Lollardy in the nation’s capital.52
It appears to have taken some time to find a master who met this qualification.53 A few years after its foundation, however, the college was fortunate enough to attract—perhaps through Carpenter’s well-connected relative also called John Carpenter, master of the hospital of St. Anthony’s of Vienne on Threadneedle Street, later bishop of Worcester54—the first in a tightly knit series of three brilliant masters, all from outside London, who successively positioned themselves at the center of efforts to promote the religious education of lay Londoners, not just in their immediate environs but throughout the city.55 This was the vigorously evangelical Reginald Pecock, always anxious (as he states in his Donet) to be “a profitable procutoure to lay men” by communicating religious truth through his own vernacular books, some of which may have been written while he was at the college and which are shot through with references to the spaces and rituals of London and to the Mercers themselves.56 Pecock’s defense of orthodoxy against the biblicism of the Lollards, with their seductive claim (as he puts it in The Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy) that “whate ever
