worked by promulgating a carefully stepped program of education aimed at the universal human faculty of the reason and thus in principle accessible to the laity, as to others.57 Although Pecock does not specify its intended readership in detail, the title of one of his books, the Pore Men’s Mirror, written for “þe persone poorist in haver [possession] and in witt,” exploits his public position as the curate of poor bedesmen and could have been designed for reading at the almshouse.58 Whether or not this is so, the premise of his entire vernacular oeuvre, that individual laypeople at all levels of wealth and education need to be equipped to understand church doctrine and ethics for themselves, is congruent with the principle of lay spiritual self-governance represented by the almshouse’s architecture, regime, and institutional arrangements. The theological controversies that finally brought him down derive from his later years as a bishop in the 1450s, by which time his emphasis on lay spiritual self-care may have been coming to seem radical.59 But in much of his surviving work Pecock writes as a Londoner and master of the college, working within the nexus of the alliance between civic authority and priestly learning that Whittington’s project enabled.
Both Pecock’s successors, Thomas Eborall (Eyburhale), master from 1444, and William Ive, master from 1464, were also concerned with the defense of orthodoxy. Eborall was a member of a 1452 commission to examine for heresy works belonging to Andrew Teye; according to a note in one manuscript of the Wycliffite New Testament, “doctor Thomas Ebborall and doctor Yve” were both asked to “oversee and read” the book “or þat [before] my modir bought hit.” Eborall also defended himself and other London rectors against the attacks his predecessor, Pecock, launched against the powerful civic preaching culture of the 1440s: the first of a number of incidents, shortly after Carpenter’s death, in which the anti-Lollard orthodoxy embodied by the college and, more generally, the city’s educated secular clergy turned on itself.60 Ive was involved in the later investigation of Pecock’s theology that led to the latter’s condemnation for heresy, as well as in the defense, with Eborall and others, of the orthodox view of Church custodianship of Christian possessions against a strong challenge from the London Carmelites.61 Surviving items from Eborall’s library show his self-understanding as an upholder of civic orthodoxy and interest in the craft of preaching and in vernacular instruction, two other concerns shared by both men.62 Eborall owned a copy of the fourteenth-century compilation Pore Caitif, as did Carpenter’s friend John Colop: the devout stationer at the heart of the scheme to circulate books of vernacular theology among the laity for “common profit” through deathbed bequests, who lived his last years on Whittington’s properties next to the college. Like the Pore Men’s Mirror, Pore Caitif, which offers to “teche simple men and wymmen of gode wille the right way to hevene … withouten multiplicacion of many bokes” by providing a stepped spiritual education beginning “atte grounde of helthe, that is Cristen mennes bileve,” is of clear relevance to the officially poor almshouse bedesmen.63
Through its sister foundation, the college of priests, the spiritual reach of the almshouse was thus broader than its private focus on Whittington’s soul would suggest, reaching out beyond the carefully selected group of poor folk in the almshouse and the parish of St. Michael’s Paternoster to become a spiritual resource for the entire city. Its members supposedly especially learned and chaste, the college became part of a larger movement, headed by substantial lay Londoners such as Carpenter and the other Whittington executors, to nurture and reform pastoral care in the city, to affirm orthodoxy, and to combat heresy by sustaining the “trewe preestis” the author of the E Visitation imagines as worthy to hear a dying person’s confession. The heart of the reformist religious and literary culture of the city from its inception into the second half of the century, Whittington college represents an extraordinary public answer to the charge of spiritual selfishness leveled against “wikkidly i-groundid” almshouses by the “Twelve Conclusions,” to the call for a disinterested, “parfyth charite” that accompanied the charge, and to Wycliffite radicalism itself. Here, the legitimate but perilous financial surplus at the heart of the merchant enterprise finds its ambitious charitable outlet not in the bodily works of mercy but the spiritual ones, not only in prayers but in preaching. Whittington’s money is poured out not prudently, for the benefit of his own soul and the souls of his bedesmen, but evangelically and in “parfyth charite,” to enrich the intellectual and spiritual fabric of the whole of London.
The London Guildhall
The Whittington almshouse and its neighboring college thus offer one careful answer to the question of how a London citizen should die. The answer is grounded in traditional theology and institutions in ways that had come under fierce reformist criticism a generation earlier: in Whittington’s responsibilities to enrich his parish church; his responsibility to recirculate his wealth to the poor from whom, ethically speaking, it had been borrowed; the spiritual benefits of posthumous works of mercy; and the efficacy of the prayers of his beneficiaries, both bedesmen and priests at the college in their capacity as chantry priests, in speeding him through purgatory. On this ground, however, Carpenter and the other executors built an innovative foundation that affirmed two specifically contemporary religious ideals: the responsibility even of poor Christians of limited education to see to their own spiritual destinies; and that of the wealthy lay paterfamilias to concern himself with the spiritual, as well as temporal, governance of his household, in this case very widely construed as comprising, potentially, the whole populace. Through the writings of Pecock, the preaching of Eborall and Ive, and the responsibility all three men took for the city’s orthodoxy, part of Whittington’s surplus wealth was translated into works of preaching and teaching still visibly under his auspices. The Whittington arms became a marker not only of the city’s prosperity and of its concern to yield a spiritual account of that prosperity through the institution-building performance of the works of bodily mercy but of a zealous reformist orthodoxy.
Despite the absence of specific attention paid the problem of merchant wealth in Visitation E and its manuscript companions, a general affinity between the Whittington almshouse project and the theological and pedagogical priorities of these works is unmistakable. Indeed, one of the three copies of Visitation E that I discussed as household miscellanies in the previous chapter, Bodley 938, copied by one of the scribes of John Colop’s “common profit” book, Cambridge University Library MS Ff.6.31, has at least this indirect link to the almshouse. Many of the shorter works in Bodley 938, such as the Schort Reule of Lif, the expositions of the Paternoster, and Visitation E itself, make obvious sense within the ambit of the almshouse.64
In discharging his religious responsibilities as Whittington’s executor, then, Carpenter worked within an ethical paradigm in which virtuous acts are understood in relation to their final, eternal, purposes. This is clearly true of the almshouse and college, directed at the salvation, by more than one means, both of Whittington and of the citizenry of London. It is true of the other large project associated with the Whittington foundation: the library it was used to create at the Guildhall, within the complex that housed the city government, which collected mainly religious materials for the use of the city’s secular clergy and educated lay citizens. Carpenter took a special interest in this library, administering it personally and leaving it an unknown number of books in his will with twenty shillings to the bishop of London, Robert Gilbert, only if he had the will proved without taking a formal inventory of “goods and chattels.”65 It is true of a number of smaller projects—for example, Carpenter’s reestablishment, through the Whittington estate, of a decayed chantry chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary facing St. Paul’s at the northeast corner of the churchyard and situated above a charnel containing centuries of remains of London citizens and the tombs of three mayors.66 In an extended sense, it is even true of the Whittington estate’s contributions to secular building projects, such as the major expansion of the Guildhall itself that made its main hall, home of the city’s Court of Husting, one of the largest in the country, second only to Westminster. Signed as a Whittington project by the incorporation of his arms into the stained glass windows of the new mayoral courtroom, the new building had as its “public face” an elaborate porch at its south end, graced with sculptures of Christ as ruler, overseeing Law
