trampling their contrary vices.67 Mayoral justice, its role the maintenance of Discipline, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance, thus becomes a manifestation of divine justice, whose end is not civic but eternal order;68 Whittington, as always under the posthumous auspices of his great promoter, Carpenter, affirms the city’s identity as a representation not only of Troynovaunt but of the city in which he hopes to lay his own stone, once it has been sufficiently polished through penitential almsgiving, the New Jerusalem.
Yet Carpenter’s engagements with the questions surrounding the civic good death did not end with his activities as Whittington’s executor, or even with the scrupulous arrangements he made for his own death, as reflected in his will. As London’s common clerk for over twenty years, the heart of the city’s government and the head of the cadre of clerks that constituted a key part of its staff, he also had other opportunities to engage with the ideas and ideals associated with death, and to use them toward the city’s institutional, moral, spiritual, and artistic enrichment, as well as, more concretely, its perpetuation. As we saw, the envoy of the English translation of the almshouse ordinances represents Whittington’s death as a “tregedie” and in so doing imagines the foundation under the complex sign of Fortuna. Fortuna was the threatening benefactor of a city of enormous wealth, divided into competing, loud, and often violent interest groups: a city still struggling to replace the population lost in the decimation of the fourteenth-century plagues; worried about storms at sea, price competition, and international shipping routes; worried, also, about the eternal implications of its worldly success; and all too aware that its liberties, granted by William the Conqueror, were held at the pleasure of the Crown.69
Just as the eternal fate of Whittington was the spiritual responsibility of Carpenter and his fellow executors, so the worldly fate of London was the professional responsibility of Carpenter and his fellow Guildhall clerks, a well-salaried and educated group whose office, in existence in some form since the early days of the city commune, saw to the day-to-day running of the city and its court, and the copying and preservation of the documents on which its power and longevity depended.70 Unlike the mayor and sheriffs, who were all elected annually, the city clerks had career tenure: as record keepers and senior officials, the clerks worked in the newly enlarged government building and constituted the city’s institutional memory.71 In this sense they differed from the royal clerks such as Thomas Hoccleve, whose concerns are often seen as typifying the “emergent bureaucratic class” of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, whose Westminster offices were no longer physically part of the king’s household, whose professional ambitions and hopes of patronage often went unrealized as a result, and whose salaries were constantly in arrears.72 As a short poem by Hoccleve, which begs Carpenter’s help in managing his messy financial affairs, allows us to infer, the city clerks’ relationship to power and money tended to be practical and managerial, focused on the smooth running of a mercantile community that by definition could not take Boethius’s advice and step off fortune’s wheel:
See heer my maistre Carpenter, I yow preye,
How many chalenges [claims] ageyn me be;
And I may nat delivre hem [pay them] by no weye,
So me werreyeth [wars against me] coynes scarsetee,
That ny [near] Cousin is to necessitee;
For why [for which reason] unto yow seeke I for refut [refuge],
Which þat of confort am ny destitut.73
The royal clerks at the Chancery and the Privy Seal are notable, among other things, for their consolidation and elaboration of a Chaucerian and broadly secular poetics, in response, so Ethan Knapp argues, to their precarious career of dependence on the turbulent dynamics of the court.74 The intellectual and literary culture of the two groups overlapped, not least in their joint concern for the relationship between permanence and impermanence, textuality, fortune, and death. Nonetheless, the writing, book ownership, and poetic patronage associated with the city clerks at the Guildhall has a different, institutionally more grounded and philosophically confident flavor.75
The best-known product of the textual culture of the early fifteenth-century Guildhall, giving one account of its attitude to such themes, is Carpenter’s main surviving written work, the massive Liber albus: a compilation of the city’s customs produced in 1419–21, early in his career as common clerk, some two years before he was appointed Whittington’s executor.76 Perhaps produced in emulation of the Liber Horn, by Andrew Horn, the early fourteenth-century city chamberlain who was Carpenter’s most ambitious predecessor in the Guildhall bureaucracy, the Liber albus is an exhaustive attempt to organize all the archival material surviving since the founding of London; to set down the customs of the city, as they pertain to the distribution and passing on of power in the city’s government; and to detail the history and duties of the elected governors and officials who make up the civic hierarchy. Before this project was undertaken during Whittington’s final term as mayor, Carpenter notes in his prohemium, many of the city’s customs had been written down “without order or arrangement,” or in some instances not at all, rendering them constantly vulnerable to the unexpected and irresistible power of death. Because “the fallibility of human memory and the shortness of life do not allow us to gain an accurate knowledge of everything that deserves remembrance,” unless knowledge is recorded in highly codified form, and because death often comes suddenly to the “aged, most experienced, and most discreet rulers of the royal City of London,” causing disruption to their successors, it is crucial to have in writing the details of the city’s elaborate ritual and legal life.77 Civic violence, such as had broken out on several occasions during the 1380s, threatens from within; impingement on the city’s liberties, especially on the part of church and Crown, threatens from without. If London, whose nickname Troynovaunt signifies its perpetual peril as well as its glory, is to stave off the fate of its ancestor, proper procedure must be visibly and repetitively followed in elections, legal proceedings, and the many processions through the city by which the mayor and his retinue physically affirmed its prerogatives. According to the Liber albus, given the deaths of the individual bodies who take part in these rituals, only a depersonalized, abstracted, and scrupulously cross-referenced set of written records can ensure the perpetual survival, across a series of “dying generations,” of the city as a corporate body.
Taken on its own, the Liber albus suggests a potent but also a narrow and secular understanding of death as a civic theme and of Carpenter’s professional relationship to that theme. Yet it is clear from the rebuilt Guildhall itself, with its theological library, its college of priests, and its iconographic representation of the heavenly roots of mayoral justice over its south porch, that the group of lay city clerks headed by Carpenter had a more capacious sense of civic textuality than this book suggests. If we look at a second document that reflects a different aspect of the textual culture of the city clerks, Carpenter’s will, written twenty years after the Liber albus, presumably in the early 1440s, we get a broader picture of his concerns and those of his most important textual community. In the process, we also encounter a discourse of death that has somewhat different roots from the reformist discourse associated with The Visitation of the Sick and similar texts, one whose combination of worldly and transcendent interests, shaped by early Christian humanism, makes it peculiarly suitable to the mercantile civic culture of London.
Aside from detailing his funeral arrangements and listing moneys and goods to be given to his wife, Katherine, his relatives, and his extensive household, Carpenter’s will mainly consists of gifts, mostly in the form of books, to two groups: rectors and other secular ecclesiasts and past and present city clerks.78 The gifts to ecclesiasts begin with a general bequest of “good or rare” Latin theological books selected from his collection by Reginald Pecock, then master of Whittington college, and William Litchfield, preacher, writer, and rector of All Hallows the Great, to be chained in “the common library at Guildhall, for the profit of the students there,
