Learning to Die in London, 1380-1540. Amy Appleford
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and cruelle fortune have oppressed and be not of power to gete their lyvyng, either by craft or by eny other bodily labour. Whereby that, at þe day of the last Jugement, he may take his part with hem [those] that shalle be saved. This considering devoutly, þe forsaid worthy & notable marchant Richard Whityngon, the whiche, while he leved, had right lyberalle and large handes to þe nedy and pouer people, charged streitly in his deth bed … to ordeyne an house of Almes after his deth, for perpetuell sustentacion of suche pouer people.9
Here Carpenter and his fellow executors, who voice the entire document as the fulfillment of Whittington’s “comendable wille and holsom desire,” represent the almshouse in the exemplary terms often used of the Whittington charity.10 The ordinances then go on to spell out, among other things, the almshouse’s physical extent and design, the moneys to be spent in the maintenance of the bedesmen, the prayers they must say each day for Whittington and his wife, and the behavior required of them as they live in Whittington’s foundation, in order that they may be worthy “after the ende of this liff” of the “hous of the kyngdom of heven whiche to pore folk is promist.”11 Following an old solution to the problem of merchant salvation, the ordinances show Whittington “slighliche” preparing his own soul-stone by preparing those of his poor beneficiaries, so that “at þe day of the last Jugement he may take his part with hem that shalle be saved,” smuggling himself into heaven with the “pore folk” who are its most legitimate heirs.
But simply because of the position of Abell’s elegant and thoughtful deathbed scene at the front of this apparently utilitarian text, Whittington’s pointing hand also directs us toward the other half of the frame, at the end of the book. Here the translator has written a brief envoy, in the form of a Chaucerian rhyme royal stanza, dedicating the translation and the book that contains it to the trustees of the Whittington estate and wardens of the Mercers’ guild for whom it was made, who in 1442–43 were John Olney, Geoffrey Feldyng, Geoffrey Boleyne, and John Burton (Figure 2):
FIGURE 2. Envoy.
Ordinances for Whittington’s almshouse, folio 15r. Courtesy of the Mercers’ Company.
Photograph by Louis Sinclair.
Go litel boke, go litel tregedie,
The[e] lowly submitting to al correccion
Of theym beyng maistres now of the Mercery,
Olney, Feldyng, Boleyne, and of Burton,
Hertily theym besekyng [beseeching], with humble salutacion,
The[e] to accepte and thus to take in gre [look with favor],
For ever to be a servant within þeire cominalte [community].12
The stanza’s points of literary reference are, of course, the envoy to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, which has the same first line and directs the “bok” to be a humble “subgit” to “Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace,” before asking John Gower and Ralph Strode “to vouchen sauf, ther nede is, to correcte” the poem; and that of John Lydgate’s Troy Book, whose author tells his book to “submitte to … correccioun” and “put þe in þe grace” of its dedicatee, Henry V.13
As they close, the English ordinances may seem to move outside the discourse of theology, drawing on a secular poetics as they submit their account of the almshouse to the foundation’s new “conservatours” and inviting the reader to view Whittington’s charity through an overtly Trojan lens.14 However courtly their settings, Chaucer and Lydgate’s glittering cities offer ready parallels to fifteenth-century London: a city ruled by the urban laity and shaped in significant ways by the Whittington estate. If poets rebuild the Old Troy, Whittington, 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