It is important to bear in mind that the bulk of Harley treats the reader as the recipient of religious knowledge, not its teacher, instructing him or her (in the words of Memoriale credencium) how “a man shal lyve parfitlych and holylich” through faith, penance, the practice of the virtues, and “knowyng of hym self and knowyng of god almyȝty.”125 Nonetheless, although we do not know who first owned Harley 2398, its contents suggest that the book was also compiled in a conscious effort to delineate and develop the view of the pastoral duties of the privileged laity sketched in texts like How lordis and housbondemen schulden teche goddis commaundementis from Westminster 3, which teach their lay readers how to exercise “on sun maner a bischopes office,” of which participation in deathbed visitation forms an important part.126
The Schort Reule is much invested in a lord’s spiritual instruction of his household, including his “homli meyne” or domestic servants and even his “tenauntis.” Very much like How lordis and housbondemen schulden teche goddis commaundementis, it threatens the reader with damnation for failing to correct his servants—”For þou shalt be dampned for þer yvel [evil] lif and þin evel suffraunce [forbearance] but if þou amende it up þi myȝt [to the best of your power]”—and exhorts him to “chastise in good maner hem þat [those who] ben rebel aȝens Goddis hestis [commandments].” The lord’s duty to “meyntene [look after] truli up þi kunnyng and miȝt [to the extent of your skill and power] Goddis lawe and trewe prechouris” may still be the most important of his spiritual duties, in which ““if þou failist … þou forfetist [offend] aȝens God in al þi lordshipe in bodi and soule.” But it is only the most public and political among the many duties he is expected to perform.127
The importance ascribed to the visitation of the sick itself within this spiritual economy is most obviously affirmed by the appearance of Visitation E. But the prominent place played by deathbed visitation in the exercise of lay spiritual governance is also suggested in telling detail by The Fyve Wyttes, an important work (or portion of a work) that offers an extended and wide-ranging analysis of the proper uses, positive and negative, of each of the bodily senses.128 Like any treatise on the senses, the work is much preoccupied with governance of the body, which it understands as a “dwellyng-place” or “halle” with “fyve sotel [thin] wyndowes,” and which God both commands and counsels be appropriately ruled, its windows and gates opened or shut as will benefit the soul who lives within. Less usually for this genre, the work is also concerned with the reader’s governance of the communal body of his extended household, threatened as all its members equally are by spiritual death: “Deth haþ ascendyd by ȝoure wyndowes; it is entred into ȝoure houses for to dyspercle [destroy] þe lytel childeren of wiþoute and þe ȝongelynges [young men] of þe stretys (Jeremiah 9:21).”129 Indeed, the work continually shifts between its individual and its social registers, sometimes treating the reader as though his duties are all to himself, only to resituate him quickly within his actual position of difficult authority over others.
As a result of this double allegiance to the reader’s inner and public lives, The Fyve Wyttes offers particularly astute and well-balanced analyses of the standard moral topics of the genre, sometimes parting ways with more severe contemporary works on issues such as food, clothing, and minstrelsy in pursuit of a practical working model of the “mixed” lay life. Perhaps its most socially nuanced passages, however, concern visitation of the sick, a ritual in which the reader may have to venture outside his own domestic space and the normal ambit from which he governs territory, town, or guild, into the homes of his subjects. Thus the work’s account of smell, and the visceral kind of suffering associated with this sense, imagines such a visitation to the alien deathbed of a person with a disgusting illness, or incontinence, or a decaying body:
Yf þou see þin evene-cristene, þe creature of God, in visitacioun of sykenesse ouþer hirtynge [pain], as suche desese [for example, some injury] þat is roted oþer is corrupt [stinking] wherfore he haþ bodyly desese, or elles of eny ynward desese or syknesse, as yf þat his breþ is nouȝt lusty [fresh] ouþer paraunter [perhaps] unkyndely [unwholesome] corrupcioun comynge from himself which for fybulnesse he may nouȝt kepe himself from. And yf þou spare [fail] þerfor come to him in comfort of him or, yf þou come, paraunter for abhominacioun of suche savour [smell] þou makest loþly semelant [an unpleasant face] wharby he is discomforted [embarrassed] oþer þat oþre be þe loþer [less willing] for to visite him, in þis þou forfetest [do wrong]. Þenke wel in þyn herte þat, þough þou be now nevere so fresch and swote, þou myȝt ful lyȝtly [easily] in a lytel tyme be as loþly and unlusty as he … Spare nouȝt þerfore goedly for to visite and comforte such on as þou miȝt liȝtly be when God wol.130
An earlier passage, on sight, also sees the reader faced with the unpleasantnesses that accompany performance of the works of mercy, enjoining him to “byhalde Crist in his lymes” (in the fellow Christians who are the limbs of his body on earth) by focusing not on the healthy and powerful but on “hem þat ben at myschef or desese of body, relyvynge [relieving] hem and comfortynge after þy powere,” performing all the works of mercy including “comfortynge hem þat ben syke,” while reflecting “in þyn herte þat þey ben Godes creatures and his owene ymage.”131
Both these passages make careful use of the egalitarian discourse of the “even-cristen,” a strong presence throughout the treatise. Both, however, also presuppose a social imbalance between the lord and those to whom he offers comfort. In beholding “Crist in his lymes,” a theological formula that readily blends with the social formula in which the lord is the “head” of his household, the reader is to remember that the sufferers “ben breþeren and systers after kynde and grace of redempcioun”:132 a reflection itself suggestive of social distance between the reader and his “even-cristen.” In the passage on smell, the danger that, should the reader “makest loþly semelant” at the smell of a sick person, other people may “be þe loþer for to visite him” also suggests an occasion fraught with the pressures that inhere in encounters between those who are not social equals, especially in the household space of the dying person, which has its own internal hierarchies of power and spiritual responsibility. In requiring that the reader humble himself by the reflections and good works they enjoin, both passages imply that, when the lord carries out the work of mercy, he does so among his own subordinates and as a matter of special, as well as general, responsibility. It is not hard to see why Harley should include, as a matter of course, a copy of Visitation E to enable this difficult duty to be performed.
As the text develops its theme of the difficult uses of the senses, it indeed becomes clear that the lay reader is being understood as fundamentally a minister, whose duties to all to whom he is connected by any tie of dependency mirror the duties of a curate to everyone in his parish so closely that the two can be discussed in quite similar terms. Another discussion of sight, often reminiscent of the Schort Reule, thus notes that, for those in “governance temperal and spiritual” alike, spiritual responsibility for one’s dependents is a matter of eternal life and death:
Þou