FIGURE 1. Richard Whittington on his deathbed.
Ordinances for Whittington’s Almshouse, folio 1r. Courtesy of the Mercers’ Company.
Photograph by Louis Sinclair.
The drawing represents a dying Whittington in the act of commissioning the foundation of the almshouse. He is attended by his physician, in the background, who is confirming the imminence of his bodily dissolution by checking his urine; by his priest, possibly William Brooke, rector of St. Michael’s Paternoster and first master of Whittington college, who is standing composedly at his head on the bed’s farther side; and by various lay members of his household and local London community.3 These include thirteen bedesmen, representatives of the almshouse, clustering in rows toward and behind the bed foot; and two of the executors, Carpenter and Coventry, identified by names on their tunics and standing at the head of the bed across from the priest. However, the most prominent lay figure in the drawing, tall, bearded, and likewise identified by name, is the third executor, William Grove, a professional scribe active in London in the early part of the century. Grove, whose role here derives from the fact that he made the authoritative copy of the Latin ordinances, is pictured in silent colloquy with the dying man, the first in a chain of figures who successively mediate, implement, and benefit from Whittington’s charity. His hands for now devoid of writing instruments, Grove makes a gesture of acquiescence to Whittington’s gesture of command, looking sternly across the bed at Carpenter and Coventry, whose own hands in turn eagerly direct our (and perhaps Whittington’s) gaze toward the bedesmen and their first head tutor, Robert Chesterton. 4 With these bedesmen—their diminutive bodies partly hidden, their eyes turned gratefully toward their benefactor, their intercessions for his soul evoked by the rosary held in Chesterton’s right hand—the energetic foundation narrative represented by the scene reaches its denouement.
In certain ways, the scene depicted in the frontispiece to the English ordinances seems in tune with the shifts in the understanding and representation of death during the decades before and after 1400 described in the last chapter. Written in the 1380s as a vernacular supplement to the liturgical rite, the Ordo ad visitandum infirmorum, and based on two well-established Latin death texts, the A version of the Middle English Visitation of the Sick made possible a new level of informed participation by the non-Latinate dying person in the church’s last rites, at a moment when such participation was coming to seem theologically necessary. Produced at very nearly the same time, and still in circulation in early fifteenth-century London alongside other reformist texts, the more radically lay-oriented longer version of this text, Visitation E, went further, encouraging the idea that lay people could not only make an informed good death but help others to do so, too: even, if necessary, in the absence of the morally upright “trewe preest” it describes.
Like the deathbed rooms that had for centuries been the destination of solemn processions such as the one described in the Sarum rite, Whittington’s deathbed thus transforms the private room in which it is situated into a public space, crowded with the dying person’s “even-cristen.” Yet as is differently the case in both versions of The Visitation of the Sick, the center of gravity here has once again, in Abell’s representation, become emphatically lay. The priest is present, indeed ready at hand, and takes proper priority over the doctor, in accord with the ecclesiastical principle noted in the A version: “it is ordeined be the lawe that ther shal no leche ȝiven no bodily medicine to a seke man til he be helid gostli [spiritually healed], & that he have take gostli medicine, that is to sai, shrift & housel [confession and absolution].”5 But although the priest is at the bed, he is almost marginal, his eyes and hands taking no part in the gestures that link almost all the other figures, his place in Whittington’s line of vision crowded out by the scrivener Grove, the recorder of Whittington’s dying wishes. As is the case in Visitation A and more emphatically in Visitation E, much of the priest’s sacral authority has thus passed to the dying person, on this occasion the same paterfamilias whose role in the conduct of the deathbed is affirmed in the latter’s text and manuscript companions. In consequence, despite the drawing’s investment in the communitarian, the laicized space around the deathbed has become hierarchic, affirming both the householder’s authority over his “meynee [household]” and the fierce responsibilities that go with it. Though he is no longer able to help them personally to die, as does the householder in the Fyve Wyttes, and though he needs their prayers, Whittington still looks to their good from the throne of this deathbed, in part by requiring their submission to a unifying disciplinary regime.
In other respects, though, the frontispiece depiction of the famous dying merchant differs sharply from the model deathbeds considered so far. This is partly a matter of scale. Whittington’s well-governed household is massive, incorporating the almshouse, the college of priests, the Guildhall Library, and the London metropolis itself, and extending indefinitely through time as well as space. To exercise the mix of temporal and spiritual governance represented by the almshouse and its companion institution requires the energies of others over generations, not years. But there is also a qualitative difference. This deathbed belongs to a substantial urban merchant: a man whose worldly importance is wholly the result of his success in creating wealth. As a result, the drawing is necessarily deeply concerned with wealth and its relation to the soul’s salvation. The iconography of the drawing recalls that of the death of a monarch or a saint, surrounded not by royal kin or monastic brethren but by the aldermen and bureaucrats who carry out the dying man’s spectacular charitable work. Yet despite the drawing’s aura of sanctity, the dying man at its center is not depicted as focused on the next world, “nouȝt thenkynge … on thy richesse, but oonliche and stedefastliche on the passioun of owre lord Jhesu Crist,” as Visitation E enjoins, gazing at a cross held before his eyes or rehearsing the colloquy with God that goes with this gaze.6 Instead, his interests are all in this world: in an urban institution, its charitable mandate, its perpetuation, and its money.
From the perspective of this new deathbed, Visitation E appears idealistic, stripped down to its urgent focus on the moment of death and the mixture of penitence, control, and abandonment to the crucified Christ it requires. Instead of preparing affectively to face eternity, Whittington is practically focused on two temporal futures: his time in the intermediate realm of purgatory and the charitable foundations, starting with the almshouse itself, that will help shorten this time. The Visitation is silent on the matter of purgatory and specifically counsels the dying not to think on “on thy richesse.” But Whittington must above all else think on his riches: partly because, as a former civic leader and substantial business owner, he has an obligation to dispose of them well; partly because these riches, acquired through mercantile trade, put his salvation in peril if he does not think about them. “As in the myddel of a joynyng of stones a paele [staff], or a stake, ficchid [fixed] is, so bitwen the myddel of biyng and silling he shall ben anguysht with synnes,” declares Ecclesiasticus 27:2.7 If Whittington is finally to “legge” the “stoon” of his soul “in þe walle of þe citee of heven slighliche [carefully], with-owte eny noyse or stryf,” as Visitation E puts it,8 his preparation of this stone demands that he continue, until the last minute, to engage with the world.
In relation to the book of almshouse ordinances the frontispiece prefaces, the mixed religious, social, civic, and financial concerns signified by Whittington’s urgently pointing hand take us most obviously to the text of the ordinances themselves. Greeting “alle the trewe people of Cryste,” the ordinances indeed open with a kind of gloss on the image, in the form of a sententious statement of the devout pragmatism that brought the almshouse into existence:
The fervent desire and besy intension of a prudent, wise, and devoute man shold be to cast before [plan in advance]