Yet if reformed religiosity provided part of the backdrop to the merchant “good death,” it had too little to say about the immersion in fortune that was merchant life, or about the temporal in general, to provide a comprehensive guide to the concerns raised by wealth for dying merchants like Whittington, for whom Carpenter had spiritual responsibility as executor. Nor, in particular, could it address many of Carpenter’s wider concerns as a professional and deeply devout common clerk, responsible for the good governance of a city whose corporate survival depended on its ability to outlive the individual bodies of its members, “dying generations” all.24 The third section of the chapter thus considers some other possibilities enabled by the intimate relationship between mortality and temporal and spiritual government I am arguing to be a strong thread of late medieval death discourse, linked to Carpenter and the seat of city government, the Guildhall, with its cadre of legally trained lay clerics. These possibilities include the purely administrative solution Carpenter offers to the problem of death in the Liber albus and the formal concern shown in his will for the decorous ritual commemoration of London’s wealthy dead: part of a strong ethical commitment to the city’s past balanced by the will’s equal commitment to its future. They also include a Christian humanist strand of thinking about living and dying well, known to Carpenter through his personal copy of Petrarch’s De remediis utriusque fortunae and somewhat distinct from the “reformist” discourse that has held center stage to this point.
The great early fifteenth-century London manifestation of this second strand of death discourse, the subject of the final section of the chapter, was the Daunce of Poulys or Dance of Death, a civic art project for which Carpenter, probably acting in his capacity as common clerk, seems to have been responsible. An idealized image of Christian London, the sequence of individualized deaths of which the work consists takes us back generically to the tragic and thematically to the fortunate. For while the Daunce of Poulys is in some ways aligned with the laicized reformist religiosity of Visitation E, its reach is not only toward the transcendent but also toward the living, the social, the corporeal, and the material—with what dies in a death, as well as what was believed to survive it. Through this dual purpose, the work can engage more closely than other kinds of reformist religiosity with the issues surrounding worldly engagement itself. In the process, it provides a tool not only of self-government and the government of the household but of civic government, reinforcing a view of the city as a dance in which all the estates of society join together even as their carefully articulated professional identities remain separate. Opening with the good death of a privileged man and its institutional and literary consequences, the chapter ends with a representation of the good death of London as a whole.
The Whittington Almshouse
Come ȝe, the blessid of my fadir, take ȝe in possessioun the kyngdoom maad redi to ȝou fro the makyng of the world. For Y hungride, and ȝe ȝaven [gave] me to ete; Y thristide, and ȝe ȝaven me to drynke; Y was herboreles [shelterless], and ȝe herboriden me; nakid, and ȝe hiliden me; siik, and ȝe visitiden me; Y was in prisoun, and ȝe camen to me.
(Matthew 25:35–36)25
The almshouse, the late medieval successor of the hospital, Langland’s “mesondieux,” has links to almost all the deeds Christ describes as criteria for salvation and, perhaps for this reason, had special attraction for late medieval English merchants. As R. M. Clay demonstrates in her classic study of medieval hospitals, it was the “old merchant princes” or prominent townsfolk who were responsible for most of the houses for the poor built in the late medieval period.26 The Whittington almshouse has been evoked in discussions of changing attitudes toward the poor in late medieval England, as evidence of an increased desire for social control inherent in alms being given only to the “deserving” poor; and, indeed, the ordinances emphasize that only “discrete and humble” poor should be admitted to the house.27 But more significantly, the ordinances’ main emphasis is that the community should be made up primarily of those Londoners who have been brought low through no fault of their own but by fortune’s whim. The house is “namely [especially] to provide for suche pouer persones whiche grevous penurie and cruelle fortune have oppressed and be not of power to gete their lyvyng either by craft or by eny other bodily labour,” whose difficult lives might be described through the language of “tregedie” used in the ordinances envoy.28 Working daily in a culture of exchange, competition, and speculation, London merchants knew well the ups and downs of fortune. As was also true of the gifts of money and food to those who got behind on their payments serving time in Ludgate, the debtors’ jail, another popular civic choice of almsgiving, there is a significant element of recognition between the “merchant prince” founders of almshouses and their inmates.
The efficiency of the almshouse form as a way of fulfilling the corporal works of mercy may in part explain its attraction for London merchants and merchant guilds. But almshouses also have a specific relationship to issues of mercantile profit and Christian morality. As the anxiety expressed by Piers Plowman about mercantile salvation suggests, the figure of the merchant had long been disruptive of traditional estate models of medieval society, not least because he was associated with the sin of usury: the sin of “selling time” or “making gold breed” through buying goods and selling them at a profit. Providing for the poor was a particularly effective means by which merchants could raise their moral profile. In order to be both just and merciful, the successful merchant, such as Whittington, needed to recirculate his enormous wealth back into the common good, because, as theologians such as Aquinas argued, “according to natural law goods that are held in superabundance by some people should be used for the maintenance of the poor.” Riches not put back into public circulation are tantamount to stolen goods: “It is the bread of the poor which you are holding back; it is the clothes of the naked which you are hoarding; it is the relief and liberation of the wretched which you are thwarting by burying your money away,” he adds.29 The institution of the almshouse by Whittington’s executors gave concrete form to the idea that the wealthy merchant is a mere steward of his property and riches in the same way bishops, abbots, and monks are stewards of the collective Christian wealth of the great monastic and secular religious foundations. As the author of the early fifteenth-century Dives and Pauper has the Pauper figure explain, “alle þat þe ryche man hat pasynge hys honest lyvynge aftir þe degre of hys dispensacioun [disposable wealth], it is oþir mennys & nout hese [not his], & he schal ȝevyn wol harde rekenyng [a very strict accounting] þerof at þe dom [Judgment]…. For riche men and lordys in þis world ben Godys balyys [bailiffs] & Godys revys [reeves] to ordeynyn [provide] for þe pore folc & for to susteynyn þe pore folc.”30 The almshouse foundation redistributes Whittington’s surplus wealth back into the London community by means of “visible participation in an economic logic … that had both a sense of civic solidarity and mystic unification.”31 The Whittington almshouse thus fits into a traditional pattern, one with its origins in patristic and scholastic work on the “problem” of excess wealth, private property, and mercantile exchange.
However, although much of the theological logic expressed by the Whittington almshouse had been worked out in full by the thirteenth century, in several respects it remains a consciously innovative project: one indeed typical of Whittington projects in the thoroughness with which it rearticulates existing