Learning to Die in London, 1380-1540. Amy Appleford

its beneficiaries. On the one hand, the inhabitants of “goddeshowse or Almeshous or the Hospitall of Richard Whittington”—”of men alonly [only] or of men or wommen to giddre after the sadde discrecion & good conscience of Th’overseers”³²—are enjoined to behave as traditional recipients of charity, living like members of any semireligious community and praying often for their founders. “Nedye, devowte and honeste in Conversation and Lyvinge,”³³ they are to reside in the house, wear its uniform, eat meals together, submit to fines if they misbehave, attend several services a day, and say prayers, alone and together, for their benefactors—including Whittington and his parents, his wife, Alice, and her parents, and Whittington’s own early patrons, Richard II and Thomas of Woodstock.³⁴ After compline, the whole community must gather at the tomb of Whittington and his wife in the church to “sey for the soules of alle cristen people” the De profundis and other prayers, ending with “God have mercy on oure founders soules and alle cristen,” said “openly in Englissh.”³⁵ Besides being under the pastoral care of the college and its master, the bedesmen are under the moral, as well as practical, control of their own tutor, chosen by the “conservatours,” first the executors, later the “maistres,” of the Mercers’ guild. Exercising the quasi-sacerdotal role of teacher by word and example, the tutor is charged to be zealous “to edifie and norissh charite & peas amonge his felawes and also to shew, with alle besinesse bothe in word and deed, ensamples of clennesse and vertue.”³⁶ A good deal is done, that is, to ensure that these “pouer persones” on whose prayers Whittington’s soul depends and for whose own souls he still shares responsibility from beyond the grave act the role of the patient poor as they should.

      On the other hand, the detailed arrangements made for the bedesmen are also suggestive of a concern to emphasize their personal spiritual responsibility, to treat them as agents, not patients. Not only do they have freedom to move around the city and spend most of their time as they please, their individual living arrangements are not monastic or semireligious but collegiate or, perhaps, Carthusian. While it is the duty of any bedesmen “myghty and hole of body” to minister to the “seke and feble” in any way that may be necessary, each bedesman lives alone, with a fireplace, latrine, and other domestic appurtenances. Moreover, the almshouse is expected to provide various kinds of space for contemplative retirement: “Also, we woll and ordeyn that every persone of hem now Tutor and pouer folk and successours have a place by him self within the seid Almeshous. That is to sey a Celle or a litell house with a chymene and a pryvey and other necessaries in the whiche he shalle lyegge and rest…. Whan they be in hir forseid houses or Celles aforeseid and also in the cloistres and other places of the seid almeshouse have hem self quietly and pesably, without noise or disturbance of his felawes, and that they occupie hem self in prayer or reding or in labor of hir hondes or in som other honest occupacion.”³⁷ Apart from enjoining them to use the very simple Psalter of Our Lady (“thries L [three times fifty] Ave maria with xv pater noster and iij Credes”)³⁸ in praying for their patrons, the ordinances do not lay out any spiritual regime for the bedesmen, who in practice included “pouer folk” from a range of social backgrounds, unsuccessful members of the Mercers’ guild, retired choristers and lay clerks from St. Michael’s, and others, some of them with very limited literacy.³⁹ But alongside the well-established arrangements for a traditional, disciplined lay community of the poor, these more novel arrangements build into the institution a set of assumptions about the need for individual spiritual self-government that we have seen to be a hallmark of the death discourse of the period. Whittington’s role as paterfamilias of the almshouse and its inhabitants is not only to care for their temporal and eternal needs but to give them the chance to exercise care over their own souls, to take responsibility not only for maintaining the communitarian values of peace, love, and “cheritee,” but for themselves.

      The second innovative feature of the Whittington almshouse also concerns laicization, for the institution is well known among historians of philanthropy as one of England’s earliest “secular” charitable institutions, whose creation and administration remained in lay, not ecclesiastic, hands.⁴⁰ The ordinances give various roles to the nearby college of priests and its master, who say daily services in St. Michael’s Paternoster, lead the prayers for the souls of the benefactors, and have the right to fill every seventh vacancy at the almshouse.⁴¹ But whereas before the fifteenth century most hospitals for the poor were under direct supervision by clergy or Augustinian canons,⁴² here full control of the almshouse remains, first, with John Carpenter as lead executor, later with the “conservatours” (the Mercers’ guild).⁴³ Ecclesiastical involvement in the day-to-day running of the almshouse is kept to a minimum.

      As with most projects connected to the Whittington estate, the specific arrangements that allowed the almhouse to retain its lay status were the business of John Carpenter, whose prompt pursuance of a charter of incorporation for the almshouse provided one of the legal instruments by which Whittington’s private riches were translated, as the theology of almsgiving demanded, into communal wealth. In 1432, soon after finally settling its endowment, Carpenter obtained a foundation charter for the almshouse from the Crown, making it into a legal “person,” empowered to hold property in perpetual succession: one of the first nonreligious institutions in England to use this juridical tool.⁴⁴ Carpenter’s incorporation protected the almshouse from the possibility that the Mercers might one day seek to sell it piecemeal, or that its moneys might be alienated by a sovereign strapped for funds. Allowing the almshouse to dispense with the expensive need for the license usually required when wealth passed from private individuals into the hands of a perpetual body, this “mortmain” arrangement also allowed the almshouse to profit from the good deaths of future merchants, duly dispersing their own winnings to the poor through this institutionalized form of the works of mercy.⁴⁵ Finally, it allowed Carpenter to invest the bedesmen with a measure of formal control over the institution’s legal status, as expressed by the keeping of the charter of incorporation and the common seal within the house itself: “We wille and ordeyne also that the seid Tutor and pour folke have a comyn chest and a Comyn seale in whiche chest thei shalle putte the said Seal. Also their chartres, lettres, privilegis, Escrites, and Tresour of theire seid house and other thinges whiche shalle seme to the seid Tutor and pouer folk expedient for the commyn profit of the seid place; whiche chest we wille be put in a secreet and a sekir [secure] place with ynne the boundes of the seid hous.” The chest was to have three keys: one held by the tutor, one by the eldest member of the house, the third by “oon of the othir felawes of the seid Almeshous every yere to be new chosen by us while we lyve, and after our discesse by the maisters of the Mercerie.”⁴⁶ This system parallels similar arrangements not only at the London Guildhall and at Oxford and Cambridge colleges but also at the Whittington college of priests, emphasizing the separateness of the two institutions from a jurisdictional point of view, and thus the exclusively spiritual nature of the care exercised by the members of the college over the bedesmen next door. In 1410, only a little over a decade before the almshouse was founded, a set of polemical Lollard petitions had been presented in the House of Commons arguing that almshouses should be placed under the “oversiht of goode and trewe sekulers,” since “preestes and clerkes … have full nyh [very nearly] distroyed all the houses off almesse withinne the rewne.”⁴⁷ Although the Whittington almshouse was created with private money, not through the ecclesiastical disendowment advocated by the Lollard petitions, and although it is far from expressing their virulent anticlericalism, Carpenter’s careful legal arrangements appear to reflect a similar view of how institutions of this kind should be managed.

      As an engine of prayer and exclusive mausoleum for London’s richest citizen, the Whittington almshouse is in another sense an explicitly anti-Lollard project, for the Lollard understanding of how almshouses should work is aggressively antihierarchic and communitarian. According to the seventh of the “Twelve Conclusions,” presented to Parliament and nailed to the door of St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey in 1395, in contemporary England “special preyeris for dede men soulis mad in oure chirche preferryng on be name [one by name] more þan anothir”—a system on which “alle almes houses of Ingelond ben wikkidly i-groundid”—represents a “false ground of almesse dede.” Instead of being the economic product of a private arrangement founded in mutual self-interest, “þe preyere of value” should spring