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

of his beneficiaries, both bedesmen and priests at the college in their capacity as chantry priests, in speeding him through purgatory. On this ground, however, Carpenter and the other executors built an innovative foundation that affirmed two specifically contemporary religious ideals: the responsibility even of poor Christians of limited education to see to their own spiritual destinies; and that of the wealthy lay paterfamilias to concern himself with the spiritual, as well as temporal, governance of his household, in this case very widely construed as comprising, potentially, the whole populace. Through the writings of Pecock, the preaching of Eborall and Ive, and the responsibility all three men took for the city’s orthodoxy, part of Whittington’s surplus wealth was translated into works of preaching and teaching still visibly under his auspices. The Whittington arms became a marker not only of the city’s prosperity and of its concern to yield a spiritual account of that prosperity through the institution-building performance of the works of bodily mercy but of a zealous reformist orthodoxy.

      Despite the absence of specific attention paid the problem of merchant wealth in Visitation E and its manuscript companions, a general affinity between the Whittington almshouse project and the theological and pedagogical priorities of these works is unmistakable. Indeed, one of the three copies of Visitation E that I discussed as household miscellanies in the previous chapter, Bodley 938, copied by one of the scribes of John Colop’s “common profit” book, Cambridge University Library MS Ff.6.31, has at least this indirect link to the almshouse. Many of the shorter works in Bodley 938, such as the Schort Reule of Lif, the expositions of the Paternoster, and Visitation E itself, make obvious sense within the ambit of the almshouse.⁶⁴

      In discharging his religious responsibilities as Whittington’s executor, then, Carpenter worked within an ethical paradigm in which virtuous acts are understood in relation to their final, eternal, purposes. This is clearly true of the almshouse and college, directed at the salvation, by more than one means, both of Whittington and of the citizenry of London. It is true of the other large project associated with the Whittington foundation: the library it was used to create at the Guildhall, within the complex that housed the city government, which collected mainly religious materials for the use of the city’s secular clergy and educated lay citizens. Carpenter took a special interest in this library, administering it personally and leaving it an unknown number of books in his will with twenty shillings to the bishop of London, Robert Gilbert, only if he had the will proved without taking a formal inventory of “goods and chattels.”⁶⁵ It is true of a number of smaller projects—for example, Carpenter’s reestablishment, through the Whittington estate, of a decayed chantry chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary facing St. Paul’s at the northeast corner of the churchyard and situated above a charnel containing centuries of remains of London citizens and the tombs of three mayors.⁶⁶ In an extended sense, it is even true of the Whittington estate’s contributions to secular building projects, such as the major expansion of the Guildhall itself that made its main hall, home of the city’s Court of Husting, one of the largest in the country, second only to Westminster. Signed as a Whittington project by the incorporation of his arms into the stained glass windows of the new mayoral courtroom, the new building had as its “public face” an elaborate porch at its south end, graced with sculptures of Christ as ruler, overseeing Law and Learning as they in turn oversee female figures representing the cardinal virtues trampling their contrary vices.⁶⁷ Mayoral justice, its role the maintenance of Discipline, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance, thus becomes a manifestation of divine justice, whose end is not civic but eternal order;⁶⁸ Whittington, as always under the posthumous auspices of his great promoter, Carpenter, affirms the city’s identity as a representation not only of Troynovaunt but of the city in which he hopes to lay his own stone, once it has been sufficiently polished through penitential almsgiving, the New Jerusalem.

      Yet Carpenter’s engagements with the questions surrounding the civic good death did not end with his activities as Whittington’s executor, or even with the scrupulous arrangements he made for his own death, as reflected in his will. As London’s common clerk for over twenty years, the heart of the city’s government and the head of the cadre of clerks that constituted a key part of its staff, he also had other opportunities to engage with the ideas and ideals associated with death, and to use them toward the city’s institutional, moral, spiritual, and artistic enrichment, as well as, more concretely, its perpetuation. As we saw, the envoy of the English translation of the almshouse ordinances represents Whittington’s death as a “tregedie” and in so doing imagines the foundation under the complex sign of Fortuna. Fortuna was the threatening benefactor of a city of enormous wealth, divided into competing, loud, and often violent interest groups: a city still struggling to replace the population lost in the decimation of the fourteenth-century plagues; worried about storms at sea, price competition, and international shipping routes; worried, also, about the eternal implications of its worldly success; and all too aware that its liberties, granted by William the Conqueror, were held at the pleasure of the Crown.⁶⁹

      Just as the eternal fate of Whittington was the spiritual responsibility of Carpenter and his fellow executors, so the worldly fate of London was the professional responsibility of Carpenter and his fellow Guildhall clerks, a well-salaried and educated group whose office, in existence in some form since the early days of the city commune, saw to the day-to-day running of the city and its court, and the copying and preservation of the documents on which its power and longevity depended.⁷⁰ Unlike the mayor and sheriffs, who were all elected annually, the city clerks had career tenure: as record keepers and senior officials, the clerks worked in the newly enlarged government building and constituted the city’s institutional memory.⁷¹ In this sense they differed from the royal clerks such as Thomas Hoccleve, whose concerns are often seen as typifying the “emergent bureaucratic class” of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, whose Westminster offices were no longer physically part of the king’s household, whose professional ambitions and hopes of patronage often went unrealized as a result, and whose salaries were constantly in arrears.⁷² As a short poem by Hoccleve, which begs Carpenter’s help in managing his messy financial affairs, allows us to infer, the city clerks’ relationship to power and money tended to be practical and managerial, focused on the smooth running of a mercantile community that by definition could not take Boethius’s advice and step off fortune’s wheel:

      See heer my maistre Carpenter, I yow preye,

      How many chalenges [claims] ageyn me be;

      And I may nat delivre hem [pay them] by no weye,

      So me werreyeth [wars against me] coynes scarsetee,

      That ny [near] Cousin is to necessitee;

      For why [for which reason] unto yow seeke I for refut [refuge],

      Which þat of confort am ny destitut.⁷³

      The royal clerks at the Chancery and the Privy Seal are notable, among other things, for their consolidation and elaboration of a Chaucerian and broadly secular poetics, in response, so Ethan Knapp argues, to their precarious career of dependence on the turbulent dynamics of the court.⁷⁴ The intellectual and literary culture of the two groups overlapped, not least in their joint concern for the relationship between permanence and impermanence, textuality, fortune, and death. Nonetheless, the writing, book ownership, and poetic patronage associated with the city clerks at the Guildhall has a different, institutionally more grounded and philosophically confident flavor.⁷⁵

      The best-known product of the textual culture of the early fifteenth-century Guildhall, giving one account of its attitude to such themes, is Carpenter’s main surviving written work, the massive Liber albus: a compilation of the city’s customs produced in 1419–21, early in his career as common clerk, some two years before he was appointed Whittington’s executor.⁷⁶ Perhaps produced in emulation of the Liber Horn, by Andrew Horn, the early fourteenth-century city chamberlain who was Carpenter’s most ambitious predecessor in the Guildhall bureaucracy, the Liber albus is an exhaustive attempt to organize all the archival material surviving since the founding of London; to set down the customs of the city, as they pertain to the distribution and passing on of power in the city’s government; and to detail the history and duties of the elected governors and officials