in his prohemium, many of the city’s customs had been written down “without order or arrangement,” or in some instances not at all, rendering them constantly vulnerable to the unexpected and irresistible power of death. Because “the fallibility of human memory and the shortness of life do not allow us to gain an accurate knowledge of everything that deserves remembrance,” unless knowledge is recorded in highly codified form, and because death often comes suddenly to the “aged, most experienced, and most discreet rulers of the royal City of London,” causing disruption to their successors, it is crucial to have in writing the details of the city’s elaborate ritual and legal life.77 Civic violence, such as had broken out on several occasions during the 1380s, threatens from within; impingement on the city’s liberties, especially on the part of church and Crown, threatens from without. If London, whose nickname Troynovaunt signifies its perpetual peril as well as its glory, is to stave off the fate of its ancestor, proper procedure must be visibly and repetitively followed in elections, legal proceedings, and the many processions through the city by which the mayor and his retinue physically affirmed its prerogatives. According to the Liber albus, given the deaths of the individual bodies who take part in these rituals, only a depersonalized, abstracted, and scrupulously cross-referenced set of written records can ensure the perpetual survival, across a series of “dying generations,” of the city as a corporate body.
Taken on its own, the Liber albus suggests a potent but also a narrow and secular understanding of death as a civic theme and of Carpenter’s professional relationship to that theme. Yet it is clear from the rebuilt Guildhall itself, with its theological library, its college of priests, and its iconographic representation of the heavenly roots of mayoral justice over its south porch, that the group of lay city clerks headed by Carpenter had a more capacious sense of civic textuality than this book suggests. If we look at a second document that reflects a different aspect of the textual culture of the city clerks, Carpenter’s will, written twenty years after the Liber albus, presumably in the early 1440s, we get a broader picture of his concerns and those of his most important textual community. In the process, we also encounter a discourse of death that has somewhat different roots from the reformist discourse associated with The Visitation of the Sick and similar texts, one whose combination of worldly and transcendent interests, shaped by early Christian humanism, makes it peculiarly suitable to the mercantile civic culture of London.
Aside from detailing his funeral arrangements and listing moneys and goods to be given to his wife, Katherine, his relatives, and his extensive household, Carpenter’s will mainly consists of gifts, mostly in the form of books, to two groups: rectors and other secular ecclesiasts and past and present city clerks.78 The gifts to ecclesiasts begin with a general bequest of “good or rare” Latin theological books selected from his collection by Reginald Pecock, then master of Whittington college, and William Litchfield, preacher, writer, and rector of All Hallows the Great, to be chained in “the common library at Guildhall, for the profit of the students there, and those discoursing to the common people.”79 Other books go to individuals, specifically to activist secular clergy of the older generation.80 Carpenter’s relative, the future bishop of Worcester, John Carpenter, receives a book on architecture.81 William Byngham, rector of St. John Zachary and founder of a school at Cambridge (later Christ’s College) meant to remedy the “grete scarstee of maistres of Gramer,” receives Roger Dymock’s response to the Lollard “Twelve Conclusions,” with its careful defense of the theology of the almshouse. John Neel, master of the hospital of St. Thomas of Acres in Cheapside, receives one of two copies of the pseudo-Aristotelian Secreta secretorum and Innocent III’s De miseria conditionis humanae: these contrasting but (in a hospital context) equally useful books on bodily and moral regimes, the first remedial, the second ascetic, had been, with “other notable things,” left to Carpenter by his own predecessor at the Guildhall, John Marchaunt.82 Pecock, Litchfield, Carpenter, Byngham, and Neel were all involved in initiatives to establish and staff choir and grammar schools, with a particular eye to raising the level of liturgical training of London’s choristers and lay clerks, many of whom sang in chantry chapels like the one Carpenter endowed at the Guildhall for the salvation of his own soul, with four choristers (“Carpenter’s children”) under a tutor.83 Like many of Carpenter’s labors for the Whittington foundations, especially the almshouse and the chantry chapel at the St. Paul’s charnel, the networks suggested by these names and gifts speak to an interest in the educational and liturgical life of the city: a concern to promote religious orthodoxy, the correct performance of the divine cultus, and the prayerful commemoration of the city’s dead that both parallels and supplements the concern for civic ceremonial displayed in the Liber albus.
The gifts to clerks, which provide a unique glimpse into the reading culture of the educated laymen in charge of London’s legal, financial, and textual resources, go to nine members of the offices of the common clerk and the city chamberlain, households long closely associated with one another. For the most part, these are works of moral philosophy and theology, in some cases written within the genre of the Fürstenspiegel or Mirror for Princes tradition, including several dating from the previous seventy-five years. Two chamberlain clerks, William Chedworth (brother to the bishop of Lincoln and one of Carpenter’s executors) and Robert Langford (Chedworth’s successor),84 respectively receive copies of Julianus Pomerius’s fifth-century De vita contemplativa, on the relationship between teaching, contemplation, and the practice of virtue, and “a book of mine called Speculum morale regium made for a sometime king of France.” This is probably the mirror for princes written for Charles VI in the 1380s by the late fourteenth-century Dominican archbishop of Sens, Robert Gervais, “useful for observing how a king or governor may be excellent and famous and virtuous and glorious and for contemplating the summit of the rule of kingly majesty and its function and reward.”85 Like Alain de Lille’s late twelfth-century Anticlaudianus, left to Carpenter’s former clerk and family friend Richard Mordan, and Christine de Pizan’s Livre du corps de policie, with its vigorous interest in the role of the merchant class in the calamitous politics of early fifteenth-century France, left to another former clerk, Richard Lovell, these texts are in different ways concerned with the place of virtues in the ordered polity and in “imagining the perfect ruler.”86 Accordingly, they suggest in general terms the moral seriousness with which Carpenter and his fellow clerks understood the theological theory of civic authority displayed iconographically on the south porch of the Guildhall, with its positioning of Learning and Law between the cardinal virtues below and Christ above, and the claims for the religious role of city government this iconography implies.
The books given to a third chamberlain’s clerk, Richard Blount, are suggestive in more specific ways, since they include not only more works broadly in the “advice to rulers” tradition—Carpenter’s other Secreta secretorum, bound with Petrus Alfonsi’s exempla collection Disciplina clericalis—and a set of practical civic texts but also a book of ethical writings whose focus is as much on the self as on the civic. Blount is offered lifetime use of “all my books or quartos of the modes of entry and engrossing of the acts and records as well according to the common law of the realm as the custom of the city of London”—a loose gathering of texts like those Carpenter had shaped into the Liber albus—provided these books revert to the “chamber of the Guildhall of London, for the information of the clerks there” after his decease.87 But he is also given outright another book, “my little book De Parabolis Solamonis, Ecclesiasticus, Seneca ad Callionum, De remediis utriusque fortunae, and De quatuor virtutibus cardinalibus”: perhaps a compilation containing glossed copies of two biblical wisdom books, Proverbs and Ecclesiasticus, and a cluster of three closely related works of moral theology or philosophy, two ancient, one modern.88 The ancient works, Martin of Braga’s brief account of the role of the cardinal virtues in the life of the ruler, Formula vitae honestae, and the De remediis fortuitorum bonorum, were widely assumed to be by Seneca. The modern work, by far the longest text in the book, is the De remediis utriusque fortunae: the most widely circulated of the writings of Francis Petrarch, of special interest here for its explicitly theological deployment of the concept of fortune to structure a set of reflections on ethical living in the face of change and death.89
Represented