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

The famous statement that defines one of the hermeneutic principles of her books, “Alle that I saye of myselfe, I meene in the persone of alle mine evencristene,” relies on this topos.³⁴ Such equality is also presupposed, after a fashion, both by the estates satire of “Wimbledon’s Sermon,” with its injunction that “everey staat shul love oþer,” and by the Schort Reule, with its final evocation of the “good lif, reste, pees, and charite … among cristene men,” if all dutifully perform the role in life they have been assigned.³⁵ The Visitation E also uses the “even-cristen” formula, along with other language of equality, to signal a similar inclusivity.

      As an account of a ritual of instruction and exhortation, however, Visitation E is also a text about governance: the self-governance of the dying person and the governance of the dying person by the lay attendant. The last section of the chapter thus turns to consider the work in the context of the manuscripts in which it is found—particularly Harley 2398, a book written in Gloucestershire although it has close ties to two London books, Bodley 938 and Westminster 3—and the wider representation of lay spiritual governance in these manuscripts. Several texts in these manuscripts articulate explicitly what Visitation E presents in action, that the “lordis and housbondemen” for whom these books were made must view their role in quasi-sacerdotal terms, even comparing their double spiritual duty (to their subjects and themselves) to the “mixed life” of action and contemplation shouldered by a bishop.

      The Augustinian canon Walter Hilton, whose writings gradually became staple reading for fifteenth-century devout lay Londoners, wrote a brief treatise On Mixed Life in the 1380s or early ’90s, in which he depicts the devout habitus of a secular lord as divided between the public exercise of secular lordship and a private life of affective devotion.³⁶ The lay mixed life depicted in the Visitation E and other works discussed in the last section overlaps with Hilton’s influential account, and occasionally circulated in its vicinity. But it is still a different model, assigning real spiritual power to the secular lord, and thus breaching the division of roles between the first two estates as Hilton—in this respect like Wimbledon—is reluctant to do. Visitation E’s extension of elite lay authority into the spiritual realm thus offers us a point of entry not only into the role of death discourse in the exercise of governance in the household, broadly considered, but into the civic uses of this discourse, yet more firmly under lay control, to which we turn in Chapter 2.

      The Ordo ad visitandum infirmum and Visitation A

      The liturgical Ordo for the sick and dying around which the Visitation texts are organized involved at least two sacraments and three distinct rituals, each with its own lengthy liturgical and textual history: the office of visitation itself, in which the priest carries the consecrated host to the sick person’s house, with prayers for recovery; then two further offices for those who are not merely sick but dying or dead, final unction and commendation of the soul. The first, the Ordo ad visitandum infirmum proper, might be undertaken by a priest more than once on his pastoral visits to provide spiritual aids for the seriously ill. If a sick person, having failed to recover, seemed to be dying, the entire, extended sequence would be performed, with the celebration of communion taking on the name of viaticum and the final section, the commendation, being said at the moment of death. The three sections appear more or less in their final conjoined form and order by the thirteenth century, surviving in manuals from each of England’s major liturgies, Sarum, Hereford, Bangor, and York. However, even before this and other occasional liturgical offices were brought into larger manuals like these during the twelfth century, independently circulating Latin rituals for the sick included nearly the same units.³⁷

      One feature of the ritual in a number of early manuscripts that anticipates its much later paraliturgical development in the Visitation of the Sick and other artes moriendi is its use of the vernacular. In several eleventh-century books, the rubrics of the Ordo, and a few other passages, are in Old English, a language whose liturgical uses were generally reserved for a small set of rituals in which comprehension of the words uttered was especially crucial: excommunication, confession, penance, and portions of the baptismal rite. Unusually, most of the Old English in these early Ordo manuscripts is directed at the priest, clarifying the actions to be performed and inner attitudes to be assumed as the ritual proceeds if it is to have efficacy—another reminder of the urgency of the death rite even before the pastoral reforms of the early thirteenth century and the importance attributed to the details of its performance.³⁸ Occasionally, however, the vernacular is used in the prayers, at those critical moments where, as David Dumville notes, “it was necessary for the unlatinate … to participate more fully”—that is, comprehendingly—”in spoken rather than merely physical aspects of the liturgy.”³⁹ At such moments, we can already sense the presence not only of the priest and his dying charge but of the deathbed attendants: participants in the rite who, as souls in need of their own salvation, are also objects of its message of exhortation and comfort.

      In the post-Conquest English liturgy, the “casual bilingualism” of these incursions of the vernacular into the domain of Latin occurs only in the baptism and marriage rites in which the non-Latinate directly participate, giving prescribed answers to prescribed questions⁴⁰—although priests’ books from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries containing occasional offices like those associated with the visitation ritual are so rare this may not be of much significance.⁴¹ However, even if these Old English prayers and rubrics are further evidence of what Mechthild Gretsch describes as a specifically Anglo-Saxon “confidence in the potential of the vernacular to be developed as a medium for scholarly and religious discourse on a par with Latin,”⁴² they clearly anticipate the larger-scale attempts to supplement the Ordo ad visitandum infirmum with vernacular prayers and exhortations, with the deathbed witnesses as well as the dying person increasingly explicitly in mind, from the last decades of the fourteenth century onward.

      Two centuries after the Ordo ad visitandum infirmum reached its developed form, a full vernacular written text emerged to serve as a paratext to the Latin rite. Appearing for the first time in books copied in the late fourteenth century, the two versions of the Visitation of the Sick survive in nineteen manuscripts, the majority produced within the period 1380–1450.⁴³ Of the six surviving manuscripts of the shorter A version of this text, almost all can be linked with clerics or religious, appearing with the Ordo itself or with homiletic and pastoral works in Latin and Middle English relevant to their professional duties. In Oxford, St. John’s College MS 47, for example, donated to the college library by Richard Butler, an early seventeenth-century archdeacon of Northampton, the work is the sole vernacular text in a collection of occasional offices of Sarum Use designed, like several other Visitation A books, for portability and use.⁴⁴

      Visitation A offers a flexible text to guide and shape the events at a sick or dying person’s bedside. Made up of discrete sections, including homiletic exhortations, an examination of faith, and passages of general spiritual comfort, the work signals through rubrics what can be left out and what must be read if the sick person is near death. Although parts of it are original, the text itself is loosely based on two early twelfth-century sources, both produced less than a century after many of the Anglo-Saxon Ordo manuscripts containing Old English: the epistolary treatise De visitacione infirmorum, often ascribed in the Middle Ages to Augustine, which has the distinction of being the earliest nonliturgical treatment of death and dying to attain any wide European influence;⁴⁵ and the very brief Admonitio morienti, a set of catechetical questions and exhortations to the dying person originally from the same period that circulated widely in England and elsewhere, often under the name of Anselm.

      Long unattributed, the main source of the Visitation, the pseudo-Augustinian De visitacione infirmorum, is now known to be the only religious prose work—written in two parts as letters to a gravely ill nephew—by the humanist poet Baudri de Bourgueil (1045/6–1130), abbot of the monastery of Saint-Pierre-de-Bourgueil in Brittany and, later, archbishop of Dol.⁴⁶ Baudri’s 256 surviving poems experiment with a wide range of classical forms, including satires, lyrics, meditations, epigrams