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In 1447, William Stevenes of Somerset wrote a will making ten bequests to ‘the fabric’ of religious buildings, and sixteen to clergy.¹ Such bequests are common in fifteenth-century wills.² Eber Carle Perrow suggests this is because ‘A dying man is less careful about the disposal of his goods than is one who has a lease on life’, and the clergy attending dying men took this opportunity to seek donations.³ With six of Stevenes’ bequests carrying requests to ‘pray for my soul’, I suggest his propensity to donate could represent not carelessness, but a shift in what he cares about. For the dying man, with divine judgment impending, money is suddenly best used saving one’s soul, not purchasing goods. Death will bring, or realise, a transition from an earthly scheme of value to a heavenly one. The wealth, status and particular objects money bought become irrelevant, replaced by God’s judgement by universal, eternal laws. This essay explores the possibility of this transition in the context of the testator, supposedly writing just before death.

Death’s power to remove one’s particularity is frequently asserted, whether pessimistically – ‘the anonymity of common mortality’ – or optimistically – the journey to Heaven, where the ‘ego is absorbed in the Godhead’.⁴ D.M. Hadley argues persuasively that death was ‘the great leveller [...] only in theory’, as status affected, for example, one’s burial.⁵ Here, however, the contemporary ‘theory’ itself interests us. As an impending evaluation of one’s existence by God, death would subordinate individual lives, and agency, to universal laws. The specificity of sins was important, but only in relating them to universal standards; and the eternal result of God’s judgement dwarfed the vicissitudes of earthly ‘mutabilitie’.⁶ John Lydgate’s translated ‘Daunce of Machabree’ reminds mortals that all were made ‘of oo mater’, and so ‘yong & olde of lowe and high parage’, must die. Death treats all ‘Adam’s children’ similarly, turning ‘all [to] dede ashes’.⁷ This echoes God’s words to Adam in the Vulgate: ‘pulvises es et in pulverem reverteris’. The next verse confirms this applies to everyone. Adam gives Eve her name ‘quod mater esset cunctorum viventium’.⁸ In these texts, individual agency is transcended by death’s universality; testators, legal or literary, stand on this cusp between worldly particularity and universal laws.

This essay examines testaments, especially Lydgate’s, in the context of this position. Legal wills largely look backwards, settling worldly affairs and seeking earthly solutions to religious problems. Some literary testators, such as the fifteenth-century lyric ‘Testament of a Christian’, instead look towards the universal, often more like St Francis’ Testamentum than wills. Lydgate’s Testament, I will argue, speaks both of a particular life and of all Christendom.⁹ It is most intensely particular when most universal, because it conceives of a self intertwined with eternal Christian experiences. Rather than looking entirely to the mortal world or speaking exclusively of the eternal, Lydgate’s poem dramatises the participation of a particular self in God’s universal scheme. Climactically, it writes that particularity in, and into, God’s universal language.

Literary critics generally cite the qualities of wills most interesting to literary critics. In his ‘Last Will and Testament as a Form of Literature’, Perrow notes ‘a few wills in which the confession is especially prominent’.¹⁰ Gail McMurray Gibson casts them as ‘not so much final legal document as test of the Christian life’, sustaining this with a confession in John Clopton’s 1494 will; while illuminating, her discussion necessarily prioritises this section over passages bequeathing ‘family heirlooms’, and Clopton himself – who appreciated Lydgate’s literary Testament – over more typical testators.¹¹ Such analyses illuminatingly compare literature with atypical wills, but concomitantly skew our overall conception of fifteenth-century testaments. While many wills formulaically bequeath their testator’s soul to God, most focus heavily on earthly matters: Giles Daubeny’s 1400 will allocates money for any who think he wronged them.¹² Fifteenth-century wills tend not to ‘test’ the (universal) ‘Christian life’, but to allocate – often very specific– worldly objects.¹³ Their religious elements are normally gifts to churchmen – see note 1 – earthly money paying spiritual debts. Despite high-profile exceptions, wills tend not to aim for a higher philosophic purpose, but to allocate particular goods to particular people.¹⁴ They describe who, what, and how.

I suggest re-examining fifteenth-century wills because it alters how we read literary testaments. Many note the intersections between legal and literary testaments, and I do not aim to negate this frequently persuasive work. I merely contend that this insight should be complemented by the recognition of radical differences. Julia Boffey, for instance, identifies structural similarities between wills and the fifteenth-century lyric ‘Testament of a Christian’.¹⁵ While normally ‘all that is certain [about testaments] is that they try and tell the survivors what the testator wants to be done with his property’, however, this poem declares only ‘All my worldly goodis let the worlde haue still’.¹⁶ And while many wills are strikingly specific about burials, the poem simply suggests ‘erthe in erthe to laye’.¹⁷ Boffey is right that this poem imitates the legal testament’s structure, but it does so only to ostentatiously differ in its content. Where legal testaments are specific, it is general. The absence of particular bequests is palpable, implying their unimportance. This ‘Testament’ looks not earthwards towards the specific owners of objects, but towards heavenly rules governing all ‘erthe’. Unlike in a will, therefore, further particularisation, of bequests or even the testator, becomes unnecessary.

‘Testament of a Christian’ is, in fact, more like St Francis’ Testamentum.¹⁸

Here Francis describes his life not to give its particular details, but to create himself and others as types of ‘illi qui veniebant ad recipiendam vitam’ – ‘recipiendam’ connoting both ‘receiving’ (everlasting) life, and ‘engaging in’ Francis’ Gospel life, described in the preceding sentences.²⁰ Those unsatisfied with the goods described definitionally exclude themselves from this category. This testament is delivered ‘sicut dedit mihi Dominus’, divinely motivated, to communicate universal rules.²¹ While legal testators describe particularity, Francis subordinates himself to universal God.

Lydgate’s Testament troubles this dichotomy. Like a will, it gives details particular to Lydgate, pleading specifically for his salvation; but like ‘Testament of a Christian’, or Francis, his text emphasises the universal laws ahead. Lydgate will be saved ‘With gold nor syluer, but with thi precious blood’ (202), if Christ, ‘Our tour, our castell, geyn powers infernall’ (140), gives Lydgate his ‘Tresour of treasoures’ (485), shrift. Boffey rightly notes the poem’s ‘consciousness of [a will’s] appropriate points of focus’, but the attention the ‘point of focus’ of possessions receives creates a negative space of worldly goods, the language of riches usurped by spiritual connotations.²² This process amalgamates those disparate goods into the universal meaning of Christ. The transition from particular possessions to universal truths is dramatically staged within the poem’s words.

Meanwhile, however, the Testament lists its specific speaker’s specific sins and asks for his salvation. Where Francis writes to his whole order, Lydgate speaks ‘lyggynge alone’ (276), and in his ‘closet’ (89). Most readers recognise this duality, whether or not they class the poem as ‘autobiographical’.²³ Derek Pearsall perceives an ‘alternation of liturgical and personal styles’. I think this combination is important, but more complex than an ‘alternation’. Instead, the ‘personal’ is the ‘liturgical’, the particular becomes the universal. ‘Objective data’ regarding Lydgate’s life are constituent of wider Christian experience:²⁴

This stanza relates an individual, to a universal, experience. The sentence that begins with the plan of one ‘I’ culminates with plural ‘we’ ‘on our kne’. ‘Crystes woundes five’ conceptually and syntactically link these pronouns. By relating his devotional experience to these wounds, Lydgate connects that experience to those of others, for whom Christ’s wounds are similarly salvific; and ‘Crystes woundes five’ is the sentence’s grammatical lynchpin, introducing the clauses describing ‘we’. Through the commonality of our relationship to God, the experience of ‘I’ becomes also the experience of ‘we’.

‘I’, however, is not subsumed into ‘we’. We usually think of plural nouns as somewhat homogenised, no longer comprised of conceptually separate singular entities. Here, however, this may be misleading. This stanza reaches its plural climax through the narration of a singular experience. Plurality is conceived as a collection, but not an amalgamation, of such singular events, connected through God. This is present too in the language of that climax: ‘knelynge on our kne’ has the collected ‘us’ on a singular ‘kne’. The phrase is notable because it does not make literal sense; we would kneel on our knees, collectively bending on collected body parts. But ‘our kne’ forbids this amalgamation. It collects instances of kneeling on ‘my kne’ (singular acts), each insistently particular, and each in its particularity insisting on a specific relationship with God that precedes its collection into plurality. ‘Our kne’ is neither quite singular nor quite plural; rather, I propose to call this effect ‘plural singularity’, the simultaneous reference to a number of singular occurrences: here, ‘our knee’ as opposed to ‘our knees’.

This plural singularity is more remarkable in context. The Testament’s first thirty stanzas each end with a line (almost always about kneeling) ending in ‘kne’. This becomes a motif of stability, gathering the passage’s historically various material into a cyclic textual moment of formal and thematic unity. Yet this ‘kne’ itself seems unstable. The pronouns describing it vary widely – ‘my’, ‘thy’, ‘his’, ‘our’, and ‘ther’ – and many pronouns refer to different groups. In stanza six, what has seemed to be the Christian community’s knee suddenly becomes the bloodstained knee of Christ himself. But this motif’s stanza-terminal recurrence suggests unity, collecting these disparate knees, moments and persons into a sense transcending their boundaries. Lydgate ‘on my kne’ (200) becomes associated with ‘Patriarkes and prophetes’ on theirs (129). Through the various collocation of the knee, to speak of one instance becomes to speak of all, telescoping the transhistorical, transpersonal narrative into the textual moment. Temporarily overcoming ‘the impossibility [...] of ever really being present in any sense’, collected particular moments approach the universality of God’s eternal present.²⁵

Like Christ’s wounds, these moments mediate between plurally singular experiences. Even the private-seeming scene of Lydgate’s ‘prayere’ (411) relates to universal experience. By the knee’s accumulated associations, Lydgate, ‘knelyng, Iesu, in thy presence’ (412), is with Christ, and a broader Christian community. Nor does this company undermine the individuality of Lydgate’s relationship with God. This company is like Lydgate’s ‘pylgrymage’ (892), a communal journey of individual spiritual travail.

As in ‘Daunce of Machabree’, these journeys conclude with death. Mortals all die ‘For Adames appel plucked from the tre’ (78), but, in sinning, all figuratively pluck those apples themselves. Lydgate does literally:

Stealers of ‘apples’ participate in the oldest sin. Lydgate’s mention of ‘apples’ and ‘gardeynes’ recalls Adam’s sin, and St Augustine stealing pears.²⁶ There are also, however, particularising details one can visualise: the ‘hegge’ and ‘wall’ childishly climbed, or the less tropic ‘grapes’ (640) also stolen. This particularisation of typology develops the plural singularity identified above. It identifies a universal experience through the description of particular sins.

Some see this as part of ‘so formulaic and conventional and predictable a catalogue of naughtiness’ that it cannot signify something particular.²⁷ But types need not wholly overwrite those that participate in them. Rather, it can elevate them. To participate in some typologies – probably not conventionalised ‘naughtiness’ – can be to truly become an ‘external realization of [God’s] rational order’, perhaps to ‘parfytly’ take Iesu as ‘origenall’ (137-38).²⁸ In Thomas Usk’s The Testament of Love, however, even the speaker’s declaration that ‘Wel may nowe Eue sayne to me Adam / in sorowe fallen from welth / driuen arte thou out of paradise’ signals the Fall-like scale of the speaker’s sadness.²⁹ By invoking the universal, these testators do not erase their own narratives, but render them significant common experiences: in talking of one Christian experience, we necessarily talk of many, but this does not stop us from talking of one.

‘‘This sesoun Ver’, and that ‘of my yeres grene’ are here held in apposition, this stanza’s equivalent joint subjects. Equating his particular childhood with Ver, the term describing Childhood in general, Lydgate speaks of one and many.³⁰ ‘The geryssh sesoun’ is simultaneously universal ‘Ver’ and Lydgate’s specific ‘yeres grene’. And Ver’s characteristics are known ‘Bexperyence’ of both Lydgate’s particular, and humanity’s universalised, childhoods; the passive ‘weel sene’ does not specify who sees. Moreover, either way, a universal childhood is constructed of particular experiences, and a particular experience given meaning by the universal pattern into which it fits. The following stanza lists childhood sins, without pronouns, Ver’s Childhood and Lydgate’s childhood grammatically inseparable (614-20); these stanzas introduce the childhood actions of Lydgate’s ‘I’, contextualising them within this plural singularity.

This universality is philosophically grounded. If ‘the created world exhibits [the] meaningful order’ of ‘God’s Ideas’, particular experiences can become divine signifiers.³¹ As argued above, St Francis casts himself thusly. A fifteenth-century carol refers to his Testamentum, and to how ‘Vpon thi body [God] set his preynt’ – the stigmata (the ‘having-been-marked’): Francis’ body becomes divinely written text. Because God ‘bede the make thi testament’, it has divine, not human, agency.³² By contrast, while a legal testament textualises its testator, it does so with (at least the conceit of) his motivation.³³ Often using conditional bequests, testators attempt to influence events after their death.³⁴ The writing of the legal testator preserves him as a moral and material presence in the world; writing on Francis creates him as text in a universal book of nature.

In contrast to legal testators, Lydgate declines to write his own text, asking

By asserting his relative insufficiency to know his ‘wille’, Lydgate places Christ as not only ‘surveior’ but as the testator himself. In alienating this right to write, however, Lydgate is not abrogating his selfhood, but asserting it. The Testament praises Ignacius, ‘most textual of saints’, whose ‘herte was graven’ (38) with God’s name ‘To teche alle cristen’ (39).³⁵ In contrast to Francis’ stigmata, Ignacius’ mark is internal, both inward essence and effect of God. And Ignacius cried God’s name before His writing was seen.³⁶ Lydgate invites God into his heart too, asking God ‘in[to] myn herte’ (506) and Ignacius’ ‘aureat letres’ (508). Language of writing, like ‘prented’ (460; 577), asserts the existence and written-ness of Lydgate’s self. His inner textuality is bound up with an inward world invisible to others.

And Lydgate overtly requests inner writing, asking ‘this word Iesu my .v. wittes tenlumyne, | In length & brede like a large wounde’ (593-94). The ‘wounde’ requested recalls ‘thy woundes fyve’, mentioned fifteen lines before. St Francis’ bodily stigmata signified those wounds. Lydgate requests not just an outward mark, but a radical reconstitution of five wits by five wounds. He asks God not only to write a retrospective testament of his life, but to overwrite his senses with divine text, to transcend the sensible and see all in God’s order. Christ’s writing does not turn Lydgate into a symbol; it constitutes and creates an intense internal – and hence particular – experience to which Lydgate assertively submits. ‘Aureate’ and ‘enlumyne’ are in Lydgate associated with the ‘taste for [poetic] spectacle’.³⁷ He does redefine ‘aureate’ through Ignacius, but also, by requesting his textual wound, converts himself from ‘enlumyn[ing]’ author to willing textual object of that process, elevating himself even in his submission.³⁸ John A. Alford notes that literature and law ‘structure our world’.³⁹ Just as ‘Testament of a Christian’ creates a negative space of the legal will’s content, Lydgate’s Testament rejects its structure, and powerfully opts into God’s, asserting his inward particularity in his choice and recognition of God’s universal truth. The ‘word’ is not only made ‘flesh’: it drives inside it.⁴⁰

This double agency – God’s and Lydgate’s – is encapsulated in the complex final section. Nisse notes the ‘autobiographical “I” disappears’ here, but an ‘I’ does remains.⁴¹ It is the ‘persona of Jesus himself’, but also the ‘litel dite’ (753) Lydgate writes on reading ‘vide’.⁴² It is authored, then, by both Lydgate and Christ, Lydgate motivated by his ‘humble diligence’ (751) and Christ’s passion. The divine imperatives that ask universalised ‘man’ to see Christ’s sufferings spring from the experience of a specific life, spoken, inseparably, by a universal God, and a particular man, who textually participates in the godhead. While it is the most consistently universalising section, it the most emotional-seeming, the repeated ‘Beholde’ suggesting an inspired, visionary fervour, and the overt mention of Lydgate’s authorship allows an intense writerly experience present within it. This experience is present in both senses: Walter F. Schirmer is correct that the ‘vide’ cannot be taken ‘so seriously’ as childhood event; as retrospectively created text, however, it is vital.⁴³

This beseeching to ‘beholde’ is itself a type of the universal instruction ‘vide’, enlivened by Lydgate’s particular delivery. So too, the Testament dramatises the participation of a still-particular life in universal laws. Gibson argues it ‘negotiat[es] between genuine autobiography and familiar echo of literary and biblical precedent’.⁴⁴ Lydgate does not, I think, endorse this dichotomy. Unlike an intensely-particular legal testament or a universalising spiritual text, the Testament conceives of individuality intertwined with generality through common relationships with God, and asserts meaningful agency not in the rejection of this commonality, but in its enthusiastic acceptance, situating the individual life in a wider, significant context. This is more than the ‘echo of [...] precedent’; it is the eternal commonality of shared devotion. On the cusp between heaven and earth, Lydgate writes his particularity in the language of the universal, through his particular part in man’s universal relationship with God. A ‘testament’ need not be only a will, moral declaration or division of the Bible; it can also be the ‘covenant between God and humankind’.⁴⁵

Sam Block

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NOTES

1. Somerset Medieval Wills: (1383-1500) (hereafter 'Somerset', ed. by F.W. Weaver, Somerset Records Society, 16 (London: Harrison and Sons, 1901), pp. 157-59.

2. Similar bequests include: William Balsham (1444), Somerset, pp. 155-56; John Baret (1463), Wills and Inventories from the Registers of the Commissary of Bury St. Edmund's and the Archdeacon of Sudbury (hereafter 'Bury'), ed. by Samuel Tymms ([London(?)]: [n. pub.], 1850), pp. 15-18; Roger Rokewoode (1479), Bury, pp. 50-51.

3. 'The Last Will and Testament as a Form of Literature', Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, 17 (1913), 682-753 (p. 688).

4. Philippa Tristram, Figures of Life and Death in Medieval English Literature (London: Elek, 1976), p. 65; Paul Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (London: British Museums Press, 1996), p. 175.

5. Death in Medieval England: An Archaeology (Stroud: Tempus, 2001), p. 9.

6. The Testament of Dan John Lydgate, in The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, ed. by Henry Noble MacCracken, EETS E.S., 107; [O.S.], 192, 2 Vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1911-1934), I, 329-62 (l. 206). Further line references to this poem are given in the text.

7. 'The Daunce of Machabree' in Lydgate's Fall of Princes, ed. by Henry Bergen, EETS E.S., 121-124, 4 Vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1923-1927), III (1924), 1025-44 (l. 56; 155; 80; 120). See also 'Vanitas Vanitatum' in Religious Lyrics of the XVth Century, ed. by Carleton Brown (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939), pp. 238-40 (l. 14); 'Mirror of Mortality', Ibid, 243-45, (l. 2; 19).

8. Bibla Sacra: Iuxta Vulgatam Versionem, ed. by Bonifatio Fischer and others, 2 Vols (Stuttgart: Wurttembergische Bibelanstalt, 1969), I, Genesis 3. 19-20.

9. I prefer the term 'particular' to 'personal', because it assumes less. I use it to suggest an individuated, specific speaker, making no judgement on whether the 'Lidgate' most manuscripts identify as testator equates to 'Lydgate' the man. I call this speaker 'Lydgate' on this authority, and for clarity.

10. Perrow, p. 689.

11. The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 89; 91. When Clopton wrote his will, Lydgate's Testament was 'probably in place' (p. 87), written on Clopton's chantry walls.

12. Somerset, pp. 4-5 (p. 4).

13. Margarete Odeham (1492), Bury, pp. 73-81 (p. 74) bequeaths John Ansty 'my sylver salt'.

14. See Perrow, pp. 688-89.

15. 'Lydgate, Henryson, and the Literary Testament', Modern Language Quarterly, 53 (1992), 41-56 (p. 43).

16. Frank Thomas, Last Will and Testament: Wills, Ancient and Modern (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1972), p. 7; 'Testament of a Christian', in Religious Lyrics of the XVth Century, pp. 255-56 (l. 21).

17. There are, for example, particularly specific instructions on the burial of both the testator and his wife in the will of John Baret, p. 15; 'Testament of a Christian', l. 5.

18. The 1226 Testamentum was probably current, at least to a monk, in Lydgate's lifetime. Bert Roest, 'The Discipline of the Heart: Pedagogies of Prayer in Medieval Franciscan Works of Religious Instruction', in Franciscans at Prayer, ed. by Timothy J. Johnson, Medieval Franciscans, 4 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 413-48 (p. 435), describes its fifteenth-century 'rediscovery'; John Moorman, A History of the Franciscan Order: From its Origins to the Year 1517 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p. 347, notes what he calls 'Wycliffite' texts utilising it.

19. Testamentum, in Fontes Franciscani, ed. by Enrico Menestò and others (Assisi: Porziuncola, 1995), pp. 225-32 (p. 228).

20. Lewis & Short, 'recipio', especially II.B.

21. Francis, p. 231.

22. Boffey, p. 46.

23. Gibson, p. 20; Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (London: Routledge & Paul, 1970), p. 5.

24. Pearsall, Lydgate, p. 296; 5.

25. D. Vance Smith, 'Afterword: Lydgate's Refrain: The Open When', in Lydgate Matters: Poetry and Material Culture in the Fifteenth Century, ed. by Lisa H. Cooper & Andrea Denny-Brown (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 185-95 (p. 186).

26. St Augustine, Confessions, ed. by James J. O'Donnell, 3 Vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), I, 19.

27. Pearsall, John Lydgate (1371-1449): A Bio-Bibliography, ELS Monograph Series, 71 (Victoria, 1997), p. 13.

28. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 128.

29. Ed. by R. Allen Shoaf (Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 1998), p. 57. The troubled transmission of Usk's text cannot be addressed remotely fully here. At worst, however, William Thynne's 1532 reading of what he thought was Chaucer's text illuminates fifteenth-century typology through its immediate aftermath.

30. Testament, l. 290, e.g.

31. Taylor, p. 128; see also Usk, p. 50.

32. John Audelay, 'Saynt Frances, to the I Say' in The Early English Carols, ed. by Richard Leighton Greene, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), pp. 188-89 (2.3; 7.3).

33. Hadley, p. 77

34. Willian Stevenes, Somerset, p. 159, gives Richard Hakyer 100s 'if he is well governed'.

35. Ruth Nisse, '"Was it not Routhe to Se?": Lydgate and the Styles of Martyrdom', in John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England, ed. by Larry Scanlon & James Simpson (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), pp. 279-98 (p. 289).

36. Jacobus de Voragnie, Gilte Legende, ed. by Richard Hamer, EETS [O.S.], 327-328, 2 Vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), I, 160-61.

37. Maura Nolan, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 20.

38. Nisse, p. 290.

39. 'Literature and Law in Medieval England', PMLA, 5 (1977), 941-51 (p. 941).

40. Gibson, p. 87.

41. Nisse, p. 293.

42. Gibson, p. 89.

43. John Lydgate: A Study in the Culture of the XVth Century, trans. by Ann E. Keep (London: Methuen, 1961), p. 9.

44. Gibson, p. 90.

45. MED.