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C Passus 5; B Passus 5; A Passus 5

Headnote

In all three versions of the poem, a new vision begins in passus 5. L displays the materials of the first half of this dream in a different way in each text, however. The C version, which contains a number of large expansions, has three units. In the substantially new passus 5, the dreamer defends himself against Reason and Conscience, and Reason delivers his sermon (which now addresses the dreamer and his quasi-clerical status, as well as the folk in the fair field). In passus 6, the sins confess (except for Sloth, at the head of passus 7); passus 7 also includes Repentance’s speech, the meeting with Piers, and the discussion of pilgrimage.

In the B version, the sermon and the acts following upon it—confession, an expansion with Repentance’s prayer for God’s absolving mercy, and the penitential pilgrimage—are all treated within a single textual unit. The A version, as usual considerably less developed, splits material between two units: passus 5 has Conscience’s sermon demanding repentance, the confession of Six Deadly Sins (Wrath does not appear in A; see 6.103n), and the initial impulse to pilgrimage; A passus 6 opposes the palmer and Piers.

In C, this passus opens with a new initiative, the longest sustained waking dialogic encounter in the poem (1–108). This expands upon the more modest efforts already present in B, which correspond to 9.294–352, 10.1–67 (but see 9.293n—C’s second vision is bracketed between these two protracted waking moments), 22.1–52 (see further 1n). Here the youthful dreamer, living with a woman in Cornhill in London, enjoys a life of indolence during a harvest season; in clothing and activity, he resembles “lollares of londone and lewede Ermytes” (3). Yet he simultaneously claims to be distinguishable from such figures, either by his ability to rationally assert the meaning of their activities or by his composition of verses satirizing those actions (see 5n). In the waking interlude, L scrutinizes this ambivalent stance. Two “characters” who are nothing except productions of Will’s own dreaming now appear as if real persons. Reason chastises the dreamer for his “lollare”-like indolence, and eventually Conscience joins Reason in assessing Will’s behavior (see 6n and cf. 9.305n).

The interrogation shows Will as a figure subjected to two discourses, one civil and one ecclesiastical (Middleton 1990:74), within each of which he may be viewed critically. On the one hand, his nonfeasance exposes him to the strictures of late fourteenth-century labor legislation (particularly the 1388 promulgation of the Statute of Laborers, for which see extensively Middleton 1997): in these terms, he appears merely an able-bodied beggar, thus a parasite and an illicit drain on the community, and not currently occupying any appropriate social position. Many notes below indicate the influence of Statute language; for those addressing the 1388 act in detail, see 7–8n, 22–25n, 29–30n, 35–44n, 36n, 53–60Ln, 89–91n.

Simultaneously, Will is judged by the standards of the gospels. He is potentially identifiable with the dishonest steward of Luke 16 (see 22–25n), someone who has misspent his lord’s gifts without generating any return on his behalf. This parable—and Luke 16:2—provided the text for Thomas Wimbledon’s famous sermon, preached at St. Paul’s Cross in 1388; however, connections between sermon and poem are particularly attenuated, except in the language discussed at 36n and 43Ln below.

One might further note the analogy of PLM 3509–3764. This sequence describes the dreamer’s first moment of decision, the point when his pilgrimage route forks. Rather than follow the path of the rural matmaker Labor or Occupation, the dreamer chooses that guarded by Oiseuce, daughter of Peresce (among the most overt of de Deguilleville’s rewritings of The Romance of the Rose). Were he to regain his proper path, the dreamer would have to pass through a hedge of thorns separating the two ways; probably in allusion to a famous episode in the life of St. Benedict, the thorn hedge represents Penitence.

To these and related charges, Will answers forcefully. He claims a continuing inheritance based on a training he received in his youth, but one no longer clearly in evidence—a claim that, if sustained, would free him from Statute jurisdiction. This is training as some form of cleric, perhaps a self-created but literate (not “lewed”) hermit (cf. 9.140–58n). On this basis, he has not misused his gifts and may indeed claim for himself a role other than dishonest steward (or prodigal son), an apostolic warrant predicated upon gospel injunctions (see 45–52n). From this perspective, Will can rail at Reason for not attending to more serious social disruptions, broadly associable with “simony,” and can claim, albeit through some witty transformations, to fulfill gospel precepts (see 86–88n, 98Ln). His response earns Reason and Conscience’s grudging acceptance; they leave him alone, encouraging him to go to church, where he falls asleep (to create more of his poem).

In his second dream, Will sees (as he had in the earlier versions) a sermon designed to bring the realm to contrition, delivered by Reason (in A, Conscience). This address, which fills the remainder of the C passus, consists of a series of directives enjoining appropriate behavior on various estates and statūs: laborers, women, husbands and fathers, the clergy (particularly regulars), the king and pope, pilgrims. In C, Reason’s sermon is significantly expanded, for the figure speaks a large section of A 11/B 10 (146–79) originally assigned to the figure Clergy. This material partially answers Will’s earlier outrage at recent social dislocations (notably 76–79), attacks abuses by the regular clergy, and concludes with a prophecy of royal correction. Other additions unique to C address unity, class cohesiveness within the kingdom, and peace throughout Christendom (182–90, 192–96).

* * *

1–108 The dreamer’s defense of his life: Among relevant discussions, one should single out Donaldson 1949:199–226, who interprets the passage as if fully autobiographical (a view re-enunciated by Burrow 1981:38–39 and 1993:83–86). Later commentators suggest that this meeting with Reason and Conscience should be viewed within contemporary systems of self-representation; see Kane 1965b:esp. 7–11; Bowers 1986:165–89; and instructive parallels adduced in Thornley 1967.

Pearsall, following Donaldson 1949:78 etc., sees the passage as as much an “apologia pro vita sua” as a confession—which certainly aligns it with the subsequent portraits of the Seven Deadly Sins; see further 11n. Skeat aptly compares the passage with B 12.16–28, removed in C, since, as Day first suggested (1928:1–2), it has in many ways been subsumed into this expansion (cf. B 12.20 “somwhat me to excuse” and 5n). However, C 5 differs from Imaginative’s flat rejection of Will’s poetry in B. Here L takes up the dreamer’s problematic “biography” as putting in question his relation to any legitimate status. In spite of his informing interests in the most basic socioreligious problems (voiced at 1.76–80), his self-created status (mentioned in the poem’s opening four lines) may well qualify any hope of valuable discoveries, since these may be predicated merely upon such personal enthusiasm.

Yet most obviously, this waking interlude disrupts the poem as it had stood in AB and significantly changes how one might read it. Through this intrusion, the entire standing text is completely reconfigured. No longer can one read C altogether profitably in parallel with AB; the waking interlude introduces new terms of engagement, with projective effects throughout the second vision—and extending into the third (cf. 9.293n). For differing views, see Kane 1998 and Wittig 2001 (and 6.Headnote at the end, 6.2n).

Most important, this episode writes the poem into a mode familiar from earlier Continental dream visions, with their emphasis on the dreamer’s contact/dialogue with figures of authority (cf. 6n). Rather than a largely observational, third-person account, like the first two visions in AB, the “autobiographical passage” recenters the poem upon its dreamer. His person, his opinions, and his contact with other figures become a frame that governs what the poem can accomplish. A purported “biography” defines its interest, most trenchantly as the restoration of apostolic fervor to the Christian, and thus contemporary social, state of England.

Equally, because the passage introduces “a life,” this interlude potentially dissolves what is always seen, on the basis of the B version, as a major divide in the poem. This falls between C passūs 9 and 10 (traditionally designated parts of the “Visio” and the “Vita,” respectively). This feature also acknowledges dialogue as the ground-form of the poem, accommodating C to already standing materials in the later portions of AB. Further, an outstanding feature of the C revision, its “frontloading” of materials from the third and fourth visions, not simply limited to B 12.16–28, testifies to this greater integration (as well as indicating that views highlighted early in C had, for its poet, always been at least tacit in the poem, if differently disposed and developed). One prominent example of such materials advanced in the argument is provided by a later meditation on proper poetry, the discussion of minstrelsy at 7.81–118L.

In addition, the C dreamer much more readily intrudes in the second vision than he had done in the comparable portions of AB. At such moments, most notably 9.71–280, he enunciates views that follow from and echo his self-portrayal here, thereby appearing in some sense a clearly defined “character” (or more precisely, figure with established discursive interests). Not so coincidentally, these are materials associated with “nonsolicitousness”—and in the earlier versions with Piers Plowman and his tearing of the pardon. Implicitly from a very early point (perhaps first at 7n), the dreamer appears as a figure programmed to seek and to imitate a Piers, a figure of charisma deserving of grace and mercy.

In contrast to AB, with their careful unity of time and place (see 1–11n), the C movement past the first vision to the second might better be described as “rupture.” The narrative moves directly from “court” to “cote,” from the guiding social pinnacle to one of London’s seedier enclaves. Simultaneously, attention shifts to, not the constructors of law, but those subject to the law (a movement answered in the interchange between Piers and the knight; see 8.19–55n).

Simultaneously, this abrupt turn might be construed as an implicit redefinition of the poetic task, associable with a different social locale. In leaving court, the poem moves from a site poetically associated with lyric complaint, the song of the despairing courtly youth. Such a figure cannot actually “vision”: “Nihtes when Y wende and wake—| Forþi myn wonges waxeþ won” (Brown XIII, no. 77/22–23, a Harley lyric). The poem’s substitutions for such lyric “wanhope” are provided by such utterances, discovered in vision, as Ps. 6:7 (cf. “penaunce discrete” 84n) or 41:4 (cf. B 7.128L).

In the dreamer’s interrogation by Reason and Conscience, biography comes to be defined as the investigation of “moral character.” In a broad sense, this emphasis guides the entire second vision, which continuously emphasizes the submission to guiding authority, most particularly penitential authority. However, as was explicit in the now-canceled B 12.16–28, the poem is more prone to speak the fervor of spiritual renewal than to enact it, to exist as nonpenitential discussion while always enjoining the activity. This keynote is struck early on in Will’s allusion to his “romynge in remembraunce” (see 11n), attempting the memorial reconstruction of the confessional, but with no abiding sense of a constructive procedure to follow.

However, as Will’s inquisition makes progressively clearer, the most visible alternative to the actual practice of a “penaunce discrete” is poetic metaphor. Throughout the second vision, the poem describes, on any number of occasions, the replacement of the socially accepted yet uninspiring vehicle with an unfamiliar but vital alternative. As the poem moves from “court” to “cote,” inherent in Will’s self-defense is a redefinition of “aristocracy” itself. This term no longer strictly refers to those landholding magnates who do not have tasks but impose them on tenants (one focus of a second variety of courtly “complaint” here rejected, the social satire derived from alliterative tradition and W&W; see my 2005:247–48, 259–62).

Rather, in the waking interlude Will, now the focus of his poem, reconceptualizes “estate.” Instead of magnate properties, he offers the gospel terms of a spiritual heritage (“hereditas”). Thus, the biographical episode subsumes into a speaker (and thus “maker”) the most general poetic effect associated with the second vision in all versions (see Burrow 1965, and further 5.111–200n, 7.Headnote, 7.108n, 7.161n, and 7.182–204n). Poetry here presents, in dubious garments, a “vocation” that seeks to return gospel possibility to a world where it is currently lacking. For the dreamer’s antitypes, perpetual creators of metaphors parodying the gospels, cf. 9n, 28n, and the later confessions of Gluttony and Sloth. See also Scott 2004:164–74.

1–11 The dreamer wakes in London: The London locale both accords with and complicates the geographical shape of the “Visio.” The first two dreams mirror one another in terms of geographical movement. The first begins with the dreamer on the Malvern Hills and viewing, in the main, an indeterminate but possibly East Midland (cf. 2.114, more explicit materials at A 2.72–76, B 2.108–12) rural locale; from this, the action passes to the central court, Westminster, at 2.148–203. The second vision reverses this movement: Reason’s sermon takes place “byfore þe kyng” (113), but the pilgrims to Truth eventually move out to the provinces again at 7.155–60, 182. And a symmetrical reference to the dreamer on Malvern, inherited from AB, occurs at 9.296. Thus, waking in a London neighborhood corresponds to the movement of the narrative. But simultaneously, this new passage disrupts the single Malvern scene inhabited by the dreamer in the AB “Visio” (not to mention the temporal unity of AB, in which the two dreams occupy but a single morning). This disruption may be responsible for the additional (and awkward) reference to Malvern unique to C (5.110). See further Prol.5n, 9.296n.

This geographical placement helps to establish one of the two discursive frameworks within which L constructs the scene, statute law. Ample evidence, signaled by the use of whan (which implies a temporary residence), implies that Cornhill is not the dreamer’s proper locale. Not only does the remainder of the “Visio” occur during a Malvern morning, but, as M. L. Samuels argues (1988:201–12), L’s speech reflects the dialect of the same area, southwestern Worcestershire. Will is not in his home country, as Middleton (1990:55–59) trenchantly demonstrates. Indeed, the C Version, as she notes, pays tribute to this out-of-placeness by disrupting the B dreamer’s anagrammatic signature Wille Longe-Londe (B 15.152); cf. the replacement line “Ich haue yleued in londone monye longe ʓeres” (16.288; cf. 5.24n). As a wanderer, and (as he admits; see 7–8n) an able-bodied one, he is potentially subject to all the strictures enshrined in successive promulgations of the Statute of Laborers (see especially 35–44n).

1 Thus y awakede: The boundary between the poem’s first and second dreams differs in C and in AB. In the earlier versions, the first dream ends within this passus (at A 5.3, B 5.3), and the dreamer manages only five or six lines awake before succumbing again. But in C, the final line of the preceding passus announces the dreamer’s waking, and this line only reiterates the fact, while beginning to establish the very specific parameters through which the dreamer’s waking life is represented. The same fastidiousness in achieving harmony of scene and passus boundaries occurs at the juncture of C passūs 7 and 8 (see 7.307–8n).

As Middleton notes (1997:211–12, 269–70), in certain respects this juncture between two dreams is the most important of the poem. The extension of PP past a single dream marks the difference between this poet and poem and any possible vernacular predecessor, e.g., W&W. The possibility of a second dream institutes the peculiar form of PP, its reliance on episodic, mirroring, and often ruptured or inconclusive visions (cf. Middleton 1982 and see further 11n).

Moreover, the waking interlude here also reveals something of L’s sense of poetic structure. As I will indicate at many points (see the preceding note and esp. 8.19–55n), the poem’s second vision deliberately mirrors the first, in the main by social inversion (cf. Middleton 2013:121–24). It thus establishes one basic pattern in the poem, the arrangement of its eight “outer” dreams into four pairs. Here the waking scene creates a further structural balance. It answers the last waking interlude in the poem, the dreamer’s meeting with Need (22.1–52): just as that conversation separates the next-to-last and last visions of PP, so this one separates the first and second visions. And these two waking scenes raise similar thematic concerns—the degree to which the dreamer may be conceived to be licitly indigent, free to take what he pleases for his survival without regard to contemporary expectations about labor (see Middleton 1997:234–35, 270–72).

——— whan y wonede in Cornehull: Pearsall notes that Cornhill “had something of a reputation as a resort of London vagabonds” (cf. Hanawalt 2005:1069–71); he cites “London Lickpenny” 85–88 for the stolen-clothes market there (he might have noted the connection with its proprietors, the vphalderes of 6.374 and 12.216–18). But although the locale may have spawned its own route of ratones, it was also a place (as Pearsall sees) associated with the imposition of severe judicial punishments, the site both of a prison, the Tun, and of a pillory and stocks. Indeed, London legislation of 1359 specifically cites these stocks as those to which officials of all wards should bring false beggars capable of labor (Clopper 1992:19). See also Benson 2000.

2 Kytte and y: At 20.469, Kytte reappears—at that point probably as the dreamer’s wife (and mother of his child; cf. the actions of my wyf at 22.193). But ME wife n. is ambiguous, either “woman” or “wife,” and Kit’s status here remains unclear. Given the next line and Will’s association with—and concomitant efforts to distinguish himself from—lewede Eremytes, Kit may be simply his concubine, one of those “Walsingham wenches” L has described at Prol.52. And as I have pointed out (1997:32–34), some evidence for married hermits does exist.

The name Kit, just like that of the daughter Calot who also appears at 20.469, identifies the figure as a “type-female.” The derived common noun a kitte (7.304) refers to a wife; Kitte is also the (type-)name of the cunning tapster who dupes the Pardoner in the “Prologue to the Tale of Beryn” (see lines 65–66), and the phrase “lewde kitt(is)” describes tricky women there (lines 443–46) and as a plausible emendation at Mum 1357 (in a passage inspired by PP, perhaps this locus). Mustanoja (1970:70) provides telling examples of pet-names for Katherine to define stock feminine “abuses.” He thus cites N-Town Plays, EETS ss 11, 139/15 and 17, respectively, for Kate kell (Katherine with her hairnet?) and Kytt cakelere (Kitty, who will not—like all women—keep her mouth shut). Rather than a discernible person, L’s wife, Kytte may just represent a type—female companionship, with all those irritations misogynists, like the author of the “Prologue to Beryn,” comment upon. See further 128n below.

Indeed, in many respects Will’s sexuality is a synecdoche for his identity. It is obviously relevant to two of the signatures Middleton identifies (1990:44–52, 74): “þe longe launde þat leccherie hatte” (A 11.118) and “þe londe of longynge and loue” (B 11.8). One might compare further Wit’s endorsement of sexuality at B 9.182–86L, a passage that suggests that the dreamer here is still yong and yeep; Concupiscentia Carnis offers similar counsel at 11.176–80, and Imaginative recalls Will’s “wilde wantownesse whiles þow yong were” (B 12.6). Will’s life, as he describes it here (cf. his locution, “louede wel fare” 8), is one of desire and self-indulgence; cf. the “unreasonable” life of mankind 13.151–55. In the context of Will’s later claim to perfection and a special status that would underwrite his life, and thus his poetry (see 84n below for its relation to passus 11), the repetition of the name Kitte at 7.304 (see 7.292–306n) is perhaps especially damning: Luke 14, the same biblical locus from which L will identify at 7.81–118L a blessed form of “minstrelsy,” equally condemns the man overly solicitous about his kitte.

However, Kytte has normally been read here as a wife and the dreamer as some variety of failed priest, a possibility that gains some credence from Lister M. Matheson’s discovery that a “William Rokayle” was ordained to first tonsure by Wolstan de Bransford, bishop of Worcester, before 1341 (announced Hanna 2000:187). Donaldson (1949:206–8) analyzes the priestly dreamer’s relation to ordo. In his lengthy discussion, for the most part based on William Lyndwood’s Provinciale, Donaldson identifies L’s dreamer as an acolyte. Upon his marriage, he says (206–7), Will would have entered an anomalous status. He could not have advanced beyond his current rank and would have been unable to serve at the altar, thus incapable of fulfilling a truly clerical function and resembling a layperson (hence the embarrassment of Reason’s opening question in 12); but so long as he retained his tonsure (which he apparently has done; see 56) and wore appropriate clerical clothing (see the next note but one), he would have retained his privilegium clericale (see 59–60n).

Will’s identity-defining marital status, coupled with his aversion to any labor except sleep (“making”) and drink, might well recall Ch’s Pardoner at CT VI.453–54. Indeed, the central contention of the Pardoner’s performance, “For though myself be a ful vicious man, | A moral tale yet I you telle kan” (VI.459–60), resonates strikingly with Will’s presentation and behavior here. Implicitly, H. Marshall Leicester, Jr.’s witty reading of the Pardoner as D. W. Robertson (1990:35–64) addresses relevant issues.

However, various details of self-presentation might imply that the Pardoner shows nothing other than Ch’s parodic reading of L’s poetic. (For a similar reading of Chaucerian revision of PP, see Grady 1996.) Like our poet, the Pardoner delights in dropping in bits of Latin (CT VI.344–46), as well as (if not biblical, at least “olde”) examples to stir his auditors’ benefactions; and he shows a similar propensity to lakke others publicly (cf. B 5.86n).

Moreover, in his most extensive description of his practice (435–54), the Pardoner implicitly riffs on a biblical verse integral to Will’s self-portrayal, Luke 16:3 (see 22–25n). Like Will, he defines his “profession” as neither labor nor beggary, but gainful and efficacious nonetheless. The range of Langlandian detail Ch allows his character to enunciate might be extended considerably, e.g., the Pardoner’s eunuchry, a cruel reflection of 22/B 20.193–98, or his association of undesirable labor and basketmaking a slighting depiction of Will’s claim to quasi-eremetic status (cf. 17.13–18 [B 15.286–91]).

——— in a cote: Such an abode implies that here the dreamer is just hanging on, living on next to nothing. The citations presented by MED stress the tininess of such hovels and the poverty of those inhabiting them. The term looks ahead to the depiction of grinding, mostly rural, poverty in passus 9, where the cote, in that context both “cottage” and “coat,” effectively cloaks the poor from scrutiny. See further 9.72, 85 and nn, as well as 1–108n above.

——— yclothed as a lollare: Will shortly (41) refers to his garments as longe clothes. And they are presumably the same “shroude” he makes for himself at Prol.3; for further references to hermit clothing, see, e.g., 10.1, 15.3, B 13.284–85, 20.1. Compare also the description of self-made hermits’ garments at Prol.53–55, 8.182–87 and the logic underlying the assumption of such garments by unqualified “lollares” and “Ermytes,” apparently identical persons, at 9.204–12. These latter passages indicate that such garments deliberately imitate the opulent copes of friars, always (from Prol.59 on) described as if marking both a steady income and impressive clerical status. MED fails to note “longe clothes” as a technical term for some kind of habit, what Wood-Legh (1965:247 and n. 1) describes as a “supertunica.” She tells of a fourteenth-century clerk in Lincoln diocese who objected to such a habit because of the very pretensions that may render it attractive both to Will and to “lollares,” “since long, tight-fitting supertunice are most appropriate for learned men and men appointed to important offices, not for simple priests” (cum supertunice longe et clause non simplicibus sacerdotibus, sed doctoribus et viris preclaris in dignitate constitutis maxime conveniant). And although “longe goune” seems only a common adjective + noun phrase, the one MED citation not from a will or account describes Wycliffe’s early disciples “dwellynge in Oxenforde, goynge barefote with longe gownes of russet” (the Harley Higden continuation of c. 1405–10, RS 8:444); for the contentious descriptions of Lollard clothing, see Hudson 1988:144–47. For the as that frequently accompanies descriptions of the dreamer’s clothing or general demeanor, cf. Prol.1–4n and 20.2n.

At least one major impulse behind the subsequent confrontation with Reason is precisely the desire to explicate this complex of issues. If PP reflects a personal longing to understand salvation in some experiential fashion, what animates the person engaged in this pursuit? From what perspective can he claim, as an individual, any warrant (or license; see 5.45–52n) for his desire to avoid all “normal” forms of work to pursue understanding and, then, to write his quest? And what might lead him to believe that he can efficaciously pursue topics over which greater (and better equipped) minds have fretted for centuries?

The dreamer customarily approaches the question, a major theme in the second vision, in two ways. On the one hand, he seeks to accommodate his disorderly appearance to that of some status that might confer upon its holder license and authority. More positively, as he does with lollares here, he attempts constructive redefinitions of terms in such a way as to distinguish himself from those negative examples with which he might be confused. But this very attempt proves every bit as problematic as the impulse that drives it. The dreamer looks like a lollare but will quickly claim (3–5) to be the enemy of such persons; yet on the other hand, whatever his claims to some responsible clerical status (see 5.35–67), these may already have been qualified by his status as sexual being.

The word lollare—and L is the first English writer known to use the noun—has obviously been the site of numerous contentions; for discussion in various veins, see Scase 1989:147–55; Middleton 1997:242–43, 276–88, 291; Cole 2003, 2003a, 2008:25–45; Pearsall 2003; on L and his relation to specific Wycliffite points of doctrine, see Gradon 1980; Lawton 1981; Hudson 1988:398–408, 2003, von Nolcken 1988; Bowers 1992 is distinctly odd man out.

lollare appears a single time in the B Version, at 15.213, “[Charity] lyueþ noʓt in lolleris ne in londleperis heremytes.” This usage occurs within the important passage (B 15.198–215) that introduces Piers as scrutinizer of wills and “as if Christ.” The sense here, “gyrovague, feigning holy man” (cf. þei faiten B 15.214), appears consonant with the remainder of L’s uses, without exception. In this context, in contrast to Piers, who looks like a grubby plowman and yet, in the exegetical discourse from which “id est” is derived, “is” Christ, lollares cloak a worldly will in the ostentatious garb of holiness. In Will’s first attempt, of a number of efforts in C, to subsume the role of Piers, he here develops his sense of his own “good will,” as opposed to theirs (cf. 61–69n).

This appearance of the word in B 15.213, which must indicate its currency in the 1370s, predates the word lollard, to indicate “Wycliffite believer.” As is well known, the earliest record of that term occurs in mid-1382, when Henry Crumpe, who had been a member of the Blackfriars Council that condemned a selection of Wycliffe’s opinions in May, was suspended from the University of Oxford for using the term Lollardi derogatorily of the theologian’s adherents (see Hudson 1988:2–4, 87–88). Thus, these two terms are distinct, and, as several commentators have pointed out (Pearsall nn. passim and 2003, Cole 2003), like the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt, contemporary issues “overtook the poem.” A word L had used in one sense had become, in current religious culture, so similar as to be potentially associable with another, and with another sense—not necessarily what the poet had had in mind at all.

Moreover, as I am grateful to Michael G. Sargent for pointing out to me, the two terms must be seen as etymologically distinct (whatever the hash OED and MED make of reporting their various uses). lollare is a transparent actant noun in OE -ere, and L at 9.214–19 offers an etymology that purports to link the noun with a parallel English verb, lollen (see further the note there). In contrast, lollard must represent a loan word from a Continental language; see the discussion at OED -ard suffix and Hudson’s reference 1988:2 n.4. Unfortunately, in contemporary usage, the two separate items had overlapped by 1390 (cf. OED’s comments on -ard/-art replacing -er/-ar in many words—a fact which implies that, confusingly, the reverse might occur as well), as the variants in Ch’s Man of Law’s Endlink will indicate. (Quite in contrast to variable Chaucerian scribal usage, only one PP manuscript, the Irish Douce 104, copied 1427, shows any evidence of having fused the words, and that fitfully; much more frequently, when they err, the scribes of PP follow the poet, who occasionally implies that a proper synonym for the word might well be lorel/losel; cf. 8.74, 9.137.)

As I have suggested above, B 15.213 proves entirely consonant with the poet’s usage elsewhere—and having been virtually invisible in the earlier versions, lollare appears in C thirteen times. Like Pearsall (2003), I doubt very much whether this profusion reflects L’s effort to distinguish his views from others deemed erroneous (although see 9.214–19n), but rather C’s attention to issues related to the dreamer, labor, and poverty. Most especially, one might draw attention to the concentration of uses (eight of them) in passus 9. There, in the context of Piers’s pardon, L offers extensive insertions that substitute for the two great enigmata he has excised from C, the tearing of the document and that passage from B 15 that most clearly addresses Piers’s powers. See further the notes there: on the whole, L is as negative about the feigningly poor holy vagrant as many contemporaries were about Wycliffites, although for very different reasons (cf. Hudson 1988:407). For differing views, not exceptionally responsive to the text, see Cole 2003a, 2008:25–45.

Thus, L, as Scase and Middleton indicate, adopts a Dutch term for an ostentatious (hence, perhaps hypocritical) pray-er, which also designates a probably fraudulent religious wanderer. However, the uses of the word in the C Version second vision must involve some measure of contestation, since they occur subsequent to recorded examples of the noun “lollar(d)” in spring 1382 as a designation for Wycliffite heretics. Probably by the time L came to write this line, the Merciless Parliament in spring 1388 had instituted the examination of written materials for possible heretical content (see Richardson 1936).

Theological speculation in the vernacular had become suspect, and, just as the poet might be (mis)appropriated in the interests of rebellion in 1381, so he might be construed in the post-1382 context as a religious troublemaker. L’s insistence on lollare to mean “gyrovague, un-licensed/-learned hermit” quite literally cloaks him; it distances him from being misperceived as religiously vagrant, although he still, as Harry Bailey claims of the Parson (see CT II.1173, 1183), intrudes religion into situations where it may be out of place. The waking interlude as apology indicates that the dreamer-poet does not randomly force his ideas upon the secular world, but that he must do so, since that forms his unique vocation.

5 made: “composed verses” (following Skeat and Kane 1965:64n), although Salter and Pearsall gloss “judged” (similarly Donaldson 1949:201: “whom he treated as Reason taught him,” but 1990:243/5 “wrote rhymes”). If made means “composed,” it associates the dreamer explicitly with the practice of poetry and thereby exposes him to his own condemnations, expressed at Prol.35–40 (cf. 9n, 11n below). There the C version has removed the AB distinction between mirth-makers and janglers; L will later try to reassert such a distinction (see 7.81n below, as well as 2.240–41, 13.33–99).

Given the animosity referred to in line 3, Will’s verses appear to have been satiric (and might be construed as subsumed in 9.139–61, 188–219, 241–55). Then, the “For” that opens line 6 apparently indicates that the ensuing scene explains how the dreamer has followed Reason’s teachings in dealing with “lollares.” In those terms, the “makynges” must be absolutely self-referential—this poem, the C Version, already conceived as the poet’s poem in that youthful moment before the work actually began.

While Will here asserts that, as satirist, he resembles Reason in calling individuals to account for their antisocial behavior, Holychurch has earlier (1.116, 2.51–52; contrast 2.19–42) forbidden such activities. Perhaps the dreamer should restrain himself from satire because, since he is not a priest, he lacks any official duty to correct others; cf. Prol.118–24, 3.58, etc. But he may equally be following early London devotional texts and guild regulations that enjoin on lay Christians an absolute responsibility to chastise their erring fellows; cf. my 2005:182–212. The discussion of such a contentious satiric stance—“lakkynge” is the usual term in the poem—recurs when the dreamer, in fulfillment of Holychurch’s strictures, meets Lewte at 12.23–40L and eventually Reason at 13.194–212; see also 9.256–80n, Recklessness’s apology 13.26–30; Will at 15.78–79; Martin’s discussion of the satiric impulse (1979:66–70) and Simpson 1990a. (Although 13.194–212 represents another example of “Resoun arating,” as in line 11 below, the dreamer believes he there “pot[teþ] forth [his] resoun”; cf. 13.183.)

Scase (1989:150) suggests identifying the verses the dreamer may here describe with extra draft materials in the prologue of the Ilchester manuscript. But I show (1996:204–10) that Ilchester has been derived from a standard C text, as that is known from surviving manuscript circulation. Consequently, its intrusions are unlikely to represent anything like Langlandian draft materials.

6 Consience-resoun: The appearance of these figures fills a surprising absence in the earlier versions (one that sets the “Visio” apart from ME dream poetry generally). In the AB “Visio” (as again at the poem’s end), the dreamer engages in no instructional conversations with authoritative figures, what Piehler calls “potentiae” (1971:12–13), after his abortive bout with Holychurch in passus 1. Before attempting to reform the realm (see 111–200n, 112–13n), Conscience and Reason begin at the root of its troubles: since the realm as depicted here reflects only the activity of the dreamer/poet, they examine his potential as a creator, member of the commune, and ostensible contributor to the common profit. The scene distances the dreamer’s claim (5) that he has composed in Reason’s way. Further, the relationship to Conscience he will assert at 83 may well be qualified by the echo of this line at 7.207; there Piers’s identification of Conscience as an initial step in the journey to Truth (cf. 7.184) might imply that, rather than advanced, and an authority worth heeding, the dreamer here only begins his pilgrimage.

But this pair of interlocutors may be further characterized. Although as Pearsall suggests, the scene depicts “the waking dreamer’s own rational self-analysis,” it is a self-analysis often couched within ideas of legal responsibility and legal self-justification. At the end of their preceding appearance in the poem (see esp. 4.184–86, unique to this version) Reason and Conscience hold central positions in the justice system (see Middleton 1990:57); moreover, the Statute of Laborers requires defendants to be imprisoned “tanqe il se voet justicier” (by providing sureties for future good behavior; 34 Edw. III, c. 10; SR 1:367). More to the point, the Statute penalties can be enforced on the testimony of two witnesses: “If any Man or Woman, being so required to serve, will not the same do, that proved by two true men before the Sheriff.” (25 Edw. III, c. 1; SR 1:307).

Here Reason and Conscience function as the representatives of those “mayors, bailiffs, stewards, or constables” who are constantly enjoined to apprehend those violating the Statute (e.g., 12 Rich. II, c. 3; SR 2:56). Indeed, Reason, who uses my twice (13, 17) in discussing rural occupations, may be conceived as an employer seeking to impress Will into his labor force (see 12–20n). Past critics (e.g., Clopper 1989:272–74 and 1992:117–19; Simpson 1990:2–3) have associated the examination with the early Edwardian statutes, but see 7–8n below and the further references there.

7 an hot heruest: The seasonal reference recalls Pearl, the only ME vision with a similar setting; cf. 39–40: “In Augoste in a hyʓ seysoun [usually taken to be Lammas, 1 August] | Quen corne is coruen wyth crokez kene.” The two poems have rarely been linked, although cf. Baker’s exposition of their common “Dialectic Form” (1984) and Schmidt 1984. But connections seem particularly appropriate to this passage: like L’s dreamer who seeks to justify himself (see 28n), the poet of Pearl considers the value of using time in this world (as well as the value of labor for salvation) in his narration of the parable of the vineyard (493–576). Thomas Wimbledon, in his Paul’s Cross sermon, associates the vineyard and the heavenly reward for labor there with the account of one’s stewardship demanded in Luke 16:2; see further 22–25n.

The evocation of the season has other implications, some alien to, others resembling Pearl. Both poems, for example, rely upon a commonplace association, predicated upon passages like Luke 10:2, John 4:36, and Apoc. 14:15, between harvest and the harvest of souls at the Last Judgment. The first of these is associated with the gospel precedents Will invokes at 48–52—see the notes there; and the last is echoed in line 23. Such a topic is particularly important in later parts of the second vision, both in the difficulties Piers experiences in his field work in passus 8 and in the climactic pardon scene of passus 9, and again in the reprise of these materials in passūs 21–22.

Perhaps unique to L’s conception of the season, as Burdach (1926–32:189) long ago suggested, is the feast of the universal church that also falls on 1 August, that of St. Peter ad vincula. This feast celebrates the miraculous liberation of Piers’s patron saint from Herod’s prison (Acts 12:4–17), his salvation from his legalistic tormentors. This allusion—certainly the dreamer hopes for a similar release from his interrogators—intrudes a potential connection of the dreamer and Peter/Piers Plowman; both have “lives” within the poem (cf. 7.200–201n), and the dreamer seeks a close integration with his subject. See further the early touches signaling this identification, at 12–21n, 61–69n, 98Ln, 100–101n.

As Burdach further notes, this feast, in addition to providing an occasion for the tithe of first-fruits, was the day on which the papal tax, “Peter’s pence,” was collected in parish churches. But from 1366 on, Peter’s pence was no longer being sent overseas (cf. 4.125–30 for Reason’s resistance to such export of specie) but into the royal exchequer.

7–8 y hadde myn hele | And lymes to labory with (cf. 10 In hele and unnit); 8–9 louede wel fare | And no dede to do: The dreamer’s self-description places him within a widespread later fourteenth-century discourse specifically designed to distinguish the worthy poor from those deserving of no sympathy or mercy. This discourse develops as specifically secular law a long tradition of canonistic discussions concerning the appropriate recipients of charity (cf. Tierney 1959:109–33, esp. 128–32, and the fuller discussion, 8.71–79n). The original site of such a language of discrimination, the 1349 royal Ordinance of Laborers, identifies those who fall under its purview as “every Man and Woman … able in body (potens in corpore)” (23 Edw. III, c. 1; SR 1:307); these must labor at fixed wages for those who request their “services.”

But the Ordinance equally defines all those who may labor and will not (cf. “no dede to do”): “some rather willing to beg in Idleness, than by Labour to get their Living” or “many right myghti and strong Beggars (multi validi mendicantes) … giving themselves to Idleness and Vice” (i.e., faryng wel; 23 Edw. III, pre. and c. 7; SR 1:307, 308). The regulation criminalizes the giving of any alms “to such, which may labour” (talibus qui commode laborare poterunt) “so that thereby they may be compelled to labour for their necessary living” (ut sic compellantur pro vite necessariis laborare) (c. 7). And this association of beggary, the refusal to labor, and the desire to live at ease off others’ alms was repeated on numerous occasions throughout the century, beginning with the first Statute of Laborers in 1351. Cf. the documents of 1376–77 printed at Dobson PR 72–78, as well as numerous London examples, most especially the splendid 1359 attack on sturdy beggars in Riley 1868:304–5; and see further Prol.22–26n and 41–46n, 13.79–86.

The Statute was initially conceived as economic legislation. As its authors themselves claimed, plague depopulation reduced the number of able-bodied laborers available for harvest work and consequently produced wage inflation (“many seeing the Necessity of Masters, and the great Scarcity of servants, will not serve unless they may receive excessive Wages,” 23 Edw. III, pre.; SR 1:307; similarly 25 Edw. III, 2, pre.; SR 1:311). Higher salaries were required to attract workers in a diminished labor pool (see further 8.163–65, 196, 335–40). However, as the century wore on, republications of the Statute show increasingly greater interest, not in wages per se, but in those who wander, presumably in search of better wages. Finally, the October 1388 version, which subsequent notes will indicate L knows very well indeed (see esp. 12–21n, 35–44n, 89–91n), addresses vagabondage and vagrancy. Indeed, this document is called not just “the Ordinances of Servants and Labourers” (as previous versions were), but of “Beggars and Vagabonds” (“mendinantz et vagerantz”) also; see 12 Rich. II, c. 9 (SR 2:58). Tuck speaks of this Statute as envisaging “stringent control of movement” (1969:236). For L’s knowledge of promulgations of the other parliament of 1388 (The Merciless Parliament), see Coleman 1981:41, 66.

In virtually every reaffirmation of the Statute, Parliament describes leaving one’s home, the place where one should “serve” at agricultural labor, as the primary means of evading the intended wage freezes. In the original ordinance, promulgated by the royal council, rather than Parliament, laborers “who depart from the same Service without reasonable Cause or License, before the Term agreed,” are to be jailed (23 Edw. III, c. 2; SR 1:307); subsequent enactments offer more explicit comments on evasive, especially out-of-shire wandering (e.g. 25 Edw. III, c. 2.2 and 7, SR 1:312–13; 34 Edw. III, c. 10, SR 1:367). Moreover, Parliament perceives London and other boroughs as providing attractive refuges for such runaway laborers; London officials are specifically enjoined to enforce the Statute (31 Edw. III, c. 1.7; SR 1:350), and Parliament wishes mayors of any borough fined if they fail to surrender fugitive laborers to their rightful masters (34 Edw. III, c. 11; SR 1:367).

9 but drynke and slepe: The latter, of course, defines the métier of the poem, the behavior by which the poet claims to get his material. But his drinking associates him with the poem’s most ubiquitous social misfits, equally poets and equally tavern loungers who share his disinclination for labor (cf. 57, an echo of Prol.36). For discussion of the tavern and its poetry, see 28n, 6.350–441n; and for the C version efforts at constructing a licit minstrelsy, 7.81–118n. Again, the description answers the Statute of Laborers: Parliament fears that those who refuse labor service are utterly dissolute, “having … regard to … their Ease and singular Covetise,” as 25 Edw. III, c. 2 (SR 1:311) puts it.

10 unnit: RK’s emendation (explained p. 159; the word means “uselessness”—its last MED citation c. 1225) should be rejected in favor of the manuscript reading inwitt; cf. Salter and Pearsall’s gloss, “(While I was) in this state of health and good understanding.” Rather than being openly provocative, Will admits he has no excuses to offer for his conduct, and his locution is precise—echoed at 9.116 in the description of “lunatic lollers.” At this moment, he has no claim to what he later will try to construct as a sanctified status.

11 Romynge in remembraunce: The phrase, of course, modifies me; as usual, Will is lost in idle motion, rambling. His behavior, rather than forming a self-critical penitential survey of his past, more closely resembles the king’s charge to Meed, “ay the lengur y late the go, the lasse treuthe is with the” (3.137). But see also 94–101, in accord with the honorific echo of 13.4: “ay þe lengere [Jesus and the apostles] lyuede, the lasse goed they hadde.” As Holychurch implies (1.138–44), memory is the way Will should rediscover the “kynde knowyng(e)” that would lead him to Truth. Here, without direction, memory leads Will, not to anything like amendment, but to a merely repetitive self-indulgence. Such romynge, which he shares with the sins who confess in the next passus, allows him to view his life always through retrospect, in terms of his initial hopes, rather than a realistic assessment of their failures (see 35–52) and produces the promise of compulsive repetition of the same activities that concludes the scene (see 94–98L). Middleton (1988:247–50, 1990:47–48) offers provocative comments on this penitential memory; the associations she draws with Imaginative suggest that L moves forward to this point in C materials he had discovered later in extending the B version (and she gives a rationale for the suppression of B 12.16–28). Particularly given the formulation of the issues there, Fletcher presents (2002) as analogous activities what are, in the poem’s argument, opposed ones. Mum 858, “Rolling in remembrance my rennyng aboute,” echoes the line.

——— resoun me aratede: One should note the echo of line 5 above, and the deliberate adjustment of the metrical emphasis here. The dramatic situation looks ahead to 13.183–212, when Reason will again arate the dreamer (cf. further 15.26–27, 16.158 and 177). In that passage, Will again defends a preexisting and questionable state; there are further parallels in the behavior of the wasters at 8.131–38 (who attempt to shroud themselves in claims resembling those Will makes at 84). For Reason’s role here, see 23–25n.

12–21 Reason on tasks: Labor issues are particularly important in the second vision and emanate from Holychurch’s injunctions at 1.84–87. In those terms, L here assesses the relationship of his dreamer’s hands and tongue: has he a legitimate laboring biography that Holychurch would find fit material for a poem?

Reason’s interrogation asks Will to demonstrate his involvement in a “craft þat to þe comune nedeth” (20). But this legal figure conceives his totalizing social model, for reasons that will shortly become apparent, as the activities of the agricultural village (cf. Middleton 1997:229–34, 248); thus, this listing has a muted echo in Piers’s first speech, 7.186–92. These activities or offices he identifies in a language that reflects, to a large extent, legal terminology, that embedded in the Statute of Laborers. Thus, 14–15 Mowen … Repe echo the first promulgation of the Statute, “if any Reaper, Mower, or other Workman or Servant … depart” (23 Edw. III, c. 2; SR 1:307). For similar synecdoche, by which one prominent craft may stand for all, see 61–69n below, Prol.143–46, 7.182–204n.

Later versions of the legislation provide richer vocabulary, which L also appropriates. In this case, statute language is very likely derived from the recommended sequence of manorial officers in the treatise on estate management, the Seneschaucy, ed. Oschinsky, 261–95: “Carters, Ploughmen, Drivers of the Plough, Shepherdes, Swineherds, Deies” and “Oxherd, Cowherd” (25 Edw. III, c. 1; 12 Rich. II, c. 4, which sets specific wages; SR 1:311, 2:57). Since the Statutes also freeze wages for artisans and victuallers, they include references to those who shap shon or cloth 18 as well (e.g., 23 Edw. III, c. 5; 25 Edw. III, c. 2.4; SR 1:308 and 312).

In seeking to hold the dreamer to “eny other kynes craft þat to þe comune nedeth,” Reason places the interrogation specifically in the context of the 1388 Statute of Laborers. In this legislation, Parliament mandates harvest-time impressment of the able-bodied (cf. constrayne 54 and constringitur 60L), even if they are not agricultural laborers by trade. In Parliament’s view, the common need at this season is primarily for field workers, and this need overrides other professional considerations. “Artificers and People of Mystery as Servants and Apprentices, which be of no great Avoyr, and of which Craft or Mystery a Man hath no great Need in harvest Time (aust “August”?), shall be compelled to serve in Harvest, to cut, gather, and bring in the Corn” (12 Rich. II, c. 3; SR 2:56). In this context, line 18 by using the verb shap, probably indicates a trained craftsman, who can produce without aid or supervision, as distinct from an apprentice. Baldwin (1981:59, 101n9) was the first to indicate that Reason’s interrogation partly accords with the 1388 statute.

12 Can thow seruen … or syngen: Although the line is certainly an embarrassment for Will, it provides a necessary first interrogation under the Statutes for a person who looks like him. Since the Statute covers only agricultural “Servants and Labourers,” priests attached to specific clerical occupations are generally exempt from its provisions (although see 52n). The distinction, however, is one that the embattled dreamer will turn back on Reason in lines 54–67. For the precise force inherent in Can thow (Do you know how to?), see 35–44n. For a different perspective, emphasizing a broader concept of Christian service, see Knowles 2010 and cf. 7.185n.

14 mywen: Apparently not recorded elsewhere, the verb must be distinguished from Mowen at the head of the line. It most likely represents a causative formation with sense “to put hay into cocks,” derived from an unrecorded OE *mīewan (< mēow, pt. of māwan). Cf. Donaldson 1990:244/13 “stack what’s mown” and the cokeres of the preceding line.

15 rypereue: Homans (1941:291) remarks: “At Halton, Bucks., also, there were ‘keepers of the harvest statutes.’ Such custodes autumpni seem to have been called in English reap-reeves (ripereves).” Among their duties, they restrained fellow villagers from illegal gleaning.

16–17 and be hayward: The Seneschaucy, ch. 4 (ed. Oschinsky 281), says in part: “During the hay harvest [the hayward] ought to supervise the mowers, gatherers, and carriers and in August he ought to assemble the reapers, boon workers, and hired labourers. He ought to see that the grain is well and cleanly reaped and gathered. Late and early he should keep watch that nothing is stolen, eaten by the beasts, or spoilt.”

Cf. Homans’s analysis (1941:291): “Harvest was the time when people were afraid of having that stolen from them which they valued most—their crops…. The corn was ripe for cutting or was left standing in sheaves which could easily be spirited away, and there were a large number of harvest laborers about, who had no ties to the neighborhood and were often with justice suspected of being evil-doers. On some manors it was the duty of the hayward to watch all the crops of the village during harvest but on others the duty fell on the men who were especially elected by the people.” See further Justice 1994:178–84 and Baldwin 1990:78 (including the citations in n22).

Homans (294) also identifies the horn as the hayward’s badge of office. The horn was perhaps more appropriate to the official’s usual duties as “hedge-warden” (the etymological sense of the title); the hayward looked after the hedges, set up to protect the corn from animals loosed in communal grazing areas (cf. the nursery rhyme “Little Boy Blue”). He repaired breaches, impounded any animals he caught straying in the crops, and arranged the prosecution of their owners. Like the office of rypereue, being a hayward cuts into one’s sleep, a prospect particularly unattractive to the dreamer. See further Menner 1949 (and 13.43–51); and Friedman 1995, esp. 116, 137–41. At PLM 3983–87, Orgoill appears as a hayward to prevent the dreamer from breaking through the thorn hedge of Penitence to his proper path (although given her status as Pride, her horn segues from being the hayward’s implement to an aristocrat’s hunting horn at 4180–95).

18 or shep and kyne kepe; 19 or swyn or gees dryue: These jobs may form a skeptically insulting anticlimax to Reason’s list of occupations. Hanawalt (1986:43, 51) notes the use of boys (but over six years old) for such functions: “He could not do the heavy work in the fields and the member of the family who herded was exempt from harvest work for the lord” (51). The Seneschaucy imagines cowherds, swineherds, and shepherds as responsible adults but probably is describing the person responsible for decisions about husbandry and such productive work as shearing, not the person with mundane daily guard duty.

20 eny other kynes craft: Just as prevalent in the poem as Will’s desire for a kynde knowyng that would help him save his soul (cf. 1.79–80, 137–38) is the alternate question implicitly posed here. Even at the poem’s end, in his extreme old age, he is still seeking a proper craft, one that would provide catel to meet necessities; cf. 22.207–11.

21: This line appears diversely in the two genetic families of C manuscripts. The x copies, in essence, follow the implications of Statute language. The p reading, which RK emend into the text (explained pp. 153–54), makes Will responsible for the support of licit mendicants.

Hem þat bedreden be byleue to fynden (the p version). Translate: “(Do you know any kind of craft) with which you may provide food for those who are bed-ridden?” Along with 33–34, which broach a topic with an ample later history in the poem (see 8.128n), this version of the line introduces those who are not required to labor for sustenance but who have claims to that produce won through the labor of others. The Statutes are uninterested in such a dole, although, from their inception, they only apply to those “able in body” (see 7–8n). At 7.107, the bedreden comprise one of the three classes of “God’s minstrels”: they are obviously infirm, if not crippled, not those who sleep in hopes of having visions (cf. line 9).

That þou betere therby þat byleue the fynden (the x version). Translate: “(Do you know any kind of craft) to benefit those people who provide you with food?” This form of the line, Pearsall¹’s adjustment of X, preferable to the form RK print, inscribes an important false step in Reason’s argument. In spite of following on the extensive list of necessary agricultural labors that the dreamer will shortly admit he is unprepared to perform, it leaves one possibility open to him. This claim of returning a spiritual benefit to his benefactors is derived from Imaginative’s command of B 12.17: “bidde for hem þat ʓyueþ þee breed” (see 1–108n and for another echo of the B precursor to this passage, 84n; cf. Godden 1990:7, 89). The dreamer will exploit this opening, claiming spiritual (whether communal, as Reason insists in line 20, recalling Prol.144 in addition to the Statute, is moot) benefits, at lines 48–67. Godden (1984) discusses tensions in the poem between two varieties of judgment (which he finds reconciled in this passage)—those favoring labor and those favoring the life of prayer.

22–25 Will as dishonest steward: These lines, as Pearsall suggests (see 1–108n above), cast the scene into the form of gospel parable, the story of the dishonest steward of Luke 16. When his lord hears of his steward’s alleged crimes, he calls him to account (v. 2): “redde rationem villicationis tuae; jam enim non poteris villicare” (give an account of thy stewardship, for thou canst be steward no longer). Holychurch tells Will (1.13–16) that humans are created with unique powers so that they may honor Truth, may exert these powers in a service appropriate to Him: such physical and mental strengths are loans, “talents,” for whose use humans must answer. In these terms, L follows the parable in presenting Reason as a fastidious and terrifying account-keeper (cf. the rationem of Luke 16:2), heaven’s registrar, as Alford (1988b:205–6) notes; for other examples, see B 5.272–73n. Such an accounting accords with Wimbledon’s reading of the parable; cf. lines 136–44 of his sermon.

On hearing this threatening news, the steward of the gospel responds (v. 3): “Quid faciam, quia dominus meus aufert a me villicationem? fodere non valeo, mendicare erubesco” (What shall I do, because my lord taketh away from me the stewardship? To dig I am not able; to beg I am ashamed). Like the steward, Will claims that he is physically incapable of basic agricultural labor (on diking and delving, see further 6.369 and 8.350n); yet continuing his effort at distinguishing himself from lollers and lewd hermits, he will simultaneously allege that he has a licit vocation, that he is not the sort of begging faitour Reason suspects (29–30). Will’s last statement under interrogation (94–98L) invokes a language of mercantilism equally dependent on the gospel parable and reminiscent of the steward’s unscrupulous charity to debtors, an action that moves his lord.

In the claim of vocation, Will adopts a “modern” reading of the parable, one that uses it as a proof-text in support of learned Latinate activities. Conventionally, readings of Luke 16 follow Bede, In Lucam 5 (PL 92:529–30; CCSL 120:297/esp. 61–65); see Wailes 1987:245–53. In this interpretation, the call to render accounts represents death. “Digging signifies active striving for virtue, which can no longer be pursued after death…. Begging can be either good or bad, for it is good to beg spiritual aid in this life, but evil to reach the time of accounting so destitute of merit that one must beg, as did the five foolish girls of ‘The Ten Virgins’ ” (248). To this reference to Matt. 25:8 (cf. 1.185), Bede subjoins a second, to Prov. 20:4 (which L cites at 8.245L, in another discussion of the refusal to labor). One might further note, given L’s other uses of the parable (see below and 84n), a number of commentators who associate digging with penance (Wailes 249–50; Bede speaks of the “mattock of devout compunction” [lig[o] deuotae compunctionis]). Will develops such argumentation further in 45–52 (see the note); cf. 7.182–204n. Thomas Hoccleve’s self-presentation, with his various worries over his status as royal counsellor, persistently echo L’s preoccupations here and elsewhere; cf. DRP 981–87, 1013–28 (both an appeal for seeing writing as just as back-breaking a labor as agriculture), 1807; and Lawton’s discussion (2011:141–44). Similarly, Rigg and Brewer’s Langlandian enthusiast caught the reference (and its penitential bearings); he ascribes “fodere non valeo” to Robert the robber at Z 5.142.

But equally, there exists a “goliardic” reading of Luke 16:3 that Will adopts as appropriate for his purposes. Mann (1980:85 and n74) notes three uses, in a poem of the Archpoet, in Abelard’s Historia calamitatum (the description of the founding of the Paraclete), and in a hymn. Abelard and the Archpoet both use “fodere non valeo” to reject material physical labor. And they do so—as the Archpoet succinctly puts it, “Fodere non debeo, quia sum scolaris”—in the interest of intellectual labor. For them, as for Will here, clerical privilege should exist and should absolve one of mundane responsibilities routinely expected of others. Will’s continuing conversation with Reason attempts to fill in exactly how a person like him, who lacks overt clerical status, can nonetheless claim such a privilege and claim it in the face of such absolute restrictions on wandering and slothfulness as the 1388 Statute. (See further Middleton 1997:251, 253–54, 309 n57; for L and the goliardic tradition, see B Prol.139–45n.)

L returns to the biblical locus, in terms more nearly resembling Bede and Wimbledon than Will and Abelard, on several occasions; see, for example, 8.234L, 9.273, 19.250L. And the poem includes a rich variety of more distant allusions to the passage, through its reliance both on biblical uses of the verb reddere (including both line 32L below and the climactic 21.258–59) and on English terms derived from the parable situation, e.g., reeue and arrerage at 11.296–98, and more distantly 12.60–71, 13.35, 21.459–64.

But the discourse of gospel parable here flows together with Statute language. Just as Reason in the legal realm, Wimbledon is utterly clear in his belief that the reckoning of Luke 16 requires labor: “he þat is neiþer traueylynge in þis world whanne þe day of his rekenyng comeþ, þat is þe ende of þis lif, ryʓt as he lyuede here wiþoutyn trauayle, so he shal þere lacke þe reward of þe peny, þat is þe endeles ioye of heuene” (alluding to Matt. 20:9, etc.; cf. 7n).

But Will at this moment has caught on to what is at issue in the interrogation and preempts the legal arguments he expects Reason to produce (see 29–30n for the passage in 12 Rich. II at issue). to wayke to wurcche specifies “non valeo” (Luke 16:3) but moves from the gospel to directly answer the language of the Statute: “Beggars impotent to serve (les mendinantz impotentz de servir, viz. to labor in the fields) shall abide in the Cities and Towns where they are dwelling at the Time of the Proclamation of this Statute” (12 Rich. II, c. 7; SR 2:58). Will, of course, quibbles on the degree of “impotence” at issue (see 21n and Reason’s suggestion in lines 33–34 that he demonstrate he has a debilitating injury), but his point is clear enough: as a weak beggar, he has every legal right to be and to remain where he is—in Cornhill. In a similar vein, see 89–91n below.

24 to long: The other explicit reference to the dreamer’s height occurs at 10.68, although it is always implicit in his name (e.g., in the signature at B 15.152). Here he refers to his stature with more than a touch of pride in opposing it to lowness. But (as Skeat first saw) this language, however descriptive physically, includes its own provocations, for it echoes “Grete lobies and longe þat loth were to swynke” (Prol.53) and intensifies Will’s associations with the lollares/lewede Ermytes whom he resembles (see 2n above) while wishing to be differentiated from them (see, e.g., 45–47n below). As Schmidt points out, the line provides only half a signature, thus exposing the dreamer to Reason’s next inquiry, “Thenne hastou londes to lyue by?” (26, my emphasis). On the proverbial suspicion of tall men, see Deskis-Hill 2004.

26–34 Reson seeks clarification from the dreamer: The speech bounces between two poles of Statute discourse. On the one hand, Reason goes out of his way to be helpful and inviting; he feeds Will, as it were, legal lines by which he might justify his failure to labor (e.g., 26–27n and 33–34, lines that echo materials discussed in 21n, 22–25n). But equally, Reason judges the dreamer by his external appearance: either he is idle pure and simple (see 28n) or he can be conflated—as Will’s insistence upon his height has done—with those hermits for whom he has claimed to have deepest (and mutual) antipathy.

26–27 hastow … thy fode: The Statutes of Laborers, directed toward field hands (cf. 8.329), were never meant to apply to those with sufficient land or resources to support themselves. Thus, among the marks that single out the agrarian laborer who is its object, 23 Edw. III, c. 1 (SR 1:307) includes a person “[not] having of his own whereof he may live, nor proper Land (propriam culturam, perhaps ‘his own arable’), about whose Tillage he may himself occupy.”

In very practical terms, Reason asks the dreamer-poet whether he has a patron. The conversation, most especially Will’s response as it develops after line 59, should be compared with 13.104–16, a discussion of ecclesiastical title. (13.111 “no lond ne lynage ryche ne good los of his handes” echoes this passage verbally and refers to the need, in the absence of support, to perform manual labor.) There the speaker Recklessness argues that no priest should be ordained without a patron to insure he has a living; he claims that provision of such support is analogous to a king’s provision of a fee for one of his knights (cf. line 77 below). See further 52n (on chantry priests and their stipends) and 54n (on Will’s possible self-presentation as an aristocratic, not agricultural “servant”).

28 A spendour … or a spilletyme: Note line 64 below, with the dreamer’s passing ad hominem appeal to his interlocutor, his later admission and justification in lines 93–101, and Reason’s further return to the theme in his sermon, lines 126–27 below. This complex of ideas—“spending speech and tyning time”—recur as Imaginative’s C Version definition of Dowel (14.4–10), that true action enjoined by Holychurch and, perhaps significantly, entirely sufficient for laypersons but not for clerics. Further, to facilitate the discussion here, L excised in the course of C revision another self-referential discussion, B 9.99–106 (cf. Aers 1975:66). In the spirit of that passage, Will here has trouble claiming he is “Goddes gleman,” not just “a goere to tavernes” involved in jangling, lakkyng, or some other impermissible minstrelsy.

Time-wasting, the alehouse, and general engagement in “worldly vanity” are emphatically associated with both producing and consuming “romance” poetry in the prologues to five large earlier texts, some of which L surely knew (The South English Legendary, Robert Manning’s HS, CM, the London translation of Robert of Gretham’s Evangiles, and SV). A large part of the discussion of the Last Judgment at PC 5644–724 expands extensively upon time wasted, for example, the implications of Matt. 12:36, “For each idle word an account shall be rendered on the day of judgment.” The topic recurs persistently in SV (Hanna 2013:131 n.19), as well as in the Rollean Holy Boke Gracia Dei, at 16/4–17/8, 22/18–44/4 (including “jangling,” 32/10–35/12), 57/9–60/4, and 68/5–69/4 (the last two passages discussing hindrances to prayer, cf. B 12.16–17, 25–28). See further Martin 1979:62–65, Schmidt 1987:11 n21 and 16 (who insists on David as model for the psalter-clerk Will), and Burrow 2003.

L loosely conjoins a variety of issues under the theme of wasteful expenditure. On the one hand, the world’s work, from which the dreamer absents himself, relies on a conception of time as an economic commodity. For the late medieval development of such a secularized time to facilitate policed labor, see Le Goff’s provocative essays, 1980:29–52 (50–51 on the sin of idleness). Cf. 3.462–63.

Yet this injunction to use time in labor is neither simple nor absolute. As Piers discovers at 8.213–15, leel labour does not simply fill out duration to produce some quantum but requires a proper spirit as well (cf. such a reprise as 12.95–96). Moreover, proper temporal expenditure is subject to further qualifications, to that mesure that Holychurch makes so central to her teaching; L constantly returns to sabbatarian arguments on the need to set aside work time to meet the obligations imposed by sacramental time (see 30n; 6.182–85n, 429–32n; A 7.112; 7.226n; 8.80n; 9.220–41n).

Such attitudes do not simply remain for L injunctions to religious practice (as, for example, in Sloth’s confession), however. The obligations of ecclesiastical time feed back into labor issues and provide an etiology of the bad or unwilling workman (see lines 65–69 below, 9.167–75 and nn, for example). In such theorizing, the refusal to restrain sexual urges (and to heed either the sacramental imperatives of marriage or ecclesiastical prohibitions of intercourse at certain times) becomes an indicator of a more general lack of self-discipline, particularly of a disinclination to foster offspring properly; as a result, children of such unions are inevitably, as if genetically, damned. Holychurch first broaches this theme at 1.24–29 (note esp. the final line) and initially tars Meed with this brush at 2.24–29L. References appear in passing at 3.188–90L and 416, Wit volubly argues the issue at 10.207–55 (and 263), and the topic is central to Will’s misreading of Kind’s creatures at 13.143–55. All these views are, of course, perverse in their refusal to consider grace and are eventually expelled from the poem as appropriate varieties of analysis; for a provocative first move in this direction, see 12.109–19L and cf. 61–69n.

29–30 Or beggest thy bylyue … | Or faytest: From the earliest publication, the Statute of Laborers reflects attitudes that had developed in response to “the new poverty” of the fourteenth century, attitudes that will exercise L throughout later stages of this vision (see the citations in 7–8n above, as well as 8.209n). In the 1388 Statute, the longstanding claims that such able-bodied individuals are merely criminous produce particularly draconian measures. For the drafters of the Statute, able-bodied beggars may be construed as simple vagabonds or vagrants, lacking any defense. Like all other unlicensed wanderers, they should be returned to their homes and put to work: “Of every Person that goeth begging, and is able to serve or labour, it shall be done of him as of him that departeth out of the Hundred and other Places aforesaid without Letter Testimonial” (12 Rich. II, c. 7; SR 2:58). See 22–25n above for Will’s effort at preempting this charge.

29 beggest … at men hacches: Note the echo in Will’s willingness to beg with Charity at 16.337–38. But, according to Liberum Arbitrium, Charity never begs (352): his food, as described at 16.318–22, 372–74L resembles what the dreamer will ultimately here claim as his own (see 86–88) and what Patience will later show Activa Vita (15.237–59L).

30 faytest vppon frydayes or festedayes in churches: The line echoes Prol.43, where the note discusses the root faiten; see also B 15.215n. Here Reason additionally charges Will with being so irregular as to carry on what pretends to be “work” at forbidden times. He would, Reason implies, come to church only because it is an efficient way to find almsgivers. The claim of misusing church may look ahead to line 105 (and cf. 21.1–8), where, rather than honoring God, the dreamer falls asleep. But cf. 9.241–47; although Will averts the charge here, such behavior would be preferable to that he there ascribes to the inimical lollares, who find service-time handouts inadequately attractive.

frydayes recur throughout the poem as those days of special obligation that they were (e.g., B 1.101, 6.182 and 352, 9.94, implicitly 9.231–35). The author of FM, who argues (214/4) that the day should be called Freday (the day of our redemption), indicates its importance with a verse mnemonic (Walther Initia, cited 214/10–12): “Salve, festa dies, que vulnera nostra coherces. | Est Adam factus et eodem tempore lapsus. | Angelus est missus, et passus in cruce Christus” (Hail, festival day, that contains our wounds. On Friday Adam was created and fell on the same day. The angel [of the Annunciation] was sent, and Christ suffered on the cross).

32 ryhtfulnesse: Justitia, essentially Reason’s self-reference. One might recall Reason at 4.144: “lawe shal ben a laborer and lede afelde donge.” His form of interrogation suggests that he desires to realize immediately that purification of Justice that he earlier couched in the terms of messianic prophecy. The related personification Righteousness (Iusticia at 20.464L) later appears as one of “the four daughters of God,” and “spiritus Iusticie” is one of the four seeds, “cardinales vertues,” Piers sows at 21.274–309.

32L Reddet … : Rom. 2:6 (God who will render to every man according to his works). Although it may simply mean “wherever,” the biblical context could identify 32 There with the Last Judgment (cf. 7n and 28n), when reward will be given in accord with “truth” (cf. Rom. 2:2, 8; the passage includes other relevant echoes). Both the Latin and the preceding line also echo the parable of the dishonest steward, evoked in lines 22–25. Rom. 2:6 recurs, again in a discussion of doubtful heavenly reward for uncategorizable worldly efforts (Dismas and Trajan), at 14.152L. Alford lists (1992:80) the numerous biblical variations on the verse.

35–44 When y ʓut ʓong was … and vp london bothe: The opening of Will’s very lengthy response (it runs to line 88) again combines an acute attention to the 1388 Statute with other materials, in this case a represented biography. Will wishes to emphasize the tender age at which he was enrolled in school—a kind of maiming, ultimately the tonsure—as his quasi-jesting response to Reason indicates. Other aspects of the scene (see 2n) would imply that Will is relatively young at this narrative moment, and thus that many ʓer hennes is exaggerated.

But the dreamer, conscious that he faces interrogation under the 1388 Statute, has very good reason to emphasize his youthful education. In the absence of his dead frendes, it may be his only claim not to be required to perform agricultural labor, for the Statute declares that “He or she, which use to labour at the Plough and Cart, or other Labour or Service of Husbandry, till they be of the Age of Twelve years, that from thenceforth they shall abide at the same Labour, without being put to any Mystery or Handicraft” (12 Rich. II, c. 5; SR 2:57). Merchandising and guild crafts had always been considered occupations that placed one outside those restrictions addressed to agricultural labor (see 23 Edw. III, c. 1; SR 1:307); the 1388 Parliament, in keeping with its desire to impress apprentices for field work (see 12–21n above), sought to close off one possible evasion of manual labor by limiting entry to mercantile or craft status altogether. The argument looks ahead to Will’s claim to a quasiaristocratic status at line 54, and L will return to another version of this scenario at 9.204–13L; there he worries self-protectively over the genesis of lewede Ermytes out of such a cadre of disaffected agrarian teenagers. With both this passage and that in C 9, compare the diatribe at JU 40–47, directed against those “comoun peple” who “leue her trewe laboure and bicome idil men,” especially feigned religious.

The reference to this particular statutory prohibition may indicate L’s knowledge of more than the published statute. For as Tuck demonstrates (1969), the Commons petition from which the Statute derives takes an even narrower view of this point. Commons (as Tuck shows, reported at Westminster Chronicle 363) wishes to prohibit either laborers or their children from learning any craft, should they be required in agriculture. Reason’s usage, Can thow 12, implies that knowing how to perform field work (as, for example, the knight does not at 8.19–22) would identify Will as a laborer’s child and without real recourse under the Commons petition. Will subsequently takes up the Commons’s position as his own; cf. children 68. See further 44n.

In line 36, the dreamer avails himself of the logical opening Reason has provided at lines 26–27 (and will turn this argument violently against his interlocutor at 53–67). He has had a fyndyng. And his youthful training emphatically distances him both from those hermits whom he defines as lewede in line 4 (see further 45–52n) and from Sloth at 7.53–54L. (See further Godden 1984:154.) Moreover, in this return to origins, L’s language comes closest to that of Wimbledon’s sermon; in his own account, at least, Will’s youthful preparation has instilled in him ideals of which the homilist would have approved: “Who stirid þe to take vpon þe so hiʓe astaate? Wheþer for þou woldest lyue on Goddis contemplacion, oþer forto lyue a delicious lif vpon oþer mennis trauayle and þyself trauayle nouʓt? Why also setten men here sones oþer here cosynes to scole? Wheþer forto gete hem grete auauncementis oþer to make hem þe betere to knowen how þey shulden serue God?” (lines 181–87).

The passage has often been pressed hard for biographical detail about L. Skeat wished to associate the scole, apparently as a guess faute de mieux, with a grammar school at Great Malvern Priory (to which L would have been sent as a younger son; see 2:xxxii). Pearsall (24n) believes the word specifically refers to university training—interrupted when L lost his support through death. More recent students, e.g., Galloway (1992:93–95, 97) and Hanna (1993:18–21), have emphasized the ambiguity of the passage, the extent to which it fails to provide any very specific information about Will’s career, much less L’s.

However, two details perhaps imply that Pearsall’s view is at least tilted toward the more likely extreme. First, Tyl y 37 implies that Will’s training may have persisted for quite some time. Certainly, his claims for knowledge of Holy Scripture (37–39), readily substantiated in the poem, of course, imply an education beyond simply the basics, some training in sacra pagina. And further, the economics of fourteenth-century education suggests that frendes (either “relatives” or “supporters, patrons,” MED frend, senses 4 and 1b, respectively) would probably have been necessities only for expensive university training. Cf. Chaucer’s Clerk at CT I.299–302.

Some such training may lie behind various of the dreamer’s antics in early sections of the search for Dowel. For example, at 10.20, he adopts a manner that he identifies as clerk[ly] (while implying that he is not such a person). Moreover, his performance there shows some knowledge (not extending either to a full citation of the Bible or to a deep understanding of syllogistic technique) of scholarly disputation (cf. his use of the verb dispute, routinely at this time referring to scholarly debate, as apposen does in some instances, perhaps 1.45 or B 3.5, more likely line 10 above or B 7.144).

Of course, Will’s reported biography does not go very far toward absolving him of Reason’s charges. The labor he claims as appropriately his own is only the residue of higher family plans for him, plans that were never fully completed (cf. the plaintive echo foend 40). Romynge in remembraunce only returns him to that previous frustration, and he cannot imagine an alternative to continuing to be what he was—but no longer licitly is. The case of Covetise, and his youthful fyndynge, provides an instructive parallel; see 6.206–20n and 215n. And further afield, as Middleton (1990:74) argues, the Lollard William Thorpe in 1407 frames his apologia in strikingly similar terms: Thorpe and Will share a common inability to conceive of themselves as anything other than what they originally were. In constructing the entire situation, L may well recall the dire warnings of W&W 7–9: “Dare neuer no westren wy … | Send his sone southewarde to see ne to here | That he ne schall holden byhynde when he hore eldes.”

However, such activity is not quite enough to exculpate the wandering dreamer under the 1388 Statute. For even had he stayed in school long enough to be a university scholar, he could not legally wander to beg without a license. 12 Rich. II, c. 7 (SR 2:58) requires him to carry a testimonial letter from his chancellor; see further 89–91n.

38 as the boek telleth: This off-verse might well be read as an ironic jibe at the alliterative tradition. In such poetry, this is perhaps the most widely attested second half-line, in the great majority of instances a pure throwaway filler; in contrast, for Will, the boek, Holy Scripture, provides the total justification for his activities.

39 by so y wol contenue: RK connect the clause with what precedes, and Skeat and Pearsall¹ gloss “provided that I will persevere (in well-doing).” But they ignore the further development, 43–43L, lines that address perseverance directly as vocation. Thus, Galloway (1992:94) plausibly argues for a full stop at mid-line; he would translate, “I wish to continue in this manner,” that is, behave like a scholar all my life. Conscience echoes the line in 104.

The passage hovers between honesty and self-indulgence. The impersonal lykede 41 makes it “not my fault” yet simultaneously asserts “I ought to be able to do what is pleasing to me,” and the concessive 42 “Yf y be laboure sholde lyuen” suggests that hand-work is a responsibility Will would rather not be stuck with.

41 longe clothes: See 2n above.

43L In eadem … : 1 Cor. 7:20 (Let every man abide in the same calling in which he was called) and Eph. 4:1, in the first case (ironically enough, given line 2), part of Paul’s rather crabby discussion of wedlock. Once again, biblical and legal discourse reinforce one another; see 35–44n above. Wimbledon cites this verse (lines 98–100) to indicate the integrity of each estate—and the impermissibility of blending them; more distantly, cf. Shakespeare’s Falstaff, at 1 Henry IV 1.2.91–92.

44 in london and vp london bothe: Will reverts to Statute concerns. Again (as in line 10) RK insert an overly provocative reading (explained p. 154), here from the p manuscripts. But the x reading and opelond bothe (“in the country, too”) is preferable, not least because it alludes to—and defends the dreamer against—the most crucial regulations promulgated by the 1388 Parliament. In the effort to arrest what it perceived as vagrancy to avoid agricultural labor, Parliament established a system of internal passports. Not only is a laborer required to serve, but once his contract ends, he cannot leave his home hundred, “unless he bring a Letter Patent containing the cause of his going, and the Time of his Return, if he ought to return, under the King’s Seal” (12 Rich. II, c. 3; SR 2:56).

Through his inspecificity about his domicile, london and opelond bothe, Will hopes to place himself outside statutory penalties. He clearly has no sealed license to roam, no warrant for his activities—like Hawkin he constitutes “an [eremitic] ordre by hymselue” (B 13.284; see 91n). Thus he should be treated like “any Servant or Labourer found in any City or Borough [cf. 1n above for statutory suspicions about such locales] or elsewhere coming from any Place, wandering without such Letter”: “he shall be maintenant taken … and put in the Stocks, and kept till he hath found Surety to return to his Service, or to Serve or labour in the Town from which he came” (12 Rich. II, c. 3; SR 2:56, my emphasis). Since the dreamer, although certainly out of place, can claim no fixed locale where he “serves,” even in the absence of a license, he cannot be punished, deported as it were, under the Statute.

45–52 The lomes … my wombe one: The dreamer’s education avowedly is his past; now he proceeds to outline his current way of life. In his last speech, he implicitly described himself as the dishonest steward of Luke 16. As he now tries to indicate how he retains a fyndyng (cf. line 49), even if not one from the now deceased “lynage ryche” Reason expected (see 26), Will quickly transforms himself from dishonest steward into other gospel characters. The steward, fearing he has lost his office, undertakes a program of chicanery, “mak[ing] friends of the mammon of iniquity” by writing off debts owed his lord. This is a deliberate program, “that when I shall be removed from the stewardship, they may receive me into their houses” (Luke 16:4); it resembles the risky chaffer Will will describe at 94–101.

But equally, Will’s vocation echoes—most trenchantly in line 52—Jesus’ instructions to his followers (Luke 9, 10; first noted Clopper 1989:276). He deliberately seeks to present himself in an apostolic status that may answer English labor law: “The harvest indeed is great, but the laborers are few” (Luke 10:2). Will claims to live by his prayers, supported by those for whose good estate and eternal well-being he importunes God. In this process, he behaves as Imaginative had told him to (at B 12.16–17) and resembles the ideal priest: “a Porthors … sholde be his Plow, Placebo to sigge” (B 15.125, there as a rebuke to an armed priest, cf. lines 57–58 below). Thus, he has interests in God’s kingdom comparable to those of his evangelical forebears. He is paid for this effort in food and follows a regular rotation of visits among his employers; his behavior thus accords with Jesus’ injunctions, “eating and drinking such things as they have,” “eat such things as are set before you” (Luke 10:7, 8, the first cited 15.44L)—although he ignores commands against wandering house to house (Luke 10:5–7).

Further, line 52 distinguishes the bagless dreamer from the “bidding [wheedling? or, like Will, praying?] beggars” of Prol.41–42; cf. 8.128n. For these figures, bag and belly are indistinguishable. L returns to this topic again at 9.98–104, 119–25L (see the notes there), 139–40, 151–58. Throughout this later passage, possession of the external trappings of a beggar damns the man who carries them, ipso facto; in contrast, to lack bag and bottle is to be perfectly apostolic: “Take nothing for your journey; neither staff, nor scrip, nor bread, nor money” (Luke 9:3; for the “staff,” cf. 9.159n). Perhaps particularly important, given Will’s aggressive turn on Reason at line 53, is Jesus’ command, “salute no man by the way” (Luke 10:4; cf. B 15.3–10, partly retained at 9.122–23; cf. Chaucer’s Miller, CT I.3122–23). Although he wears the habit of a lollare, Will claims to be truly apostolic, neither a gyrovague friar like penetrans domos (22.340) nor a lollare, since he does not carry a lollare’s equipment and takes no more than his day’s food (carries nothing away with him). He thus is exactly what the gospel calls a “laborer” and acquires a “measurable hire” from his patrons in return for his prayers (see Luke 10:7). Perhaps the most comparable figure elsewhere in the poem is the pilgrim Patience who “preyde mete ‘pur charite, for a pouere heremyte’ ” (B 13.30; cf. 15.32).

Donaldson (1949:208–19) pursues his autobiographical argument by urging that L was “an itinerant handy man” who dealt in prayers. This, he argues, would have been one of the few jobs open to him as “a married clerk without benefice” (208). But the dreamer, whatever ecclesiastical hopes underlay his education, may now be in some status besides priest, perhaps some variety of hermit (see further 45–47n, 91n). With this depiction, Godden (1984:162), following Allen (1927:51–61, 430–70), compares Richard Rolle’s career as a hermit. Hanna (1997:41–42) discusses evidence for hermits as patronized domestic servants; as Bullock-Davies points out of minstrels (1978:18), all household servants “while they were on duty at Court … had their commons provided.” Hanna also examines (40–41) the limited begging the few surviving rules allow hermits: these require, following Matt. 6:34, that a hermit seek no more than his day’s fare, especially in urban settings.

45–47 The lomes … seuene psalmes: Recall lines 12–21 above; the dreamer may, once again, rely on Statute language. To forestall wage inflation, Parliament requires open hiring meetings, to be held in a public place in boroughs; to these laborers are to “bring openly in their Hands … their Instruments” (25 Edw. III, c. 2.1; SR 1:311). The dreamer shifts allegorical—and argumentative—levels in a way that anticipates more powerful shifts of this kind later in this vision, where spiritual values become the metaphorical meanings of agrarian acts—see 7.161ffnn and the later reformulations of 8.1–4n etc., as well as the citation of B 15.125 above. Here, in self-defense, Will inverts the later technique and claims a literal hard labor out of spiritual action, cf. 48 here soules.

The word lome recalls other themes. For not only does it refer to a laborer’s instrument, at GGK 2309 it refers to military weaponry, a sense that looks ahead to line 58 and Will’s claim to belong to a nonmilitary aristocracy. Moreover, when at line 35, the dreamer may imply that his education has been like a maiming, he suggests that he has (or should have) exchanged one lome, his penis (see WA 4877 and cf. 22.195), for a second, the (prayer-)book—and if priestly, for chastity as well. He should no longer sow physical seed but spiritual; his plowshare (cf. the uses of the implement in Jean de Meun’s Rose and Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale, and the lengthy discussion, Barney 1973) is prayer—or what Will often substitutes for it, the composition of his poem. His claim for an equality of manual and spiritual work is perhaps affirmed in B 6.247–49, lines revised out in the C version.

The locution þat y… with must be read with both verbs in line 45. One might further notice that deserue, an echo of lines 12 and 32, here seems to attract honorific overtones (“merit”) largely absent in the previous use in line 42 (where the word seems to mean only “earn”). Both uses pun on Statute language, where “servantz” and “servir” define, respectively, those covered by the legal prescription and the act that they are to perform; cf. the climax of this argument in Crist for to serue 61, in context opposed to to labory and lordes kyn to serue 69.

When he comes to list his lomes, Will mentions a series of common prayers that he routinely repeats on behalf of others. At least in part, he is thinking of Conscience’s visionary prediction at 3.464–65 (q.v.), where these prayers, and not the manual labor enjoined on everyone else, constitute the appropriate duties of perfect, messianic-age priests. Such a memory leads up to Will’s claim to perfection in line 84, itself in part an appeal to the Conscience who spoke the lines in C 3 to defend him as fulfilling an ideal status. For the “Pater noster,” see 16.322–23n.

To the prayers Conscience has already mentioned, Will here adds the primer. The word describes the “Book of Hours [of the Virgin],” the customary private prayer-book for laity. Such volumes typically include the penitential psalms and Office of the Dead as well as the hours; for their usual contents and a good introductory statement about their use, see de Hamel 1986:159–64. A much more detailed survey (unfortunately, none of the books described are English) appears in Wieck 1988; for typical contents, see esp. 149–67. Duffy 2011 provides compensating images of English examples. For the equivalent modern volume, see Officium parvum; for ME vernacular examples, see Maskell 1882, 2:1–179 (“placebo” and “dirige” at 110, 123); and The Prymer (“placebo” and “dirige” at 105:52, 56).

To a certain extent, as Galloway notes (1992:96, following Donaldson 1949:221, cf. 208–9), Will’s prayers provide “a neat summary of what was considered paradigmatic by the late fourteenth century for being ‘letterede.’ ” But Will’s self-presentation is calculatedly poised against a specific “professional” status, that of the “lewed Ermyte.” This phrase translates Latin heremita non literatus, a term limited to one narrow discursive context, discussions of the liturgical offices assigned hermits in those few surviving rules for that status. In such contexts (see Clay 1914:201–2), the prayers assigned the lettered hermit—and apparently closed to “lewed” ones—precisely correspond to Will’s lomes (see Hanna 1997:36–38).

As Skeat noted, not just the requiem masses Will is not qualified to say, but prayers also, have power to remit time in Purgatory. Cf. PC 3586–89 and the canonistic text underpinning this view, Decretum 2.13.2.22 (CJC 1:728). The dreamer’s apparent engagement in intercessory prayer should probably be read forward into his meditations at 9.318–52. His deprecation there of acts geared simply to remitting purgatorial time, rather than an effort to Dowell, represents a substantial change of opinion peculiar to this version.

49–50 fouchensaf … | To be welcome: Vouchsafe occurs most frequently in the fourteenth century in romances to describe grants, of property, of a spouse, or of goods. The locution underwrites Will’s subsequent claims to membership in a new aristocracy (cf. line 58). In contrast to the suggestion of a back-door beggar in hacches 29, Will claims he is an honored guest in households.

50 oþerwhile in a monthe: The adverb again echoes Imaginative’s attack on the dreamer’s poetry (cf. B 12.23), canceled in this version. The lines may lie behind the claim at Mum 193–99 that a wise king would let a truth-teller visit once a month.

52 but my wombe one: Will’s claim to an appropriately modest pay may also gain further resonances from the Statutes. For, in a situation of expansive demand and reduced labor force, government officials charged that chantry priests, like field laborers, were demanding higher wages after the Black Death. Edward III’s council appears to have perceived such activities as widespread when it promulgated the original Statute of Laborers. On publication, separate letters containing the ordinance were sent to sheriffs and to bishops, and Edward commanded the latter, inter alia, “that you likewise moderate the Stipendiary Chaplains of your said Diocese, who, as it is said, do now in like manner refuse to serve without an excessive Salary; and compel them to serve for the accustomed Salary, as it behoveth them, under Pain of Suspension and Interdict” (23 Edw. III, in fine; SR 1:308). For episcopal efforts at holding down clerical wages, the three promulgations of the constitution “Effrenata,” see Putnam 1908:188–89, 432–33; Putnam 1916; Harding 1984:185–86; and cf. Scase 1989:144–45.

53–60L And also … constringit[ur]: With a certain (mock?) deference to his interlocutor (cf. “syre resoun,” perhaps also an effort to enlist him as fellow clerk), Will presents the general case that clerics might well fall outside Reason’s legislative ambit. With their crounes (the tonsure), they form a special sort of aristocracy. He readily converts the absence of his frendes’ continuing benefactions into a claim for a spiritual inheritance in the job they had prepared him for (but that he may no longer practice).

Will may be guided by the Statute in terms that recur in lines 61–64: as someone who prays for members of well-to-do households, he might be construed an aristocratic hanger-on, a special type of servant (as a minstrel also is). The 1388 Statute absolves persons with such claims from its prohibitions on unlicensed movement: “The meaning of this Ordinance is not, that any Servants, which ride or go (chivachent ou aillent) in the Business (busoignes) of their Lords or Masters, shall be comprised within the same Ordinance for the Time of the same Business” (12 Rich. II, c. 3; SR 2:56). Tuck (1969:236) suggests that this exclusion was introduced by the magnates during the process of framing the Statute language after receipt of the initial Commons petition, which lacks any such exclusion.

But again, L presents biblical rhetoric and Statute discourse as mutually supportive. And although Will’s most immediate motivation is to excuse himself from knaues werkes, he at first ebulliently emphasizes the peculiarity of clerical aristocracy. While truly a special heritage, it lacks, not just requirements of labor, but requirements of any necessary participation in all those cares and responsibilities associated with aristocratic social status. Thus, þe lawe of leuyticy 55 points toward a double freedom. Given the claim of line 57, that clerics “Sholde nother swynke ne swete,” L (as Alford 1992:44, 99 suggests) here alludes to Num. 18:20–24. This passage excludes the Levites both from land ownership (and other necessary aristocratic efforts at estate management) and from the need to work for sustenance (instead, they are given the Lord’s tithes and first-fruits, portions of which they eat). Cf. Num. 18: 20: “And the Lord said to Aaron: You shall possess nothing in their land, neither shall you have a portion among them: I am thy portion and inheritance (pars et hereditas tua; cf. line 60L) in the midst of the children of Israel.” The death of his frendes is immaterial, Will suggests, for his education and tonsuring long ago in youth earn him an immutable claim to sustenance.

These verses from Numbers, together with various New Testament citations (e.g., Acts 4:34–35), had considerable social currency in the later fourteenth century. They provide standard proof-texts for Lollard attacks on ecclesiastical ownership of real property. For discussion, see Hudson 1988:337–42 and 146–79nn.

Further distinctions between the aristocrats of this world and Will’s crowned eyres of heuene 59 occur in subsequent lines. As regards “ne swerien at enquestes” (57), Alford (1988c:50–51) provides a rich array of citations to indicate that clerics are excused from participation in legal procedures. See most pregnantly his citation of Lyndwood 91–92: “We forbid any clerk to be judge or associate in any trial touching life or member.” Cf. Patience’s presentation of poverty as remocio curarum at 16.123–28L; Mum 705–9, in discussing the “piteousness” priests should display, also cites their freedom from military and judicial service “Al for cause þaire conscience to kepe vn-y-wemmyd.” With regard to Ne fyhte (58), an attack on priests who bear arms—rather than service books—occurs in a passage alluded to above, B 15.120–27 (and see A 11.214, parallel to 159).

On the offensive, the dreamer may well overstep in his claim to retain youthful perquisites no longer descriptive of his current life (see 11n). He is not, as he seems to claim, a mynistre (cf. Conscience at line 91 below), and probably not in quoer, that portion of the church reserved for clerics (cf. AB 5.3–8n), although he might have a place there as a clerk with song-school training. His clerical training in scripture now has become sadly reduced to repeating prayers he should know by rote.

55 leuitici: Properly, of course, “of Leviticus,” where many of the priestly regulations are discussed, but L again uses the term to mean “Levites” at 17.219.

56 of kynde vnderstondynge: Presumably “plain common sense indicates” or “as plain common sense would indicate,” Will’s effort to appeal past his interlocutor to a more basic psychological faculty.

58L Non reddas … : Alford (1992:44) cites Prov. 20:22 (Say not: I will return evil). Alford compares the primary Christian locus, Rom. 12:17 (To no man rendering evil for evil), as well as 1 Thes. 5:15, 1 Pet. 3:9. However, the uncited preceding verse, Prov. 20:21, may be performing implicit argumentative duty here: “The inheritance gotten hastily in the beginning, in the end shall be without a blessing.” In these terms, Will wittily implies that long deferral of his career might render his contribution more efficacious, rather than the less that Reason expects.

60L Dominus … constringit[ur]: The first citation is Ps. 15:5: “The Lord is the portion of my inheritance,” a direct claim to heavenly heirship (and line 59 effectively translates it as if it were being spoken by a priest). This verse traditionally provided “benefit of clergy” and defined that status as essentially Latin literacy; see further Imaginative’s discussion at 14.128–30. The verse achieved this status from its quotation during the ceremony of tonsuring new clerks (Alford 1992:80, s.v. B 12.189); cf. PLM 453–54, where Moses (representing episcopacy) tonsures aspiring clerics “seyinge hem þat God shulde be here part and here heritage.” In de Deguilleville’s account, Reason then describes the haircuts as comic, fools’ garb, but, paradoxically, in their bare pates, hiding true wisdom (457–502); cf. B 15.1–11, 9.105–39, 22.74–79, etc.

clemencia non constringit, given the preceding tag “And elsewhere (it is written),” presumably also cites a text, but one I have failed to identify; one should probably read constringitur. Pearsall aptly associates the statement “Clemency is not constrained” with Portia’s “The quality of mercy is not strained” (Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice 4.1.179). However, the valences of Portia’s claim and that here are not quite similar. One should compare two standard definitions of the virtue Clemency (a “part” of the cardinal virtue Temperance) widely cited in the Middle Ages, Cicero, De inventione 2.54.164; and Seneca, De clementia 2.3, the latter of which reads: “Clementia est … lenitas superioris adversus inferiorem in constituendis poenis” (Clemency is a superior’s lenience in inflicting punishment on an inferior). Clemency “is not constrained,” because it voluntarily avoids what is constrained, the proper penalty assigned to a criminous action. Equally, by its nature, it is the virtue of a noble man, a superior or eyre, who displays meekness, not a desire to impose punishment. See further Seneca’s discussion, De clementia 1.7.1–5. The remark is obviously double-edged: Will directs Reason’s attention to his potential lack of clemency, while claiming his own pure intentions.

61–69 Hit bycometh … to serue: If the preceding lines suggest the heedless nature of clerical aristocracy, these emphatically distinguish clerkes and knaues, the illiterate lower classes, committed to agrarian labor. The dreamer invokes canonical regulation to indicate, in yet another way, restrictions that prevent those born to manual labor from advancing to an improper degre, to a state where they might perform intellectual work. For such regulation, as it forms part of the 1388 Statute of Laborers, see 35–44n; Skeat (1886:2, xxxiv–xxxv) connects these lines with a parliamentary petition of 1391. Lines 67–68 reiterate, as two fundamental requirements for priesthood, that the candidate must be legitimate and that he must not be a slave or a beggar. The first such concern, as Middleton notes (1997:258–59), also piqued John Ball, who claimed no bastard “aptum regno Dei” (Walsingham 1:544).

The two criteria Will invokes are of different degrees of plausibility. On the one hand, Gratian is clear that slaves, unless freed by their lord from servitude, are debarred from ordination (Decretum 1.54; CJC 1:206–14). But the discussion of whether a priest’s child, and by extension any product of an unsanctified union, may be ordained (Decretum 1.56; CJC 1:219–23) offers a range of views. These include a series of attacks on the proposition that parental sin descends to the offspring, and the authors generally would allow ordination on a showing of the candidate’s virtuous merits (succinctly Jerome in c. 8). These discussions may come as some surprise to proponents of genetic predestinarianism elsewhere in the poem, notably Holychurch at 2.24–42 and Wit at 10.203–35. (The latter, in the form of B 9.121–57, as Justice 1994:105–11 points out, is a plausible source for John Ball’s views; note the subsequent 236–55, unique to C.)

For those excluded from intellectual work on these bases, carting (65) is an appropriate task. Although Reason does not mention this job in lines 13–21 above, 12 Rich. II, c. 5 (SR 2:57) uses the phrases “to labour at the Plough and Cart” as a general synecdoche for agricultural work. Carting evokes the hazards of such labor and was the equivalent of modern long-haul trucking. For the dangers of transport (which include falling asleep on the job, perhaps relevant to the dreamer’s objections), see Hanawalt 1986:126–27, 131–32; and cf. Ch, CT I.2022–23, more distantly PF 102, CT III.1537–70.

In contrast, Will outlines appropriately clerical jobs in lines 61–64. The list shows some self-serving shuffling in the dreamer’s claims. Although his highest pretension, to be an eyre of heuene, apparently involves serving Christ through prayer, Will opens the possibility of other clerical labors. Thus, clerks serve not simply God but good men (62) too, qualifying the universal condemnation of Prol.90–94. Further, clerks do not just pray but “sitten and wryten, | Redon and resceyuen”—perform exactly those acts associable with a reeve and his accounts (cf. Middleton 1997:251, 253, 309 n57). In this framing, the dreamer again appears a steward, here one who strives to ingratiate himself with Reason (cf. his role as defined by Holychurch at 1.50–53). Of course, the reeve rendering his account offers yet another forecast here of a character probably literally to be conceived a reeve, Piers Plowman (cf. 7.182–204n). But being such a reeve is also continuing as Will always has, “ma[kyng] of tho men as resoun me tauhte,” and a reprise of lines 22–25.

62–64 God … spene: RK advance these three lines, which appear in the manuscripts after line 69; their discussion (pp. 172–73) ignores the obvious explanation of misinsertion after a line ending in serue (as both 61 and 69 do). Sledd 1940 offers a punctuation (followed by Pearsall¹) that makes the manuscript order reasonably sensible.

70–81 Ac sythe … ychaunged: Pearsall properly notes that this long sentence to the end of line 79 is formed by a series of five parallel clauses, all dependent on Ac sythe; the remaining pair of clauses outlines the results that have occurred. Will moves naturally from insisting on keeping clerkes and knaues separate to a calamitous view of contemporary disaster, ending with a prophecy reminiscent of such earlier moments as Prol.62–65, 118–24.

The depopulation following the Black Death reduced the number of available priests. In this shortage, canonical distinctions could no longer be sustained, and there were “innumerable dispensations … sanctioning the ordination of candidates who did not possess the usual qualifications of age, of legitimate and free birth, of education, etc.” (Putnam 1916:13). Will thus offers a different reading of the situation already discussed at Prol.81–94.

This prospect reminds him of manifold analogous breakdowns. Boundaries between estates should be preserved, but in all the (hypothetical) cases Will mentions, aristocratic privilege is subject to incursions from every direction. Yet Will attacks behavior exactly analogous to his own. Will’s claim broadens the case far past his own particular merits to show Reason’s undue fastidiousness about his own apparent lawlessness; Reason irrationally selects to prosecute but one of many social distortions. Post-Plague society has become so depraved that Will’s valid claims to gentility have been undermined from every side and thus appear lacking, yet one further modern instance of depravity. Moreover, the vagueness of the concluding line—Will’s inability to imagine social improvement—is linked with his necessary vagueness about his personal amendment in subsequent lines.

However, one should see that it is only within this “vague space” that the poem PP can come into existence and be written. The text answers the dreamer-poet’s disquiet at contemporary conditions, amply illustrated in the first vision (not to mention his interrogation here). Equally, as 1–108n and 11n argue at some length, the poem can only evolve (roll out) as the compulsive substitute for that penance the dreamer cannot bring himself to undertake. The passage, more directly than Will’s return to this complaint at 9.204–13L, inspires PPCrede 744–67.

70 bondemen barnes haen be mad bisshopes: At the best, Will in his doomsterism probably alludes to the use, developing through the first half of the fourteenth century, of bishoprics to support royal administrators. While no bishop during the century seems to have risen, as Will alleges, from serfdom, a number of candidates useful to the king for their administrative ability were branded “laicus” or “illiteratus” when presented (see Pantin 1962:13–14). In practice, in the later fourteenth century “a new type of bishop appeared, drawn from the higher aristocracy” (ibid. 23).

71 And barones bastardus haen be Erchedekenes. Lords were expected to provide benefices for their servants, household chaplains, and clerical staff, and certainly expected to look after their families. Pantin cites (1962:32) the Liber Niger Edwardi IV, which assumes that magnates will reward clerics in their service with “officialships [an erchedeken was a bishop’s chief administrative officer; cf. Pantin 1962:26–27], deaneries, prebends …”

72–75 And sopares … kynges worschipe: The word sopar has been persistently misconstrued (including by MED) and has nothing to do with soap. It means simply “shop-keeper, merchant,” as in the London street “Sopare(s) Lane” in Cheapside. The etymon is British Medieval Latin soparius, derivative of scopa/shopa/sopa “shop,” all presumably representing an unrecorded OE *scopa, *scopere. Cf. Nightingale 1995:81–82. London soap-making seems to have been a post-Langlandian industry; cf. Thrupp 1948:10; Stow, Survey 1:251.

Thrupp discusses at length (1948:234–87) the efforts of merchants to penetrate the ranks of genteel landed society. Perhaps particularly interesting is the case of the grocer John Wiltshire, who could purchase his knight’s fee but could not persuade others to let him perform the associated coronation services in 1377 (see 259). Cf. O’Connor’s description (1994) of the activities of John Pyel, a fringe player who escaped prosecution by the Good Parliament in 1376. In fact, the only London merchants elevated to knighthoods in the period, mayor William Walworth and three companions, received the honor for “military service,” their aid in dispatching Wat Tyler at Smithfield in 1381; cf. Barron 2000:410–12. Here the reversal of roles resembles the exchange knight/mercer that Covetise describes at 6.248–52; the knight’s son must become a laborer, impoverish himself, in order to perform his appropriate military duty (lines 74–75 recall 1.90–106).

76–77 And monkes … ypurchased: The income of monasteries, which should be expended in the conventional monastic alms, hospitality to the sick and dying, and weekly doles of bread and ale, has been diverted to the militaristic aggrandizement of relations. Under William Gray, bishop of Lincoln 1431–36, the severest visitation formula for an ill-run house states, “elemosina consumitur; hospitalitas non observatur” (the funds for alms are dissipated; the rules of hospitality—often opulent and extended to wealthy patrons, not the poor—not observed) (cited Knowles 1957:211 n1). Instead of this socially useful occupation, in which the monk of genteel birth performs with proper spiritual gentility, a place in a religious establishment has become an extension of the family household and the assets of the community are transferred to private use (cf. the examples of abbots making personal use of revenues mentioned by Knowles 211, 213). Reason hears this complaint and addresses it in his sermon, lines 156–67 below (esp. 165–66).

78–79 Popes … to kepe: The dreamer addresses two similar abuses, both involving a purchase from which an individual like him, poor but noble by birth, would be excluded. From Popes, one would receive a provision to occupy a certain benefice (see Pantin 1962:47–75); patrones would hold the advowson of, the right of appointment to, a particular benefice (cf. again the discussion of 13.104–14). The notion that such appointments might be purchased leads to the charge that successful applicants are Symondus sones, the children of Simon Magus (Acts 8:18–24); cf. 2.65–66n.

83–88 For in my Consience … alle thynges: Given the current state of the world, no external spiritual guidance is trustworthy. The individual can only rely on his own conscience as he pursues justice. The dreamer appeals to Conscience for support in claiming that his whole mode of lowly living—which Reason identifies as having no regimen but that lines 86–88 define in terms of the B version’s doctrine of nonsolicitousness—amounts to a penitential act (as Will will in passus 9 claim of the deserving poor en masse).

However different the modality, the phrase penaunce discrete (84) recalls the end of the upcoming vision in the A and B versions. There Piers, the poem’s closest approximation to a parfit man, takes on penaunce discrete as his primary métier. This passage is “the displaced form of Piers’s tearing of the Pardon sent from Truth that is cancelled in C” (Middleton 1997:263, cf. 292). Here the dreamer’s effort to replace Piers and to enact this promise (in lines 105–8 below) only turns out to be a further example of the recursion he will shortly describe, a fall back into the habit of sleeping (and of poetic composition).

Will also attempts to wrap himself in the ne solliciti sitis ethic prominent in AB. Skeat compares B 7.126–35, and one might also notice resemblances to the lunatic lollers of 9.105–39. But Will’s behavior might be distinguished from Patience’s invocation of the same verses at 15.244–49 and his seriousness perceived as tempered, a self-serving joke. Given the description of line 46, the pater noster, with other associated prayers, is completely responsible for any fyndyng he manages to obtain!

Links between Will and Conscience particularly intrigue L in his revision of early portions of C. In Prol.125–38, the personification takes over materials spoken by the dreamer in B, and in their outspoken antipathy to Meed, they are progressively isolated figures throughout passus 3. The dreamer will invoke Conscience again at 9.236–40. This association is renewed in the Dowell banquet scene, especially 15.175–83, and lasts until the end of the poem (following on Clergy’s remark at B 13.203–4). Recent criticism, to which one may now add Wood 2012, following Jenkins (Martin) 1969, has typically perceived Conscience as a figure nearly as subject to mistakes as the dreamer.

84 Preeyeres of a parfit man and penaunce discrete: Later passages offer conflicting evidence about how to read Will’s implicit claim in the on-verse. On the one hand, Will’s self-associations with perfection have been inherited from B 12.24, where the dreamer alleges that not laboring, failing to say his Psalter so as to write the poem, approaches perfection. Writing is “play,” not just an opposite of labor but a foolishness easily deprecated; yet ancient wise men “Pleyden þe parfiter to ben.”

On the other hand, Will’s “perfection” reminds one of Piers’s rejection at 8.131–38 of the wasters’ excuse that they laze about in order to pray. Perhaps a more relevant gloss appears at 11.174 and 13.230; the claim to be a parfit man reflects the dreamer’s “pruyde/pruyde or presumpcioun of parfit lyuynge,” and links this self-defense to Will’s desperate immersion in the inner dream of the Land of Longing (first noted Clopper 1989:274, 278). Such associations intensify the connections with the later self-defense, Recklessness’s huge rant (including its assertion that indigence of any stripe is blessed), and with its conclusion in another rebuke from Reason (see 11n above).

The phrase penaunce discrete is equally difficult to define discursively. The English phrase, so far as is known, appears in only two other places, the Lollard tracts “On Clerks Possessioners” (“Wycliffe,” English Works, EETS 74:117, cited Godden 1990:55) and “On Church Temporalities” (Arnold SEW 3:213), in both instances apparently to describe a life of self-directed penitential meekness. In these terms, private penaunce discrete would contrast with Will’s prayers undertaken on behalf of others.

But equally, the phrase may reflect the technical language of penitential theory. “Confessio … discreta” routinely appears in widely distributed verses that enumerate the conditions (up to twenty-seven of them) for a proper confession. In this context, “discreta” means using appropriate and modest language in the confessional, intruding no trivial concerns, and, perhaps most relevantly here, following lines 70–81, concentrating upon one’s own sins rather than revealing those of one’s neighbor (so DTC 3:957). For the verses and discussion, see Millett 1999.

Alternatively, as Sarah Wood points out to me, an authoritative source, Raymund of Penyaforte’s Summa 3.34.26, sees “discrete penance” in slightly different terms: “Likewise, confession ought to be discrete, so that the penitent confess distinctly and separately every one of his sins. This follows from Ps. 6:7, ‘Every night I will wash my bed,’ that is, I will wash my conscience of every one of my sins” (Discreta similiter debet esse confessio, scilicet vt distincte, ac separatim confiteatur singula peccata, iuxta illud: ‘Lauabo per singulas noctes lectum meum,’ etc. Id est, per singula peccata conscientiam meam). Godden (1984:132) notes that preeyeres and penaunce forms a persistent alliterative doublet in the poem and (132–33) gives examples of penance meaning “the ascetic life” elsewhere in ME.

86–88 Non de solo … nec in pane, Fiat … : Matt. 4:4, itself a quotation of Deut. 8:3, reads “Non in solo pane vivit homo” (It is written: Not in bread alone doth man live, [but in every word that proceedeth from the mouth of God]). But as Burrow argues (1993:104), L splits and extends the verse so that it reads as a rejection of the entire food cycle, production and consumption: “Man does not live of the soil, nor in bread or other food.” The subsequent Latin from the Pater Noster, Matt. 6:10 (Thy/God’s will be done), of course defines the word of God. L ultimately allows Patience to offer something like a definitive reading of these conjoined verses (see 15.244–49, 83–88n above, and 7.260Ln); given Patience’s association with holy suffering, one might also consider the analogue of Luke 22:42, “But yet not my will, but thine be done.” On the Pater Noster throughout the poem, see Gillespie 1994. Middleton (1997:246) signals the implicit connection with Matt. 10:19–20, where God will give the arrested apostle sufficient answer to hold off his tormentors. Mann (1979:30–32, followed by Barney 1988:121), adduces John 4:34: “My meat is to do the will of him who sent me.”

89–91 Quod Consience … to mynistre: Skeat and Pearsall suggest that Conscience here responds to 84 parfit, but one might equally argue that he is actuated by the dreamer’s claim to a clean, and extraordinarily perspicacious, conscience in the preceding line. Whitworth (1972:6) distinguishes Reason, at this point silent, as concerned with theory, Conscience with practice; the latter figure sees that the dreamer’s behavior does not entirely accord with his claims. For Conscience, the issue then becomes, not the claim of perfection per se, but a sad (stable) life of that sort (cf. 103–4). Following good monastic precedents, Conscience associates this, not with the individual will to be perfect, but with a stable social status, overseen by someone in an official capacity, a position analogous to the emphases of Reason’s subsequent sermon.

Conscience invokes legal discourse as well and draws attention in line 91 to the statutory exception to the status Reason has attacked at 29–31. If Will looks like a “lewed” hermit (but isn’t “lewed”) and may be a priest (but may have tainted that status through sexual indulgence), he still potentially has a licit claim to beg (as Godden 1990:181 notes). The 1388 Statute extends this privilege to “People of Religion and Hermits approved (heremytes approvez) having letters testimonial of their Ordinaries” (12 Rich. II, c. 7; SR 2:58). Such supervisory figures would include the prior or mynistre (cf. MED ministre, sense 2b, usually of Franciscan provincial officials) mentioned here, although Will has already suggested (line 76) that his status may reflect precisely a failure by supervising clergy to aid deserving beggars like himself.

89 lyeth: Skeat and Pearsall¹ gloss “applies, is to the point.” But Godden (1984:155), although noting OED sense 13, directs attention to the adversative Ac in the following line (glossing the word as Skeat and Pearsall do would seem to require “For”) and suggests translating “I cannot see that this doctrine (that prayer and penance is the best life) is false; and yet.…” A similar ambiguity occurs at B 10.112.

92–101 That is soth … shal turne: At this point, Will simply caves in (beknowe 92 is an admission). He accepts Reason’s earlier charges of his irregularity (see line 28) and, in return, can only offer his good will; cf. Imaginative’s discussion at 14.23–29 and Conscience’s at B 13.190–97. But here Will’s proffer, rather than fusion of his soul with “voluntas dei” (88), veers back into the very unregulated status for which he is being chastised. For all that Will can promise is compulsive and repetitive effort, the same acts over and over again—a reflection of what he has earlier identified as Romynge in remembraunce (see 11n and esp. Middleton 1988). He promises such behavior in the good hope (94 and 99, not in his later despairing behavior as Recklessness) that such repetition will somehow once manage not to be loss (as it has always been in the past) but profit (wynnyng 98). As Piers sees, when in the AB versions he tears the pardon, such a profit (salvation) can only come to pass independently of Will’s, or any individual’s, efforts to obtain it, through the mysterious infusion of grace; see further Recklessness at 12.205–9 and more distantly, Imaginative’s flailing blind man at B 12.103–12.

Chaffare provides a powerful metaphor for this complex activity. Just as in the mercantilistic parables on which he relies to create his apostolic status (see 7n, 23–25n, 45–52n, 98Ln, 100–101n), Will invokes a widespread analogy between commerce and spirituality. Both, as in the earlier example of the dishonest steward, involve a calculus of risk and disaster; for Will, the likelihood of utter failure, total waste and loss, and concomitant repetition, overwhelms any immediate sense of possible success. (This point is taken up at length in a draft, unpublished version of Middleton 2013, which I am grateful that the author shared; and more distantly, at her 1990:46, 1997:234.) The suggestion here, intensified by wyrdes as well as the impersonal verbs of 95 and 98, is that chaffare is purely blind luck, that the mode by which salvation occurs is incomprehensible and bears no apparent relation to either desire or effort. Thus equally, the dreamer asserts that what appear to Reason his undisciplined flailings about serve a deep purpose, even if one incomprehensible, and are not to be measured by ostensible in-transit results alone. For a different reading, see Lawler 1979.

Of course, this promise of repetition and recursion to the lost hopes of youth defines not simply a spiritual status and a biography but also the very métier of L’s poetry (cf. 1.80). Indeed the three are very nearly coterminous. At the very opening of his project, in A 1.119–20, L inscribes, through Holychurch, a Dantesque prospect that it will be possible to “enden … in perfite werkis.” But the working of the poem involves L in the discovery that he can only “ofte chaffare.” See further 1–108n.

Such chaffering marks the poem in the most large scale and most obvious ways. It determines its gross form, its incessant visioning, the repetitive effort to approach more nearly to the heart of that mystery that Will here identifies as grace itself (and the form of his identification acknowledges, of course, his distance from it). Moreover, L’s visions are not simply repetitive but recursive: each seems to begin at some point before the last had started (see, e.g., 126n, 180–90n below), and none seems to achieve finality, only a new conflicted restatement of the issues. See further Middleton 1982, Smith 2001:184–87, and 110n.

But such repeated visioning only vaguely signals the great act of recursive chaffering that L undertakes. This is the determination to write the poem over, head to end, to create Versions. Rather than some climax, some moment of prophetic vision, re-vision is the very métier of the poem and of L’s biography as the poem represents it. And, as the reader will find in the conversations parallel to 5.1–108 that comprise passus 6, such biographical re-vision and irresolvable verbal conflict proves to be the poem’s version of gracelessness, of scapegraceism, of sinful life itself.

97 sette … at a leef: Translate: “regarded … as of no consequence” (so MED lef n.1, sense 1d); apparently an allusive use of such idioms as “not worth a kres” or “not worth a leaf.” However, this sense underlies L’s common (and often provocatively placed) idiosyncratic use of leef as “bit, small part” (MED sense 2d): cf. 6.209, 15.103; B 6.254, 7.111 (the archetypal, not edited, version) and 181.

98L Simile est … dragmam: Will continues the chorus of gospel citations that began at line 86. The first text is Matt. 13:44 (The kingdom of heaven is like unto a treasure hidden in a field). Middleton comments (2013:133): “The field [Will] has obtained for development is Piers’s half-acre, and his project, idiosyncratically specified as penance by other means, now becomes his work, neither idleness nor courtly play.”

The second citation alludes to Luke 15:8–10 (the woman who finds her lost groat). Pearsall notes that this parable immediately precedes that of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11–32, itself juxtaposed with the dishonest steward of Luke 16) and that both express the joy in heaven over a returned sinner. An equally powerful subtext, again an adjacent citation (Matt. 13:45–46, immediately following the treasure in the field), especially relevant to line 96 and to possible connections with Pearl, would be the pearl of great price: “Again the kingdom of heaven is like to a merchant seeking good pearls. Who when he had found one pearl of great price, went his way, and sold all that he had, and bought it.” With such treasure-seeking, cf. Holychurch at 1.43–53, 79–87, 136, 202 and the notes there. All these parables describe gaining the kingdom of heaven, identifying a vocacio (43L) that eventually will achieve the hereditas (60L) the dreamer has persistently claimed.

100–101 bigynne a tyme | That alle tymes of my tyme to profit shal turne: Certainly the lines address the mysterious multiplier effects of capitalistic chaffare, whereby apparent loss, the constant outlay of investment, sometimes achieves a wondrous reward beyond expectation. Cf. for example, Jerome’s famous discussion of the multifold “fruits” of virtuous chastity, Adversus Jovinianum 1.3 (PL 23:213, and L’s tree of C 18), or in this context, its source, the parable of the sower (Matt. 13:3–23). This last, yet again, forecasts the appearance of Piers in the poem as a desired object.

Yet equally, the lines may rely upon ecclesiastical legalism. Galloway (1992:95 n4) cites a Worcester Cathedral prior’s letter refusing to release a previously supported clerk from service to the chapter; the house “for a time and times has thus brought you up.” Galloway comments, “Education is a patron’s or institution’s proprietarial investment.” Being provided with a vocation does not necessarily create one’s freedom (reward or hereditas), but a further debt and potential loss. The locution may echo, to various effects, Dan. 7:22 and 25, “tempus advenit, et regnum obtinuerunt sancti” (the time came, and the saints obtained the kingdom), “usque ad tempus, et tempora, et dimidium temporis” (until a time, and times, and half a time).

102–4 Y rede the … ywende: Just as the dreamer has retreated, his interlocutors retreat. Their surrender (a fantasy of slack enforcement without even a prerequisite Meed-like appeal) leaves the dreamer ostensibly self-justified and self-authorized as poet. Reason and Conscience perform like the lord of Luke 16, who, in a mysterious act, accepts an ostensibly heavenly economics that relies upon worldly sharp practice. Of course, the dreamer chooses to respond to Conscience’s statement, not Reason’s; it allows him to persist in past behavior (contynue) once he has entered the church.

103 louable and leele to: Translate: “profitable and appropriate for.” The first adjective fluctuates among a range of self-reinforcing meanings—praiseworthy, licit, worthy of remuneration (cf. 8.194n, B 15.4n). See the discussions of lele labour and lawe and leaute, Prol.147n and B Prol.122n, respectively.

105–11 (B 5.3–10, A 5.3–10) The dreamer sleeps again: The first four lines in the C version have replaced the transition of AB 3–8; in these versions only characters in the dream, the king and knights of his Chamber (see Given-Wilson 1986:passim, esp. 160–74, 280–86), actually go to church. Will’s repositioning in C corresponds to a potentially significant shift in tone between the versions. In AB, the dreamer is (perhaps typically) insouciant; in C, he responds immediately to Conscience’s parting command, “to þe kyrke ywende.”

In the earlier versions (AB 5.3–8), while sadder 4 forecasts the lack of steadfastness addressed in the preceding C version addition, such a failure is associated, not with labor or the pursuit of perfection, but with inefficacious sleeping. The point is expanded in faren a furlong 5; the dreamer resumes his wandering, albeit briefly, and the minimal distance he travels has been chosen for its etymological force—which associates it with plowing (generally echoed at 7.307–8.2). The brevity of even his motion—much less purpose—finds an echo in the fastidiousness of softely 7 (which, of course, also recalls the opening of the poem and the previous onset of vision). And when Will prays, he repeats a public formula, my bileue, the Creed. See further 110n.

In contrast, C 105–8 sound legitimately penitential, in a way that revises both 5.30 and the dreamer’s response to Imaginative at B 12.27–28. Will enters the church and prays Byfore þe cross—as Donaldson suggests, in the nave, like any other penitent layperson (a check upon any clerical pride expressed in the previous conversation). He also performs conventional gestures that indicate sorrow for his sins, thus beginning the penaunce discrete he has promised at 84.

Knocking one’s breast punctuates the center of the general confession recited in every mass, the prayer “Confiteor”; there it accompanies the threefold repetitions, “peccavi nimis cogitatione, verbo, et opera, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.” The gesture will recur in the confessions of the Deadly Sins; see 6.63–64 (a parody completed by 67), 7.6, 60. Will again weeps within the dream at 6.2. Equally, in C his prayer is no longer the Creed, but my paternoster, a fulfillment of his earlier assertion about the efficacy of “fiat voluntas tua” (88), as well as public formula. To this newfound seriousness in C, one might link Kerby-Fulton’s suggestion (1990:22, 53) that sleep in church identifies a vision clearly prophetic. The dreamer urges his family to attend the Easter mass at 20.468–75 and returns to church at Easter, after a delay to write his preceding vision, at 21.1–5.

109 (B 5.9, A 5.9) Thenne mette me muche more then y byfore tolde: Rather than the line being an example of aaa/xy alliteration, the cesura may fall after muche, with b-verse alliteration on more and stress on -fore and told-. In this reading, there should be a mid-line comma, and one should translate, “Then I dreamed a great deal—even more than I described previously.”

110: This line, unique to C, draws the poem back from the waking London scene to Malvern, the site, in all three texts, of the dreamer’s first vision. The poem recourses to its opening, as if intervening materials had never happened, a feature Bennett and Schmidt¹ associate with bablede (AB 5.8), a muttered lulling they find reminiscent of AB Prol.10. This verb, attested nowhere else in the poem, accords with other elements of the AB portrayal and associates Will’s prayer with childish prattle or other unproductive speech; one might compare the opinion of a Lollard interrogated in the 1430s, that laypeople who pray in Latin might just as well say “bibull babull” (Hudson 1988:31). The word may be reflected in the similarly echoic formation 123 mamele; the only other use of this word in the poem, B 11.418, describes Adam’s fall.

111–200 (B 5.9–59, A 5.9–42) Reason’s sermon to the fair field of folk: John Burrow, in one of the most influential essays ever written on the poem (1965), identifies the “Action of the Second Vision” as an emphasis upon amendment. Burrow describes this as a four-part process: (1) Reason’s sermon enjoining penitence (which brings the inhabitants of the fair field to contrition, the first “part” of sacramental penitence); (2) the oral confessions of the Seven Deadly Sins, the second “part” (6.1–7.154); (3) pilgrimage, one possible manifestation of the acts of satisfaction, the third “part” (such satisfaction demonstrates a fulfilled desire for amendment) (7.155–9.2); and (4) absolution, the pardon for sin that Piers receives (9.3–294). Chaucer’s Parson provides a quite conventional guide to the “parts” of penance and their functions; cf. the “signposts” to his argument at CT X.107–15, 128–29, 315–21, 1029–33.

The scene begins as a public occasion and follows, as Burrow says (1965:249; cf. Stokes 1984:156), from Conscience’s insistence that amendment in the realm can only follow some reformation of the commune that will render it accepting of the rule of law (4.176–78). This public governmental theme gains through L’s various revisions progressively more emphatic expression within the sermon; see 180–96nn. But the public forum dissolves at 6.1: L conceives Conscience and Reason’s reformatio regni, not within the governmental sphere of Prol.-4, but as a private sacramental act. The folk of the fair field return to the narrative at 7.155, and the language of governmental relations only at 8.6 (cf. couenant 8.26).

Bennett argues that Reason’s oration forms a shifting sermo ad statūs, paralleled in Gower’s Vox clamantis and Miroir de l’omme. But when Owst (1926:247–65) discusses sermones ad statūs, as a genre distinct from either those de tempore (explanations of the daily, usually Sunday, gospel or epistle) or de sanctis (for the feast days of saints), he significantly discusses only Latin examples. These are often associated with episcopal visitations and delivered ad cleros (one prominent such status). Although John of Wales’s Communiloquium, for example, appears constructed to provide materials for addressing a wide range of social groups, sermones ad statūs to specific social classes represent a specialized genre, in the main confined to late twelfth- and thirteenth-century France (cf. d’Avray 1976:134–211, and for John’s Communiloquium, the extensive description, Swanson 1989:63–166). These collections were all composed by friars, which may explain the Lollard sectarian sniping of JU 251–52: “Frere, siþ ʓe wolen opinli preche aʓen þe defautis of prelatis, of prestis, lordis, lawiers & marchauntis & comouns.” (cited Owst 1961:220–21, Spencer 1993:66).

Owst’s voluminous demonstration of sermon commentary on different social groups (1961:210–470) thus substantially misleads. It insists on a selective presentation of sermon content, at the expense of recorded sermon form. For as Spencer points out (1993:65–67), the social commentary L here presents as Reason’s full text most usually is found in English sermons as a block of material placed within a text given over to other issues. Such reliance upon estates categories appears prominently in part 1 of Wimbledon’s sermon; for other examples from a single collection de tempore, see (the misnamed) Lollard Sermons, sermons 2/415–576; 8/200–410; 11A/202–300, 383–415; DM/524–618. The opening section of the first, 2/415–69, might be noted as particularly relevant here, since it addresses a series of clerical failures, including many of the topics broached at 146–67, as signs of the last days, the topic with which Reason opens.

Thus, Reason’s sermon belongs within the widely dispersed discourse of estate satire, analysis of class responsibilities; for the outstanding discussion, see Mann 1973 passim (and cf. 22.229–51n). In keeping with this discourse, Reason is generally informed by a social model of the commune as a series of clearly defined statūs, each with delimited duties and each necessarily adhering to these in order for the entire social organism to function. (Cf. the reference to Wimbledon in 43Ln.) Further, this discourse insists upon hierarchical relationships and the obedience to that figure of authority appropriate to each status. Because of such universalism, the address to a variety of statūs, rather than a single one, Reason’s oration depends upon persistent analogies between figures in functionally comparable positions.

After a brief introduction (115–25) filled with portents of disaster brought on by sin, the sermon follows in a lockstep manner, quite atypical of L’s usual development, Reason’s speech at 4.108–30 (cf. Alford 1988b:209, elaborating upon Dunning 1980:85). There Reason has laid out the conditions for a messianic/Utopian society; cf. 4.144–45 and its echo of Conscience at 3.452–63. Here Reason, imagining as a future the inversion of messianic hope, expresses no reuthe as he demands the removal of sinful behavior so as to redeem individuals and society (cf. Burrow 1965:249). Reason thus ticks off here in close order all his earlier critiques, from purnele porfiel (4.111, corresponding to 5.128) through to Rome-running (4.122–30 reduced to 5.197–98). With those categories Reason invokes, contrast Wimbledon’s traditional three estates, specified as priests, knights/lords and judges, laborers and merchants, respectively (lines 100–118); or in the Lollard Sermons, prelates, parsons, regular clergy; lords, gentry; and merchants, artificers, husbandmen (11A/383–415, the final triad of “commons” again at DM/548–49). Yet both Reason and Wimbledon accord with Lewte’s counsel to openly rebuke publicly known faults. Schmidt calls that figure’s advice to Will, “To reden it in retorik to arate dedly synne” (B.11.102, slightly varied at 12.36) “one of the most important lines in PP” (1987:13).

The handling of the sermon across the three versions typifies L’s poetic development throughout the second vision. A, as customary elsewhere, is the briefest rendition, generally an outline of those topics L broaches in all three texts. B subjects this standing text to two types of expansion—a modest addition of materials within the sermon as presented in A (e.g., B 5.32–40, although some A manuscripts include, perhaps by legitimate archetypal descent, partial equivalents unprinted by Kane) and an equally outline-like smattering of new topics near the end (B 5.48–55). In contrast, C doubles the length of the sermon, in part by extensive development of B (as in the case of king and pope, 180–96). But just as the first half of this passus “front-loads” parts of the B “inquisicio de Dowell” (there Imaginative’s rebuke from B 12), so L imports into the sermon—and many subsequent passages of the second vision—materials originally treated later in the poem. Here the primary example is the prophetic attack on regular clergy (146–79, from B 10.297–335; cf. A 11.204–16). This represents but one example of a persistent form of revision in C’s third vision. There L removes a good deal of the carping on bad priests that had characterized earlier versions, most particularly A, with its several efforts at aligning “the three Do’s” with clerical status.

112–13 (B 5.11–12, A 5.11–12) resoun/Consience: Burrow (1965:250) describes the scene as “a great ecclesiastical occasion,” and, as Pearsall sees, the cross precedes a bishop in formal ecclesiastical processions, such as archiepiscopal visitations. As Pearsall also mentions (114n), Reason’s preaching is reminiscent of sermons in the open air, e.g., at St. Paul’s Cross. (Bennett in fact confuses the cross, carried in both B and C versions, with an open-air stationary cross; for an example of such a canopied preaching station, see the photo of the surviving Dominican example in Hereford, Hinnebusch 1951:plate 23, following 192.)

Each version formulates the relationship between the two allegorical figures differently. In A, Conscience gives the sermon, and Reason is not mentioned; Kirk comments (1972:46) that the poem shifts from the external to the internal, “enacting what happens when conscience brings self-awareness to creatures.” In B, Reason, “more priestly” and thus “more appropriate” according to Bennett, preaches, and Conscience does not appear. And in C, Reason still preaches but is accompanied by Conscience; Whitworth argues (1972:5–6) that they appear here as universalized figures, not the private faculties he sees as having addressed the dreamer in the preceding waking episode.

The C version complicates matters further, through its inclusion of a detail not present in earlier versions. At 4.184–86, the two personifications have been associated with specific governmental offices, Reason as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Conscience as King’s Justice. Reason might appropriately be conceived as an episcopal figure also performing as royal official; Treasurers of the Exchequer were frequently bishops also; see Tout 1920–33, 6:19–24. The association of Conscience with justice and his role here as liturgical acolyte is considerably more amorphous. But certainly, these judicial appointments resonate with C’s major expansion, the materials at 180–96, which imply a conjunction between royal and ecclesiastical legal discourses (cf. 140–45n). Stokes (1984:42–44, 60, 159 etc.) argues that lawyer and priest are comparable legalistic figures (and constructively draws attention to the imbrication of the penitential system in legal metaphor).

But Reason ryht as a pope 112 is detached from a secular legal system that idealizes a strict lewte (without perversely merciful incursions from Meed). He is here associated with an office differently founded (through apostolic succession) and the vehicle of divine mercy and grace (recall Prol. 128–38 and contrast that passage with the following lines). De Deguilleville’s Reason, who first appears at the opening of the dreamer’s pilgrimage, is routinely presented as preaching or giving sermons, rather than just speaking (e.g., PLM 447, 510). She goes to a “chayre” to give a formal sermon, instruction to clerics on the responsibilities of clerical judgment, that is, penitential chastisement (PLM 589–690). She argues, in part, that clerics resemble the Cherub with burning sword who guards the New Jerusalem (cf. Gen. 3:24), the role L will assign Grace and Amend-you at 7.243–54.

Conscience as Reason’s cross-bearer (113 crocer) expresses the necessity of both powers, but (as signaled at 3.437–38, 4.5) with the practical and experiential force subordinated to the more theoretical figure (cf. 5.89–91n). Reason’s directorial function is implicit in radde 125, which with reule is the action most frequently associated with the figure. Note line 181 below, where Reason speaks for Conscience.

115–22 (B 5.13–20, A 5.13–20) Sinfulness and disaster: The theme of natural disaster as a check upon human sinfulness recurs with some frequency. Wit, within a model that does not allow for any redemptive possibility, discusses Noah’s flood in this spirit at 10.220–33; and in a moment of frustration over apparently intractable labor problems, the dreamer wishes for a similar emergency, in this case famine, at 8.341–52 (see the nn. there). Imaginative lists “poustees of pestilences” among God’s warning tribulations, messages to the sinful, “Amende þee while þou myʓt” (B 12.10–12L). Following Stokes (1984:203), the appearance of Death at 22.80–105 has much the same effect. Bennett refers to Bromyard and Brinton, who argue that plagues are vengeance for human vices. 117 pertliche implies that Reason finds this a reading of the storm of 1362 that requires no proof.

Just as frequently, however, L perceives disaster, and perhaps especially the pestilence, as less a cure for sin than a force that fosters it. See, e.g., the dreamer at lines 70–79 above (speaking in the context of statute law created to control the effects of plague depopulation) or Study at 11.52–77. Meiss (1951:67–70) was perhaps the first to comment upon this bifurcated response to the plague, both severity and license.

115 (B 5.13, A 5.13) this pestelences: For the recurrent episodes of bubonic plague that began in 1348, see Prol.82n.

116 (B 5.14, A 5.14) the southweste wynde on saturday At euene: See Skeat’s lengthy note (derived from Tyrwhitt); this hurricane can be identified through L’s references to saturday and the southweste. The date of the storm (15 January 1361/2; the feast of St. Maur, as the verses cited by Lawler 2011:84, 101 indicate) provides a terminus a quo for the A version, although a shaky one: the event was remembered for years (indeed, even invoked at the time of the October 1987 storm that struck southern England). Bennett cites Anominalle Chronicle, which includes a reference to uprooted trees, both those in orchards and those in woods, very much in the spirit of subsequent lines.

121 (B 5.19, A 5.19) turned vpward here tayl: The trees with roots in the air (an unusual usage, for tail usually means a plant’s leaves or stem) expand upon the topic of a world turned vpsodoun by sin; cf. PC 608–87, where, following Innocent III, sinful mankind is compared with an inverted (and fruitless) tree. In passus 4, Reason spoke as a utopian; now those hopes have been inverted, and at 22/B 20.53–57 such an inversion will mark the Last Days of the world (and the poem); see the note there. Heist argues (1952:189–90) that L here reproduces an unusual Old French variant for the “sixth sign” before Doomsday (cf. Heist 28–29; for the more normal sanguineus ros [bloody dew]; cf. PC 4780–81); see also Kerby-Fulton 1990:16–18.

Bennett identifies Beches and brode okes 120 as the most strongly rooted of all trees. For the proverbial well-rooted oak, see Trevisa DPR 973/35, 1027/33–34; and the grammar-school text L surely knew, Avianus’s fable 16 (the oak and the reed); cf. Chaucer, T&C 2.1180–90.

121–22 (B 5.19–20, A 5.19–20) in … hem: in tokenynge of drede | That is not simply a metrically appropriate equivalent for as a dreadful token | That “as a fearful sign that”; rather, translate, “as a revelation of their fears that.” Bennett and Pearsall identify the antecedent of hem 122 as segges 119 (although they equally note the alternation between direct and indirect address here and elsewhere). But hem actively contrasts with we 119 (AB ye), and the grammar of ar domesday is not as Bennett Pearsall suppose.

Rather than an adjectival modifier of synne, the phrase is adverbial and modifies fordon. At Doomsday, the accumulated might of human sin will expunge Nature so as to produce a new heaven and new earth (cf. Apoc. 21:1 and PC 6343–98), but within history, continuing human sin can cause Nature to suffer before its due time. Cf. 10.228–33, where Wit accepts Nature’s destruction as an unfortunate byproduct of human sin; and Gloucester, at Shakespeare, King Lear 1.2.90: “nature is scourged with the sequent effects.”

126 (B 5.24, A 5.24) wastoures: As Stokes (1984:157) sees, Reason’s actual argument ad statūs opens by circling back to the very beginning of Will’s first vision, Prol.24 (cf. 93–101n). The lines, especially the greater particularity of the C revision, follow from 5.28 (q.v.).

128–39L (B 5.26–39L, A 5.26–33) Disciplining the family: Purnell introduces a series of four examples and a general admonition. These insist upon the husbandly power and responsibility to coerce domestic obedience. Purnell’s pride in her apparel indicates how a wife, left to her own devices, will behave. In the next pair of injunctions, Reason recalls to the complaisant husbands Tom and Watt their duties in controlling such wifely excess; in the final example and the admonition, he addresses fathers’ responsibilities for their children. For such a general parental responsibility, one form of patriarchal/magisterial ordering of society, see PC 5544–59, 5578–87. Purnell will reappear as a personification of Pride at 6.3. In her preceding appearance at 4.111, as here, her name almost becomes absorbed into her purfyle, the costly fur edging on her garment (cf. 2.9); Bennett associates her fascination with her clothes with Meed’s finery—all money-generating show, as opposed to the “savings” that Reason here enjoins, recalling 1.50–53. Cf. also Ch’s description of the Monk’s sleeves, CT I.193–94, and Mann’s comments (1973:221 n27). Unusually, Chaucer’s Parson addresses pride in clothing with far greater verve than does L; see CT X.412–31. The topic was of more than modest social interest. An abortive and soon abandoned effort at sumptuary legislation paid particular attention to furred borders of garments as a way of enforcing class distinctions. See 37 Edward III (1363, repealed 1364), cc. 8–15, SR 1:380–82; and the discussion, Strohm 1989:5–7 (5–14 passim).

Similar satire on fashion appears in the discussion of Wat’s wife. Women’s headdresses provide a definitive example of their concern for frivolous externals, and satiric accounts are epidemic in vernacular antifeminism, thus in analyses of this gender-based status. See Mann 1973:121 and Owst’s sermon examples 1961:390–404. The most notorious ME examples are the Wife of Bath (CT I.453–55; see Mann 1973:267 n91) and the Prioress’s wimple (and what it does not cover) (CT I.151, 154–56; Mann 1973:129–30). Robbins, in his notes (323–24) to HP no. 53, itself an example of the commonplace, cites a variety of vernacular parallels, to which one can add Brown XIII, no. 74/31–35 (a Harley lyric).

Tom Stowe introduces a series of injunctions to fathers/husbands to discipline their families. Most commentators have cited (with not a little relish) evidence that medieval husbands were expected to whip their wives into subservience. This assumption of female wantonness, and of the consequent need for male correction, has been present in the poem, together with the discourse of antifeminist satire that underlies it, since Meed’s appearance. The argument over Meed’s proper husband (cf. 2.17, where L introduces the premise that she must “belong to” someone) is, after all, simply the question, “Under what stable (because masculine) control should she belong?” Cf. 3.121–24 and Mann’s perception (1973:121) that women are often characterized in estates literature by their marital status. And charges against Meed routinely allege that she is only a wanton female; cf. 3.57, 162–71, 188–90L, 4.158–61.

But for a more normative view, see Hanawalt’s discussion of this topic (1986:206–8, 213–14), which insists that the medieval marriage necessarily had as ideal a domestic partnership. However, within this model, wives were to be obedient and husbands responsible for their correction, should they err badly. Following on his perception of a sin-filled world, Reason describes as if normative situations in fact extreme; Felice, for example, is “a wikkede wyf þat wol nat be chasted” (19.303–4).

From a husband’s responsibility for the behavior of his wife, Reason passes on to the tutelage he owes his children. At 6.15–18, Pride will assert that her career began by disobeying her parents. Consequently, “unbuxomness” is associated with this vice and with the very origins of sin itself (cf. B 1.109–13, 2.87). The topic recurs later in this vision at 6.12–29, 7.213, 8.82–91.

Insistence upon paternal correction recalls Conscience’s discussion of Hophni and Phineas at Prol.109–17, although his actual moralization of that biblical anecdote is more relevant to lines 140–42 below. Wit will address the parental responsibility for “fauntokynes … þat fauten inwit” at 10.183–87. With the entire passage, cf. FM 88–90 on disobedient children; their faults are laid upon their parents “for lack of correction and chastising in their youth” (propter defectum correctionis et castigationis dum fuerunt iuvenes, 88/61). The author of FM, in his effort to provide other Franciscans with sermon material of the sort L here evokes, relies heavily on bits of proverbial wisdom; in addition to Prov. 13:24 (L’s text at 139L), he cites (90/76–83) Ecclus. 30:1, 22:3, 30:2, as well as “Hendyng’ ”s English proverb, “Lef chyld lore behoueth” (cf. B 5.38). Hanawalt associates (1986:182–83) such parental tutelage with ages four to six—at the end of which, the dreamer, ʓut ʓong 35, was sent to school; she includes references to the widespread ME literature of parental instruction. See further Owst’s sermon parallels (1961:461–68).

128 (B 5.26, A 5.26) purnele: The name is a vernacular derivative of Petronella, and the saint appears in B 6.275 (the parallel 8.296 reads Poul, as do nearly all B manuscripts). Mustanoja (1970:52) shows that purnele is a common typename for the flirtatious country girl of French pastourelles. But he also draws attention (74–75) to 6.367 and 17.72, where purnele is a (priest’s) whore (to which one might add Mum 1360–61 and perhaps 6.135–36). These underlie the eventual development into OED Parnel/Pernel (a loose woman).

130 (B 5.28, A 5.28) Tomme stoue … : Tom needs two staues to beat Felice for her misbehavior, which has landed her in the wyuene pyne, the cucking-stool (see 3.79n). Her name corresponds with that of a willful fair in the romance Guy of Warwick, mentioned at B 12.47–48, and of a woman (coupled with a Purnell) prideful of her apparel at RichR 3.156–60.

Like many details here, Tom may be a character from proverb-lore. At least, a similar figure appears in an early fourteenth-century sermon with English bits from Fountains (a Cistercian house in West Yorkshire); see Fletcher 1998:32–35. Initially introduced as “Thomas þe Thome” (empty/idle Tom, 29–30), this figure is subsequently reidentified, under the name “Tome Stouue” (Tom the [hewn-down] stump, short Tom, 58–80), with the flesh that chops down all virtuous works. But as husband, he should be the commanding soul, not subject to his wife, the flesh; the preacher cites a couplet, “4ar Thome Stouue es at ham, | God gif þe husband schame,” to indicate his mismanagement and status as evil neighbor.

133 (B 5.31, A 5.31) here hed: In Reason’s valuation, Watt’s wife outspends him for her headdress by twenty to one (half a mark = 6 s. 8 d., a groat = 4 d.) Contrast “Hicke þe hackenayman” (6.378), whose hood, precisely because valueless, generates social value in the tavern.

134–35 (B 5.32–33) bette, Betene: Skeat identifies the names as those of a man (Bat, from Bartholomew) and a woman (from Beatrice), respectively. Both occur elsewhere; see 2.114 and 6.353. Pearsall¹ suggests that Betty is Bat’s daughter (and that the lines are thus linked with those that follow, rather than those that precede). On children’s contribution to the family economy, see Hanawalt 1986:156–68.

137 (B 5.35, A 5.33) Late no wynnynge forwanyen hem: The C version of this discussion looks suspiciously as if L revised from a B manuscript that had skipped from children 34 to the word’s repetition in line 40, forcing the poet to reconstruct the passage from memory.

This is the only use of MED forwēnen v. after the early thirteenth century. However, the sense is clear from the etymon, OE wenian “to train” (the modern “wean”); hence the compound implies “train disastrously,” that is, “pamper.”

139L (B 5.39L) Qui parcit … : Prov. 13:24 (He that spareth the rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him correcteth him betimes). B 5.39 provides an explicit gloss that explains 139 the wyse, a translation of the common Latin sapiens (“Solomon, author of biblical wisdom books”).

140–45 (B 5.41–47, A 5.34–39) Reason advises the clergy: All three versions include a brief general address; in it, Reason offers advice to two distinct classes of “clergy.” In all texts, the complaint is the rather generalized one enunciated in, e.g., the 1410 Lollard “Disendowment Bill” (Hudson SEWW 137/86–90), “they lyven nat now ne done the office of trewe curates … ne they helpe nat the pore comens with here lordeshippes … ne they lyve nat in penaunce ne in bodely travaylle as trewe religious shulden by here profession.”

Lines 140–42 address secular clergy, those having cure of souls in the world, the prelates and prestes of 140. Cf. Chaucer’s Parson and the emphasis upon his exemplary status, CT I.496–506, 527–28; and Mann 1973:65 and 237 n43. Contrasting figures occur ubiquitously in the poem, e.g., the hirelings of Prol.81–84 or the ignorant Sloth of 7.30–34. L here invokes the proverb “practice what you preach” (cf. Whiting P 358–62), as Recklessness will do at 11.233–35L. See further Lawler 2002.

In contrast, religioun comprises the regular clergy, those living according to a specific reule. L eventually specifies them in C (156, 170, 173) as the expected groups: monks, nuns, canons, and friars. For such individuals, the rule itself defines the status and acts appropriate to it, cloistered spiritual service to God and to the poor (although friars are not cloistered).

All three versions of Reason’s address agree in the same relatively moderate threat. If religious do not keep the rule, they will face discipline from the appropriate authority—not an ecclesiastical figure (e.g., episcopal visitation), but þe kyng and his consayl. Monastic performance is a matter of public policy.

In describing this chastisement/correction at 144–45 (A 5.38–39, B 5.46–47), L invokes (as he will more explicitly in the subsequent C expansion; see 163–67 et seq.nn) specifically English views of lay-monastic relationships. ʓoure comunes apayre literally refers to withholding food; cf. Prol.143, Piers at 8.167–68, or Donaldson’s rendition (1990:40/46), “curtail your rations.” But the word comunes stands by synecdoche for the whole complex of commonly held monastic possessions, as the resulting argument (e.g., lines 173–75) explains. This emphasis continues in the designation of king and council as a steward, the officer who controls domestic arrangements, both the master of festivities in a hall (cf. Reason as styward of halle 15.39) and the central administrative factotum in a great household, responsible for accounts, the movement of supplies, etc.

At this point, Reason asks religioun to see that it holds its temporal possessions in revocable trust. They came to religious establishments by gift from laypersons, and king and council can enforce proper behavior by rescinding their prior donations. Rather than letting religious beneficiaries act as their own trustees, lay figures will temporarily administer the properties as intended under the original grant.

Such a view relies upon English law and its common acceptation; see Plucknett 1949:92–93. Statute of Westminster II, c. 41 (1285; SR 1:91–92) builds upon earlier legislation designed to enforce payments or services due under a lease (see c. 4 at SR 1:48, c. 21 at 1:82–83). A lessee who fails to pay rent or provide services for two years can be sued for return of the property, and the action is heritable for both parties—successors in the lease and heirs of the lessor. Westminster II, c. 41 extends this right of recovery to include spiritual services, “But if the Land so given for a Chantry, Light, Sustenance of poor People, or other Alms to be maintained or done, be not aliened, but such Alms is withdrawn by the Space of Two Years, an Action shall lie for the Donor or his Heir to demand the Land so given in demean.” (The statute, thus, as Robert Swanson points out to me, actually does not threaten a monastery’s full endowment, but specific funds for spiritual purposes, perhaps particularly chantries, engaged in prayers for the patrons.) In any case, L’s position is moderate, for the return of endowments is not irrevocably to the donor’s “demesne,” but only a temporary cessation (til 145) to coerce performance. On the topic, see further Heale 2004.

As an example of such a grant, cf. Thomas of Lancaster’s 1318 gift of lands to Whalley (Lancs.), a Cistercian abbey, “in free, pure, and perpetual alms, free and quit of every secular service, exaction, and demand, reserving nothing therein to myself and my heirs except prayers” (in liberam, puram, et perpetuam elemosynam, solutam et quietam ab omni seruicio seculari, exactione, et demanda, nichil nobis et heredibus nostris inde reseruando nisi preces et orationes), from Hulton 1847–49, 1:249; cf. 2:527, 4:940. Aston provides (1984:63–64) examples of legal cases brought by knights for return of their endowments on the grounds of clerical nonperformance of promised services.

146–79 (B 10.297–335, cf. A 11.204–16) Reason chastises regular clergy and predicts their disendowment and reformation: L advances this material from Clergy’s discussion early in Dowell. The revision resembles the relocation of the adjacent B materials concerning Hophni and Phineas to Prol.95–124. Here lines 141–42 seem to recall to the preacher Clergy at B 10.257–335; see further 146–55n. In making both C revisions, L attempts to group passages with similar themes in early stages of the poem, while simultaneously streamlining and concentrating the discussion of learning in the Dowell passūs. There Clergy’s assault on the religious orders echoes Study’s diatribe against the rich and their dining habits.

The qualified threat of Laste 144, retained from AB, is buried in the charges of this large C relocation, with its climax in the famous prophecy of disendowment at lines 176–77. Here L, without having Reason abandon his reliance on estates satire, supplements that discourse with another, the language of expropriation. Such threats, as Aston shows (1984:49–57; followed by Scase 1989:109–12), were far from uncommon c. 1358–1410; in an era when royal and magnatial policy was frequently driven by considerations of “national defense,” temporal lands under clerical ownership often appeared an attractive source of funds to underwrite military activities (cf. the emphasis on military benefits in the “Disendowment Bill,” Hudson SEWW 135/6–15). Wilks (1972:esp. 116–27) discusses the centrality of disendowment to Wycliffe’s reforming efforts at renovatio; at Opera Minora 64, he argues that founders’ heirs, if in need, have a right to reclaim church endowments.

This passage introduces substantial disproportion into Reason’s sermon. Not only does it overweight one status, but it will come to breach the nonmessianic tone of the whole. The performance in C perhaps most resembles the sermon attacking avarice preached by the Lollard Nicholas Hereford on Ascension Day, 1382 (ed. Forde 1989). Like Reason’s effort, it was public (at the cross in the cemetery of the Augustinian canons, St. Frideswide’s, Oxford) and delivered “in vulgari ydeomate Anglicano” (237/13, although only surviving in a Latin notarial reportatio). And although Hereford ostensibly addressed all classes, he gave two of his main divisions over to failures of regular clergy and concluded (as Reason will not) with an invitation to disendowment and return to the apostolic life (240/[1] 15–38).

L presents errant monastics as personifying the violation of status-based ethics. Reason first elaborates (146–55), since religioun has apparently forgotten them, the joys of the strait inclaustration that defines this social group. But at the center of the passage (156–63), he identifies current behavior as an effort to subvert status altogether, regular clergy’s effort to claim for itself the perquisites proper to another social group, knights. Religious orders have redefined the verb holde; it should mean “preserve or follow [the rule],” not “seize [temporal lordship] tenaciously.” (Contrast the basic formulation of Prol.139–42 and Wimbledon’s view of status, mentioned in 43n, as well as Will’s effort in the waking interlude to redefine aristocratic “estate” as spiritual “hereditas.”). After identifying the social costs of such behaviors (164–67), Reason concludes his discussion with a prophecy of disendowment and reform (168–79).

146–55 (B 10.297–310, A 11.204–10) Reason explains the ancient religious ideal: Reason now defines “religion” as a status; he relies upon complementary and importantly, very ancient metaphors (only the first of them in A). The first is negative—that the noncloistered monk is an absurdity and a dead thing, a fish out of water. For a discussion of this commonplace, see The Riverside Chaucer 807, CT I.180n, as well as Mann’s commentary (1973:30–31). The “Verba seniorum” in the Vitae patrum is responsible for the immense dispersal of the figure; see Hanna 1987:411.

In the context of Reason’s allusion to Gregory and The reule, the figure recalls Benedict’s definition of “monk” in Regula ch. 1: “gen[us] coenobitarum, id est monasteriale, militans sub regula vel abbate.” Fixity of abode and community of purpose, specified in the basic virtues the Rule inculcates (obedience, poverty, and chastity) make a monk. Benedict further specifies this status by contrast with two tribes of evil monks who wander guideless following their own wills, not a rule or superior, saraibites and gyrovagues. (The passage can be connected with Will’s interrogation and the discussions that follow from it; is Will a holy hermit, Benedict’s fourth genus monachorum, or simply, like lollares and lewede Ermytes, a graceless gyrovague?)

The Benedictine ideal of communal responsibility and support underpins Reason’s second metaphor. The cloister is a nonworldly place of spiritual (L, mindful of the unaccommodated Will the scholar, has Reason add “and intellectual”) fulfillment. The comparison of cloister and heaven is an utter commonplace; see Bloomfield 1961:72, 197–98 n13. Orsten (1970:528) quotes bishop Brinton, who identifies the statement as a proverb (although Wit, as perhaps typically, manages to get the identification wrong in B 9.119–20): “iuxta vulgare, ‘si sit vita angelica in terra, aut est in studio, vel in claustro.’ ” Similarly, FM declares (684/67): “vita claustralis est vita angelica,” and see further Wenzel 2008:186, 278–79. Cf. Kaske 1957, who traces the idea to a well-known sermon ascribed to Peter Damian (but actually by a follower of Bernard, Nicholas of Clairvaux). Another example occurs in Peter of Blois’s epistle 13 (PL 207:42); see further Lawler 2013:59–60, with further citations.

The evocation of heuene on erthe looks ahead to lines 171 and 186–90 (with retrospective allusions to 1.103–10). In these later passages, L makes the more sweeping suggestion that society at large should be reformed so as to imitate the ideal aboriginal society of prelapsarian Heaven. Until such reformation is completed, the cloister should be the closest worldly representation of that state.

146 (B 10.298, A 11.204) Gregory þe grete clerk: In AB, L claims that the fish out of water image comes from Gregory’s Moralia, which is incorrect: no passage of this sort occurs anywhere in Gregory. Gregory was the first monastic pope, and the evangelical mission he arranged in 597 also (as Pearsall says) brought the first monks to southern England. In addition, he was a major theorist of the monastic life, authoring, for example, the standard Vita Benedicti, book 2 of the Dialogi, PL 66:125–204. Cf. B 10.330, where, for all these reasons, L can refer to monks as Gregories godchildren. Moreover, Gregory on several occasions discusses the evils of wandering religious (see Epistolae 5.20.5, 9.108.19, 11.26.78, 12.6.27; Homeliae in Evangelia 19.7.11). The C version drops this inaccurate specificity: “Gregory disseminated (gart write, not a statement of authorship) the rule: it implies that wandering monks are like fish out of water.”

154 (B 10.307) no man to chyde ne to fyhte: Wrath seconds this view at 6.151–57, but equally argues (6.128–42) that some inclaustrated women are not so restrained.

156–62 (B 10.311–16, A 11.211–16) Reason describes dissolute modern monasticism: Just like Chaucer’s Monk, modern monastics, according to Reason, have fused two social statuses properly distinct (cf. Will at lines 76–77). While still claiming to be monks and canons, they behave like secular magnates. Cf. 167 ʓe leten ʓow alle as lordes; or the language of “The Disendowment Bill” (Hudson SEWW 137/84–85): “worldely clerkes, bisshopes, abbotes and priours that arun so worldly lordes;” or Wimbledon, cited 5.35–44n. Not only do monks now routinely desert the cloister, but when they do so, they ryde 157, and consequently, ryde out of aray “in disorder,” with the strong undertone “out of their proper state” (and not just out of their proper habit/clothing). Cf., following Pearsall, Chaucer’s Monk as an outridere (CT I.166) and 4.116. AB have the blunter yet possibly less pointed a rydere, a rennere [archetypal B romere] by stretes.

Reason highlights two aspects of these abuses. First of all, modern monastics behave as only noblemen should. Riding with hawk and hound is virtually a synecdoche for the noble life; for an early example, see Brown XIII, no. 48/1–3, and analogues are legion; Skeat provides historical examples of episcopal hunters (supplemented by Mann 1973:23–24, 221–22 n29); Aston (1984:53, 59) mentions two Lollard parallels from the 1380s, “The Petition to King and Parliament” (Arnold SEW 519–20) and Hereford’s sermon (239/65–66); Owst (1961:263–64, 282–84) cites Lollard Sermons 2/417–30, 438–42; 11A/217–46, 249–50; see also Wimbledon, lines 259–62; and the Auchinleck “Simonie” 121–30. The specific association of this behavior with monks may be a late medieval development; at any rate, canon 15 of the fourth Lateran council (1215) banned both hawking and hunting for all religious persons in the context of a canon bemoaning the ill effects of drunken carousing on those who serve the altar (cf. the supplement to Innocent III’s Regesta, no. 211, PL 217:250, specifically of monks).

Other details support this metaphor for usurpation. A emphasizes the monk’s armament, A bidowe or a baselard 214, which recalls abuses the dreamer attacks at 58 (and see 22.218–19n). The B parallel to line 162, the aristocratic monk’s reported question, who lered hym curteisie? (B 10.316), involves a status confusion Chaucer displays with the Prioress, at CT I.132, 137–41 (cf. Mann 1973:34, 225 n62, 272 n36). C manages something like the same sense with the implicit pun that joins lordeyne (rascal, lowborn fellow) with the monk’s improper “lordly” aspirations.

Second, Reason charges that modern monastics interest themselves in the basic goals of lordship, the exploitation of an estate. Following Pearsall’s explanation of fram places to maneres 159 as “from one country residence to another,” they have become land-hungry proprietors of more than they need. With ypurchaced 158, cf. the comment of the Knight in the Lollard “Dialogue between a Knight and a Clerk” (Hudson SEWW 132–33/47–51): “ʓe [clerics] haue þe þridde parte of þis land in ʓour handes, and ʓit ʓe beþe about to purchase and amortaise euer more and more, so þat, ʓeue ʓe had ʓour will, in processe of tyme ʓe schuld haue all þe possessiouns of þis land in your handes.” The verb “amortaise” (to gain inalienable possession of properties by mortmain, “the dead hand”; cf. 17.55) alludes to one common lay objection to temporal ownership by clerical foundations; disendowment procedures sought precisely to overcome this claim to perpetual possession, a right contested between crown and clergy since Edward I. Aston (1984:62–63, 79 n94) cites parallels for such complaints, including passages from John Trevisa’s translation of ps.-Ockham’s Dialogus (contemporary with L’s composition of the C version). Trevisa was, of course, a magnate dependent and not, so far as we know, a Lollard (if perhaps, one of the Wycliffite translators).

163–67 (B 10.317–21) Reason explains how religious disrupt the parochial system: Having described the abusive result (sumptuous behavior), Reason now turns to its causes. As Pearsall explains, he attacks magnatial donation of the right to appoint parochial incumbents (“advowsons”; cf. persones 165 and Prol.81–84n) to religious corporations. For the ubiquity of this procedure with houses of Augustinian canons, in particular, see Southern 1970:244–48. Typically, L claims, such corporate bodies, rather than providing a rector, or even a cheap vicar, to hold services, retain the entire income of the church and redirect it to their own sumptuous uses. Not only is the parish congregation unserved and its poor unsupported, but the untended fabric collapses. Here auters 164 is particularly pointed, since in England, by custom, the parish was responsible for upkeep of the nave, the lay portion of the church, the priest/patron for the clerical chancel. The argument recurs at 17.54–73 (although there it equally addresses the consequent pauperization of lords, with which cf. William Taylor’s sermon, 17–18/545–58).

One can generate extensive parallels to the argument, especially from Lollard texts (like Taylor’s); see Skeat and Pearsall’s notes. A complaint about this abuse, seen as an English custom within a universal church infected by temporalities, heads “Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards” (1395), which mentions “chirchis … slayne be appropriacion to diuerse placys” (Hudson SEWW 24/8–9). Lollards are not simply complaining against clerical ownership but also against the disruption of both parochial instruction and the eleemosynary system. With regard to the latter, cf. such discussions as 8.222–36n and 288n, 9.58–70n.

Thus, the double reference, to reuthe 164 and pite 166, draws attention to the appropriation of the parish’s income/tithes to sustain a superfluous lifestyle, rather than to use as alms. Cf. Holychurch at 1.186–96 (where she is, however, speaking of chaplains, rather than monastics). Reason here opposes the should-be poor—who, of course, constantly protest that they are so, in spite of chartre evidence—to the actualities of dilapidation and poverty. Like L’s related discussion at B 15.340–46, Aston (1984:45) cites Jerome, Epistolae 66.8 (PL 22:644): “Pars sacrilegii est rem pauperum dare non pauperibus” (it is a form of sacrilege to give the poor’s right to those who aren’t poor), a sentence Gratian includes in his Decretum (2.12.1,5–7, CJC 1:677–78). The tag was cited as a logic that should compel disendowment during the 1371 Parliament, as well as by Wycliffe and Lollard authors (see Aston 1984:48, 51, 60, 71 n29). But in these complaints, L expresses neither the opinion of a lunatic fringe nor his individualistic and sharply honed perception of widespread poverty; as Aston mentions (1984:64–65), Parliament passed a statute designed to curb such abuses, 15 Rich. II, c. 6 (SR 2:80).

163 (B 10.317) Lytel hadde lordes ado: As Pearsall¹ points out, an example of litotes: “Surely lords could have thought of something better to do,” a topic to which L returns in line 172. At the conclusion of the original A discussion here (11.216), L suggests a much narrower resolution than that found in BC; Religion should look to þe memorie of his foundours, should use the monastic church to serve benefactors by performing memorial masses that will shorten their purgatorial suffering. (Thus, when he composed A, L implied that monks should behave as the dreamer claims he does earlier in this C passus.) Such a view, given the sect’s belief in the universality of the church and in salvation by divine election, is distinctly non-Lollard; cf., as Aston (1984:53, 56) suggests, “The Twelve Conclusions,” Hudson SEWW 26/73–92; and Hudson 1988:309–10.

165 (B 10.319) be hemsulue at ese: Cf. the complaint of “The Disendowment Bill” (Hudson, SEWW 137/90–92): “But of euery estate [worldly clerics] take luste and ese and putte fro hem the travaylle and takyth profytes that shulden kome to trewe men”; and Wimbledon, lines 271–76. On the religious’ fall from their original poverty, see Mum 540–50 (perhaps particularly of Augustinian canons) and Hereford 239/65–66 “in sua prima fundacione non dedignabantur vocari et esse serui et rustici, set iam …” (In their first foundation, they did not disdain to be called—indeed, to be—servants and peasants, but now …).

166 (B 10.320) puyre chartre: The noun refers to the document recording the monastery’s endowment, the gift of secular lords. The word “charity” is presumably a loud subtext, mirroring the very suppression of their responsibilities by bad religious (cf. the “chartered streets” of Blake’s London). Cf. the similar submerged word-play of Prol.62, where one hears “chaplain,” not Chapman.

168–79 (B 10.322–35) Reason waxes prophetic: This passage, far more so than a second, more pointed example (17.204–38) was central to L’s sixteenth-century reception. George Puttenham (1589) identifies L as a “malcontent of that time” who “bent himselfe wholy to taxe the disorders of that age and specially the pride of the Romane Clergy, of whose fall he semeth to be a very true Prophet” (60). Similarly, Crowley’s preface (1560), which specifically singles out this passage (“concerning the suppression of Abbaies”), speaks of L and Wycliffe together: “it pleased God to open the eyes of many to se hys truth, geuing them boldenes of herte, to open their mouthes and crye oute agaynste the worckes of darckenes” (Skeat 2:lxxiii–v).

For these early readers, Reason’s words were apparently “fulfilled” in the 1530s. But modern readings have contentiously swung between hopes that L offers here a specific program and disappointment that that he merely enunciates a future hope. Readings purely prophetic appear with some frequency; by way of indicating the partiality of the Reformation reading (and in deference to the staunchly promonastic reading of the poem in Bloomfield 1961), Pearsall¹ (177n) argues that L is only concerned with the millenialistic king of 3.441–42 (a view now retracted in 168–71n, which refers to the powers of an English king). In addition to Adams 1985, Kerby-Fulton 1990 provides extremely rich documentation for a generally prophetic reading. In a strenuous effort at detaching the poem from specifically English discourses, she draws attention to a mainly female visionary tradition with concerted interests in “clerical reform” and “repristination” through disendowment. For analogues and discussion relevant to this passage, see particularly 36–39, 43–45, 106 (and 108–9 on the arator as reformer in St. Bridget), 173, 175–77, 184–86 (the ME “The Last Age of the Church,” 1356), 190.

Yet simultaneously, L, who has been relying upon contemporary speculation about disendowment, cannot simply shut off such language at the head of the prophecy. Skeat cites parallel passages from Gower’s CA, and Pearsall adds (168–71L) abundant Lollard parallels on royal power; both Baldwin (1981:93–94) and Simpson (1990:179–80) adduce parallel opinions from Wycliffe’s Latin works, c. 1376–79. Aers (1980:70) and Simpson (1990:179 n5) note L’s reliance here on Lollard corrective rhetoric, but, for them, the allusion to chronicles or to Cain (178) unfortunately defers practical action to some millenialistic date. This line of argument seems the most persuasive, but see the qualification introduced in 178n.

168 (B 10.322) þer shal come a kyng: The royal servant Reason views the king as supreme lord, whose right to coerce obedience, even from supposedly exempt clerics, must be absolute. Cf. the Lollard “Dialogue between a Knight and a Clerk” (Hudson SEWW 134/94–97): “in all þinge þat longeþ to temperalte, [clerics] schuld be suggetes to þe kinge and to oþer lordes temperales, and, ʓeue þai wiþstonde þe temperale power, þe kinge and þe lordes temperals schuld chastise hem and constreyne hem, for þerto þai bereþ þe swerd.” If religious have just been damned for appropriating aristocratic behavior, Reason’s discourse is asymmetrical and places the king, the center of the state and its law, under no such restriction. In fact, given the insistently sacerdotal language of confesse/bete/amende/potte to ʓoure penaunce in lines 168–71, Reason selfconsciously builds into his language a provocative royal usurpation of clerical discourse and power. Indeed, at lines 176–80, Reason will suggest that the particularistic claim of religioun, that it is the unique heavenly model in this world, overstates: he there will associate the heavenly commune with the harmonious realm itself. See further 21.424–27n.

The idea invoked here, that of a “national church” under the headship of the king, may be implicit in Prol.141–42, although Clergy there is far broader than merely Religion. Skeat refers to L’s numerous passages to similar effect, e. g., 2.246–51, 3.378–85. Within the argumentative context Reason has created, the royal role extends by analogy the patriarchal injunctions concerning familial governance at 130–39L, and bete ʓow 169 recalls both that passage and Conscience’s discussion of Hophni and Phineas (Prol.109–18).

169 (B 10.323) as þe bible telleth: Pearsall cites, rather tentatively, Isa. 32:1, Jer. 23:5 and 11–12. But L is probably thinking ahead to the verse he will cite at line 177L (and to the knok 177).

171 (B 10.325) ad pristinum statum ire : “To return to the pristine status.” Alford (1984:280–81) points out that the phrase is traditional in canonical discussions of the power of penance to remit sin, to return one to a prior state of merit (Reason’s major purpose), and he cites Gratian’s use of the term at Decretum 1.50.28 (CJC 1:189). The canonist Bartholomeo of Brescia explains Gratian succinctly: “Probat hieronimus post peractam penitentiam sacerdotes poss[unt] deo placere et sacrificare sibi sicut ante peccatum faciebant” (Jerome demonstrates that after having performed penance, priests may please God and make offerings to him, just as they did before they sinned; cited Alford 1984:281).

Like the preceding appropriation of penitential language, L’s usage is figurative. Under magnate correction, a penance, religious will return to the hardship and straitness (another sense of penaunce, e.g., Prol.27–32), the apostolic life associated with their original pristine rule that defines their status (cf. Aston 1984:60). Alford (1992:67) also cites contrasting discussions by Scase (1989:88–96, 202n 14) and Baldwin (in Alford 1988:75).

Simultaneously, ad pristinum statum seems to have become, by the late fourteenth century, subject to varying uses. Kerby-Fulton (1990:186–88) finds it a key to many prophecies, and Bloomfield (1961:87) identifies an example used to describe clerical reformation in the Franciscan Eulogium historiarum. But other uses seem a great deal more neutral, a catch-phrase “set things right in the old way”—e.g., in Thomas Walsingham’s Historia to describe the end of the Peasants’ Revolt and in the monk of Evesham (lines 3916, 4083), to describe the pro-Ricardian goals of the Holland Revolt of 1399/1400. At midcentury, the clause appears in a mid-fourteenth century York register to describe the restoration of a dilapidated chantry to its original form (cited Wood-Legh 1965:201 n2), and the London jurist Andrew Horn, in his Annales Londonienses (76/1:175) speaks of mayor Richer de Reffham’s reformist efforts (1310), both legal return to “ancient customs” and refurbishment of walls and streets, as having “serva[tus] et reforma[tus]” the City “ad pristinam dignitatem et indempnum.” Robert Swanson informs me that the phrase appears as a legal commonplace in cases where plaintiffs win suits in royal courts against sentences of outlawry, as well as in suits for defamation.

172L (B 10.327L) Hij in curribus… : A selective quotation of only the negative threats from Ps. 19:8–9 (Some trust in chariots, and some in horses: but we will call upon the name of the Lord our God. They are bound, and have fallen: but we are risen, and are set upright). As Skeat, Pearsall, and Schmidt indicate, L chooses the verse to answer the monastic fascination with aristocratic horsemanship described in lines 157–60 and to recall Will’s complaint at 72–77, in which true knights are unhorsed as the result of monastic activities.

173–75 (B 10.328–30): L apparently uses friars as a model for the treatment all orders can expect. Although their founders imagined them as bound by rule yet operating in the world, friars will be shut in, converted to the antique monastic form of inclaustration. Since, as subsequent verses argue, they will have shelter and not have to wander to beg, moneys that they have converted into overly elaborate buildings will be available for other, more socially useful purposes—for the truly needy poor. Cf. Aston 1984:45–48 for attacks on fraternal building programs, and 62–63 for comments on a curtailed mendicancy producing poor relief.

L promises that friars will be maintained by a royal (or perhaps merely secular?) grant. constantyn, of course, through his supposed “donation” to Sylvester I, always offered a justification for church endowments. Rather than an inadvertent corrupter, who introduced the venym of temporal concerns into the church (cf. 17.220–24), the name here represents “Christian kingship,” and he corrects what is amiss, just as Reason promises an English king will. Presumably, since the only thing Constantine will cook them is Bred 174 (contrast Wrath as monastic cook at 6.132–33, or the doctor of divinity in passus 15), the grant will be, if perpetual (euere aftur 174), quite a minimal one. This is probably the freres fyndynge of 22.383, as Pearsall¹, Schmidt, Kerby-Fulton (1990:34), and Clopper (1997:292–98) argue, an echo of the “daily bread” of the Pater noster.

176 (B 10.331) abbot of engelonde (Abingdon B): Skeat follows Wright in identifying Abingdon as the first truly Benedictine house in England, a product of Aethelwold’s tenth-century reforms.

——— his nese: Cf. 6.440 “Abstinence myn aunte” for a similar example of allegory based upon familial relationships (other notable examples would include 7.278–82, 8.80–83); Tavormina 1995 includes provocative materials on familial metaphors in the poem (e.g., 48–50, 57–58, 78–82, 87–88), if not a discussion of such fitful allegorical connectives. It is just possible, however, that Reason wishes the word to imply “concubine”; the sense is not recorded under MED nece n., but cf. the parallel and al his issue B 10.331, as well as Suster B 5.642 (and distantly, MED suster n., sense 3a[c]) and Brown XIII, no. 25/7–14.

177 (B 10.332) a knok … and incurable þe wounde: This devastating blow must be read in the context of the following Latin, where baculum and virgam refer to the insignia of lordly office. Thus, it must mean the destruction of religious’ lordships, the loss of temporal endowments. Cf. the more direct 17.227: “Taketh here londes, ʓe lordes, and lat hem lyue by dymes.” Contrast the implicit evocation of another baculum and virga (from Ps. 22:4) at B 7.120–21 and the echo at B 12.292L (and the notes to both).

177L (B 10.333L) Contriuit… : Isa. 14:5–6, fuller in B with part of v. 4 (How is the oppressor come to nothing, the tribute hath ceased? The lord hath broken the staff of the wicked, the rod of the rulers, That struck the people in wrath with an incurable wound, that brought nations under in fury, that persecuted in a cruel manner). Pearsall notes that L’s quotation is wrenched from context; in the Vulgate, the Lord breaks the rulers’ rods, with which they struck inferiors incurably, while in L’s rendition, the Lord’s breaking of such false rulers’ rod is the incurable wound. The verse is also used to promise the destruction of corrupt clergy in the Joachite prophecy De oneribus prophetarum (Kerby-Fulton 1990:177).

178 (B 10.334) cronicles me tolde (Caym shal awake B): For C’s cronicles, i.e., apocalyptic materials offered as portions of historical accounts, see Kerby-Fulton 1990:24, 210 n73. The revision is at least partly inspired by L’s having front-loaded the passage; the next line in B, Ac dowel shal dyngen hym adoun, relies on a personification from 10.128–38 (B 9.1–11). The allusion was sensible when the passage was spoken by B’s Clergy, but not in this earlier context. Yet L perhaps revised a bit too rigorously, and thereby lost one powerful effect present in B. For as Schmidt¹ sees, one should identify Caym with Antichrist’s appearance at 22.53; and in his train come the four orders of friars whose initials comprise his name. In fact in B, Clergy forecasts Piers as the dowel whom Conscience (a kyng at 21/B19.256) will seek to set things right in the Last Days; the use of friars’ refounding in lines 173–75 as a model for the treatment of all orders also looks ahead to the poem’s end. C’s shal be clothed newe is, in such a context, pallid (perhaps a reference to celestial garments?), although subsequent revisions might be construed as compensation for such loss; see the discussion of lines 181 and 189 in the next note.

180–90 (B 5.48–49) Reason addresses king and commons: In the extensive C expansions at its end, L focuses Reason’s sermon in forward-looking terms, rather than the retrospective opposition to Meed inherent in the rather scrappy B materials. This passage now clearly follows from Prol.139–59 with its evocation of social groups working to common purpose. L thus truncates B 5.49, with its doubly recursive reference to tresor and tryacle (cf. 1.81, 136 and the fuller B 1.134–37, 202; and 1.146). And he drops altogether B 5.52–55, with its particularistic glance at lawyers; in the reformulation of C, the profession will become otiose. CK 61–62 probably echoes, a bit vaguely, the C Version.

Rather than the narrowness of B’s treatment, the discussion of king and commune has a new global interest rooted in a return to an aboriginal pristinus status. Central to this is the injunction Holde ʓow in vnite 189, which seeks to undo the original disunity and cause of sin, Lucifer’s revolt (alluded to in treson B 5.49). Pearsall compares 1.104–29, which describe this primal act of disobedience, the servant trying to escape his status to become maister; the king is to be analogous to the paterfamilias at the head of the sermon; see 128–39Ln.

The emphasis upon vnite also binds this political analysis more closely with the preceding prophecy. The injunction of 189 will be echoed at 22.246, to which he þat oþer wolde ominously alludes (cf. further 21.359, 22.75). And Reason’s bow to his helper Consience 181 has similar resonances. Not only will Conscience officiate at the poem’s conclusion, but the line summarily refers to developments in this character unique to C. Conscience now speaks the Latin speech at Prol.153–59, which emphasizes the king’s pietas, his love for his commune; as well as the expanded discussion of clerical failures (Prol.95–138), germane to the preceding prophecy. Equally relevant is the extensive grammatical metaphor of passus 3 through which Conscience tries to explain licit relationship (cf. the parallel of divine and human kingship evoked there with the use of acorde 183). For fuller discussion, see Wood 2012 passim.

At moments, Reason achieves powerful rhetorical statement of the desire for vnite. For example, wit and wil 185 are conventional opposites, but in this line come into a harmony, in which the grasping desire inherent in wil is denatured (cf. the perhaps flashier locution of B 5.52). Rather than “wardships” (the only sense Alford cites at 1988c:165), wardes 185 probably refers to administrative units of a city and the day-by-day relationships between their inhabitants.

191–96 (B 5.50–51) Reason addresses the pope: Reason here moves past the fair field or al the reume 125 to consider the global Christian community. God’s vicar, properly another paternalistic figure like the king in his realm, should return European society at large to the harmonious stability that existed in Heaven. Reason here, as in the preceding reference to Lucifer, apparently wishes to undo history altogether, to replace rancorous memory with 192 good loue through a perpetuel forʓeuenesse. One might contrast the poem’s version of the future, the lewed vicory’s report on the behaviors of popes and cardinals at 21.409–58; or Meed’s argument at 3.236–64 that kingship should translate to the international sphere her particularly divisive brand of retinue politics with the injunction to surrender accions 196, legal claims, however licit they may be. As a statement of forgiveness, this discussion again looks ahead to Dobest, L’s one brush with a central topic of traditional alliterative poetry, the treatment of the conqueror, in passus 21.

192 (B 5.51) grace: That is, “penitential forgiveness” (cf. Bennett), looking ahead to line 194. B gouerne first hymselue, a statement parallel to lines 141–42, perhaps implies that evil modern popes have lost the Petrine right to dispense forgiveness (cf. Prol.128–38). In C, L makes the statement more provocative and expansive.

196 eche man loue other: Cf. John 13:34 (A new commandment I give unto you: That you love one another, as I have loved you, that you also love one another), 15:12 and 17. The injunction is to be voiced by royal confessors, in the later fourteenth century, universally friars, most usually Carmelites.

B 5.54–55 in þe gospel: A reference to the parable of wise and foolish virgins (Matt. 25); the Latin is v. 12: “Amen I say to you I know you not.” 1.185 alludes to the same passage. Bennett wishes that L had cited another verse that would insist upon Jesus’ dismissal of those who do evil (to follow contrarieþ truþe); he suggests as appropriate loci Matt. 7:23 or 25:41, Luke 13:27. But the B version might be construed as analogous to 1.185 and following the analysis of Prol.161–64: lawyers refuse to display their talents and thus fail to actuate love, just as do the foolish virgins.

198 (B 5.57, A 5.41) Seketh seynt treuthe: The command recalls the lying pilgrims of Prol.47–50, and Reason’s messianic reformulation of pilgrimage at 4.122–24. This pilgrimage follows easily upon Reason’s papal universalism—one should no longer seek particular saints (as does the palmer of 7.160–81). The folk of the fair field will take up this pilgrimage at 7.155, and Piers will explain to them the actual nonspatial route to the “shrine” at 7.205–60L.

Burrow argues (1965:252) that the injunction voices L’s antipathy to actual pilgrimages and (in the developing treatment of this theme in passus 7–8) his opinion that the spiritual values to be gained through pilgrimage are better discovered in nonmobile true labor. For anti-pilgrimage invective generally, see Prol.47–50n. More germane in this context may be Jerome, Epistolae 58.2 (PL 22:580): “Non Jerosolymis fuisse, sed Jerosolymis bene vixisse laudandum est” (What’s praiseworthy is not to have been in Jerusalem but to have lived in Jerusalem well), cited Polak 1970:285. The statement appears at Decretum 2.12.2.71.3 (CJC 1:711) in a context relevant to those interests L broaches at B 7.53–59. Cf. also the Lollard “Hou men shulden gon,” fol. 14, citing Augustine: “not bi goyng of feet but bi goyng of goode maners, God is to be souʓt, for her place and not her leuynge þei chaungen þat rennen biʓonde þe see.”

Such citations imply a widely dispersed discourse that distinguishes pilgrimage as a truly penitential living from a physical journey. But metaphorical translations of “pilgrimage” were particularly alive in local English discussions. L’s thinking, which predates Lollard writing, resonates with the sect’s sustained invective; see Hudson 1988:307–9. L would certainly distance himself from the logic underlying Wycliffite antipathy to pilgrimage, that the systematic veneration of postbiblical saints is misbegotten idolatry. Yet simultaneously, there are striking parallels—which may reflect Lollard appropriation of L, rather than the reverse; cf. Lawton’s aperçu (1981:793), “Lollards had Langlandian sympathies.”

In general, Lollard writers insist, as does Chaucer’s Parson (CT X.48–51—is he “a Lollere in the wynd”?), upon pilgrimage as defining the whole of human life. See William Thorpe, lines 1237–54 (including as “pilgrimage itinerary” an instructional program that elaborates Piers’s route in C 7) or “Hou men shulden gon,” fol. 12v; for the pilgrimage of life as totalizing narrative theme, see Wenzel 1973. English heretical materials commonly include statements analogous to Reason’s “til saynt Iames be sauhte there pore sikke lyggen” (4.122); cf. “Hou men shulden gon,” fol. 13v, which urges a stay-at-home pilgrimage “wiþ þe gold and siluer þat þei spenden in pilgrimages, first founden vp and stifli mayntened by couetise of fals prestes, fulfillynge þe seuen dedis of merci to whiche euery man is bounden vp peyne of dampnacioun.”

199 (B 5.58, A 5.42) Qui cum patre et filio: “Who with the father and the son.” Skeat and Knott identify the phrases with the closing blessing of sermons, “In nomine Jesu Christi, qui cum patre et spiritu sancto vivit et regnit saecula saeculorum.” The former cites Chaucer, CT III.1734, a brief use of the phrase at the end of the friar’s sermon. Schmidt¹ argues that the phrase is formulaic and Qui not necessarily a functioning relative, but the blessing merely restates a clause of the Apostles’ Creed, “(Credo) et in Spiritum Sanctum Dominum et vivicantem, qui cum Patre et Filio simul adoratur et conglorificatur.” Truth is the Holy Spirit, the source of love; cf. 19.184–226.

——— þat: “May,” elliptically introducing a volitive subjunctive, a prayer for willing listeners.

200 (B 5.59, cf. A 5.42) and Thus sayde resoun: RK’s C version is emended to accord with B, but equally plausible would seem retention of the harder manuscript verb and substitution of a synonymous alliterating particle, and [so] endede resoun. Kane prints no parallel line in A, in the belief that the manuscripts that provide one (EKWM) have borrowed it from later versions.