Читать книгу The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman, Volume 4 - Traugott Lawler - Страница 9

C Passus 15; B Passūs 13–14

Headnote

Passus 15 (B.13 and 14.1–131a) has two actions: first, a dinner party at Conscience’s, which Clergie seems to cohost and to which both Will and a learned friar are invited. Piers Plowman (C only), and a new character named Patience, show up at the door begging alms, and are welcomed in by Conscience. The fare is soul food, though the friar demands, and gets, puddings and mortreux. Will (of course) envies him, and resents his apparent hypocrisy, and so challenges him after dinner; Conscience deflects the challenge into a contest among the friar, Clergie, and Patience to define Dowel, a scene that Gruenler 2017, building on Galloway 1995, reads as in the tradition of riddle-contests. In Lawler 1995, I have emphasized its comic aspect, as a contest between alazon (the friar) and eiron (Patience), and its relation to the final scene of the poem. It is a bit like the contest in the pardon scene: Patience is like Piers, the doctor like the priest (cf. Kirk 1972:152, Simpson 2007:227–28, Gruenler 2017:160). Patience upstages everybody, offending the friar but winning the admiration of Conscience, who brings the dinner to an end and goes on pilgrimage with Patience; Will tags along.

They soon meet Activa Vita (Actyf), Patience’s opposite, a “minstrel” and waferer, and the second action begins. Patience offers Actyf first a piece of the Paternoster to eat, fiat voluntas tua (the motto, as it were, of Passiva Vita), and then plenty of good counsel about patient poverty (proving that agere bene est pati, to do well is to suffer) that continues right on into passus 16. In B the offer and the counsel take up the first part of passus 14, since the final nearly 200 lines of passus 13 are taken up with the description of Actyf’s dirty coat, stained by the seven deadly sins. Both actions of the passus, stripped to their essentials, set the spiritual figure Patience, with his spiritual food, against a figure of utter worldliness with a special focus on food, first the friar, then Actyf—and the still-pretty-worldly Will is there to learn from Patience.

Many readers have seen the dinner scene, so different from anything that has come before, as marking a new departure. The scene itself is full of characters who are not Will nor aspects of Will, and they interact with each other, which, apart from some slight play between Wit and Study, has not happened before in the Vita. Chambers 1924, treating B, saw the last eight passūs as a kind of liberation of L’s theme, after the “review of his own mind” in passūs 11 and 12, in which, like Wordsworth moving from the Prelude to the Excursion, he has managed to “solve his old doubts,” enabling him to proceed with “his ‘great philosophical poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and Society,’ with its three divisions” (i.e., the Vitae of the three D’s) (68). Kirk 1978:97 writes similarly: “Patience appears at a crucial, transitional point in the poem’s development, a point where the poem casts a retrospective eye over its own progress in order to reorient its action toward the sweeping portrayal of God’s work in history which is to follow.” Watson 2007:99, focusing on the B text, speaks for many when he says that passus 13 gives us Will’s “return to direct engagement with the social world, after the ‘inner journey’ of B.8–12 is done.” We are relieved to be back in a story; we feel like listeners to a dreary sermon when an anecdote suddenly comes. The inner journey is not quite done, of course, since soon enough Will’s guide will be one more inner faculty, Liberum arbitrium, his own free will (in B Anima, his soul). These figures guide him without making him as anxious as the earlier guides did, however, and Patience, his first new guide, is certainly not an aspect of Will but a virtue he needs to learn, and once he meets Abraham, then Moses, then the Samaritan, he is definitely in a world outside himself. Once the dinner is over, Clergie is out of the picture: the issues are moral now, not intellectual. Dowel is now clearly defined as a patient life of poverty, penance, and love. Patience as a tutor-figure brings a whole new manner to the role, less hectoring, more loving, a manner that will be continued by Liberum arbitrium, then notably by the Samaritan. And the journey Will starts once he leaves the dinner will take him finally to Jerusalem; see the note below to line 183, comparing this whole portion of the poem to the central portion of Luke’s Gospel, in which Jesus is “going to Jerusalem.”

Will wakes and reviews his dream, then falls asleep (1–24, B.13.1–21)

1 (B.13.1) witteles nerhande: some degree of witlessness becomes in the Vita, until the vision of the events of redemption in passus 20, the dreamer’s regular state as he wakes, especially in B: cf. “my wit weex and wanyed til I a fool weere” (B.15.3), “I … yede forþ as an ydiot” (B.16.169–70), “nere frentyk” (18.178), “recheles” (20.2; B.18.2). In this instance, however, his near-witlessness stands in specific contrast to Ymaginatif’s defense of wit and learning, a contrast especially pointed in the B version, in which Ymaginatif’s last words have praised “wit and wisdom,” and in which Kynde’s purpose in showing Will the vision of middle earth was “þoruʒ þe wondres of þis world wit for to take” (B.11.323). Later in the passus, Patience and the doctor will have a difference of opinion about wit: see the note to 171–73 (B.13.173–76) below.

2 (B.13.2) fay: doomed to die; the dream has reminded Will of his mortality in various ways, some of which are recited in the summary that follows in lines 5–23 (B.13.5–20). But since the summary goes on to emphasize not merely mortality but the difficulty of avoiding damnation, the more pregnant sense “doomed to eternal death” seems present as well. Perhaps realistically, Will’s memory of his dream on waking is chiefly of its terrors; he ignores such reassuring material as his own reply to Scripture (12.58–71, B.11.141–53), Trajan’s account of how he was saved (12.76–88, B.12.280–97), and Ymaginatif’s demonstration that good heathens are saved (14.202–17, B.12.280–97); see Simpson 2007:126.

3 (B.13.3) mendenaunt: an ordinary beggar (as, for instance, at 9.180, 11.48 [B.10.66, A.11.52], 13.79), not a friar. In the C version, Will may be responding (whether rightly or not) to the call to poverty by Recklessness, who has given a detailed picture of “mendenantʒ” at 13.79–98a; in the B version, there is perhaps a relation to the somewhat less extreme praise of poverty and of humble apparel, involving no actual call to mendicancy, at 11.231–82a. But forth can y walken/In manere of a mendenaunt probably just means, “I went on living my itinerant, mendicant life,” the life he describes at 5.44–52 and touches on in the B version at 8.1; that is, nothing has changed. In any case, the role suits Will for supping with Patience, who is also a beggar. (In the two instances, both in C, where L refers to the friars as “mendenants,” there is an accompanying word to make the specification clear: Prol.60 “mendenant freres” and line 80 below, “frere … of þe fyue mendynantʒ.”) Does mony ʒer aftur bring the waking Will into Elde, as in the dream? More likely, it is the conventional expression of the passage of time that the rhetoric of the waking situation often seems to demand, comparable to “Alle a somur seson” (10.2; B.8.2, A.9.2), “wonder longe” (B.15.1), “al my lyf tyme” (20.3; B.18.3).

5–23 (B.13.5–20) Furste how fortune … he vanschede (B passed): This summary of the third vision offers hints about both Langland’s structure and his process of revision. Structurally, the summary is remarkable in that it begins with the so-called “inner vision,” omitting the encounters with Thought, Wit, Study, Clergie, and Scripture, and at the other end carries through to the encounter with Ymaginatif, ignoring the waking that takes place at 13.214 (B.11.406). Evidently Langland could think of the sequence Fortune-through-Ymaginatif as a unit; at least he treats it here as a “meteles” (4) all its own, separable from the sequence Thought-through-Scripture and undivided within itself. Thus our notion of an “inner vision” may be mistaken. Or perhaps in summarizing he was focusing on what he had written new for the B version: the encounters omitted from the beginning of the summary were all in the A version. In the only other waking summary of a dream, at 9.301–2 (B.7.152–53) only two events late in the vision, the granting of the pardon and the priest’s impugning of it, are summarized, suggesting a tendency to focus on what is most recent.

Perhaps, however, one should think not of Langland but of Will: the selective memory, the editing out of most of the optimistic materials of the vision, may be a function of Will’s near-witlessness and sense of doom. On this reading, the entire opening sequence is of a piece, constitutes a specific reaction to at least some of the events and warnings of the vision, and establishes Will’s need for the comfort (B.13.22) that Conscience and Patience will bring him in the ensuing scene. (For a different opinion, see Burrow 1981:37; he finds the summary merely “amnesic,” and the “‘autobiographical episodes’ of Passus XI–XII … strangely lacking in consequence.”)

As a summary of the sequence Fortune-through-Ymaginatif, the passage is less arbitrary than may at first appear, though not without its difficulties. In the B version its character as a summary is marked rather baldly: eight events are listed, the first introduced by “First how” and the other seven introduced by “And how”; six of the eight are given one line each. Lines 5–10 cover B.11.7–83, 5–6 echoing Elde’s threat at B.11.28–29; the friar material is given disproportionate weight in the summary. There is also, indeed, some amnesia: as Donaldson 1949:81 points out, “According to B’s account of the quarrel, the Dreamer refused to be buried with the Friars, but according to the line in which he mentions the matter [i.e., B.13.9–10], the Friars refused to let him be buried among them.” Lines 11–13 cover at least B.11.283–319, which treat avarice and ignorance in priests and imply the betrayal of the lewed (but see below on lines 12–13), and can be thought to cover the entire disquisition on love and poverty, B.11.154–319, since that passage is arguably addressed to priests from the beginning (see Lawler 2002:98–107): the word preestes doesn’t appear until line 283, but men of holy chirche in line 160 must mean priests. However, the sequence Lewte-Scripture-Trajan (B.11.84–153) is not summarized. Lines 14–20 summarize B.12.217–97, and deftly take in the vision of middle earth in B.11.320–441.

Lines B.13.12–13 are perhaps troubling, since the criticism of ignorant priests in B.11.283–319 does not say explicitly that their ignorance brings damnation on their parishioners. But see the variants to B.11.302, and p. 193 of the B introduction, where KD report that they have omitted from the text as scribal a pair of archetypal lines: “I haue wonder for why and wherfore þe bisshop/Makeþ swiche preestes þat lewed men bitrayen.” The lines sound scribal indeed (though Schmidt prints them), and yet they provide an explicit referent for 13.12–13. KD (p. 193) suppose that the scribe who made them wanted to “participate in criticism of the clergy,” but we might better suppose he was bothered by lines 13.12–13, and felt moved to provide a specific basis for them.

The passage shows incomplete revision in the C version. Some attention has been paid to varying the list of eight events: in the last two (21, 23) the “And how” formula is varied, and now only the first and last are confined to one line. Lines 5–12 are essentially unchanged from B.13.5–10, even though there is now more material in the passage they cover (C.11.166–12.22) than there was before. As Donaldson points out (1949:68–69), the lines on the friars’ burial practices (11–12) should have been omitted, since the B passage they referred to, 11.64–67, has been omitted (at 12.15). On the other hand, covetousness is now said (13–14) to overcome not just priests but al kyne sectes, a change that seems to recognize better than in the B version the place of covetousness in Fortune’s program for us all, and, in its greater breadth, to be suited to the significant extension by Recklessness of the praise of patient poverty. Lines 15–16, unchanged from the B version, cover C.13.100–128, and make it plain, pace that interfering scribe of B, that L thought the passage clearly implied that a lot of people go to hell because their priests are ignorant. (Meantime the scribal couplet of B.11 has been replaced in C by lines 13.115–16.) C.15.17–23 have the same effect as B.13.14–20, although C.15.20 (referring to C.14.161–63) improves the rather fatuous B.13.18. For C.15.22, see the note below.

5 (B.13.5) fortune me faylede At my moste nede: at 12.13 (B.11.61), though the phrasing here reflects Elde’s threat at 11.188 (B.11.29).

6–8 And … lotus (B.13.6 And … mete): “And how Old Age threatened me, if I should live long, (that) he would leave me in debt, and all my good looks and all my powers vanish.” The C lines repeat accurately Elde’s threat to Will at 11.187–89 (B.11.28–30) that Fortune would fail him and Concupiscencia carnis forsake him. So myhte happe / That y lyuede longe translates, in C’s way, the more metaphorical B myʒte we euere mete—though the B phrase is closer to what Elde originally said in both versions, “yf y mete with the” (11.187, B.11.28). As the conjunction with fayre lotus (which may mean “fair speeches” or “loving glances” rather than “good looks,” but which appears regularly in romantic contexts; cf. MED, s.v. lote, sb. 1) suggests, vertues refers in particular to sexual powers (which do vanish, thanks to Elde, at 22.193–98 [B.20.193–98]).

9–12 (B.13.7–10) And how þat freres … quyte here dettes: For a definitive, nuanced discussion of bequests from Londoners to the various orders of friars in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, see Jens Röhrkasten’s article of 1996 and his book of 2004. Bequests fluctuated, he shows, and were waning in Langland’s time, but still frequent, especially among the rich.

21–22 And y merueyled … how ymaginatyf saide / That iustus … non saluabitur bote vix helpe (B.13.19 And siþen how ymaginatif seide “vix saluabitur iustus”): B is straightforward and noncommittal, but C offers a playful version of Ymaginatif’s dictum (14.203; B.12.281), turning it into a little grammatical-legal narrative. Since vix (scarcely) is almost a synonym for “non” (not), the poet seems to posit an underlying statement non saluabitur iustus (the just man will not be saved), of which the statement Vix saluabitur iustus is what we would call a “transformation.” Vix (an “auxiliary” word) “helps” the statement mean something new, and so “helps” the just man to be saved. It is a way of saying just what Ymaginatif said: salvation almost doesn’t happen. Salter and Pearsall (1967:13) instance the passage as an example of “embryonic allegory”: the Latin phrase is “dramatized, in simple but striking terms, as a court scene, with ‘vix’ personified, and interceding for ‘justus.’” Later, in annotating the passage on p. 131, they assert (adding a notion of Wyclif’s cited by Skeat) that the wordplay depends on the “interpretation of vix as the Five (V) wounds of Jesus (I) Christ (X),” and Pearsall repeats it ad loc. in his edition; “depends” is perhaps strong, but the further meaning is certainly welcome. Fiona Somerset accepts both meanings: “The word ‘vix’ will help to save the just man on the Day of Judgment in the grammatical sense Ymaginatif employs—it restricts rather than reversing ‘saluabitur’—but also in the sense that it is the mercy of Christ symbolized by the word ‘vix’ that will save him” (1998:45).

24 me lust to slepe … 18.178 y wakede (B.13.21 at þe laste I slepte … 14.335 þerwiþ I awakede): The fourth vision. Most commentators have seen in this vision a shift from a cognitive to a moral emphasis: the interlocutors are no longer mental faculties but the moral faculty of Conscience and the virtue of Patience. And the mode changes from sharp correction of Will, first to narrative in the dinner scene and the meeting with Actyf, then to benign instruction from Patience, and in C from Liberum arbitrium as well. Simpson (2007:125) argues that the move is from “the rational faculties of his (Will’s) soul” to “those parts and qualities of the soul that direct and condition moral choice…. The burden of learning is now, in effect, on Will himself, as the human will, since it is the will that must choose, rather than merely be informed of the truth.” Conscience is certainly part of the soul; see the quotation from Isidore, 16.201a (B.15.39a) and the surrounding discussion in both versions. Medieval philosophers regarded conscience or synderesis as a function of the soul, whether in Plato’s tripartite soul (rational, appetitive, emotive), where it was a function of the rational soul, or in Jerome’s quadripartite soul, where conscience is a separate part; see Potts 1980:6–9 and passim.

Conscience’s dinner (25–184, B.13.22–214)

25–184 (B.13.22–214) Conscience’s dinner. The dinner scene is the most complex narrative scene in the poem so far: it is less intense than the pardon scene, but involves more characters and more interplay among them. In B the dinner takes place at Conscience’s court or palace, and Conscience is clearly the host, inviting, welcoming, seating, ordering service. Clergie is the star guest, the “draw” for Will. In C Conscience is perhaps to be thought of as still the host, although at times Clergie seems to act as cohost; now Reason, who at first seems to be a guest but turns out to act as steward of the hall, is the draw. Conscience and Clergie both invite Will; we are not told where the dinner takes place, although Conscience’s welcoming everybody suggests that the scene is still his court; Reason does the seating and Clergie calls for service. Piers is there, at least for a while. Since Scripture, Clergie’s wife, serves the food in both versions, it may be that cohosting was L’s idea in both. The relative clarity of the literal events in B is put aside in C in favor of a greater allegorical suggestiveness. In any case the issue is the conscientious (and reasonable) use of learning—the same issue that was at the fore in the third vision—with an undercurrent of emphasis on the synonymous trio penance-suffering-patience (also not a new theme but one that will take center stage in the episodes that follow). The showy learning of the friars is satirized. The literal scene, however, seems ultimately to take over: the issue of how best to use learning is never completely resolved, for the behavior of the friar-doctor is so off-putting, and Patience’s pressing of another agenda so urgent, that Conscience departs.

In the C version, the alliance of Reason and Conscience as Will’s major guides continues from passus 5; in B Conscience reemerges after being absent since the end of passus 4, where he and Reason agreed to remain always with the king; in both versions Will has also had a recent, unsatisfying encounter with Reason in the vision of middle earth, within vision three. But Reason in actuality plays almost no role here, and leaves the poem for good. Pearsall considers the dinner a “probationary reward for Will, who has shown recent signs of improvement,” these being his blush of shame at 13.213 and his good definition of Dowel a few lines later (220). But it may be better to think of Conscience as an indiscriminately generous host like the host in Christ’s parable of the Great Feast, out on the highways inviting all he meets. Thus he welcomes the doctor, also, and when he comes home and finds Patience (and, in C, Piers) on his doorstep, he welcomes them too. Especially in the C version, L is at pains to stress the breadth of Conscience’s hospitality. The invitation would thus be, like much else, a happy accident for Will rather than a reward.

As others have intimated (Middleton 1987:32; Simpson 2007:138; Gruenler 2017:165), the “source” of the scene would seem to be the speech of Dame Study in passus 11 (B.10, A.11), which is largely taken up with a tirade against various abuses of feasts (I cite the fuller version of B.10): the exclusion of the man with “holy writ ay in his mouþe” (32) in favor of lewd entertainers (39–51); ignorant and presumptuous theological disputes after dinner (52–58, 67, 70–71, 104–18); and refusal to admit to the feast the poor clamoring at the gate (59–66, 79–103, see also B 9.82–83); also, friars are incidentally criticized for preaching insincerely at St Paul’s (74) and for seeking feasts at other men’s houses (95–96).

Conscience’s dinner is an attempt to right all these abuses, although the feast-seeking friar, fresh from St Paul’s, with his pompous speechifying, does his best to maintain business as usual. Bourquin regards the scene as a “dramatizing” of Study’s tirade, 1978:406. He also points out (405–6) that the structure of the scene reproduces that of the Meed episode, featuring two sharply opposed sides (there, Conscience and Reason vs. Meed, here Patience vs. the doctor), with a figure in the middle (there the king, here Conscience) who chooses “the good side” (optait pour le bien) at the end.

The ultimate source, of course, is the New Testament, particularly the Gospels, where dinner scenes and parables of feasts abound (see Barney 1968:192–208 on how the New Testament material is developed in Old French allegories that personify the banquet foods, etc.). See especially Luke, where “the Son of man is come eating and drinking” (7:34), and where Jesus urges his dinner host to invite the poor (14:12–14), then tells the parable of the Great Feast (14:16–24). Matt 23:6–7 says of the Pharisees: “They love the first places at feasts, and the first chairs in the synagogues, and salutations in the marketplace and to be called by men Rabbi” (which means “Master,” John 1:38) (see also Luke 20:46–47, where almost the same thing is said of the scribes). And see 2 Tim 3:1–7, in which Paul warns against the heretics of latter days, among whom are “they that creep into houses” (qui penetrant domos, verse 6). For a full account of how William of St Amour drew from Matt 23:6–7 and 2 Tim 3:6 what developed into the major conventions of antifraternal literature, see Szittya 1986: 34–41, 58–61, 71, et passim; cf. also the pair Frere Flaterere and Sire Penetrans-domos in passus 22 (B.20), 313 ff. and the note there. (For a nuanced account of the whole complex history of antifraternalism, going well beyond William of St Amour, see Geltner 2012.) Our friar is (seemingly) greeted by Conscience outdoors (in C), penetrates his house, is called master and takes first place at dinner, and even uses that place as a kind of pulpit. Jill Mann (1979:38) suggests that the scene might be seen as the product of L’s rumination on the text, “Not by bread alone doth man live, but by every word that proceedeth out the mouth of God,” Matt 4:4, Luke 4:4, quoted in the next scene by Patience, 15.244a (B.14.47a) (and half-quoted at 5.86).

Alford 1995 is an important attempt to see the entire scene as built on Proverbs 23, which starts, “When thou shalt sit to eat with a prince, consider diligently what is set before thy face,” and commentary on it by Ambrose and Hugh of Saint-Cher. He uncovers some telling parallels, though much of what both commentators advocate is rather standard moral teaching.

For all its trappings of allegory, the scene is in the main literal enough. It is a little comedy in which, as Piers and Patience say, the patient win; see Kirk 1972:145–53 and 1978:98–100, and Lawler 1995. Neither the friar nor Will acts as a guest ought. The friar as alazon is overcome, not by Will’s heavy-handed resentment, arrogant enough in its own way and suavely deflected by Conscience, but by the mercurial Piers (in C) and the mild eiron Patience. The issues are literal too. How do we do well? What are the major values we aspire to? Love and patience win out over the friar’s worldly notions. This core of meaning is eked out by two kinds of allegory. The food, served by Scripture, consists of the Gospels and the Fathers, or, in Will’s and Patience’s case at the side table, scriptural calls to do penance. These are not out of line with the scripture-based stress on love and patient poverty that emerges in the debate after dinner. Those who ate willingly what they were served speak and act well in the debate; Will and the doctor, who spurn their food, speak and act badly. The allegory simply says that those who feed the body and not the spirit will come out spiritually undernourished. Secondly, the identity of the hosts implies that dining on such insubstantial fare is reasonable, is what both our conscience and our learning urge on us. Meanwhile, the friar is shown not to make conscientious or reasonable use of his learning, whereas Will, for all his impatience, learns enough to ally himself with Conscience and Patience. At the end of the scene, he starts on the road that will lead him to redemption—the road to Jerusalem: see 15.184 (B.13.215)n.

For a different emphasis on the theme of learning, see Schmidt’s note, in his 1995 edition of the B text, to B.13.24, “And for Conscience of Clergie spak I com wel þe raþer”: “Will’s eagerness is the fruit of Ymaginatif’s instruction … But after meeting the doctor he will have many of his earlier misgivings shockingly confirmed and withdraw from intellectual learning into the company of a spiritual virtue, Patience, to find the kynde knowyng of Dowel he has sought in vain elsewhere.” It is true that Conscience regards Patience as having given a more penetrating answer than Clergie, and that he chooses the way of experience as he and Will go off with Patience, and yet the accord that Conscience and Clergie reach by the end of the scene suggests that Clergie is not being altogether rejected.

The scene is an instance of L’s general tendency to satirize the friars’ love of learning: see 11.52–58 (B.10.72–78, A.11.58–60); B.11.219–30; 16.231–41a (B.15.70–88); 22.250 (B.20.250); and 22.230–31n.

Clopper, both in his 1990 article (74n34) and his book (1997:238–41), argues that the scene has a “Franciscan character,” and that Patience is modeled on St Francis, though most scholars have accepted the identification of the friar with the Dominican William Jordan; see 91n.

Conscience and Clergie invite Will to dine with Reason (25–31); Conscience invites Will to dine with Clergie (B.13.22–28)

B.13.23 court: A large house or castle; cf. Kane, Glossary, and Chaucer’s Summoner’s Tale, D2162, “Doun to the court he gooth, / Wher as ther woned a man of greet honour.” That lord like Conscience is friends with a friar. Conscience is a lordly figure all through the poem; he regularly speaks “curteisliche.” See B.13.207–10n.

B.13.24 And for Conscience of Clergie spak I com wel þe raþer: Will was similarly eager to meet Clergie at B.10.226 (A.11.169), and he seems to remember also how warmly Clergie welcomed him (B.10.230–35; Clergie and Scripture both in A.11.173–77) to his and Scripture’s house. He might not have been so eager if he also remembered how badly he got along with Scripture. More proximately, he has been given a new understanding of Clergie by Ymaginatif in the passus just completed. The line is a bit ironic, however, since Patience will trump clergy in what follows, and become Will’s new patron as the poem makes its decisive swerve from knowing to doing—or rather, to not doing: to suffering, being acted on, to pati not agere; see the Headnote above, and the notes to 32–33, 190–16.157 (B.13.221–14.335), and 137, 156a (B.13.135a, 171a) below.

B.13.26 lowe louted and loueliche to scripture: A bit of estates satire; for friars’ attentions to women, see CT, General Prologue, A211, 217, 234, 253–55 and SumT, D1797–1815. For the way they have of showing up at dinnertime (against their rule; see next note), see SumT D1774, 1836 ff., and B.10.95 above. In B the friar seems to be already in the house when Conscience gets home; in C they seem to meet on Conscience’s way home, but perhaps not altogether by chance.

29 a maystre, a man lyk a frere (B.13.25 a maister, what man he was I nyste): usually called this doctour starting at line 65, and identified as definitely a friar in lines 69–87; in line 84 he is doctour and dyuynour … and decretistre of Canoen, i.e., very learned, and he may be named as a particular Dominican in 91; see the note there. Maister is a loaded word in antifraternal satire: it means “Pharisee,” thanks to Matt 23:7–10 and John 1:38; see Szittya 1986:35–37 and SumT, D2184–88. Of course plenty of friars, especially Dominicans and Franciscans, were Masters of Theology and Doctors of Theology; see Glorieux 1933–34:1.27–222 (Dominicans); 2.5–248 (Franciscans); Courtenay 1987:56–87; Cobban 1999:164–67; Lawrence 1994, Chapter 7.

It is evidently part of L’s purpose to present Will as not at first recognizing this master as the man he heard preach three or four days before, though the development to that recognition in B (from “what man he was I nyste”) is more startling than in C. That he is at the dinner at all is not quite right. The Dominican Constitutions of 1220 declare that “In places where we have a convent, our friars, both priors and others, should not presume to eat outside the cloister except with bishops or in houses of religious, and that rarely” (ed. Thomas, 1.8, p. 319). But the Summoner’s Tale suggests that the rule was little regarded—and Conscience may be a bishop; again see B.13.207–10n. Gruenler 2017:155 compares him to the bishop in the story of St Andrew and the Three Questions from The Golden Legend that he posits as an analogue to the scene.

Ralph Hanna has suggested above (8.73–74n) that Faus Semblant in Roman de la Rose 11204–06 (in the Lecoy edition) gives us a model for this doctor. I would add lines 11007–19; see the note to 68–73a below. As a hypocrite relying on a surface of religiosity, he is certainly among the progeny of Faus Semblant, though not so thoroughly like him as Chaucer’s Pardoner.

31 (B.13.28) They: Why not “We?” Surely Will was invited to wash too, as Patience is a few lines later. The friar, it turns out, has a traveling companion, whom Patience mentions at line 101; this pronoun includes him. Friars always went about in pairs: see Luke 10:1 (and note to line 44a below), and supra, 10.8n. Clopper 1990:74n34 asserts that since there are two friars they must be Franciscans, for “the Franciscan rule required that brothers go about in pairs in order to imitate Christ’s apostles; the Dominican provisions for preaching and itinerancy (Distinctio 2.12–13) make no reference to this practice.” And yet Distinctio 2.12 (of Raymond of Pennaforte’s redaction, ed. Creytens 1948, which Clopper used) in fact says of preachers, “eis socii dabuntur a priore” (they will be assigned companions by the prior, p. 63). The Constitutions of 1228, ed. Thomas 1965, have the same sentence of preachers (2.30, p. 363), and, of itinerants, “socius datus praedicatori ipsi ut priori suo in omnibus obediat” (the companion given to a preacher is to obey him in everything as his superior) (2.34, p. 366). In Dominic’s famous dream in St Peter’s, when Peter and Paul order him to preach, he sees his sons “setting out two by two” (Golden Legend, trans. Ryan, 2.47). Jack Upland 310, Friar Daw’s Reply 771, and Woodford, Responsiones pp. 162–63 all write as if going in pairs was the practice of all orders. The issue matters because of the identification of the doctor with the Dominican William Jordan; see 91n. Cf. the phrase socius itineris in Gen 33:12 and 35:3.

Patience and Piers (C only) show up and are welcomed (32–37, B.13.29–32)

32–33 Pacience … Ilyke peres the ploghman, as he a palmere were (B.13.29–30 Ac Pacience … heremyte): B is plain enough, but C surprises: Piers is here! This is the first reference to him since the second vision, in the course of which he took on the role of “a pilgrym at þe plouh” (8.111), dressing accordingly (8.56–65). “Palmere” here clearly just means “pilgrim” and is not pejorative (as it probably is at Prol.47 and 7.180). The revision suggests that readers of B are perhaps to intuit from 29 in pilgrymes cloþes, along with all the praise of patient poverty in passus 11—including lines such as B.11.243–44, “And in þe apparaille of a pouere man and pilgrymes liknesse/Many tyme god haþ ben met among nedy peple”—that Patience is “Piers-like” and will speak authoritatively. But readers did not intuit that, apparently, so C, in typical fashion, makes everything plain by having Piers actually accompany Patience to the dinner.

Ilyke is a crucial word; the adverb “likewise, also,” OE ġeliċe. Skeat printed “Ilik,” the reading of ms. X and many others—i.e., the adjective “like”—and Schmidt has followed him (though he apparently takes it as the adverb, which can appear [unhistorically] without the final e: see both his note and his textual note to his line 34). Consequently readers for years thought the poet was saying here that Patience was dressed as a palmer “like Piers Plowman,” and that when Piers suddenly speaks at line 137, he has simply appeared out of the blue, just as he will disappear when he finishes speaking (148–49). But when RK-C appeared in 1997, with the reading Ilyke (in three manuscripts) and a semicolon at the end of line 32, and the editors’ account (on p. 156) of their reasoning, along with their identification (156n) of 130 ʒent as “yonder,” Piers’s role in the scene was put on a sounder footing: he does not appear out of the blue after dinner, but has been at the dinner all along. See Kane, Glossary, s.v. ylike, and the note to 130 below. (I was present at a plenary session of the Langland conference in Cambridge in 1993 when the scene was being discussed, and George Kane stood up and electrified the room by declaring that the word was “ilyke,” likewise: Patience came and likewise Piers Plowman. We all had a feeling of great clarification, and the reading has become standard. [Kane then also referred to it in his plenary address to the conference, subsequently printed in YLS; see Kane 1994:16.])

If as he a palmere were simply meant that Piers begged his meal as if he were a palmer, it would have come after the verb; in view of its position, and of what he says and does at 8.56–65 (B.6.57–64, A.7.52–58), it almost certainly means “dressed like a palmer.” Why he is begging dinner is unclear, though if the C version had not erased the tearing of the pardon and its aftermath in AB, we might associate it with Piers’s determination there to cease sowing and be less busy about his belly-joy (B.7.122–35, A.8.104–17). It does seem suitably humble for both Piers and Patience to beg dinner, even though Liberum arbitrium will later insist, at the end of passus 16 and the beginning of 17, that Charity does not beg, nor did the apostles, the desert fathers, and other saints.

This is Patience’s first appearance as a character, although in certain parts of Recklessness’s long speech on patient poverty the virtue has already been half-personified (e.g., 13.2, 21). (Donaldson sees him as a development of Recklessness, and sees Piers as a further development still [1949:174–75].) As a virtue and not an intellectual faculty, he is symptomatic of a shift in emphasis that has been taking place in the poem: from “speculative to practical morality,” in the words of Stella Maguire (1949:100), or “toward a more active engagement of the will” (Alford 1995: 97), or from understanding to doing—except that patience of course means “being acted upon” rather than “acting.” His presence imparts an ironic dimension to the “do” triad, suggesting that another way to parse “do” besides comparing its adverb is to change it to the passive voice. (Morton Bloomfield used feminine pronouns for Patience in his 1962 book, as he did also for Anima and even Conscience, despite the proposed marriage to Meed, apparently on the basis of the gender of the underlying Latin nouns, but L himself uses masculine pronouns and clearly conceived of Patience, like the others, as male.)

From this inauspicious entrance as beggar and table companion to Will at the edge of the dinner party, Patience will come to dominate this scene, first as Will’s adviser and then as the giver of the best answer to Conscience’s after-dinner challenge, then go onto the road with Will and Conscience, where he will tutor Will and Actyf until his place is suddenly taken by Liberum arbitrium (Anima) at 16.157 (cf. B.15.12). In the dinner scene he is a playful ironist, and though he later gets preachy he never altogether loses the comic, understated quality his name implies. In Gregory’s oft-quoted definition, “patientia vero est aliena mala aequanimiter perpeti,” patience is to suffer the evil others do to you with equanimity (Homilies on the Gospels, 2.35, PL 76.1261), and he never loses his aplomb. Kirk 1978:98 speaks refreshingly of his sense of humor, and the “spirit of high comedy” that suffuses the dinner scene; see also her witty account in her 1972 book, pp. 145–53, and Lawler 1995. Pearsall too recognizes the comedy in Patience’s long discourse: see 279–16.21 (B.14.104–65)n below. Clopper (1997:241–45) sees him in Franciscan terms as advocating “a kind of reckless abandonment,” merry and unlearned like Francis: “Both Francis and Patience are able to penetrate the Scriptures and to reveal Treuthe through divine inspiration and by their delight in their poverty” (244–45). Simpson 2007:142 offers an excellent analysis of his “specifically New Testament poetics, a poetics of paradox.” Gillespie 1994:105 regards him as a “minstrel of God,” apostolic in his mission like the “lunatyk lollares” of 9.107–40. Latin writers like to speak of suffering for Christ “patienter, immo gaudenter” (patiently, nay joyfully), citing Acts 5:41.

He plays a positive role by moving Will toward a deeper understanding of suffering, poverty, and the patient acceptance of both, as other critics such as Shepherd 1983 and Anna Baldwin 1990 have insisted. Kirk 1978:101 stresses his “grounding … in Charity,” and in general terms it seems right to say that he, Charity, and the Samaritan are versions of the same set of values, the major values of the poem; see also Bloomfield’s eloquent treatment of patience (the virtue rather than the character) and its central place in the poem, 1962:140–42. In Lawler 1995:98–99, I argued that Patience is Christ, especially since there is a continuous bilingual pun between the Latin participle patiens, the suffering one, i.e., Jesus, and the English word Patience, pronounced nearly the same way; see 15.152n below. As Reason says to Will (13.197, B.11.380), “Ho soffreth more then god?” (see Kirk 1978:101–2). Of course we should all be “pacient as pilgrimes for pilgrimes are we alle” (12.131, B.11.242), so that Patience (like Piers) is also Everyman, or what Everyman should be: what Will should be, and what Patience’s opposite Actyf, the central figure in the second half of the passus, should be. (The pun perhaps extends to the word “passus”: it means “step,” yes, and reminds us of Will’s quest, but it is also the past participle of patior and means “one who has suffered,” reminding us of the object of the quest, Christ.)

Curtis Gruenler argues persuasively that the entire dinner scene draws on riddle–literature, and that Patience is the “low-status outsider” so central to that tradition. He offers as analogues Solomon and Marcolf and Jacobus’s legend of “St Andrew and the Three Questions,” in which the saint makes a sudden appearance as a pilgrim at a dinner party, and poses three riddles that unmask a beautiful woman guest at the bishop’s table as the devil: “It is rather as if Langland had blended “St Andrew and the Three Questions” with the dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf” (2017:154). Given L’s close knowledge of Jacobus’s book (which also gives essentially the same story of St Bartholomew), however, we might even consider his accounts as a source rather than an analogue. Patience has not only the patience but the insight of a saint.

Watson 2007:99n says, “All critics concur that Will meets Patience because he needs to learn Patience.”

36 hym: Piers. Schmidt in his textual note to line 34 aptly cites B.13.131, where Conscience says, “I knowe Piers,” and B.7.134, C.8.13, where Piers speaks of Conscience’s teaching and counsel. hem all: I.e., them both. Conscience knew Piers well, and welcomed both him and Patience. All perhaps emphasizes how general Conscience’s hospitality is. Multi are called to this mangerye.

41 a syde table (B.13.36 a side borde): not the lowest possible place; see 14.137, 140 (B 12.197, 200).

The guests are seated and dinner is served (38–64, B.13.33–60)

42–46 (B.13.37–41) Clergie (B Conscience) cald aftur mete … potages: The nature of the food should not come as a surprise, given who the hosts are—what else would Scripture serve?—but in this deadpan account it always surprises us readers as much as it surprises the doctor. Jill Mann’s essay of 1979 is central here; I have already cited her assertion that the scene is the product of L’s rumination on “Not by bread alone.” Also relevant, surely, is Jesus’s saying, “My meat is to do the will of him that sent me” (John 4:34). And remarks from the fathers can be multiplied almost indefinitely. “Scriptura cibus est” (scripture is food), Rabanus PL 110.561; Gregory’s Moralia PL 76.573 on the crib (praesepe) of Job 39:9: “Praesepe hoc loco ipsa Scriptura sacra non inconvenienter accipitur, in qua verbi pabulo animalia sancta satiantur” (The crib in this passage is taken not inappropriately as Holy Scripture itself, in which holy animals are filled with the food of the word). Or see Gregory on Job 1:4, PL 76.540, to the effect that scripture is sometimes food (in darker passages), sometimes drink (in more open passages). That remark is repeated by writer after writer. In any case, that scripture was food was an utter commonplace—L didn’t really have to ruminate about the matter at all. (On allegorical food in Old French poetry, see Barney 1988:126–28 and Owen 1912:103–7.)

44a (B.13.39a) Edentes … sunt &c: “Eating and drinking such things as they have,” Luke 10:7. The passage (Luke 10:1–16) is Christ’s instructions to the seventy-two, which the friars tried to follow, but which their detractors used against them: see Szittya 1986:43–47, 209. Here in Luke 10 the disciples are told to stay in one house and eat what they are offered; the next verse repeats, “eat such things as are set before you” (this verse appears in the Franciscan Rule of 1223, Chapter 3, as Clopper points out [1997:239]). But our friar has no appetite for scripture. Patience, on the other hand, loves the food: he eats such things as they have. Will “mourns” at it (64, B.13.60), envying the friar’s substitute menu; he appears not to eat it, but hasn’t the gall or status to ask for something else, as the friar does.

45 of this mete þat maystre myhte nat wel chewe (B.13.40 þis maister of þise men no maner flessh eet): Þise men (B only), namely Austin, Ambrose, and the evangelists. Gruenler associates the doctor with the hyperlogical thought of Scotus and Ockham, who, so differently from Aquinas, “wrote very little about scripture” (2017:275–76).

KD-B rightly edit out the doctor’s “man” who is in almost all B mss, and does appear in Donaldson’s translation (1990); see their explanation on pp. 179–80. Kirk and Anderson, the editors of Donaldson’s translation, point out that a man “would presumably not be at the high table in any case.” Benson 2004:55 argues for the man because friars traveled in pairs, and because of the plural pronouns þei, hem, and hir in lines 42–43. But a companion would not be called “his man,” and the plural pronouns are in C too (47–48), though there is no question there of the man; L simply wanders here from strict focus on the dinner to make a general hit at friars; see the next note.

47–50a (B.13.42–45a) Of þat men myswonne … euometis &c: Though Scripture apparently does go back to the kitchen for mortrewes and potages, since later Will actually watches the friar eating mortreux, Conscience’s house would not be stocked with food bought from miswinnings. Thus the sentence beginning at line 47 (B.13.42) is best read as a general statement: the friar’s regular diet was more costly food—at his convent, presumably, which would explain the modulation in the next line to the plurals men and þei—though the Dominican Constitutions of 1228 explicitly declare that “Everywhere in our convents meals should be meatless” (ed. Thomas, 1.8, p. 319; mortreux is a meat dish). He and his fellows would dine comfortably off þat men myswonne by buying their food either with the price of absolution purchased by the dishonest rich (12.4–10, B 11.54–58), or with contributions extracted from confessants as restitution for their wrongful gains (12.17). (This passage—12.4–22, B.11.54–83—has just been summarized in ll. 9–12.) On the whole subject of “miswinning,” see Lawler 2006, and for fuller specific comment on this passage, Appendix E to that essay, pp. 188–89. (I retract, however, my insistence there on construing “many” with mortem [“after the death of many”] rather than with “bitter peynes,” where Ian Cornelius has persuaded me it must be construed, for metrical reasons. As he says, “each hemistich is an independent unit of sense and syntax.”)

Yet another way friars miswin is to extort inheritances by promising to sing Masses for the souls of the givers (as they do for Lady Meed, 3.53, and as Coueitise of eiʒes assures Will they will do for him, B.11.53–58), and then fail to sing them: their sauce is “ground in the mortar called ‘many bitter punishments after death unless they (the friars) sing and weep for those souls’ (i.e., the souls of those whose money is thus miswon).” As Skeat says, “The whole expression, from post-mortem down to teeres, is the allegorical name of the mortar.” It should be hyphenated. Since the sauce is said in fact to be sour and unsavory—and also since they make themselves at ease—the friars clearly do fail to sing and weep. Lines 47–50 are a free translation of the Latin that follows them: “you who eat the sins of men, unless you will have poured out tears and prayers for them, will vomit up amidst torments what you eat now amidst delights.” Or the Latin translates the English, as Kerby-Fulton 1990:157 asserts [again see Lawler 2006, App E, 188–89]. The source is unidentified; it is probably by L himself. It alludes, as Alford, Quot. points out, to Hosea 4:6–8, a diatribe against bad priests. Eating sins, as Peter the Chanter says (Lawler 2006:166–67), means either saying they are not sins or making the sins food for themselves (i.e., by requiring a donation in exchange for absolution, as described above). Kerby-Fulton 1987:396 associates the phrases with the pseudo-Hildegardian anti-mendicant prophecy that begins, “Insurgent gentes quae comedent peccata populi.”

I still think, as I thought in 2006, that the sentence is L’s, but Stephen Barney has shown me a very similar passage in St Bonaventure’s Regula novitiorum (Instructions for Novices) that is surely the source—and an intriguing one, offering some support for the theory that L spent some time as a Franciscan novice, see 78–79n below. Urging the novices to pray constantly, Bonaventure says, “Ait enim Bernardus, ‘Ora, frater, instanter ora, quia ille dicitur habere tunicam mixtam sanguine, qui carnem suam nutrit de pauperum sudore. Cantando nobis,’ inquit, ‘ista bona proveniunt; graves ergo pro eis effundite gemitus, alioquin quod hic in deliciis sumitis in tormentis evometis’” (1898:214) (For St Bernard says, “Pray, brother, pray hard, for a man who feeds his flesh on the sweat of the poor is said to have a tunic mixed with blood. These goods come to us for singing [i.e., Masses],” he says, “Otherwise what you take here in pleasure you will vomit up in torments”) (my translation; cf. Monti 1994:155). Bernard, in a sermon on the Ascension, says, “Ora instanter, ora perseveranter” (PL 183.315), but Bonaventure seems to have made up the rest, or to be remembering something else. (For eating off the sweat of the poor, see Aelred, Speculum charitatis, PL 195.559 and Peter of Blois, Letter 102, PL 207.319–21.)

For a similar idea, cf. PL 209.114 (Martinus Legionensis, in a sermon directed at monks): “Peccata vestra et eorum quorum eleemosynas comeditis, studiose deflete, poenas inferni formidate” (Cry hard for your sins, and for the sins of those whose alms you eat—fear the punishments of hell). See also Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede, 701–6, quoted by Szittya 1986:220. “Eating sins” is the opposite of “eating the labours of one’s hands” (Psalm 127, quoted at 8.260a (B.6.252a, A.7.234a). Peter of Blois in his Letter 102, which L knew (see B.15.332–43a note below), insists repeatedly that feasting at the expense of the poor brings damnation.

In view of this satire, of the fact that this doctor preached at St Paul’s the other day, and of the apparent association with William Jordan (91 [B.13.86]n below), Nicholas Watson’s calling him “that sad parody of the insatiable appetites of Thomas or Bonaventure for heavenly learning” (2007:95), fine though it is, is probably wrong; L is thinking much more locally, and much more venally of actual greed.

54 (B.13.48) oþer mete: Listed in lines 56–62 (B.13.58–58a). Will and Patience get more than their share of both food (such as it is) and attention from the hosts, accentuating Will’s rudeness later. The elaborate chain of command, Reason as steward reminding the host Conscience to have the server Scripture bring up the dishes, accentuates the bathos (in Will’s eyes) of the nature of the food.

55–57 (B.13.49–53) He … he … he: L has not forgotten that Scripture is female. Rather, these are feminine pronouns. He, with a middle-front rounded vowel, from West Midland ho/heo, “she,” is much less common in B mss. than in C mss.; presumably these forms have been allowed to slip through by B scribes because there are no references in the vicinity to Scripture’s sex, no genitive or accusative her or reminder that Scripture is Clergie’s wife; but see B.13.26 above.

55 (B.13.49) Agite penitenciam: Do penance (Job 21:2, Ezek 18:30, Matt 3:2 [transposed], etc.: see Alford, Quot.). Luther quoted the Matthew in the first of his 95 theses, and discussed it in the next two. Simpson (2007:128) sees a pun on French pain, English pain, and the stem of “penance” (poenam), both here and at B.17.126–28a (79). He argues (128) that Will is being invited to “pass from academic treatment of scriptural texts (associated with the universities) to a more inward, reflective consideration of Scripture, drawn from monastic traditions,” and cites Leclercq 1982 on the monastic practice of reading, with metaphors of eating, chewing, etc. Mann 1979:37 also cites Leclercq, and her whole essay is the seminal discussion of the deep relation in the poem between real food and spiritual food. All these text-foods set up Patience’s admonition later in the passus (in B, in the next passus) to Actyf to nourish himself on fiat voluntas tua (249; B.14.50).

The scene may not be as medieval as it seems. Cf. Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (Knopf: Everyman’s Library, 1995), p. 176: “Reverend Mother doled out the curries and meatballs of intransigence, dishes imbued with the personality of their creator; Amine ate the fish salans of stubbornness and the birianis of determination.”

56 (B.13.50) diu perseuerans: long-persevering. In the next line, Scripture specifies the length of diu: in effect, the whole name of the drink, as with the mortar whose name begins post mortem (50–51 above) is “diu-perseverans-as-long-as-lyf-and-lycame-may-duyre”; it half-quotes, half-translates Matt 10:22: “qui autem perseveraverit usque in finem.” The verse is part of the passage in Matthew that contains Jesus’s instructions to the apostles, corresponding to Luke 10:7, quoted above, line 44a (B.13.39a). “Diu” is a natural enough addition, “diu perseverare” being a quite common phrase, as in Hildegard, “humilitatem attendite, et in ea diu perseverate” (PL 197.293), though it is as often used in a bad sense, of persevering in vice, as in the good sense here. Schmidt, however, by printing the reading “dia” of many manuscripts of both versions—the harder reading, and probably right—draws attention to what is surely a pun on “dya,” potion, a word L uses at 22.174 (B.20.174); (Schmidt 1987:92). Indeed the whole two-word phrase might be thought of as bilingual, either Latin “diu perseverans” or English “the drug perseverance.”

58 “This is a semely seruyce,” saide pacience (B.13.52 “Here is propre seruice,” quod Pacience, “þer fareþ no Prince bettre”): A deft C revision. Patience protests too much in B; the matter-of-fact remark in C is funnier.

59–62 Thenne cam contricion … non despicies (B.13.53–58a And he brouʒte vs … non despicies): Since contricion is the motion of the will that must precede acts of penitence, it (he?) is properly said to prepare the dishes. (In B no cook is mentioned.) Contrition will have a central role in the last scene of the poem. A pytaunce (60; B.13.57) is a tiny portion of food; OED, s.v. pittance, n. 2, but originally a gift to a religious house to allow an extra portion of food (the first meaning in OED). Its name is “For this shall everyone that is holy pray to thee in a seasonable time,” Ps 31:6 (te is God; pro hac means “because of thy forgiveness,” referring to the end of verse 5, “and thou hast forgiven the wickedness of my sin”). Thus the pittance is forgiveness, a gift from God: L plays on the two meanings. As forgiveness, it differs little from the “comfort” Conscience offers in the next two lines in both versions (in C, along with bothe clergie and scripture): “A contrite and humbled heart, O God, thou wilt not despise” (Ps 50:19). Though this comfort is spoken, it is food, too: see OED, s.v. comfort, v. 4.

In the B version, the pittance of forgiveness follows a mees of ooþer mete from the same two Psalms (both among the seven penitential psalms: cf. Alford, Quot. B.13.53, and above, 5.46n): Ps 31.1, Beati quorum … et quorum tecta sunt peccata, Blessed are they whose (iniquities are forgiven), and whose sins are covered (i.e., need not be confessed, because already forgiven through penitence—it is a dish of derne shrifte, B.13.55; see B.14.94n); Ps 31.2, Beatus vir, Blessed is the man (to whom the Lord hath not imputed sin); cf. Ps 31:5, Dixi [&] confitebor [tibi], I said, “And I will confess to you” (& is L’s addition, as is tibi for Domino); Psalm 50:3, Miserere mei deus, Have mercy on me, O God. In B it is tempting to see a clear progression, between the mess and the pittance, from penitence to forgiveness, though the cancellation of B.13.53–55 in C suggests that L had no such progression in mind: the meal, like the Psalms, intermingles penitence with trust in the Lord’s mercy.

61 Consience confortede vs, bothe clergie and scripture: I.e., all three waited on us.

64 (B.13.60) made hym merþe with his mete: Cf. Charity at 16.343 (B.15.217), who is “murieste of mouthe at mete ʒer he sitteth.” See 32–33n above.

65 (B.13.61) faste: Steadily, continuously, eagerly, hard.

65a (B.13.61a) Ve vobis … vinum: “Woe to you that are mighty to drink wine” (Isaiah 5:22). Schmidt quotes verse 21, “Woe to you that are wise in your own eyes and prudent in your own conceits,” as “account[ing] for the one quoted” (1995 edition of B), and “[having] special relevance to the Doctor’s situation, as will appear” (Parallel-Text edition). Note also verse 23, “That justify the wicked for gifts”: that is precisely the charge leveled against friars in line 47 (B.13.42) above.

66 (B.13.62) poddynges: A meat dish, haggis: a sausage consisting of the stomach or one of the entrails of a domestic animal, stuffed with minced meat, etc. and boiled (OED pudding n., 1).

Will resents the doctor’s food (64–93, B.13.60–85)

68–73a Thenne saide y … frygore &c (B.13.64–67a Thanne seide I … quadragenas &c): Will cloaks his envy (y mournede euere 64, B.13.60) in righteous indignation. See Romaunt of the Rose, 6178–81, where Fals-Semblant boasts that as a “fals religious” (6157) he prefers religious who are proud, who “feyne hem pore, and hemsilf feden/With gode morcels delicious,/And drinken good wyn precious,/And preche us povert and distresse” (Roman de la Rose 11014–17). Again, Love says to him, “Thou semest an hooly heremyte” (6481), and he replies, “‘Soth is, but I am an ypocrite.’/‘Thou gost and prechest poverte.’/‘Ye, sir, but richesse hath pouste.’/‘Thou prechest abstinence also.’/‘Sir, I wole fillen, so mote I go,/My paunche of good mete and wyn,/As shulde a maister of dyvyn;/For how that I me pover feyne,/Yit alle pore folk I disdeyne’” (6482–90, Roman de la Rose 11202–10).

What penaunce … ioye: what penances all who desired to come to any kind of joy suffered; not in B. (Penaunce is probably plural both here and in line 72, with assimilation of the final -s; cf. 73a and penaunces B.13.66.) In enlarging the subject of the sermon in the C version, L probably imagines the doctor preaching about the desert fathers: see B.15.269–71, “Lo! in legenda sanctorum, þe lif of holy Seintes,/What penaunce and pouerte and passion þei suffrede,/In hunger, in hete, in alle manere angres,” followed soon by reference to St Paul (though to working with his hands rather than to his sufferings; B.15.290–91). Compare further 83 below (B.13.76–77), on friars preaching about Christ’s sufferings for man, to B.15.260–68 (also C.16.327–29). In effect, Anima in B.15 preaches the sermon the doctor preached at St Paul’s. L uses penance throughout in the general sense “suffering”; thus, as line 87 makes explicit, the friar has been preaching Patience, and now fails to recognize his subject when they meet in person.

70 At poules (B.13.65 bifore þe deen of Poules): At St Paul’s Cross, the outdoor cross-pulpit in the churchyard of St Paul’s cathedral in London, a venue that suggests the doctor’s stature; see 11.54n.

73a In fame et frygore &c (B.13.67–67a In fame & frigore and flappes of scourges:/Ter cesus sum … quadragenas &c: In hunger and cold, etc., cf. 2 Cor 11:27. In C L picks (with a purpose; see 74–75a) two of the perils in which St Paul “glories” (2 Cor 11:30). In B he adds flappes of scourges (blows from whips): “Thrice was I beaten” (2 Cor 11:25), “five times (did I receive) forty stripes (save one)” (2 Cor 11:24).

74–83 (B.13.68–77) Ac … tholede: parenthetical polemic, in the present tense (me wondreth 74, me thynketh 78, ouerhuppen B.13.68); the sense continues directly from 73 to 84 (B.13.67 to 78). Pearsall punctuates the lines as “a parenthetic comment by Langland,” but I still hear Will, and I don’t think it “unlikely that [he] would claim to know Latin.” He does know Latin, and he is not bashful about making claims.

74–79 Ac me wondreth … yclothed (B.13.68–73a Ac … fratribus): They preach at Paul’s about Paul but avoid Paul’s message: in fame … frygore above now appears to be, not L’s random choice from among Paul’s perils, but a self-serving substitution by the friar for periculis in falsis fratribus, perils from false brethren, listed by Paul in the previous verse, 2 Cor 11:26. It would in fact have been very risky for a friar preaching in Langland’s time to call attention to Paul’s phrase (see also 80–81 below), for it had been fully exploited by antifraternal writers from William of St Amour on (see Szittya 1986: 33–34, 91, 110–12, 121, 171, 181), and is related to the common satirical association of the friars with Cain, who was the original falsus frater. Will cheats, of course, by changing Paul’s ablative periculis, the last of eight repetitions of the word, to the emphatic declaration periculum est, a move already half-made by Uthred of Boldon and Wyclif. Uthred’s Contra querelas fratrum (1367–68; ed. Marcett 1938) opens with the words Periculum in falsis fratribus. Uthred probably intended this incipit to be his title, in the medieval way (Kerby-Fulton regards it as the title, 2006:375), though as part of his text the phrase is probably meant to be construed as a sentence, with the verb est understood. Wyclif explicitly added est: see De perfectione statuum (Polemical Works, II, 471–72, cited in Szittya 1986:171). (The title Contra querelas fratrum is not in the manuscripts; it is probably John Bale’s; see Marcett p. 65.) Uthred goes on to argue that Paul listed false brethren last because, being hidden, it was graver than all the other dangers (Marcett 1938:25–26). (See Knowles 1951 for some corrections to Marcett, including the spelling Uthred for her Uhtred and a closer specification of the date).

Ofte 75 is cheating too. In fact St Paul speaks of “false brethren” in just one other place, Gal 2:4—though cf. 1 Cor 5:11, 2 Thess 3:6, both on brothers up to no good, and William of St Amour’s association of friars with other false types—prophets, apostles—who are harped on by Paul, Szittya 1986:31–61. By preaching at Paul’s, the doctor emphasizes the contrast between Paul, the true apostle (often simply called Apostolus by medieval writers), and himself, the false brother or pseudo-apostle. Among the forty-one signs William lists for distinguishing false apostles from true, all gleaned from passages in the New Testament, are that “they love fine food … (sign 29); they are selective about what is offered to them (sign 26); they eat frequently at strangers’ tables and so seem flatterers (sign 33, 2 Thess 3:8–9),” Szittya 1986:54.

There is still further and more blatant cheating in B.13.71–73a, where we are made to suppose that line 73a (Let every man beware of his brother for, as is said, there is danger in false brothers) is holy lettre. It is not, though it almost is. Alford, Quot. says the source is unknown, but it is surely Jeremiah 9:4, “Unusquisque se a proximo suo custodiat, et in omni fratre suo non habeat fiduciam (Let every man take heed of his neighbour, and let him not trust in any brother of his). The C revision draws back from that blatant cheating, but not very far. Whereas the translation is coyly withheld in B, C withholds the Latin (the doctored Jeremiah) but in effect translates it, specifying the danger as flattery: C.15.76 wysly hem kepe reflects B.13.73a se custodiat. (The reason given in B for not translating, that the translation, such a neat couplet in C, would be all too quotable and injure good friars, may imply that the poem in the A version had been well received, that people were quoting it, “rehearsing it often.”)

The way false friars flatter is by offering easy absolution, flattering you that you are in the state of grace, in exchange for a donation, as Friar Flatterer does at the end of the poem, 22.363–70 (B.20.363–70). See 22.235n, 313–15n, and Lawler 2006.

78–79 Ac me thynketh … yclothed: Although the Wycliffite translation was probably in circulation by the time of C, Thogh y latyn knowe 78 alludes primarily to the same idea that is in B, that since the bible was unavailable in English its “warning”—the doctored verse from Jeremiah quoted in B—is only known to Latinists, but perhaps secondarily also to the fact that the double meaning of frater is not reproducible in English.

The apology (me thynketh loth … to lacken) seems utterly perfunctory, of course, since the damage is done. Its exact nature, nevertheless, is teasing. In all likelihood, the referent of 78 secte is to the whole class of friars, and line 79 refers, not to the different habits worn by different orders, but to the differences between the “frere frokke” (16.355) in general and the dress of secular clergy or laymen. (Some have thought, however, that L was a friar; Lawrence Clopper in particular thought it “probable” [1997:325]; see his careful discussions in his Introduction, 1–24 and his Afterword, 325–33; and see 47–50a [B.13.42–45a] note above). Wyclif liked to call the fraternal orders “sects,” though he also uses the word to designate whole classes of religious such as friars, monks, canons (see his De fundatione sectarum, in Polemical Works, I, 13–80 and Szittya 1986:180–82). For L the word “secte” almost always means clothing, that is, the characteristic garb of a profession or class or order; he may have used it interchangeably with “sute.” See 12.133 (B.11.245; 16.357 (B.15.232); 6.38; 16.97, 99 (B.14.257, 259); also 7.129, 136, 140 (B.5.487, 490, 496), “in oure secte,” where it is a metaphor for “flesh.” Even when he uses it to mean the class or order itself, as at 15.13 or 16.295, the idea of clothing is at least implicitly present, since so many groups in medieval society had a characteristic dress. And indeed what is meant here may be something much broader than friars vs. seculars or laymen: it may refer to the variety of professions in general: cf. the diuisiones gratiarum, 21.227–55, esp. 254, “Loke þat noen lacke oþere (sc. craft) bute loueth as bretherne”; and see 12.110, 116: Christ’s blood made us brothers.

As for not “lacking”: Will has already been told by five teacher figures not to lack: 2.51 (B.2.248) (Holy Church); 8.85 (Piers); 12.40 (B.11.106) (Leaute); 13.206 (B.11.388) (Reason); 14.6 (cf. B.12.97) (Ymaginatif), and will be told so again by two more: 19.103 (Hope) and 21.254 (B.19.254) (Grace). Thus, perfunctory though it seems, the apology (like that at 13.26, “leueth nat … þat y lacke rychesse” or B.15.249, “Ac I ne lakke no lif”) should probably be taken as a sincere attempt, however brief, on Will’s part to be patient (so Pearsall in his first edition, citing 13.205–6). (On the near absence of the verb lakken in the A version, and its burgeoning importance in the B version, see Lawler 1996:163–65.)

80 fyue mendynantʒ: One of three references in the C version to five orders of friars; the others are at 8.191 (“alle þe fyue ordres”) and 9.344 (“alle fyue ordres”). But Prol.56 retains foure, the number used in A and B (A.Prol.55, B.Prol.58 = C.Prol.56; A 8.176 = B 7.198 [where ms. R has fyue] = C 9.145); thus L has retained the AB reading in the Prologue but changed it in passus 9, and added two more references to the orders, and in this one specified mendicants). He is by no means alone in speaking of five orders. Jack Upland mentions “þe fyue ordris” (83) objected to in Friar Daw’s Reply 84, which insists that there are only four. And wills provide further evidence: see below.

Four is, of course, the standard number, going back ultimately to the Council of Lyons of 1274, which (mainly to place a limit on mendicancy) prohibited all orders of friars except the Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelites, and Augustinians from taking in novices, and so ensured their gradual extinction. However certain orders managed to elude this edict, apparently because they had sufficient endowment to make begging unnecessary. These included the Trinitarians and the Friars of the Holy Cross or Crutched Friars, both of whom maintained houses in England right up to the dissolution by Henry the Eighth in 1534–38. Since neither of these groups were mendicants, however, the phrase here raises doubt whether either can be what L had in mind. On this basis Ralph Hanna, in his note to 8.191 above, has settled on the Pied Friars, an offshoot of the Carmelites who did beg.

A small piece of evidence on the matter is provided by Chaucer’s translation of the Romance of the Rose (ll. 7456–60), listing five orders, Dominicans, Franciscans, Augustinians, Carmelites, and Sacks (where the French text [ed. Lecoy, ll.12102–7] lists four: it has the Sacks but not the Augustinians). Andrews 2006:221 asserts that the Friars of the Sack were gone by early in the fourteenth century, but argues (222) that this line in RR helped keep their memory alive.

Despite Ralph Hanna’s conclusion, and despite Chaucer’s keeping the Sacks, when I weigh all the evidence it seems to me that the likeliest candidate for the fifth order—unless it is an ironic reference to the hermits on the highway who beg in friar-clothing and are called friars, C.9.189–255—is indeed the Crutched Friars, for whose activity in London in the late fourteenth century there is ample evidence. They had a house in St Olave’s parish near the Tower, on a street adjacent to the street still called Crutched Friars Street (in the City, a block south of Aldgate Street) (Röhrkasten 2004:62). Their strong presence in London is evident in the taxation rolls cited in McHardy, 1977; see her index, s.v. Crutched Friars. For the phrase “five orders,” see especially Röhrkasten 1996:473 and Virginia Davis, “Mendicants” and Clergy, passim. Davis in Clergy 33n says that the Crutched Friars, though “not technically a mendicant order” were “usually treated as such,” and says that in “many London wills” “bequests are left ‘to the five orders of friars’”; she cites one such will. See also her “Mendicants,” esp. p. 4. and n23. Even more aptly for our purpose, Röhrkasten, whose study of bequests to friars in wills is definitive, says that “Only about 10 per cent of the testators mentioned the number of five mendicant orders while 18.5 percent indicated that as far as they were concerned there were only four friaries in the city. This does not mean that they ignored the Crutched Friars; on the contrary, many of this group not only included the smallest of the convents in their wills but actually named them together with the others, maintaining the differentiation” (1996:473). In a note he cites a typical such differentiation: “Cuilibet domui fratrum XII denarios ac etiam domui S. Crucis XII denarios” (To each house of friars twelve pence, and twelve pence also to the house of the Holy Cross). This suggests that Langland’s “four” and “five” are both normal. Hayden 1995 lists English ordinations to the order, and shows ample activity, mostly in London, throughout the second half of the fourteenth century. P. L. Heyworth, in his edition of Jack Upland, p. 119, opts for the Crutched Friars. They were still around in 1534: see Roth 1966: 2.445–46.

Meanwhile, Robert Swanson, whose knowledge of the fourteenth-century English church is unrivaled, has suggested that the fifth order may be the Trinitarians, who were not friars but were often thought to be friars, and were more numerous and prominent than the Crutched Friars. See Swanson 2007: 63–64, 144–45.

82–83 (B.13.76–77) They preche … tholede: The friar preaches penance, as the apostles did when they went out in twos (Mark 6:12), and as Francis did in imitation of them (Celano, First Life, 1.22, 23, Habig 1983:247); and he preaches “Christ crucified,” as St Paul did (1 Cor 1:23), and as Chaucer’s Host says “freres doon in Lente,/To make us for oure olde synnes wepe” (Clerk’s Prologue, E12–13). See Fleming 1977:126 and Owst 1926:147, who quotes Chaucer’s lines. Faus Semblant, of course, preaches penitence too, in the forms of poverty, distress, and abstinence; see the note to 68–73a above.

84 decretistre of Canoen: Canon lawyer, one versed in the decretals.

86 (B.13.79) Hath no pyte on vs pore: i.e., won’t pass the mortreux; see 115 (B.13.107–8). Will complains that the friar preaches penance without practicing it; but he seems no more willing to suffer himself. He has utterly forgotten Ymaginatif’s counsel “no clergie to despice/Ne sette shorte by here science, whatso þei doen hemsulue/…/Laste cheste chaufe vs to choppe vch man oþer” (14.64–68, B.12.121–25).

B.13.83 Mahoun: I.e., a devil; see 20.293 and OED, s.v. Mahound, n. Will’s basic wish is that the doctor were in hell, and undergoing this Dantesque punishment. The C version is much milder.

91 (B.13.84) iurdan, iuyste: the former is a vessel doctors used for urinalysis, the latter a drinking-pot with handles; see OED. s.v. jordan, n.¹ and just, n.². Since both had a narrow neck and a round belly, the line is pleonastic. Iurdan, however, suggests strongly that we have here a satiric portrait of Friar William Jordan, O. P., Doctor of Theology, a major Dominican spokesman (Gelber 2004:50) who had engaged in controversy with Uthred of Boldon: see Marcett 1938:57–64, Gwynn 1943:2–4, 19–24; Russell 1966:113; Middleton 1987:31–32n; Kerby-Fulton 2006:375. (Clopper 1997:239n accepts the “one-liner directed at Jordan” a little reluctantly “as a local allusion that does not detract from the overall Franciscan character of the scene.”

B.13.85 raþer: I.e., three or four days ago at St Paul’s, B.13.65–66 (C.15.69–70).

B.13.86 Pacience … preynte on me to be stille: See also 120 (B.13.113), where Conscience winks on Patience to pray Will to be quiet, and 20.19 (B.18.21), where Faith “printe” (B preynte) on Will when he asks after Piers. Here, the word is an editorial conjecture for “wynkede” in the majority of B mss; clearly the archetype had already substituted the more common verb. Burrow 2000:80–82, 2002:103–5 discusses “prinken” and concludes that the gesture is our modern wink of the eye, but that it carried more weight then. Stephen Barney has suggested to me that it is more a wince than a wink.

92 apose hym what penaunce is and purgatorie on erthe: i.e., ask him if he realizes what a penance it is to be poor, and have one’s purgatory on earth: see 82, 86–87 above, and, on purgatory on earth for the poor, 9.279 (B.7.106, A.8.88) and “The Simonie,” ed. Dean, 1996, l. 509.

Patience calms Will down (93–105, B.13.86–98)

94–105 (B.13.87–98) Thow shalt se … penaunce: Patience, true to his name, advises passiveness, not action: “Let him talk first,” doing so in a supercharged version of the extravagant language that will turn out to be his hallmark. He utters a satiric tour de force of prediction of what the doctor will say, namely that in eating and drinking as he did he was actually doing penance. His predictions, however, are not borne out at all in the lines that follow: instead, rather anticlimactically, the doctor just coughs and gapes 108 (coughs and carps B.13.101, and nearly all C mss.), and then Patience asks him about the three Do’s. But of course L could hardly have shown the doctor fulfilling the prediction in any detail; the point rather is for Patience to quiet Will down by saying, “Let him convict himself”—and the doctor apparently does that by coughing and gaping, that is, revealing how ill his overeating has made him, though the unspecified “carping” in B (and the C majority) may consist of the sort of arrogant self-justification Patience has predicted. The details of the passage are hard, since Patience speaks with his usual playful irony (see 32–33n above, and Simpson 2007:142–43); I shall do my best to explicate them one by one.

95 (B.13.88) poffe: pant, breathe hard: his stomach pain makes speaking painful. See OED 1.b, which cites this passage.

96 (B.13.89) And thenne shal his gottes gothelen: as Glutton’s did, 6.398; cf. also 108 Cowhede to 6.412, where Glutton “cowed vp a caudel.” Patience is clearly playing on Will’s mention of penaunce 92 (B.13.85); in C he may be playing further on the idea of purgatorie on erthe: the doctor has purgation problems right now.

97–100 (B.13.90–93) For now he hath dronke … fode for a penante: a most difficult passage of satiric hyperbole. Its gist is that the doctor will defend himself ingeniously by arguing either that rich food is penitential because, as 95–96 (B.13.88–89) say, it gives you a stomach ache, makes you suffer, or that what appears to be brawn and so on is in fact merely bread and soup. Bacon and brawn are flesche, i.e., meat, blaunmanger and mortrewes contain meat; mortrewes can also contain fische. Though he will deuyne, that is, argue ingeniously a difficult theological point (cf. B.10.185–88), his manner of argument will in fact be typically Langlandian, “preving” by taking a text or person or anecdote “to witness”—cf., e.g., Recklessness proving that the poor are close to God, 12.98–176a, where the word “witness” is used four times, “preven” twice, “testify” and “accord” once each, and ll. 170–75 are a special rush of authorities testifying and proving. See 20.275–76 for a similar statement about phony friar-argumentation, proving by Seneca that all things should be in common.

Sui generis though this outburst seems, it is actually like Study’s tirade in B.10 at a number of points. The basic idea, that the doctor will be too addled by food and drink to talk sense, is just what Study has said: he is one of those who “puten forþ presumpcion to preue þe soþe” and “dryuele at hir deys … whanne hir guttes fullen” (B.10.56–58). Drawing on Job, Jeremiah, and the Psalms, Study all through her speech contrasts the prosperous wicked to the just poor, just as Will contrasts this prosperous, arrogant doctor to himself, poor deserving Will. The doctor is “a frere to seke festes” (B.10.95), a “maister” “moving motives in his glory” (cf. B.10.117). Since Will and Patience are offered none of the good food, he “þus parteþ wiþ þe pouere a parcell [i.e., turns them away] whan hym nedeþ” (B.10.64); he is one of those who “in gaynesse and glotonye forglutten hir good/And brekeþ noʒt to þe beggere as þe book techeþ:/Frange esurienti panem tuum &c” (B.10.84–85a). He “prech[e3] at Seint Poules” “that folk is noʒt … sory for hire synnes” (B.10.74–76). He speaks of “a trinite” if not “þe Trinite” (B.10.54). And so on; we see L here reworking a set of ideas he has already used.

The first witness here, here pocalips, is probably not (pace Pearsall and Schmidt) The Apocalypse of Golias, though that text does satirize corrupt clergy and ends in a long scene featuring gluttonous monks, who at one point assert that by the “sore pains” of drinking they come to know heaven’s bliss (ed. Wright, 1841, ll. 379–80), but why it should be “their” Apocalypse is troubling. Alternatively, the phrase may mean “their (the friars’) mumbo-jumbo, their clever apocalyptic way of speaking” or “their own ‘Revelation,’” in which they reveal such things as why bacon and so on are penitential foods, or that this or that angel mentioned in the Book of Revelation is Francis. Certainly the long association between the Franciscan Spirituals and Joachism is a sufficient background for accusing friars of having made the Apocalypse their own, even though the Spirituals characteristically used their apocalypticism to argue for a life of poverty, not indulgence. See Leff 1967a:1.51–255 and, for Peter John Olivi, Burr 1993; in his first two chapters, he gives a full review of Franciscan Joachism before Olivi. On the internal Franciscan disputes, see Lambert 1998, Clopper 1997:27–54, and Burr 2011.

Another possibility is opened up by this verse from St Paul [1 Cor 14:26]: “Quid ergo est, fratres? Cum convenitis, unusquisque vestrum psalmum habet, doctrinam habet, apocalypsin habet, linguam habet, interpretationem habet. Omnia ad aedificationem fiant.” “How is it then, brethren? When you come together, every one of you hath a psalm, hath a doctrine, hath a revelation [an apocalypse], hath a tongue, hath an interpretation. Let all things be done unto edification.” Although Paul is not speaking disparagingly, the exhortation at the end of the sentence implies the possibility of a kind of pandemonium if it is not followed—everyone with something to say, but bringing about not edification but ruin. Though I have not found it, it is hard to imagine that this verse, with its “fratres cum convenitis” at the head and its little potential scene of glib chaos, was not used satirically by antifraternal writers, and if so the word “apocalypse” may play a key role. In any case, our friar has his little revelation (or, rather, Patience imagines he does).

Þe passioun of seynt Aueroy is still more obscure. “Passion” here perhaps does not mean “suffering and martyrdom,” as it regularly does in the martyrologies, but just “suffering,” or “hard life,” the sort of heroic abstinence one associates with saints: once again Anima’s “sermon” in B.15 is relevant: the desert fathers’ “penaunce and pouerte and passion” (B.15.270) consists above all in eating simply. In contradistinction to this, Patience predicts, the friar will offer, in proof of his proposition, the suffering of St Aueroy from too much fine food. But St Aueroy (B Auereys) has been a puzzle. Pearsall in his first edition, following Skeat, suggests St Avoya, “who was fed in her torment with fine bread from heaven—a useful twist to the doctor’s argument that good food and suffering go together,” and also mentions St Aurea, “a Spanish solitary, better known, who is said to have drunk only what she could distil from cinders.” Schmidt says it is either one of these “or an imaginary saint (the B form echoing Avarice) suited to the Doctor, whose own ‘passion’ would presumably result from over-indulgence.” Middleton (1987) has argued powerfully that the reference is simply to the Arab philosopher Averroes, here “sainted” by the friar for his materialism in a brilliant satiric thrust on L’s part against fraternal materialism in general. Again the historic disputes within the Franciscan order seem relevant, since the place of secular learning, in which Averroes’s thought was prominent, was a major issue. Peter John Olivi, the major Franciscan Joachist, in his Postilla on the Apocalypse made the study of Averroes a prominent mark of the carnal church (Leff 1967a:1.125). Pearsall in his revised edition drops his earlier suggestions and accepts Averroes. But this explanation, as Schmidt points out, leaves “passioun” imperfectly explained: in what sense did Averroes suffer? Yet another possibility (very like Schmidt’s imaginary saint) is that the word meant is “Auerous,” avaricious, and that the “Passion of St Avaricious” is invented as a partner-text to the “Apocalypse of Gluttony.” (On how avarice suffers—not as severely as Gluttony—see 6.272–85; avarice is relevant because fine food is expensive; see 44–45.) But Golias is not necessarily “Gluttony,” and there is no reason to suppose that the common word “averous,” even in connection with “saint,” would be mishandled by scribes, who had no trouble with “Erl Auerous” (10.86, B.8.89, A.9.80). On the whole, the best explanation seems to lie in the Franciscan disputes; though L elsewhere shows some sympathy with the Spirituals’ position, this line strikes at fraternal intellectual extremism in general by ridiculing both sides.

101–3 (B.13.94–96) And thenne shal he testifie … leue me neuere aftur: “And then he will tick off three proofs that he found in a pamphlet about how a friar should live his life, and get his companion to back him.” Clopper 1997:76, referring to this passage, says that “Patience ridicules the mendicant habit of using trinities to gloss away their Rule.” Irritatingly, he provides no evidence for this remark, and I do not know what glosses he has in mind, but it is true that a lot of fraternal writers love to number their thoughts. The Summa theologica is an obvious example, as are the Legenda aurea, Bonaventure’s Minor Life of St Francis, and Olivi’s Rule Commentary. This habit seems to me to be as good an explanation as any for the doctor’s trinite.

A forel is “a case or covering in which a book or manuscript is kept, or into which it is sewn” (OED, s.v. forel, n. 1c). “Lyuynge” can mean “way of life,” “rule of life,” or it can mean “livelihood, means of getting a living.” Pearsall, apparently settling on the latter, glosses the line “What (poor) fare he [i.e. his felowe] found in a friar’s box of provisions.” This presumably means that the friar will argue further that his fellow brought his dinner with him, obtained by begging, and is asking for himself a kind of guiltlessness by association. But the line is more likely to mean “what he, the friar-doctor, found in a pamphlet on the fraternal way of life,” i.e., further specious defense of la dolce vita. And then the furste leef is simply the first page of that book or pamphlet. Of course, if the first leaf is lies, so are all the other leaves: it is “lies from the word go.” Cf. 22.248–50, 274–75. Or does the first leaf take up the topic mendacium?

104–5 (B.13.97–98) And thenne is tyme … penaunce: Why is thenne the time to quiz the friar about Dowel, etc.? Not, probably, because he will have brought up the subject of trinities (Patience can’t have that much confidence in his prediction), but simply because having spoken first, and probably incoherently, he can now be spoken to: Will’s error was to want to be the first to speak. And Patience also deftly redefines what Will is to ask about, deflecting the issue of “penaunce” to a subordinate and nonconfrontational position in the question (though Will will manage soon enough to deliver his challenge directly). to take and to appose: to begin to challenge, a phrase a little like our saying “go ahead and challenge” instead of just “challenge”; this is a similar filler, and provides the poet with an alliterating stave. The phrase “take and” is used by L only here, and not treated by either OED, MED, or Kane, Glossary; but see MED, s.v. take, meanings 37–39a. Yf dobest be eny penaunce: i.e., Isn’t the best life one of suffering and self-denial?

Will questions the doctor, then challenges the answer (106–18, B.13.99–111)

107 (B.13.100) As rody as a rose: Whiting R200, though not commonly used for the flush of overindulgence, as it is here.

108–9 (B.13.101–2) Cowhede and capede (B carped), and consience … trinite: All B mss. read carped(e), as do all but five C mss. Skeat and Schmidt have carpede in both versions. RK-C include capede on p. 80 as part of a very long list of “small lexical and rhetorical differences” between B and C that may be scribal but may also be L’s “minute revision” and so are “accepted as features of the revised version” (78). Ms. X of C very clearly reads capede. If L indeed wrote capede, he forgot that Patience’s prediction obliges him to have the doctor speak. If he merely coughs and gapes, the prediction looks foolish; if he speaks, we can assume, as we do in B, that he drivels in some way more or less like what was predicted. And consience hym herde: Heard him cough? Surely he heard him speak.

Note that it is Conscience who opens the dialogue with the doctor, not Patience, who is after all at this point nothing but Will’s tablemate; Conscience is the host, and thus the right person to speak. But we have to assume that he has overheard Will and Patience’s conversation.

109 (B.13.102) tolde hym of a trinite: Apparently with ironic reference to the self-serving trinite (101, B.13.94) Patience has predicted that the friar will cite to justify his indulgence, Conscience brings up a trinity with real moral import. We might think of him as saying, “Will here has a trinity on his mind that he would like to ask you about.”

109 (B.13.102) and toward me [B vs] he lokede: The scene is alive to the decorum of the dream vision: a threatening opponent is wisely softened by the guide before the protagonist confronts him. Cf. Inferno 29, in the tenth bolgia, where Vergil first speaks to Griffolino and Capocchio, propped against each other and scraping their scabs, but when he finds they are Italian, draws close to Dante and says, “Say to them what you want.” Similarly, in the eighth bolgia, Cantos 26 and 27, Vergil has spoken to Ulysses and Diomede, because “being Greeks, they might disdain your speech,” but has let Dante speak to Guido da Montefeltro: “He touched me on the side and said, ‘You talk; he’s Italian.’” Cf. also Wit silently gesturing to Will to speak to Study, B.10.140–46. Cf. B.13.86 and note, and C.15.119–20 and note.

110 (B.13.103) “What is dowel … is dobest eny penaunce?”: Will, perhaps after all a little cowed, truncates his question, in the second part merely parroting what Patience said in line 105 (B.13.98); the doctor will ignore that part. The question is a mere trap, designed to enable Will to retort with the charge that the doctor does not practice what he preaches. Conscience takes it seriously, though, and will rephrase it at 122 (B.13.115) to include Dobet—and get a fuller answer.

111–13 “Dowel? … avowe” (B.13.104–5 “Dowel … power): If the friar’s answer is put in what may seem to us (and seemed to Robertson and Huppé, 1951:162, Middleton 1972:180, and many others) a curiously negative way, it may be only because the language is poor in n-words to alliterate with neyhebore. (In B.13.105 the alliteration is also on n: “þyn euencristen” is to be pronounced “þy neuencristen.”) Pearsall aptly cites Piers’s similar formulation at 7.211, “ʒoure neyhebores nexst in none wyse apayre.” Both places are free translations of Ps 14:3, “Qui … non fecit proximo suo malum.” Ps 14 has an honored place in the poem (see 2.42n), and will be cited soon by Clergie. The rhetorical situation, indeed, requires an orthodox answer, so that Will can retort with the charge that the doctor fails to practice what he preaches. Nevertheless, the fuller answer in C, adding not harming oneself (after which the doctor does himself a favor by taking a drink, as if to remind everyone of his selfish conduct at dinner), even though we are enjoined to love our neighbor as ourselves (see B. 13.141 and note below), sounds more than a little arrogant. B.13.105 nouʒt by þi power: not if you can help it.

114–18 “Sertes, sire” … in die iudicij” (B.13.106–11 “By þis day, sire doctour … I am in point to dowel”): Probably the doctor is satisfied with his peremptory reply, as he says at 123 (though that line has no counterpart in B), but it is possible that Will interrupts him here. In any case, Conscience thinks he deserves a chance to speak further.

To take C first: ʒe passeth means “you fail in respect to” (Kane, Glossary), “you evade”; the doctor “walks right past” dowel. Et visitauit & fecit redempcionem &c: Luke 1:68, (with et for quia) from Zachary’s song of joy at the birth of John the Baptist: “(Blessed be the Lord, God of Israel, because) he hath visited and wrought the redemption (of his people).” God has performed the redemption he promised; and he has also restored Zachary’s speech, as Gabriel promised (Luke 1:20). Altogether, he practiced as he preached. However, by making the omitted subject of the Latin verbs appear to be 116 oure lord, that is, Christ, L appears not to be invoking the actual context of the phrase but using it instead as an emblem of the ministry of Christ to set before the friar, a hands-on way of redeeming, visiting, and doing—including visiting the sick and sharing food—not just teaching, and certainly not just eating. And having failed to feed Will, the doctor failed to feed Christ, as he will learn in die iudicij: “As long as you did it not to one of these least ones, neither did you do it to me” (Matt 25:45); see Matthew’s whole account of Judgment Day, 25:31–46. Verse 43, “I was … sick … and you did not visit me,” perhaps accounts for the reference to sick friars in the infirmary, and the repeated verb “visitastis/non visitastis” echoes visitauit in the citation from Luke. The friar in Chaucer’s Summoner’s Tale visits a sick man, but without compassion. Finally, cf. Everyman (ed. Bevington 1975:962): as Everyman approaches death and judgment, “All fleeth save Good Dedes,” i.e., dowel.

Here Dowel is implicitly defined in terms of the “seven corporal works of mercy,” developed from this passage in Matthew (and is also equated with Christ, the “enditer” on the day of judgment and the major worker of mercy). The works of mercy emerge here and there in the poem, most fully in Scripture’s definition of Dobet at A.11.188–95 (where to “seken out þe seke” is placed, as it is here, in the context of brotherhood). On visiting the sick, see also 9.34–35 (B.7.30), 7.21 (B.5.405); on providing for them, see Reason’s challenge to Will, that he has no useful craft, “Hem þat bedreden be byleue to fynden” (5.21); and on caring for them, see above all the Good Samaritan, 19.46–93 (B.17.50–126; also, the account of Christ as healer, 18.138–49 (B.16.103–18), and the false physic offered by Friar Penetrans-domos in passus 22: by the end of the poem, ministry to the sick has become perhaps the major form of love in action.

B.13.109–10, without the reference to Judgment Day to evoke Christ’s words in Matt 25, is murkier: the infirmary seems to come out of nowhere—as do the yonge children. Clearly the charite that sholde be is precisely this ministry to the sick. The cheeste in the convent that replaces it recalls the activity of Wrath among nuns, B.5.153–65. As for the children, along with the sick they are presumably the weakest members of the community, those most in need of charity, but instead the joint victims, in Will’s view, of the doctor’s bullying ways.

The standard minimum age for entering an order was the age of legal puberty, fourteen, i.e., when one was no longer a yonge child. But it was commonplace to accuse orders of friars of enticing underage boys to join, and there is sufficient evidence that they actually did. See the good discussion in Logan 1996:12–16, who says the practice was “not uncommon in England” (12) but not done “routinely” (16) either. On p. 15 he describes a case involving a seven-year-old. See also Röhrkasten 1996:454 (a case in 1392 in which Crutched Friars, on the wane and desperate for recruits, tried to deceive a ten-year-old into making a profession). Richard Fitzralph, in a well-known anecdote in Defensio curatorum (Heyworth 1968:126, Fowler 1980:236 and 1995:168, Walsh 1981: 424–25), speaks of a boy “not yet 13,” and later claims that “You can scarcely find a friar-place that doesn’t have one whole convent, or at least half a convent, of boys under ten” (ed. Brown, 1690:473, 476). See further Jack Upland, ed. Heyworth 1968, ll. 209–11, 330–34, 347–53 and Heyworth’s notes; Woodford, Responsiones, ed. Doyle 1983:141–42, 167–68, 172–74; Szittya 1986:205–6; and Erickson 1975:112–13, 117–18, though Logan’s discussion is the best informed. Woodford insists that boys are not “stolen,” nor are they recruited before the age of 14 (172), but he admits that the order accepts younger oblates from their parents, though they make no profession until they are 15 (173).

B.13.111 I wolde permute … dowel: i.e., “if what you are doing—keeping all the best food for yourself—is Dowel, let’s trade penances, for I am keen to do well.” Note that though he asks, “Is Dobest any penaunce?,” Will seems in fact to assume that penance is a necessary part of doing well, perhaps because the friar’s sermon of a few days ago harped on that theme.

An after-dinner contest to define the three D’s (119–69, B.13.112–71)

119–69 Thenne consience … techest (B.13.112–71a Than Conscience … vincunt): Gruenler 2017:154 argues that the scene “follows a variant of the common folktale pattern of threes by asking the same question of three different people, who give increasingly riddling answers.” He goes on to show how it has elements comparable to both “Solomon and Marcolf” and “St Andrew and the Three Questions.” In “Conscience’s Dinner” (Lawler 1995:91–92) I suggest as a major source the scene in Matthew 22 in which a doctor of the law asks Jesus, “Which is the great commandment of the law?,” i.e., What is Dowel? Jesus’s simple answer—the whole law and prophets boil down to two verses in the Pentateuch—undercuts the doctor by “setting all science at a sop.” Jesus wins a comic victory, as Patience does here by giving what is essentially the same answer.

The second-person pronouns offer a guide to the interrelationships of the characters. (I cite B because it has more dialogue; C is consistent with it.) Will (105–11) and Conscience (114–15) call the doctor “you,” as he no doubt expects them to. Clergie calls Conscience “you” when he objects to his leaving (183–87), but switches to the familiar “thou” when they see eye-to-eye at the end of the scene (203–4, 211–14). Conscience calls Clergie “thou” all through (119, 188, 201). Patience begins his reply by using “you” to Conscience (“At youre preiere” 136), but then uses the imperative singular in both Latin and English (137–38); he quotes his lemman as using “thou” to him (140–47); then, interestingly, when he stops quoting her and goes on to speak for himself, he keeps on saying “thou,” as she did to him (148–49, 157 [the imperative singular “Vndo”], 162–63, 164–71). Possibly he is just continuing his lemman’s way of speaking (which is biblical: the imperative singular for commandments); possibly he has turned to address Will, who originally posed the question about Dowel; but, especially because the doctor is the first to reply, I think he is simply talking down to everybody because he knows his answer is superior. The brashness of his “thou” is perhaps one thing that provokes the doctor, and also one thing that Conscience means when he says he has been taken by “þe wil of þe wye” (190).

119–20 (B.13.112–13) continaunce … preynte: Countenance, i.e., a silent sign, a look. Both lines probably refer to the same gesture, i.e., a wink or wince. See B.13.86 and C.15.109 (B.13.102) above (and notes). Why does he make a sign to Patience rather than Will? Apparently Conscience has already perceived the charisma in Patience that will cause him to go off with him at the end of the scene, though allegory perhaps operates as well: Will’s conscience tells him to be patient. From this point in B Conscience will act as master of ceremonies, calling on each person in turn to define Dowel: the doctor at 114, Clergie at 119, Patience at 134 (but KD-B seem to punctuate so as to have Clergie rather than Conscience invite Patience to speak to Clergie; see the note there). In C he calls on the doctor (121) and Clergie (127), but (after Piers speaks and leaves) Patience speaks without being asked.

The doctor goes first (119–26, B.13.112–19)

122 (B.13.115) ʒe deuynours: Lawton in Alford 1988:238 marks a triple pun in “diviner”: doctor of divinity, quack, and over-imbiber (one who speaks de vino).

123–26a “Y haue yseide … vocabitur” (B.13.116–18a “Dowel … celorum”): Since the speaker is a doctor himself, his definition of Dowel seems self-serving, and reminiscent of the Minorites in passus 10 who said, “Dowel lives with us.” The definition of a dobet seems likewise self-serving, since one meaning of That trauayleth to teche oþere can be “One who travels to teach others” (OED, s.v. travail, v. 5), i.e., a member of the Order of Preachers. And it is hard to see why to do as one teaches is “best,” instead of a minimal expectation. To be sure, he is quoting Jesus, who said (line 126a, B.13.118a, which rightly appears inside the quotation marks—the doctor himself cites his source), “Whosoever shall do and teach (the commandments), the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven” (Matt 5:19). In context, however, Jesus is not contrasting teaching to doing, but rather contrasting breaking the commandments, and teaching others to break them, to keeping them and teaching others to keep them. Thus the doctor has quoted scripture to his purpose rather than with full justice. He has come up with a neat schema to answer the progression of the adverbs rather than a genuinely useful progression: he is too taken with the neatness of do, teach, do-and-teach.

On the other hand, the doctor’s words could be applied to the difference between a theology teacher in a school and a parish priest: the latter is a teacher who is out in the world doing. (L sometimes uses “teacher” to mean “parish priest”; see 15.242 [B.15.89–90]n and Lawler 2006:86.) From this angle there is a modesty in what he says. See Pearsall’s good note; like Skeat he finds the doctor’s remarks correct but inadequate; and see Lawler 1995:90–91. Schmidt: “The text was earlier cited by Scripture at A.11.196a in defining Dobest as ‘a bishop’s peer’; but the Doctor … more probably means learned Mendicants like himself than the episcopal order as a whole.”

Why has L changed the Vulgate future perfect fecerit (like docuerit) to the present facit? Apparently to give greater emphasis to doing over teaching: in the phrase “he who does and shall have taught,” the teaching is made to seem remote. The effect is a little like what we are told of Chaucer’s Parson (A497): “First he wroghte, and afterward he taughte.”

Clergie is next (127–36, B.13.119–33)

128–36 “Haue me excused … founde” (B.13.120–30 “I haue seuene sones … Plowman”): The gist of Clergie’s reply is clear enough, and essentially the same in both versions, though C erases various puzzles in B. Perhaps following the lead of Study, he declines to engage in a scholastic disputation outside of school; one feels that he is counteracting the complacent certitude of the other cleric present, the doctor, with modesty. His assertion—echoing 12.92–95 (B.11.171–73)—that Piers has impugned the sciences in favor of love and reduced all texts to two is surely a reference to Jesus’s reply to the doctor of the law who asked, “Which is the great commandment of the law?” Jesus too quoted two texts, love God and love your neighbor, Deuteronomy 6.5 and Leviticus 19.18, and said, “On these two commandments dependeth the whole law and the prophets” (Matt 22:40). See Middleton 1972:179. Jesus set the law at a sop (B.13.125), reducing it to two rules, presumably to the chagrin of the Pharisee who questioned him, whose doctorate is devalued; the phrase applies to our doctor as well, with the added sting of the food-image in at a sop: the rich meal that presumably he thought his status deserved becomes itself a mere sop. As for Domine, quis habitabit (Ps 14), see Middleton 1972:179–80 on the importance of its “infinite” pronoun quis. As she shows, verses 1–5 of this major psalm are all relevant; however, most pointed of all is presumably verse 3, “qui non … fecit proximo suo malum” (nor hath done evil to his neighbour), since it is the equivalent of the second great commandment of the law, love thy neighbor (see B.3.234–45, 9.46–50 [B.7.47–52a, A.8.49–54] for other applications of this psalm to love of neighbor; in the latter passage, it is used to satirize lawyers, as if L thought of it in general as an anti-intellectual text). Verse 3 has just been quoted, all too baldly and flippantly, by the doctor; Clergie restores it to its proper context.

Though the B version thus refers to love of both God and neighbor, C makes that clearer by citing the whole phrase from Matthew, dilige deum et proximum, rather than B’s brief lemma Dilige deum. The formula crops up in numerous places in the poem, above all as the wording of Moses’s maundement in passus 19 (B.17); see 19.14, 17 (B.17.13, 16)n. A passage that Clergie does not quote, but which may well be in L’s mind since it defines Dowel clearly in terms of loving one’s neighbor, is James 2:8, “Si tamen legem perficitis regalem secundum scripturas, ‘Diliges proximum tuum sicut te ipsum,’ bene facitis” (If then you fulfill the royal law according to the scriptures, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” you do well.)

Since Clergie’s seven sons in B are replaced in C by the phrase in scole, they are clearly the seven liberal arts, as Crowley asserted long ago (see Skeat). The Castel/Ther þe lord of lif wonyeþ, and where they seruen, is then presumably Theology, the queen of the disciplines, who will leren hem what is dowel: moral theology refines the ethical ideas encountered in the study of the liberal arts. L may have in mind the seven sons of Japheth or Job or Tobias, or Ruth 4:15, where Naomi is assured that Ruth’s son Obed “is much better to thee than if thou hadst seven sons.” He recasts B.10.155, where Scripture is “sib to þe seuen artʒ”, and B.9.1–24, the castle of Anima. The father with seven sons is a folktale and romance motif, Stith Thompson, Motif Index 251.6.3 (also 252.3 seven daughters). The whole little allegory suggests what Clergie goes on to say, that learning must submit to the law of love; the seven arts are in the process of learning that; eventually Clergie hopes to see them agree with him (122: “until I see that they and I agree”). Middleton 1972:172 says, “Without Piers’s ‘text,’ Clergie’s seven sons cannot define Dowel.” However, Middleton also makes clear that it is precisely through grammar, the first of the arts, and the “grounde of al” in the deeper sense that it represents unchanging truths about the nature of our relation to each other and to the world, that Clergie is able to explain the Infinite, i.e., non-finite, imperfect, insubstantial status of Dowel and Dobet. “Dowel, the object of the search, turns out to be itself an ‘infinite,’ a seeker after its own perfection” (188). For a full exposition of B.13.128–30, read Middleton; in a nutshell, they mean “Dowel and Dobet, both infinitives in their grammatical form and so non-finite, imperfect, and meaningless by themselves, are therefore expressions of the ever-seeking nature of our life: we seek perfection and completion in Dobest, which is the perfect love expressed in the two ‘infinite’ injunctions of Jesus. Virtue is endless, but in the end if you have done your best you will be saved.” Note that Clergie, in looking forward to when he will reach agreement with his sons, is himself also a seeker, a model of the interpretation of the moral life that he propounds. However, for all the disclaimers about learning in his reply, he still manages to be obscurely clerical, so that Conscience’s remark at B.13.131, which means, “I don’t really follow you, but I trust Piers,” is apt.

As Middleton grants, “The C-revision, by simplifying or removing most of the grammatical argument from these speeches, seems to acknowledge that in the poet’s final judgment their obscurity largely outweighed their explanatory value” (182). But the central notion of imperfection remains in C, stated directly in 135 through yet one more “impugning” remark by Jesus, Nemo bonus (nisi unus Deus), None is good but one, that is God, Mark 10:18. I find that Middleton’s analysis sheds much more light on the passage than Vance Smith’s treatment of the three D’s in terms of “beginning” (2001:202–11), though his account of the value the passage places on passiveness, and its relation to Patience, is very fruitful. He is wrong to say that Middleton “does not argue that the verb in ‘Dowel’ is itself an infinitive” (206); she certainly does, on p. 175.

For some analogies to Clergie’s allegory of his seven sons, see Peter the Chanter, ed. Boutry 2012a:522, where charity’s daughters are the seven beatitudes “and the eighth, which returns to the head” (because it repeats the phrase “theirs is the kingdom of heaven”); Garnier de Rochefort (Garnerius Lingonensis), Sermones, PL 205.723, where since Moses “was instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians” (Acts 7:22), the seven daughters of the priest of Midian (Exod 2:16) are the seven liberal arts, which were invented in order to serve theology; and Sigebert of Gembloux, Catalogus de viris illustribus, where appears one Thomas, ninth-century author of an “enigmatic little book” in which Wisdom is the mother of seven daughters, the seven liberal arts (ed. Witte, 1974:89–90) (see Prov 9:1, the seven pillars of wisdom). In Alan of Lille’s Anticlaudianus, the seven arts are seven sisters attendant on Wisdom, though not her daughters.

130 þe palmare ʒent: Yonder pilgrim, the pilgrim over there—with a gesture, presumably, toward Piers. Cf. B.13.124 þe Plowman. ʒent occurs twice in the Harrowing of Hell scene, spelled yon, yond, ʒone, yone; in both places the daughters of God refer to Christ as “yonder light”: 20.148 (B. 18.145), 194 (B.18.189). It is omitted here at 15.130 in many C mss, including HM 137 (P), which Skeat used as his base, so that it was never available in print until Pearsall used HM 143 (X)—but he glossed it “noble,” as if it were “gent” (a genuine ME word that does not appear elsewhere in the poem), so that no one took it as implying Piers’s actual presence. However, words in the family “gentle,” derived from Latin gens, are never spelled in ms. X, or generally in any manuscript, with the letter yogh. Kane 1994:16 identified it for the first time as a form of “yon,” associating it with the reading “ylyke’ in line 33. See also RK-C 156n, Concordance, s.v. yond, and Kane’s Glossary, s.v. yon; Pearsall’s new edition has “over there.” It is thus a significant word indeed, reaffirming Piers’s presence at the dinner shortly before he speaks.

B.13.133–35a “Thanne … vincunt &c”: KD-B punctuate as if Clergie speaks these lines, though there seems to be little reason not to regard 131–35 as a single utterance by Conscience, as all other editors treat it; see Lawler 1995:91n10. Since Conscience has been fairly well established as Master of Ceremonies, it would surely be his place, not Clergie’s, to call on Patience. 133 þis: i.e., that only these texts matter; cf. line 132 and Matt 22:40, “on these two commandments dependeth the whole law and the prophets.” David Aers asserts (1975:88) that Piers’s “proving this in deed” occurs when he explains the tree of charity in passus 16, though “in dede” suggests that the reference is rather to the poem’s account of the redemption in passus 18, Jesus jousting in Piers’s arms, the supreme example of love of God and neighbor in action. 134 Pacience haþ be in many place: one meaning of “to be patient” is “to experience”: if you are patient, you “have been through a lot,” and therefore have been in many places. In Ymaginatif’s terms, you have “kynde wit,” which “comeþ of alle kynnes siʒtes” (B.12.128), contriving many things “of cloudes and of costumes” (customs) (C.14.73). This preferring of “experience” to “authority,” to use Chaucer’s terms, also suggests that the lines belong to Conscience: they would be out of character for Clergie. See Lawler 1995:91–92; Vance Smith 2001:205 writes similarly.

137 Pacientes vincunt (B.13.135a Pacientes vincunt &c): “The patient conquer,” or, perhaps, “Those who suffer win.” I will comment here on sources; on the meaning and value of the phrase in the poem, see below 137, 156a (B.13.135a, 171a)n.

Skeat says that, though the sentiment is a central idea in medieval culture, this exact formulation is not extant other than here. The statement in Anna Baldwin 1990:72 that it is “a quotation from the apocryphal Testament of Job” is quite misleading: this very early work was never translated into Latin, and the Greek phrase Baldwin refers to is “kreissōn estin pantōn he makrothumia,” patience is superior to everything (Kraft 1974:52–53). In a paper he wrote some time ago but never published, Steven Justice argued that the source may be two contiguous sentences, one with patientes and one with vincunt, in William of St Amour’s De periculis: his twenty-second sign is “quod veri apostoli in tribulationibus patientes sunt,” and his twenty-third, “quod veri apostoli in primo adventu male recipiuntur … sed postea vincunt.” (See G. Geltner’s edition of 2008:126.) Recently Lawrence Warner has found the phrase in John Bromyard’s Summa praedicantium (2014:65–66). I find that Thomas of Chobham has vincunt patientes (Summa de commendatione virtutum et extirpatione vitiorum, ed. Morenzoni 1997:160, line 1918). To see just how rampant the idea is, if not the phrase, search vinc* or vic* or supera* or triumpha* + patien* in the PL online and the Brepols LLT-A; the latter will show a number of examples from Roman writers as well as Christians. The commonest mode has patientia in the ablative, and vincere transitive: By patience we conquer the devil/wrath/strong enemies, etc.

The phrase is certainly not in the bible, and yet B.13.135 as crist bereþ witnesse is surely right: it may just mean Christ’s passion, the great victorious act of patience, an experience beyond clerking; Burdach 1926–32:3.2.226 n1, says that it refers to “sein gesamtes Leben, Wirken, Leiden, Sterben und seinen Sieg (seine Auferstehung)” (his whole life, deeds, suffering, and dying, and his victory [his resurrection]), and means that Christ through his patience—and passion—“Vorbild und Bürgeschaft ist für Geduld, Leiden und Sieg seiner Getreuen” (is model and security for the patience, suffering, and victory of his faithful ones), citing 1 Peter 2:21 and four Pauline texts, of which the most apt is 2 Tim 2:12, “if we suffer, we shall also reign with him.” Burdach sees little relevance in Matt 10:22 (which Skeat settles on, followed by Simpson 2007:132), “Qui autem perseveraverit usque in finem, hic salvus erit” (He that shall persevere unto the end, he shall be saved). (In my opinion, if Skeat wanted to cite the Gospels he should have chosen Matt 5:10, “Beati qui persecutionem patiuntur propter iustitiam, quoniam ipsorum est regnum caelorum” [Blessed are they that suffer persecution for justice’s sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven].)

In Juvencus’s hexameter version of the Gospels, Evangelicae historiae libri IV, Matt 5:38–39, in the Sermon on the Mount (You have heard, an eye for an eye, but I say, do not resist evil: turn the other cheek), Jesus says that the law says, “similis vindicta sequatur” (Let like vengeance follow), “Sed tranquilla malum melius patientia vincet,” But calm patience will conquer evil better. L would surely have read that in Peter the Chanter’s good chapter on patience (ed. Boutry 2004:687; for the context in Juvencus, see PL 19.129). Peter further cites Jesus’s famous remark, Matt 11:12, “The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away,” then (p. 688) quotes Jerome, “Nonnisi per pacientiam impletur,” (That remark) is not fulfilled except by patience. Jerome in fact has no such statement; but see Letter 22.40, PL 22.424; Peter the Chanter is apparently interpreting what Jerome says there about seizing heaven by violence as only making sense in terms of patience—as if Jesus is saying that the patient take heaven by storm, they win salvation—and L might have been thinking of this as well. Peraldus and others (as Google shows) cite Jerome similarly, but they are probably parroting Peter the Chanter.

At C.15.156 the phrase is called, more generally, of holy writ a partye, which offers a wider field of possibilities for a scriptural source: Prov 16:32, “Melior est patiens viro forte, et qui dominatur animo suo expugnatore urbium” (The patient man is better than the valiant; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh cities); James 1:4, “Patience hath a perfect work, that you may be perfect and entire, failing in nothing” (failing in nothing = conquering); and James 1:12, “Blessed is the man that endureth temptation; for when he hath been proved he shall receive the crown of life” (endurance = patience, receiving the crown = conquering). See also 1 Peter 2:20, “If doing well you suffer patiently, this is thanksworthy before God”—as if the pardon read “Qui bona egerunt et patienter passi sunt ibunt in vitam eternam.” Or, if to do bet is to suffer, as both Wit (B.9.207) and Clergie (B.10.257) have said, then the first line of the pardon and patientes vincunt are equivalent statements. See Lawler 2000:144–45.

John of Salisbury at Entheticus minor 243–48 cites Prov 16:32, and says that patience “crushes wars with an unwarlike hand.” Prudence in Chaucer’s Melibee, whose whole aim is to persuade her husband that patience and forgiveness will be the most effective vengeance, cites Prov 16:32 and James 1:4 consecutively (B.15.14–15). Donaldson 1949:175 n2 and 180 n2 cites James 5:11, “Beatificamus eos qui sustinuerunt” (We account them blessed who have endured) (which repeats James 1:12 in other terms), and “Burdach’s interesting note,” which I have drawn on above, and which also cites the Sententiae of Publius Syrus, “Feras dolorem; vincitur patientia” (Put up with sorrow; it is conquered by patience) (ed. Friedrich, 1880:85, sent. 6).

See also Chaucer, FrkT F773–75, “Pacience … venquysseth … Thynges that rigour sholde nevere atteyne”; ParsT I661, “seith the wise man, ‘If thow wolt venquysse thyn enemy, lerne to suffre’” (translating “Si vis vincere, disce pati,” Walther, Proverbia 16974; see Hazelton 1960:367–68); and Troilus 4.1584, in Criseyde’s letter to Troilus, “Men seyn, ‘The suffrant overcomith,’ parde” (“Qui patitur, vincit,” Walther, Proverbia 24454). Note that Chaucer’s speakers always quote somebody: “thise clerkes,” “the wise man,” “men,” as if none of them want to be caught treating it as an original idea. Likewise Roman de la Rose, ed. Lecoy 3199–3200, “J’ai bien esprové que l’en vaint/Par sosfrir felon, et refraint,” I have well proved that one conquers and reins in the wicked one by suffering.

For other uses of the phrase by English writers, see Whiting P61, S865, T213, W264; Skeat may be right to say that Langland was thinking of the Distichs of Cato, Sententiae xl and Disticha 1,38 (which Burdach also mentions, and Hazelton treats, 1960:357)—though not when he called it part of holy writ. The brilliance of the phrase is precisely that it goes to the heart of both the Christian ethic of love and self-sacrifice and Cato’s Greco-Roman prudence. L seems to be aware of its protean nature; of its six appearances in the B version (13.135, 171; 14.33, 54; 15.268, 598), he omits or significantly changes in C all but one (B.14.54, C.15.253).

Piers jumps in (C only) (130–51)

137–51 Quod Peres the ploghman … y couthe no mo aspye: In B.13.133, Conscience has resolved the discussion of Piers’s impugning of learning by looking to his coming at some unspecified time in the future. In C, where we were told at the start of the passus (33–37) that he is present, he breaks suddenly into the debate here, uttering Pacientes vincunt and then a single long sentence (138–47), asserting belief in the power of love, that in the B version (13.137–47) is reported by Patience as having been “once” taught him by his girlfriend Love—and then he disappears. This is undeniably more dramatic, and keeps the mysterious Piers alive in our minds, but does not seem to me to add any depth of meaning to the dinner scene. It is hardly more than a distraction, and undermines somewhat the speech of Patience, which has more integrity in the B version.

137, 156a (B.13.135a, 171a) Pacientes vincunt: The overall meaning of this motto “the patient win” in the passage as a whole is “Love your enemies.” That is, assuming that we are in conflict with our enemies, and want to conquer them, the way to do it is to love them: that is a “beating” that will make them “bow” (147, B.13.147). See B.11.379, “Suffraunce is a souerayn vertue, and a swift vengeaunce,” and everything else that Reason says there (and in C.13.194–212) to Will about suffrance. (Piers and Patience are hardly the first figures in the poem to urge loving one’s enemies; see Study’s remarks at B.10.194–204, a passage omitted in the C version; but Wit has introduced the idea as Dobet at 10.189. See also B.11.178–215. Actually, the idea, if not the phrase, was first introduced by Holy Church in her long speech to Will on love in passus 1: the Son died but “wolde … hem no wo þat wrouhte hym þat peyne”; he was “myhtfull and meke and mercy gan graunte/To hem þat hengen hym hye,” 1.165–70 [A.1.143–48; B.1.169–74].)

In addition, however, the literal meaning “the patient win” has a local application that varies each time. At B.13.135a it signifies that Patience, the third and last speaker, is likely to win this contest of wits: as Conscience says, he probably knows things that the two clerks don’t know. In the course of Patience’s speech in B, and the combined Piers-Patience speeches in C, “vincunt” comes to mean “win” in the sense of “gain”: the enemy’s love, 143 (B.13.145), but further, power, land, and possessions: 154, 166–69 (B.13.167, 170–71). Thus when the motto is repeated at the end of Patience’s speech, B.13.171a, and by Piers in C at 156a, it means “the patient gain” or “the patient win power.” Not, of course, that the point is to be greedy: both speakers speak in riddles, and Patience emphasizes the paradox of patience’s power by carrying out to its logical political conclusion the aggressive denotation of his verb. He attaches it to all the objects it would ordinarily be attached to in the commonplace assumption it silently replaces, namely that agentes vincunt: wars, power, land, money.

Finally, given these local applications in the other places, it is likely that when, in the C version, Piers uses the motto to open his speech at 137, it refers not just to the “overall” point, “love your enemies,” but also to the two lines that follow, and makes clear that they constitute a rejoinder to what, for all the courtesy of “For Peres loue þe palmare ʒent” (130), amounts to a charge by Clergie in lines 130–36 (B.13.124–30) that Piers has undermined his profession. Piers argues back, “The patient win, and I intend to maintain (thus winning out over Clergie) that what I said (when I impugned crafts, namely, dilige deum et proximum) was right.” The implication then is that Piers is patient, whether because he represents Christ, who suffered the passion (and said dilige deum et proximum), or because he and Patience, who apparently arrived together at the dinner, share the same ideas.

138–47 “Byfore perpetuel pees … blynde mote he worthen” (cf. B.13.140–47 “Wiþ wordes and werkes … blynd mote he worþe”): What Love says in B.13.140–46 is a complete imperative sentence, a series of injunctions: Love your soul, learn to love your enemy, cast coals on his head, try to win his love, lay on him with love till he laughs at you. In Piers’s mouth in C, the sentence gets changed in such a way as to appear incomplete: I shall prove and avow and never forsake that this series of injunctions—love God and your enemy, help him, cast coals on this head, try to win his love, give to him again and again, comfort him, and lay on him with love till he laughs at you—what? He never ends up saying what he will prove the injunctions will do. The answer, I think, is first to add line 147 to the sentence, as Schmidt does (though I would put a dash rather than a semicolon at the end of 146), and to see that the imperative verbs are actually conditions that will bring about the bowing predicted in 147: I will prove to you that, love your enemy and he will bow, i.e., if you love, then he will bow. It also works in B to add line 147 to the sentence, again as Schmidt does, though again with a dash: Love him, cast coals on his head, and so on—and surely he will bow. For comment on individual phrases, see the notes below.

140 disce, doce, dilige deum and thyn enemy (B.13.137 Disce … doce, dilige inimicos, 138 Disce … doce … dilige): “Learn this and teach it: love (God and) your enemies”; see B.13.142, lere þe to louye, and cf. Lawler 1995:92 and 2011:72. “Love your enemies” is the message, as the speech goes on to make clear (cf. Matt 5:44, Luke 6:27, 35: diligite inimicos). Learning and teaching are simply elements of any major injunction: we absorb it and press it on others. For example, Love taught it to Patience (in B), and he is teaching it now. On the idea “learn to love,” see 22 (B.20).208 and 206–11n. The phrases “disce diligere” and “disce amare” occur frequently in Augustine, e.g., “Disce diligere inimicum” (as in B) PL 37.1273 (Enarrationes in Psalmos, Ps 99); “Disce amare Deum” (as in C), PL 38.160 (Sermo 23). See also 1 Thess 4:9, “Ipsi enim vos a Deo didicistis ut diligatis invicem,” Yourselves have learned of God to love one another.

The sentence in both versions scans as the first few feet of a hexameter (if in B one does not elide dilige inimicos at the caesura). As I have reported in Lawler 2011:72, the schoolbook collection of hexameter proverbs, Ms. Douce 52 in the Bodleian Library, gives an elegiac couplet that starts “Disce, doce, retine” (Learn, teach, retain), and Walther, Initia carminum, has eight pages of proverbs that start with Disce. Thus we may have here a little example of what I called at the end of my essay “evidence that Langland’s own training in the writing of Latin verse found its way in to Piers Plowman” (2011:68).

142 (B.13.144) Caste coles … speche: I.e., “Make his face red” with shame before your kindness; see Proverbs 25:21–22, which St Paul quotes and explicates at Romans 12:20, the climax of a passage (12:14–21) on returning good for evil. Medieval explicators thought of the coals as either one’s enemy’s hot penance or one’s own hot love: see Whiting C337. Alanus, Distinctiones, PL 210.731: “Carbo, proprie; est charitas, unde Jacobus [Paulus]: ‘Hoc faciens, carbones ignis congeres super caput ejus’ [Rom 12:20], idest patientia tua accendens eum in charitate divina” (Coal, besides its proper meaning, is love, whence James [Paul], “Doing this, thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his head,” that is, by your patience setting him on fire with divine love). (In the Latin, I have inserted a semicolon after “proprie” to indicate what the PL text obscures, that Alan’s “proprie” is a brief nod to the literal word before he moves on to figurative meanings; he is not saying that “coal properly means love”; see Tuija Ainonen’s compelling explanation, 2008:21–27.)

Alle kynde speche: Speech that is “all kind,” entirely kind, with reference probably to the various sorts of unkind speech criticized in the surrounding verses in Proverbs 25: false witness in 18, unwelcome jollity in 20, backbiting in 23, contentiousness in 24. Say only nice things! The phrase may be a compression of “all kinds of kind speech”: say all the nice things you can think of.

148–51 And whan he hadde yworded thus … y couthe no mo aspye: The disappearance of Piers is like Christ’s from the dinner table at Emmaus, Luke 24:31, described at 12.123–33 (B.11.234–45), where Christ like Piers in this scene is dressed as a pilgrim. The comparison deepens the association of Piers with Christ. Cf. Aers 2004:41–42 and Gruenler 2017: 225, 240. Cf. also the disappearing guest—an angel—at St Gregory’s banquet: Golden Legend, trans. Ryan, 1.176–77. See Stith Thompson, Motif Index D2188, Magic disappearance. 150 resoun ran aftur: We forget that Reason is a significant figure at the dinner, since he was last mentioned in line 28. Why he leaves now is anybody’s guess.

Finally, Patience (152–69, B.13.133–71)

152–69 And pacience properliche spak … techest (B.13.136–71a “At youre preiere … Pacientes vincunt”): As I have said above, what Patience says has much more integrity in the B version, without Piers to say half of it for him. It celebrates love with élan in the multiple ways I have explicated above in the portion of his speech later given to Piers (136–48), then turns to riddling mode in 151–57, challenging the doctor to vndo the riddle, and going on to specify, still with élan, all the dangers, natural and political, that the charitable needn’t fear, that the patient will conquer. It is a brilliant tour de force, well calculated to get a rise out of the doctor. The slightly longer C counterpart of these lines maintains the élan, though it drops vndo it: it cuts out the riddles but then adds a new one at 161, sharpens the political boast by speaking of winning all fraunce without bloodshed, and raises the temperature of B’s Caritas nihil timet. See the enlightening discussion in Galloway 1995:95–97.

What effect does the speech have on the rest of the poem? Its immediate effect is to put the doctor and his power mode to rout, and to align Conscience firmly with Patience. From now on, the conscientious way is the patient way—the way of the Samaritan, and of Christ himself. At 21.109–14 (B.19.109–14), it is clear that “Love your enemy,” Patience’s message, is Christ’s special message. I argued at the end of my 1995 essay that Conscience’s utter commitment to patience explains his decision to admit Friar Flatterer to Unity in the final scene of the poem. And Will too is committed to patience from now on.

152 properliche: “Appropriately, correctly,” MED; “with due modesty,” Kane, Glossary. But its emphatic position before the verb suggests the more pregnant meaning, “in his own person, himself.” Piers has just praised patience and the patient, and now that Piers is gone, Patience himself speaks. And what he says is anything but modest, as the doctor sees. “I could win all France without shedding a drop of blood!”

B.13.136 so no man displese hym: “As long as no one will be offended.” The doctor, it turns out, will be very much offended.

B.13.139 a lemman, loue was hir name: See C.20.185. The word lemman calls up the Song of Songs. Cf. its use in two contemporary passages clearly derived from the Song of Songs, Miller’s Tale, A3700, 3705 and Pearl 763.

B.13.140 wordes … werkes … wil: This series of terms goes back to Holy Church’s answer to Will 1.84–85 (B.1.88–89, A.1.86–87); see B.14.14 and note; B.15.198–200, 210; Alford 1988:52, 55; and Burrow 1969.

B.13.141 loue leelly þi soule: On this important Christian concept (which boils down to “do well”), see the notes to 17.125–49 (sixth paragraph), 17.140a, and 17.143–49; and cf. the doctor 15.112 above.

153–56a That loueth lely … vincunt &c (B.13.148–50 Ac for to fare þus wiþ þi frend … no catel but speche): Though these passages correspond in the two versions, they say quite different things. In B, Patience rounds out his lemman Love’s remarks on loving one’s enemy by adding, rather superfluously, that you don’t have to cast coals on the head of your friend, who unlike an enemy does not want to annex your land but only wants you to talk to him. (Galloway, though, argues [1995:96] attractively that speech between friends is an arena that allows for riddling: thus the riddles that follow.) In C, Patience picks up where Piers left off, and goes in an entirely different direction from B, confirming Piers’s praise of love by asserting that one who loves has no interest in annexing land—but asserting (since patience conquers) that by the peaceful means of patient love he could win all France, if he wanted to. He will continue that boast—see the note below to 157–69 (B.13.158–71a).

155 bruttenynge of buyren: Cutting men to pieces. In this line about war, L wittily imports the diction of alliterative battle poetry, as Chaucer famously does for battle scenes in KnT A2601–16 and The Legend of Good Women 629–53.

B.13.151–71 Wiþ half a laumpe lyne … Pacientes vincunt (Cf. C.153–69 That loueth lely … techest): The structure of this riddling passage in the B version is quite clear, even if the riddle is not. Herwith and it 156 refer to the bouste, and so to the riddle. Vndo it 157 means “solve it”; þerInne means “in it.” It 163, 164 (either the bouste or the riddle or just “love”) and þis redels 167 complete the references. The riddle ought to be the equivalent of dilige inimicos, caritas nichil timet, and pacientes vincunt, which are all roughly synonymous: see Lawler 1995:93. If you love your enemies you will not fear them; if you heap coals on their head, that is, if you are patient and loving toward them, you will conquer them. Indeed, in 15.159 the it of B.13.163 is replaced by pacience, which is itself clearly apposed in 15.164a to Caritas. Thus charity = patience (1 Cor 13:4: “Caritas patiens est”) = the answer to the riddle. Skeat: “The general solution to the riddle … is Charity, exercised with Patience.” Its simplest expression is perhaps “love,” an imperative verb (dilige) that must be completed by an object: when “love” is transitive, that is, when you love another or others or your enemies, you’ve got Dowel in a nutshell. The passage reprises Holy Church’s teaching on love, 1.141–204 (B.1.142–209, A.1.130–83); see also the words of Peace after the Harrowing, 20.456–58 (B.18.413–15). (The specific solution is “cor,” heart, as Galloway 1995 showed; see note below. Ex vi transicionis is a common grammatical phrase: a transitive verb governs its accusative object “by the power of transitivity” [Kaske 1963:38, Middleton 1972:179 n12, 181; Alford 1982: 755; Bland 1988].) Kirk 1978:100 says that Patience (amusingly) gives away the solution in the next passus when he “opens his bundle and we see the contents,” namely “fiat voluntas tua.” That works too: to love is to do the will of God. Kirk goes on, (reflecting on the two appearances of fiat voluntas tua in the Gospels—in the Lord’s Prayer and as uttered by Jesus in Gethsemane), “‘Thy will be done’ is the phrase that links man’s daily acceptance of God’s will with Christ’s acceptance of the Passion in the Garden of Gethsemane. Clearly, for Langland, as for the Patience poet, any positive definition of patience must see it as imitatio christi.”

The C passage is parallel but without the riddle—though it adds a riddle of its own at 161; see below.

B.13.151 half a laumpe lyne in latyn: Galloway 1995:91–92 takes this as the equivalent of “The myddel of the Moone” 155, like it meaning “cor”; see the note there. Bradley 1910 reached the same solution in a different way: taking “lamp line” to mean the line a lamp hangs from, he posited a Latin word “cordella,” and cut it roughly in half to yield “corde” as the solution to the riddle. Stephen Barney, in a private communication, cites in support of Bradley’s solution, from Latham’s Dictionary of Medieval Latin, both the word chorda (in the Durham accounts, ca. 1367) and the word chordula (in the rolls of St Swithin’s Priory, 1485) used in connection with lamps, and in all likelihood meaning the hanging-cord rather than the wick. That seems to me a more straightforward explanation than Galloway’s.

B.13.152 in a bouste: A conjecture by KD-B, who discuss it on p. 186, convincingly to me (though not to Schmidt, who rejects it in both editions and discusses it in the commentary to his 1995 edition). A bouste (MED, s.v. boist) is a box or vessel: either the heart as the vessel of love, or the riddle as a handy little container. The whole idea of Dowel is contained in the word love; love is a synonym for Dowel. Kaske 1963:47–49 associates it with Magdalen’s “box of salue” (B.13.194), alabastrum unguenti (Luke 7:37), and cites Hugh of Saint-Cher’s interpretation of that box as cor penitentis, the heart of a penitent. Watson, who is out to discredit Patience, sees him in this speech as “recenter-[ing] the scene around himself,” and says that his claim to have Dowel bound fast is “uncomfortably reminiscent of one made by the glosing friars in B.8” (2007:101), but to me he does not seem nearly as smug as they are. All he is saying is “Dowel is really simple: it’s love.”

B.13.153–54 þe Saterday þat sette first þe kalender … þe wodnesday of þe nexte wike after: As Galloway says, these references, perhaps to the first Sabbath, when God rested after the six days of Creation, and to Wednesday of Holy Week, the week of “Re-creation,” connected with charity and prudence, respectively (Ben H. Smith, Jr. 1961:681, 1966:53; Kaske 1963:43–44), “have not been … satisfactorily explained” (1995:92). Schweitzer 1974:319–27 chooses Holy Saturday and the Wednesday after Easter, and makes some arguments from the liturgy—also unsatisfactory. Anna Baldwin 2001:103–4 applies the passage, including Patience’s recommendations for a loving foreign policy, to relations between England and France in June 1377, and suggests that particular days are dropped in C “because their significance was now forgotten.”

B.13.155 The myddel of þe Moone: Galloway shows convincingly that this phrase (which has been used by Conscience, prophesying at the end of the Mede episode, at 3.480 [B.3.327]) is a translation of the beginning of a Latin hexameter riddle, “Lune dimidium solis pariterque rotundum/Et pars quarta rote; nil plus deus exigit a te,” Half of a moon and equally the round of a sun,/And the fourth part of a wheel; nothing more does God demand from you. Half a moon is the letter C; the round of the sun is the letter O; one-fourth of rota is the letter R: the solution is COR: all God wants from us is love. Cf. Luke 8:15: the seed that falls on good ground is those who “in a good and perfect heart hearing the word, keep it and bring forth fruit in patience.” Galloway shows further that to cite the first phrase is to cite the whole riddle, and argues that “half a laumpe lyne” is a rendering of “lune dimidium,” so that line 152 also refers to the whole riddle by its first words (1995:87–88, 90–92).

B.13.157 Vndo it: lat þis doctour deme if dowel be þerInne: Gruenler 2017:159: “Patience’s challenge … uses a typical way of closing a riddle to tell the doctor to look into his own heart.” This “goading address to the doctor,” as Galloway calls it (1995:96), is dropped in C. Actually he is addressing Conscience, the master of ceremonies, urging him to let the doctor deem.

156 holy writ: See above, note to B.13.135a.

157–69 For, by hym þat me made … techest (B.13.158–71a For, by hym þat me made … vincunt): Patience continues his speech in somewhat the same way in both versions. The first sentence is very clear in B: if you have the bouste, which is love, with you, you will fear no danger from man, devil, or nature, because love fears nothing. C is equally clear, really, though it adds pacience 159 to love (since they have been established as synonyms), and, having dropped B’s earlier riddle, throws in a new one: 161 In þe corner of a cartwhel with a crow croune. Galloway 1995:94 shows adroitly that the first half of the line refers to the Latin riddle given above, being the equivalent of pars quarta rote, and so means cor; that the second half also means cor, the caput corvi, head of the word “crow,” and that cor or its anagram cro occurs thrice in the line. In short, bear in your bosom, in Galloway’s words, a “heart given to God, the essence of patience in the Christian tradition” (94).

The second sentence is much shorter in C, listing fewer authority figures, and is rhetorically a little stronger, but both say essentially the same thing: with this bouste you will conquer everybody. A brash peroration indeed.

164a Caritas expellit omnem timorem (cf. B.13.163a Caritas nichil timet): Charity drives away all fear: 1 John 4:18, “perfecta caritas foras mittit timorem,” perfect charity casteth out fear. Maybe compare 17.5a, Caritas omnia suffert (1 Cor 13:7), perhaps yet one more way of saying “Love your enemies.” For B, see Ambrose, Letter 78 (PL 16.1269), “charitatem habens nihil timet”: Paschasius Radbertus, De fide, spe, et caritate 1990:110: “Caritas nihil timet sed excludit foras timorem.”

The dinner comes to a sudden end (170–84, B.13.172–215)

170–84 This is a dido … y folowede (B.13.172–215 It is but a dido … pilgrymes as it were): Patience’s stunning answer (Piers’s too, in C) brings the dinner to an abrupt end. In B, Conscience has responded ambivalently to Clergie, deflecting his dissatisfaction into a wish that Piers will come; he has looked to Patience for something better. He gets it, and yet what Patience says polarizes the company: the doctor erupts in contempt, and expects Clergie and Conscience to support his move to throw Patience out. Conscience surprises him by siding with Patience, and is ridiculed by Clergie, who like the doctor treats Patience as if he were an itinerant minstrel; the rift between Clergie and Conscience, quite tentative and unclear at 131, is now hard to deny. Nevertheless, Conscience, gracious host to the last, takes courteous leave of the doctor at 198, then tries to treat his rift with Clergie as a friendly disagreement, 199–201. Clergie rejects this as a parting gesture, soberly foretelling a time when Conscience will need him, which seems to change the mood, so that they part with expressions of mutual respect. What appeals to Conscience in Patience is presumably his combination of simplicity, hopefulness, and experience: he has cut through not only the doctor’s arrogant learning but the helpless quality of Clergie’s more thoughtful and humble learning; he has a charisma (þe wil of þe wye 190) that Conscience seems to find refreshing enough to want to test further (182); or he wants to test his own capacity for patience, which is Clergie’s view (214).

In C, as earlier in the serving of the dinner, the characters are less sharply differentiated. Clergie’s speech has had the same gist but was far less academic, and Conscience did not reply to it at all; in place of his wish for Piers in B, Piers is actually here and speaks—and says the first half of what Patience said in B (love your enemies) but minus the riddles. Patience then picks up where Piers leaves off, and the doctor’s contemptuous response is the same, although he does not explicitly suggest ejecting Patience. Conscience’s farewell to Clergie has the essential combination of respect and disagreement, but there is no subtle interplay between them as there was in B: indeed, Clergie has no lines at the end at all. It is still clear that Conscience has been moved in the course of the scene to abandon his friend Clergie, at least temporarily, to ally himself with Patience, but that alliance is made to seem a response more to the dramatic intrusion of Piers than to what either Clergie or Patience says. Besides the addition of Piers, the second most notable change from B up to this point has been the dropping of the cryptic parts, Clergie’s academic jargon and Patience’s riddling. And we lose the delicate exchange of words between Conscience and Clergie. Again both what happens and what is said are clearer in C, though with some loss of motivation and subtlety.

170 (B.13.172) dido … dysores tale: A dysore is a storyteller or minstrel. The word is not necessarily pejorative, though it is clearly pejorative in L’s two uses of it, here and at 8.52 (B.6.54, A.7.49). Dido in this meaning is otherwise unattested (it seems unrelated to the nineteenth-century dialectical usage that OED defines as a caper or “row”). It is evidently a coinage by L, and defined in the off-verse as a minstrel’s tale, that is, a worthless, blatant fiction, like those that Piers has warned the knight not to listen to at dinner, 8.50–52 (B.6.52–4, A.7.47–9)—perhaps, as is commonly thought, with reference either to the romantic tale of Dido, as told in the Aeneid and the Heroides and often retold, and dismissed by St Augustine in Confessions 1.13 (along with the whole fable of the Aeneid) as inanity, or to Dido’s degeneration into a poetic byword for a mistress, as in a poem by Hilary the Englishman quoted by Boswell 1980:249, “Ut te vidi, mox Cupido/Me percussit; sed diffido;/Nam me tenet mea Dido/Cujus iram reformido” (The moment I saw you,/Cupid struck me, but I hesitate,/For my Dido holds me,/And I fear her wrath). For further discussion of Dido’s reputation in the Middle Ages, see Mann 2002:12–13 and Desmond 1994. Marjorie Woods (2001, 2002) has argued that schoolboys were regularly required to compose laments by Dido, Andromache, or Niobe and enact them; thus the doctor may be implying that Patience is being childish. Woods cites Pico della Mirandola’s famous letter to Ermolao Barbaro, in which he imagines Aquinas, Scotus, Albertus Magnus, or Averroes coming to life again, learning the new eloquence, and, “in terms as free as possible from barbarism, their barbarous style,” saying, “We have lived illustrious, friend Ermolao, and to posterity shall live, not in the schools of the grammarians and teaching-places of young minds, but in the company of the philosophers, conclaves of sages, where the questions for debate are not concerning the mother of Andromache or the sons of Niobe and such light trifles, but of things human and divine” (Woods 2002:287–88; cited from Symonds 1877:333–34; the translation is his; for the original, dated Florence, 3 June 1485, see Garin 1952:806). The doctor’s contempt here is quite like Pico’s—or rather, like what Pico supposes Aquinas and the others would feel if they lived when he did.

Perhaps, though, dido does not refer to Virgil’s Dido at all, but is a nonsense word like “folderol” or “la-di-da” (or “hey trollilolly” 8.123, A.7.108; B.6.116 “how trolly lolly”; see also “mamele” 5.123 and “bablede” B.5.8, A.5.8), invented on the spot by the doctor out of the first syllables of Patience’s “disce, doce”—with the pattern completed by the echo of “dilige” in “dysores.” (Cf. French dada, hobby-horse, and the art movement Dada, whose name came from that and was meant to signify meaninglessness; also French dodo, baby-talk for “sleep”). See 20.145 (B.18.142), “bote a tale of walterot,” and 20.150 (B.18.147) “truyfle,” and Pearsall’s note to 20.145; cf. Chaucer’s “He served hem with nyfles and with fables,” SumT D1760, where “nyfle” clearly has the same meaning as “dido” and is equally mysterious in origin (OED, s.v. nifle, n.); see 20.150n below; see also MED trotevale, from Handlyng Synne. Both MED and OED say that “walterot” is the same word with syllables reversed—and thus apparently not based on “Walter”—and thus it isn’t parallel to Dido as a character. See Noel Coward 1937:287, “slick American ‘vo-do-deo-do’ musical farces,” where the intention is like Langland’s, to refer dismissively to a trivial and inferior literary form. Kane 1989:103–4 lists it as one of those expressions in the poem that “await recovery,” and “require annotation, not translation.”

171–73 Al the wit … parties (B.13.173–76 Al þe wit … peple): The doctor responds not scripturally at all but politically: interestingly, he here represents the very school of hard knocks, the cynicism of experience, that Conscience credited Patience with representing. (There is a valuable exchange of opinion on Patience’s ideas in YLS 15 (2001) between Anna Baldwin and Fiona Somerset, in which, roughly speaking, Baldwin (99–108) adopts Patience’s idealism, and Somerset (109–15) responds with something like the doctor’s realism, though not his bad manners. They live the poem.) By wit B.13.168, Patience presumably meant both the skill to solve the riddle and the wisdom to grasp the value of laying on your enemy with love till he smiles at you (146); what the doctor means by wit here is hardheaded realism. The poem will continue to promote Patience’s view; see 17.123–24n. On the pope and his enemies, see 17.234n and Stephen Barney’s very full note to 21.428–48; also J. A. W. Bennett 1943:60–63, Gwynn 1943:4, Anna Baldwin 2001:105. As for kynges (B), Bennett says (61) that “the context suggests that the poet was thinking of the English and French kings as adherents of the pope and antipope respectively”—though Barney makes it clear that nothing in the B text requires us to date it after the schism, which began in 1378.

B.13.178 That Pacience þo most passe, “for pilgrymes konne wel lye”: Passe means “leave the house.” For Patience’s “pilgrymes cloþes,” see line 29 above. The quotation marks indicate that these are the doctor’s words. On pilgrims and lying, see Prol.47–50 (B.Prol.46–49, A.Prol.46–49) and 7.180–81 (B.5.535–36, A.6.23–24), where the palmer insists that he has never heard of any palmer asking after truth. The meaning “lie” for “Canterbury tale” did not develop until at least the fifteenth century, (Spurgeon 1925:1.81 etc.) or even the sixteenth (OED).

175–83 Ac Concience … parfitnesse to fynde (B.13.179–215 Ac Conscience … pilgrymes as it were): Conscience’s purpose in going away with Patience is clearer in the much shortened C version. In B he will go til I haue preued moore (182), a vague formulation that perhaps means “gained more actual experience”—either of Patience, or in general—as opposed to book-learning—see B.13.133–35a and note—but that also carries a suggestion of “proving himself” morally. Presumably he will learn both by undergoing experience himself and by hearing of Patience’s experience; it is the latter source of knowledge that Clergie assumes at B.13.185–87 that Conscience has in mind. At B.13.191 he adds a penitential purpose, and apparently a desire to imitate Patient’s patient will; in B.13.201 (C.15.179) he implies that he hopes to become perfectly patient, although the contrast of perfect patience there to half þi pak of bokes suggests that “patience” still carries the meaning “experience.” At B.13.214 Clergie interprets Conscience’s purpose as to be tested in order to be made perfect; and Conscience’s own final, rather grand articulation of this purpose is for the two of them, Conscience and Clergie, with Patience as their ally, to bring peace and religious unity to all nations; see below, B.13.203–4n, B.13.207–10n.

In the C version, this process of gradual clarification—as if Conscience were figuring out before our eyes why he is going—is replaced by an immediate settled decision: his purpose is to perfect himself in patience, once again through the medium of experience: he must escape the world of books if he is to learn kynde pacience. No mention is made of any grand plan to apply his newfound perfection to saving the world. Of course one should keep in mind that L seems to place a high value on an impulsive decision to go on pilgrimage: see Piers and the knight at 8.56 (B.6.57, A.7.52); Conscience at the end of the poem; perhaps the Samaritan’s sudden resumption of his journey to Jerusalem.

B.13.183–84 What! … redels: With this friendly dig, Clergie indicates that he shares the doctor’s contempt for Patience’s speech, ridiculing its presentation as a redels (cf. B.13.167) and reducing to absurdity Patience’s formulation at B.13.169–71 of the political value of patient love in terms of the generous requital it will earn from kings and queens. A yeresʒeue is a New Year’s gift, traditionally exchanged at court; cf. Gawain 67; though it can be a bribe exacted by an office-holder, as at B.3.100; see Alford, Gloss. Clergie still insists on the superiority of books to experience.

B.13.188–97 “Nay, by crist!” … Gaʒophilacium: Conscience in reply makes it clear that he certainly does not expect material gain from his association with Patience: what he treasures is his trewe wille, which is priceless, in contrast to the will of folk here, that is, the doctor with his ego and Clergie with his diffidence. He instances the woman in Luke 7:37–50 (often identified as Mary Magdalene), anointing the feet of Jesus and the widow who gave her mite (Luke 21:4) as examples of true will, and presumably also of perfect patience, for their fearless love. I have discussed lines B.13.183–97, Clergie’s challenge and Conscience’s answer, fully in Lawler 1995:94–96. As I wrote (96), “Our dinner scene has by now amounted to a rewriting of these biblical dinner scenes [i.e., those featuring Mary and Zacheus], a rewriting in which at last the host acts with full generosity.” For Zacheus, see Luke 19:1–10. He too has a true will, even if Mary Magdalene outshone him: he climbed a tree to see Jesus, “received him with joy” in his house, and gave his half. Mary gave her all, to be sure; but half is a lot.

B.13.185–87 I shal brynge yow a bible … parfitly knew neuere: This pointed contrast between the old law and Patience is yet another hint that one thing Patience represents is Christ himself; see the note to 32–33 (B.13.9–30) above.

179 (B.13.201) half thy pak of bokes: A little friendly dig in return, whispered softly in the ear, perhaps, as a gesture of friendliness. Conscience is a book unto himself; cf. 17.197 “no boek but Consience” and n. As Gillespie 1994:105 says, since Clergie will await Conscience (in B), “Learning is deferred rather than despised.”

B.13.202 Clergie of Conscience no congie wolde take: This seems petulant, but what he goes on to say makes clear his deep attachment to Conscience—and Conscience’s reply indicates such warmth in return that the petulance evaporates, as line 211 shows.

B.13.203–4 þow shalt se þe tyme … wille me to counseille: A prediction of Conscience’s need when he attempts in B passūs 19–20 to carry out (though only for Christians) the program of unity that he announces here at lines 205–10, and in particular of his cry “help, Clergie or I falle” 20.228 (C.22.228); see also 20.375. Note that both Conscience’s program and Clergie’s prediction are omitted in the C version, perhaps because L was aware that though he had presented Conscience’s attempt at unity, he had not worked out a way of involving either Patience or Clergie, not to mention the conversion of heathens and Jews, in that presentation. Or he intended to transfer this material somehow to that final scene, but never managed to revise it.

B.13.207–10 Ther nys wo … oon bileue: To bring all lands to love and to belief in one law was Wit’s definition of Dobest, 10.190–200 (not in AB). Conscience proposes here, in effect, that he, Clergie, and Patience undertake the effort “to wende as wyde as þe worlde were/To tulie þe erthe with tonge and teche men to louye,” the effort it is said there (10.199–200) that bishops should make. Later, Liberum Arbitrium (Anima) will treat the matter extensively as the duty above all of bishops who are assigned to dioceses in Muslim lands but who never leave England; see 17.150–321 (B.15.390–613). Thus there may be a suggestion that our three figures here are (ideal) bishops, particularly since Clergie seems to list administering the sacrament of Confirmation as one of his duties (B.13.213; but see B.13.211–14n below). If so, he would be an English bishop, Conscience and Patience missionary bishops, for Clergie’s humdrum routine at home is treated with equanimity, whereas similar work in England by missionary bishops is treated as escapism at 17.279–80 (B.15.529–30). See Lawler 2002:115–16. As I have mentioned above (15.29n), Gruenler 2017:155 regards Conscience as resembling the bishop in the story of St Andrew and the Three Questions.

B.13.209 Sarsens and Surre: Since Syria was in Muslim hands, this phrase must be a doublet. Surre is similarly used as a generic term for Muslim lands throughout passus 17 (B.15); see notes at 17.189 (B.15.494) and 278 (B.15.528).

B.13.211–14 “That is sooþ” … parfit þee maked”: This essentially comic scene ends with genuine reconciliation, arrived at deftly after Clergie’s petulance at line 202. To quote my essay one last time (97): “This is the first time in the whole scene that anyone has said, ‘I see what you mean’ to anyone else. Clergie’s ‘I shal dwelle as I do my devoir to shewe’ seems to acknowledge implicitly that Conscience’s devoir is to go, and his defining his own devoir as confirming children or those who have taken instruction has a winning modesty: the children in whose company he puts himself now are like the widow and the Magdalene, underdogs: Patience has indeed become Clergie’s ‘partyng felawe.’”

Kane, Glossary defines confermen 213 as “make secure in the faith,” which may be right, though fauntekyns suggests the sacrament of confirmation, which was typically administered to infants as soon after baptism as a bishop was available; see B.15.457 and Brewer 2005:66.

Conscience and Patience—and Will—go on pilgrimage to seek parfitnesse (184, B.13.215)

183 With pacience wol y passe parfitnesse to fynde (B.13.215 Conscience þo wiþ Pacience passed, pilgrymes as it were): In C Will says that he goes, too: with grete wille y folowede 184. In B he is not said in so many words to accompany the others on this pilgrimage, though he is obviously there—one is always present in one’s dreams—to report on it, to look and listen, though not to interact in any way with Actyf. There are several instances of careful peering in B (13.271 I took greet kepe, 318 þanne took I hede, 342 I waitede wisloker), that are removed in C, which drops not only Actyf’s coat but all physical description of him. Even in C Will says, “They met with a minstrel,” not “We met with a minstrel” (190, B.13.221). Nor has Conscience much of a part. He fades out of the vision in the C version after asking Actyf one question at 15.196–97 (not in B). In B he lasts longer, till 14.28, after which Patience takes over as Actyf’s interlocutor, and nothing more is heard of Conscience, or of his quest for perfection. In B the pilgrimage ends when Will wakes at the end of passus 14. It will turn out to be less of a quest for perfection on Conscience’s part than one more learning opportunity for Will. In C it keeps going, though as Will’s pilgrimage rather than Patience’s, when Liberum arbitrium silently replaces Patience as Will’s guide at 16.158.

And since Will is going to stay on the road, in effect, until he arrives in Jerusalem in passus 20 (B.18), we should perhaps think of him as “going to Jerusalem” from the moment he leaves Conscience’s dinner party. That would make him like many a contemporary pilgrim, but also, more interestingly, make passūs 15–19 something like the middle chapters of Luke’s Gospel, specifically 9:51 to 18:30, in which Jesus too is “going to Jerusalem”: 9:51, “he steadfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem,” and we might think of Will’s whole long search starting here as inspired by the structure of Luke’s Gospel. This is perhaps too grand a notion, but at least it seems true that L responded in a special way to Luke. Luke is especially tough on the rich, and more willing than the other evangelists to speak of “the poor” rather than “the poor in spirit.” He is also the only source of the story of Dives and Lazarus, and of the parable of the Good Samaritan.

183 parfitnesse (cf.179 [B.13.201] parfitlyche, B.13.214 parfit): I.e., dobest. Conscience shows a knowledge of the Gospels here, since the passage from the Sermon on the Mount about loving one’s enemies that Patience quoted ends with the verse, “Be you therefore perfect, as also your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt 5:48).

186 (B.13.217) Sobrete … bileue: The idea of spiritual nourishment is carried over from the dinner scene. Bileue is an apt pun: what most pilgrims have in their pouch is bí-leve, sustenance, what they live by; Patience has bi-léve, what he believes.

188 (B.13.219) vnkyndenesse and coueytise … hungry contreys: The opposition of patience to coueytise that marked the land of longing in the inner vision continues; presumably the “contrey of coueytise” is not dissimilar from the land of longing. Hungry contreys is a daring catachresis. They will make the pilgrims hungry for the foods in the poke, and they are hungry themselves. Coueytise is hungry because it is full of needs and desires, always seeking to be filled: hunger is another word for longing. But also it is a country beset by famine, a country where there is a dearth of the sort of good food Patience has in his poke. And covetousness causes famine; see the Hunger scenes earlier. Of course this world itself is a hungry country: it is the opposite of “aeterna patria … ubi nemo esurit” (our eternal home, where no one is hungry), Gregory’s frequently quoted formulation in his treatment of “activa vita” in his second homily of the second book on Ezechiel, PL 76.954; see 193–98 (B.13.214–16), note below.

Vnkyndenesse, the lack of (natural) generosity toward others, is a land bordering on coveitise, as Gregory’s homily suggests. For activa vita’s opposite, contemplativa vita, “est charitatem quidem Dei proximi tota mente retinere” (is to devote all one’s mind to love of God and neighbor; PL 76.953), that is, to be kind. In the hungry countries, neither life is in evidence; the pilgrims have arrived there as soon as they meet the needy Haukyn, ironically named Actyf in C; that is, in the next sentence.

L couples unkindness and coveitise again at B.13.355, 389–90; see also 19.185, 258, 328 (where the terms appear together in the course of the Samaritan’s long account of unkindness as the sin against the Holy Spirit, 19.159–329), 21.224, 22.296 (where coveitise and unkindness besiege Conscience). In the B version, it is clear at 354ff., where Patience perceives the stains of avarice on Actyf’s coat, that our pilgrims have indeed come to the hungry countries; but their vitayles—sobriety, simple speech, and firm belief—strengthen (conforte) them (and Patience tries to use them to strengthen Actyf).

Actiua vita (Actyf) joins the pilgrims (190–16.157, B.13.221–14.335)

190–16.157 (B.13.221–14.335) actiua vita. In B, he is called Haukyn by Patience, Conscience, and the narrator, but calls himself Actyf (the word is spelled Actif in B and Actyf in C, except at 7.299; I have used the C spelling except when actually quoting the B text, and I generally call him Actyf, even when discussing a B passage). “Haukyn” alliterates with Actyf and was a common enough English name, as the commonness of its derivatives, the modern surnames Hawkins and Hawkinson, suggests. Haukyn is a hawker of goods, a huckster, as Godden 1990:111 and others have pointed out. His name may be a diminutive of Harry, or of the pejorative nickname Hawk; see Hanks and Hodges 1988, s.v. Hawkin. Just as you can call any plowman Peter or Perkin, or any priest Sir John, you perhaps can call any Active Man Haw or Hawk or Haukyn; there is nothing impertinent in Will’s sudden introduction of the name at B.13.272. Nevertheless, in C the name disappears and he is called Actyf throughout.

Godden (110) insists on the disreputability of waferers, instancing, besides one Wycliffite text, the association of a waferer with a cutpurse and apeward at 7.285 (B.5.636, A.6.117), and the appearance of waferers among the “verray develes officeres” in the tavern in PardT C480. Most readers, though, have taken at face value his account of himself as an important cog in the food chain. In C he says he is Piers’s apprentice, and in B, in the course of confessing his covetousness, he speaks of plowing. Though the details of his sins are often hard to take as further actual characterizations of our waferer, his mentioning plowing is interesting because twice before in the poem the adjective “actyf” has been applied to a husbandman. At C.7.299, the man who cannot come with Piers because he has wedded a wife is “oen hihte actif; an hosbande he semede.” And at A.11.182–83, Scripture says of Dowel that it is “a wel lele lif … among þe lewide peple;/Actif it is hoten; husbondis it vsen.” Both these places seem relevant to the present episode. The man in C.7.299 has been plucked directly from Haukyn’s account at B.14.3–4 of the way married life smears his coat; both quote Luke’s Vxorem duxi et ideo non possum venire, so that one might argue that Actyf’s first appearance in C is not here but in passus 7. And Scripture’s using his name to define Dowel suggests that, at least on first glance, that is what he is: Dowel, in the flesh. As Godden says, that should be what we surmise from the fact that Conscience and Patience are carping of Dowel when they meet him (189–90, B.13.220–21): he is “the ultimate personification of Dowel” (1990:110). Carruthers calls him “the most complex figure of Dowel Will has yet encountered” (1973:122). The name Dowel comes, of course, from the wording of the pardon, Qui bona egerunt (as if Qui bene egerunt, Those who have done well), and activa comes from the past participle of the same verb. Though not everyone calls him Dowel—he is, after all, quite the sinner—associating him somehow with Dowel, or a superficial form of it, has been the critical consensus from Chambers 1939:151–52 on (well summed up by John Alford in Alford 1988:50–51); Chambers does not actually call him Dowel but “the hard-working Christian man.” Here is the gist of this consensus: as a hard-working sort who can’t keep his coat clean, Actyf stands for the inadequacy of the active life to win salvation; he is finally Dowel only in the sense that he is no better than he should be, i.e., clearly not Dobet; or he is not so much Dowel as Try-to-do-well-but-end-up-doing-badly. Gillespie 1994:107 nicely calls him “an embodiment of … the seed that falls among the thorns.” In short, critical tradition itself undermines the penchant for treating him as Dowel at all. In fact he seems to be everything that the man described in Psalm 14, destined to rest on God’s holy hill, is not. He does not walk without blemish, he of the stained coat; he has used deceit in his tongue and taken up a reproach against his neighbor (B.13.319–30, 363–64); he has put out his money for usury, and taken bribes against the innocent (375–82); the name Actyf implies the opposite of one who “shall not be moved forever.” Piers in the B version pardon scene rejected the active life for one of prayer and penance, and here Patience tries to get Actyf to do the same thing. Alford (51) quotes Godden 1984:149–50: “The two contrasting roles played by Piers in the pardon scene are here manifested in Haukyn and Patience, worker and pilgrim-hermit,” and continues, “In both cases, a preoccupation with hard work gives way to ne solliciti sitis.” And this mainline critical tradition also sees Patience’s appeal as wholly in keeping with Langland’s adherence to originary Franciscan ideals.

However, David Aers (2004), in the course of demolishing Patience’s arguments (see above, 15.32–33n), offers a sympathetic view of the value of Actyf’s work both for himself and others. This view is taken up at length by Watson 2007, who sets Actyf’s “bottom up heaven” against Patience’s “top down heaven” (91), sympathizes like Aers with the system of production or “social structure” that Actyf is part of, and like Aers points out that “it is in fact only such a structure that can support the zealous indifference to worldly goods Patience himself advocates” (109). He sees Actyf as browbeaten into his final state of wanhope and self-loathing by Patience the “spiritual elitist” with “his slogans, his swagger, his certainty,” and “ever more self-absorbed answers, until [Actyf] ends the passus, and leaves the poem, bewailing everything he has done and been since the moment of his baptism, wishing that he were not who he is” (108). Kirk more positively associates Actyf’s tears with a series of earlier moments of weeping or mourning; she calls it a “cathartic awareness” on his part, and on mankind’s, argues “that a larger reality surrounds and redefines” him and it, and concludes sympathetically that “The B Poet’s final definition of DoWell is not a formula but an image: Haukyn weeping in his dirty coat” (1972:158).

For a similarly balanced view, guided by Konrad Burdach’s findings long ago that the doctrines of poverty and ne solliciti sitis were associated with the idealization of labor, see Frank 1957:32–33, 76 (Burdach 1926–32: 294–96, 351–54). Watson’s sympathy for Actyf is perhaps more a function of his dislike of Patience than of any genuine appeal, aside from victimhood, in Actyf. I wish he had paid some attention to the C text, which substantially rewrites the scene, perhaps because L felt some of the very objections Watson feels, or just found the whole presentation ambivalent. The coat is gone, the confession of sins is gone, the wanhope and tears at the end are gone. Patience’s offer of food from his bag comes right after Actyf’s initial account of himself. The inadequacy of the active life compared to the “patient” life is still the point, of course, but Actyf is not in this version subjected to humiliation the way he is in B. As Anna Baldwin finely says, “Patient poverty is desired by the Activa Vita of the C-text for its own sake, and not primarily as a weapon against his own sin” (1990:83).

In B, then, Actyf’s chief mark is his sinfulness, the chief events the confession and repentance he goes through under the guidance of Conscience and Patience. (For his likeness to Will, see below, 193–98n.) But all the matter in the confession was moved in C to the Seven Deadly Sins section in passūs 6 and 7; leaving Actyf as ignorant and boastful as he was in B, but not notably marked by sinfulness. This probably accounts for the disappearance of the somewhat derogatory name Haukyn, though calling him Actyf still accentuates his role as Patience’s opposite. He has in the second half of the passus a role like the doctor’s in the first half: as Patience and Conscience shone there against the doctor’s arrogance, they will shine here against Actyf’s ignorance, for Will’s edification. Probably the most important thing about him in C is that he provides food: that sets him against all the spiritual dishes that Patience liked so well at the dinner in the first half, and sets him up for Patience’s offer of the food fiat voluntas tua.

In both versions Actyf is prompted in part by the agere/pati topos (for which see Crampton 1974) implicit in the role of Patience, in part by the prominence earlier in the passus, and in the several previous passūs, of the “Do” triad (not to mention Patience’s and Conscience’s present conversation), in part by the food theme; and perhaps also by Psalm 14, as I have argued earlier in this note.

I don’t think Active vs. Contemplative, the rubric Pearsall invokes, is of much importance. In the phrase “Activa Vita,” “vita” probably just translates English “life,” that is, in a frequent Langlandian usage, “estate,” “occupation,” or even just “person.” So we should probably think of him as just “an Active Man,” rather than, allegorically, as “the Active Life.” But Pearsall’s note is in general good, and he stresses the way that in B Actyf is “a compelling portrait of sinful and repentant humanity,” in C mostly just set up to be instructed by Patience. In both versions his major purpose seems to be to serve as a foil for Patience, and as an opportunity for Patience to expound his views. In C he turns out to have a “leader,” Liberum arbitrium, who is not mentioned, and plays no role, until 16.158 when he suddenly replaces Patience and Conscience, but is presumably leading Actyf the whole time.

Curtis Perrin makes the excellent point that Actyf takes on Will’s earlier role of “clueless questioner” in a new “comedy of correction” (2006:169). Many critics, including Robertson and Huppé 1951:169, Carruthers 1973:121–22, and, most notably, Staley 2002 try to connect Actyf’s dirty coat to Matthew’s parable of the man without a wedding garment, unconvincingly to me.

190 (B.13.221) They mette with a mynstral: Not “We met.” Even in the C version, where Will says he followed Patience and Conscience, L seems bent on not letting him do anything in this episode but look and listen, until Liberum arbitrium, Actyf’s “leader,” arrives at 16.158. This helps make it possible to take Actyf as a stand-in for Will.

191 (B.13.222) apposede hym and preyede: one action, not two: the second phrase specifies the question asked, 191 (B.13.223) What craft þat he couthe. It is the standard question one asks of a new acquaintance in estates literature, as perhaps also in actual life: cf. the Host to the Canon’s Yeoman, “Telle what he is” (G616), i.e., what is his job?, and the implication in the General Prologue that the narrator has gone around asking everyone at the Tabard, “What are you?” Though apposede can carry the legal weight of “interrogated,” there is no reason to think of Patience’s question as anything but civil (though we should be aware of the sharp contrast between Actyf and Patience, agere et pati, which L exploits throughout the scene). It is the same word used of Reason’s interrogation of Will in 5.10, though there the aggressive nature of the questioning is insisted on: “thus resoun me aratede” 5.11.

Actyf describes his craft to Patience and Conscience (193–231, B.13.224–70)

193–98 (B.13.224–26) Ich am a mynstral … a waferer: Actyf is in the food business, as the verb conforte 194, which regularly means “feed” in this passus (15.61, 187; B.13.58, 218), suggests most clearly. In Gregory the Great’s definition of the active life (PL 76.953, referred to above, 188 [B.13.219]n), feeding the hungry comes first: “Activa enim vita est, panem esurienti tribuere.” (For the active life is: to give bread to the hungry). It goes on: teach the ignorant, correct the sinner, and so on, but feeding the hungry is first. I have quoted the full sentence at 16.324–36a (B.15.182–94)n below. To feed the hungry is also the first of the corporal works of mercy: see above, 114–18n and, again, 16.324–36n. Actyf, we may note, inhabits a world where bread is bread, not Agite penitenciam and the like.

Mynstral is used in its general sense of “minister,” that is “servant, functionary, someone who ministers (food, etc.) to others”; see MED minstral 2; DML ministrallus 1. In associating activa vita with minstrelsy, Langland has surely in mind Luke’s sentence about Martha, who served Jesus food and who became a standard symbol of the active life: “Martha autem satagebat circa frequens ministerium” (But Martha was busy about much serving, 10:40). (Cf. Gregory, Commentary on the First Book of Kings, PL 79.402, “activa vita, quae frequens circa ministerium satagit”; St Benedict’s Rule, “vitae activae ministerium” PL 66.445; Gerhohus Reicherspergensis, Expositio in Psalmos, PL 194.591, “activa vita, quae proximis in corporalibus ministrat”). Actyf is definitely not an entertainer, as he says emphatically in lines 202–7. His initial statement, “I am a minstrel,” probably means no more, in reply to Patience’s query about his craft, than “Actually, I’m not a craftsman, I provide a service”—though using the noun instead of saying “I minister” gives him the chance to dilate on his superiority to lordes munstrals (15.203), who provide less and get paid more.