The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman, Volume 2: C Passūs 5-9; B Passūs 5-7; A Passūs 5-8

By Ralph Hanna

The first full commentary on Piers Plowman since the late nineteenth century, the Penn Commentary places the allegorical dream-vision of Piers Plowman within the literary, historical, social, and intellectual contexts of late medieval England, and within the long history of critical interpretation of the poem, assessing past scholarship while offering original materials and insights throughout. The authors' line-by-line, section by section, and passus by passus commentary on all three versions of the poem and on the stages of its multiple revisions reveals new aspects of the work's meaning while assessing and summarizing a complex and often divisive scholarly tradition. The volumes offer an up-to-date, original, and open-ended guide to a poem whose engagement with its social world is unrivaled in medieval English literature, and whose literary, religious, and intellectual accomplishments are uniquely powerful.

The Penn Commentary is designed to be equally useful to readers of the A, B, or C texts of the poem. It is geared to readers eager to have detailed experience of Piers Plowman and other medieval literature, possessing some basic knowledge of Middle English language and literature, and interested in pondering further the particularly difficult relationships to both that this poem possesses. Others, with interest in poetry of all periods, will find the extended and detailed commentary useful precisely because it does not seek to avoid the poem's challenges but seeks instead to provoke thought about its intricacy and poetic achievements.

Volume 2, by Ralph Hanna, deliberately addresses the question of the poem's perceived "difficulty," by indicating the legitimate areas of unresolved dilemmas, while offering often original explanations of a variety of textual loci. Perhaps more important, his commentary indicates what has not always appeared clear in past approaches—that the poem only "means" in its totality and within some critical framework, and that its annotation needs always to be guided by a sense of Langland's developing arguments.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9780812293838

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C Passus 5; B Passus 5; A Passus 5

Headnote

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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