The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman, Volume 4: C Passūs 15-19; B Passūs 13-17

By Traugott Lawler

The detailed and wide-ranging Penn Commentary on "Piers Plowman" places the allegorical dream-vision of the poem within the literary, historical, social, and intellectual contexts of late medieval England, and within the long history of critical interpretation of the work, 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 poem'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 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.

Covering passūs C.15-19 and B.13-17, Volume 4 of the Penn Commentary on "Piers Plowman" creates a complete vade mecum for readers, identifying and translating all Latin quotations, uncovering allusions, providing full cross-reference to other parts of the poem, drawing in relevant scholarship, and unraveling difficult passages. Like the other commentaries in the series, this volume contains an extensive overview and analysis of each passus, and the subdivisions within, large and small, and discusses all differences between the two versions. It pays careful attention to the poem at the literal level as well as to Latin texts that are analogues or even possible sources of Langland's thought and it emphasizes the comedy of the poem, of which these passūs offer a number of examples.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Apr 4, 2018
• ISBN: 9780812295122

Traugott Lawler

TRAUGOTT LAWLER is a professor of English at Yale University and the author of One and the Many in the Canterbury Tales.

Book preview

Preface

As I have always done when annotating a text, I have assumed that what puzzles me also puzzles others; I have worked out answers to my puzzles, and then tried to write the note I’d have loved to have to guide me in the first place.

A feature of my commentary is the frequency with which I have cited Latin analogues. I have found it illuminating to use the online Patrologia Latina to deepen my understanding of what lies behind what Langland is saying; and when I have found something relevant I have passed it on. The result, I hope, will help readers see the ideas of the poem in the context of patristic and contemporary Latin culture. I have usually thought it useful to quote the Latin, but everything is translated, so that no one should feel weighed down by the Latin. A second mark of my commentary is its emphasis on comedy. My section has an unusual number of comic scenes and moments, and I have tried to bring that out without being heavy-handed about it.

I have not minded being repetitious, since readers rarely read a commentary straight through. Nor have I minded citing my own essays, most of them from YLS, since nearly all of them sprang out of my work on the commentary, and are a natural extension of it.

I am grateful to the Humanities Institute of the University of California for supporting our project at its outset, and to Yale University, especially the Koerner Center for Emeritus Faculty, for financial support on several occasions.

I have taught a graduate seminar in the poem a number of times since I started work on the commentary, and I owe a great debt to the students in those courses for helping me understand the poem. Among them, Anne Borelli, Seeta Chaganti, Christopher Cobb, Anna Keller, Nicola Masciandaro, Robert Meyer-Lee, Ray Lurie, Daniel O’Donnell, Mary Peckham, Curtis Perrin, David Rosen, Philip Rusche, George Shuffelton, Jennifer Sisk, Emily Steiner, John Watkins, and Michael Wenthe were particularly helpful. Also, after I retired Ian Cornelius often invited me to his graduate seminars, and I have been helped by his students as well, especially by a group with whom he read the poem in fall of 2014; they read parts of my draft and gave me excellent suggestions, Annie Killian and Emily Ulrich in particular. Also Ian himself read a lot of my work and responded most astutely. One more student gave me crucial help: Max Ehrenfreund. As a Yale College sophomore in 2011, Max read Chaucer, Spenser, and Donne in a course with me, and then told me he wanted to study Piers Plowman. I hired him as a research assistant, and after reading the poem with me he undertook to read my entire commentary in its then state; his sharp queries proved most valuable.

Besides Ian Cornelius, numerous of my colleagues on the Yale faculty have given me valuable help: Wayne Meeks, Harry Atkinson, and Ivan Marcus on the bible, Gene Outka on St Augustine, Denys Turner on medieval vernacular theology, Walter Cahn on medieval art, Howard Bloch on French language and literature. And I greatly miss the stimulation of my conversations about Langland and Chaucer with Lee Patterson, whose untimely death in 2012 was a blow to many of us. So were the deaths of Dorothee Metlitzki in 2001 and Fred Robinson in 2016, my longtime close friends who similarly stimulated and taught me. All through the eighties and nineties and into this century, it was an endless learning experience for me to enjoy being the colleague in the Yale English Department of these three people, and of Marie Borroff and Roberta Frank as well. And as I dwell on the past I want to call up the long-distant past and my first teachers of Langland: Father Thomas Grace, S. J. at Holy Cross College, and Morton Bloomfield at Harvard. I have dedicated my work to their memory.

I thank scholars elsewhere who answered my queries, or discussed Langlandian matters with me at conferences: Tuija Ainonen, Christopher Cannon, Christina Cervone, the late Lawrence Clopper, Andrew Cole, the late Mary Clemente Davlin, Alan Fletcher, Curtis Gruenler, Michael Kuczynski, Jill Mann, Carl Schmidt, James Simpson, M. Teresa Tavormina, Lawrence Warner, Miceal Vaughan, Christina von Nolcken, Nicholas Watson.

I thank my fellow commentators: Stephen Barney, who conceived the idea for this commentary and gathered our team, and to whom I sent first each passus as I completed it; his clearheaded guidance is evident to me on every page; Ralph Hanna, with whom this is my third collaboration, and who has been tough on me but fair; and Andrew Galloway, who joined us late but quickly outstripped us, and whose devotion to our project, and careful attention to everything I sent him, have never flagged. Anne Middleton was our intellectual leader when we started the project at Irvine in 1990. She insisted then on the highest standard, and continued to do so until she died in Fall 2016; it pains me that she who gave so much to our cause has not lived to see her own work in print. And John Alford, that fund of Langlandian knowledge, made a huge difference for all of us while he was with us. Finally, Derek Pearsall and Robert Swanson, the readers for the Penn Press, vetted my work with extraordinary care and made it far better than it was. My daughter, the writer and editor Kate Lawler, copyedited my final draft with an eagle eye.

Finally, Peggy Lawler, my wife of nearly sixty years, has teased me, justifiably, about being slow but never stopped supporting and encouraging me. Whenne alle tresores ben tried, treuthe is þe beste.

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