LITMIR.BIZ

       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

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