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
