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
