insure he has a living; he claims that provision of such support is analogous to a king’s provision of a fee for one of his knights (cf. line 77 below). See further 52n (on chantry priests and their stipends) and 54n (on Will’s possible self-presentation as an aristocratic, not agricultural “servant”).
28 A spendour … or a spilletyme: Note line 64 below, with the dreamer’s passing ad hominem appeal to his interlocutor, his later admission and justification in lines 93–101, and Reason’s further return to the theme in his sermon, lines 126–27 below. This complex of ideas—“spending speech and tyning time”—recur as Imaginative’s C Version definition of Dowel (14.4–10), that true action enjoined by Holychurch and, perhaps significantly, entirely sufficient for laypersons but not for clerics. Further, to facilitate the discussion here, L excised in the course of C revision another self-referential discussion, B 9.99–106 (cf. Aers 1975:66). In the spirit of that passage, Will here has trouble claiming he is “Goddes gleman,” not just “a goere to tavernes” involved in jangling, lakkyng, or some other impermissible minstrelsy.
Time-wasting, the alehouse, and general engagement in “worldly vanity” are emphatically associated with both producing and consuming “romance” poetry in the prologues to five large earlier texts, some of which L surely knew (The South English Legendary, Robert Manning’s HS, CM, the London translation of Robert of Gretham’s Evangiles, and SV). A large part of the discussion of the Last Judgment at PC 5644–724 expands extensively upon time wasted, for example, the implications of Matt. 12:36, “For each idle word an account shall be rendered on the day of judgment.” The topic recurs persistently in SV (Hanna 2013:131 n.19), as well as in the Rollean Holy Boke Gracia Dei, at 16/4–17/8, 22/18–44/4 (including “jangling,” 32/10–35/12), 57/9–60/4, and 68/5–69/4 (the last two passages discussing hindrances to prayer, cf. B 12.16–17, 25–28). See further Martin 1979:62–65, Schmidt 1987:11 n21 and 16 (who insists on David as model for the psalter-clerk Will), and Burrow 2003.
L loosely conjoins a variety of issues under the theme of wasteful expenditure. On the one hand, the world’s work, from which the dreamer absents himself, relies on a conception of time as an economic commodity. For the late medieval development of such a secularized time to facilitate policed labor, see Le Goff’s provocative essays, 1980:29–52 (50–51 on the sin of idleness). Cf. 3.462–63.
Yet this injunction to use time in labor is neither simple nor absolute. As Piers discovers at 8.213–15, leel labour does not simply fill out duration to produce some quantum but requires a proper spirit as well (cf. such a reprise as 12.95–96). Moreover, proper temporal expenditure is subject to further qualifications, to that mesure that Holychurch makes so central to her teaching; L constantly returns to sabbatarian arguments on the need to set aside work time to meet the obligations imposed by sacramental time (see 30n; 6.182–85n, 429–32n; A 7.112; 7.226n; 8.80n; 9.220–41n).
Such attitudes do not simply remain for L injunctions to religious practice (as, for example, in Sloth’s confession), however. The obligations of ecclesiastical time feed back into labor issues and provide an etiology of the bad or unwilling workman (see lines 65–69 below, 9.167–75 and nn, for example). In such theorizing, the refusal to restrain sexual urges (and to heed either the sacramental imperatives of marriage or ecclesiastical prohibitions of intercourse at certain times) becomes an indicator of a more general lack of self-discipline, particularly of a disinclination to foster offspring properly; as a result, children of such unions are inevitably, as if genetically, damned. Holychurch first broaches this theme at 1.24–29 (note esp. the final line) and initially tars Meed with this brush at 2.24–29L. References appear in passing at 3.188–90L and 416, Wit volubly argues the issue at 10.207–55 (and 263), and the topic is central to Will’s misreading of Kind’s creatures at 13.143–55. All these views are, of course, perverse in their refusal to consider grace and are eventually expelled from the poem as appropriate varieties of analysis; for a provocative first move in this direction, see 12.109–19L and cf. 61–69n.
29–30 Or beggest thy bylyue … | Or faytest: From the earliest publication, the Statute of Laborers reflects attitudes that had developed in response to “the new poverty” of the fourteenth century, attitudes that will exercise L throughout later stages of this vision (see the citations in 7–8n above, as well as 8.209n). In the 1388 Statute, the longstanding claims that such able-bodied individuals are merely criminous produce particularly draconian measures. For the drafters of the Statute, able-bodied beggars may be construed as simple vagabonds or vagrants, lacking any defense. Like all other unlicensed wanderers, they should be returned to their homes and put to work: “Of every Person that goeth begging, and is able to serve or labour, it shall be done of him as of him that departeth out of the Hundred and other Places aforesaid without Letter Testimonial” (12 Rich. II, c. 7; SR 2:58). See 22–25n above for Will’s effort at preempting this charge.
29 beggest … at men hacches: Note the echo in Will’s willingness to beg with Charity at 16.337–38. But, according to Liberum Arbitrium, Charity never begs (352): his food, as described at 16.318–22, 372–74L resembles what the dreamer will ultimately here claim as his own (see 86–88) and what Patience will later show Activa Vita (15.237–59L).
30 faytest vppon frydayes or festedayes in churches: The line echoes Prol.43, where the note discusses the root faiten; see also B 15.215n. Here Reason additionally charges Will with being so irregular as to carry on what pretends to be “work” at forbidden times. He would, Reason implies, come to church only because it is an efficient way to find almsgivers. The claim of misusing church may look ahead to line 105 (and cf. 21.1–8), where, rather than honoring God, the dreamer falls asleep. But cf. 9.241–47; although Will averts the charge here, such behavior would be preferable to that he there ascribes to the inimical lollares, who find service-time handouts inadequately attractive.
frydayes recur throughout the poem as those days of special obligation that they were (e.g., B 1.101, 6.182 and 352, 9.94, implicitly 9.231–35). The author of FM, who argues (214/4) that the day should be called Freday (the day of our redemption), indicates its importance with a verse mnemonic (Walther Initia, cited 214/10–12): “Salve, festa dies, que vulnera nostra coherces. | Est Adam factus et eodem tempore lapsus. | Angelus est missus, et passus in cruce Christus” (Hail, festival day, that contains our wounds. On Friday Adam was created and fell on the same day. The angel [of the Annunciation] was sent, and Christ suffered on the cross).
32 ryhtfulnesse: Justitia, essentially Reason’s self-reference. One might recall Reason at 4.144: “lawe shal ben a laborer and lede afelde donge.” His form of interrogation suggests that he desires to realize immediately that purification of Justice that he earlier couched in the terms of messianic prophecy. The related personification Righteousness (Iusticia at 20.464L) later appears as one of “the four daughters of God,” and “spiritus Iusticie” is one of the four seeds, “cardinales vertues,” Piers sows at 21.274–309.
32L Reddet … : Rom. 2:6 (God who will render to every man according to his works). Although it may simply mean “wherever,” the biblical context could identify 32 There with the Last Judgment (cf. 7n and 28n), when reward will be given in accord with “truth” (cf. Rom. 2:2, 8; the passage includes other relevant echoes). Both the Latin and the preceding line also echo the parable of the dishonest steward, evoked in lines 22–25. Rom. 2:6 recurs, again in a discussion of doubtful heavenly reward for uncategorizable worldly efforts (Dismas and Trajan), at 14.152L. Alford lists (1992:80) the numerous biblical variations on the verse.
35–44 When y ʓut ʓong was … and vp london bothe: The opening of Will’s very lengthy response (it runs to line 88) again combines an acute attention to the 1388 Statute with other materials, in this case a represented biography. Will wishes to emphasize the tender age at which he was enrolled in school—a kind of maiming, ultimately
