ends, he cannot leave his home hundred, “unless he bring a Letter Patent containing the cause of his going, and the Time of his Return, if he ought to return, under the King’s Seal” (12 Rich. II, c. 3; SR 2:56).
Through his inspecificity about his domicile, london and opelond bothe, Will hopes to place himself outside statutory penalties. He clearly has no sealed license to roam, no warrant for his activities—like Hawkin he constitutes “an [eremitic] ordre by hymselue” (B 13.284; see 91n). Thus he should be treated like “any Servant or Labourer found in any City or Borough [cf. 1n above for statutory suspicions about such locales] or elsewhere coming from any Place, wandering without such Letter”: “he shall be maintenant taken … and put in the Stocks, and kept till he hath found Surety to return to his Service, or to Serve or labour in the Town from which he came” (12 Rich. II, c. 3; SR 2:56, my emphasis). Since the dreamer, although certainly out of place, can claim no fixed locale where he “serves,” even in the absence of a license, he cannot be punished, deported as it were, under the Statute.
45–52 The lomes … my wombe one: The dreamer’s education avowedly is his past; now he proceeds to outline his current way of life. In his last speech, he implicitly described himself as the dishonest steward of Luke 16. As he now tries to indicate how he retains a fyndyng (cf. line 49), even if not one from the now deceased “lynage ryche” Reason expected (see 26), Will quickly transforms himself from dishonest steward into other gospel characters. The steward, fearing he has lost his office, undertakes a program of chicanery, “mak[ing] friends of the mammon of iniquity” by writing off debts owed his lord. This is a deliberate program, “that when I shall be removed from the stewardship, they may receive me into their houses” (Luke 16:4); it resembles the risky chaffer Will will describe at 94–101.
But equally, Will’s vocation echoes—most trenchantly in line 52—Jesus’ instructions to his followers (Luke 9, 10; first noted Clopper 1989:276). He deliberately seeks to present himself in an apostolic status that may answer English labor law: “The harvest indeed is great, but the laborers are few” (Luke 10:2). Will claims to live by his prayers, supported by those for whose good estate and eternal well-being he importunes God. In this process, he behaves as Imaginative had told him to (at B 12.16–17) and resembles the ideal priest: “a Porthors … sholde be his Plow, Placebo to sigge” (B 15.125, there as a rebuke to an armed priest, cf. lines 57–58 below). Thus, he has interests in God’s kingdom comparable to those of his evangelical forebears. He is paid for this effort in food and follows a regular rotation of visits among his employers; his behavior thus accords with Jesus’ injunctions, “eating and drinking such things as they have,” “eat such things as are set before you” (Luke 10:7, 8, the first cited 15.44L)—although he ignores commands against wandering house to house (Luke 10:5–7).
Further, line 52 distinguishes the bagless dreamer from the “bidding [wheedling? or, like Will, praying?] beggars” of Prol.41–42; cf. 8.128n. For these figures, bag and belly are indistinguishable. L returns to this topic again at 9.98–104, 119–25L (see the notes there), 139–40, 151–58. Throughout this later passage, possession of the external trappings of a beggar damns the man who carries them, ipso facto; in contrast, to lack bag and bottle is to be perfectly apostolic: “Take nothing for your journey; neither staff, nor scrip, nor bread, nor money” (Luke 9:3; for the “staff,” cf. 9.159n). Perhaps particularly important, given Will’s aggressive turn on Reason at line 53, is Jesus’ command, “salute no man by the way” (Luke 10:4; cf. B 15.3–10, partly retained at 9.122–23; cf. Chaucer’s Miller, CT I.3122–23). Although he wears the habit of a lollare, Will claims to be truly apostolic, neither a gyrovague friar like penetrans domos (22.340) nor a lollare, since he does not carry a lollare’s equipment and takes no more than his day’s food (carries nothing away with him). He thus is exactly what the gospel calls a “laborer” and acquires a “measurable hire” from his patrons in return for his prayers (see Luke 10:7). Perhaps the most comparable figure elsewhere in the poem is the pilgrim Patience who “preyde mete ‘pur charite, for a pouere heremyte’ ” (B 13.30; cf. 15.32).
Donaldson (1949:208–19) pursues his autobiographical argument by urging that L was “an itinerant handy man” who dealt in prayers. This, he argues, would have been one of the few jobs open to him as “a married clerk without benefice” (208). But the dreamer, whatever ecclesiastical hopes underlay his education, may now be in some status besides priest, perhaps some variety of hermit (see further 45–47n, 91n). With this depiction, Godden (1984:162), following Allen (1927:51–61, 430–70), compares Richard Rolle’s career as a hermit. Hanna (1997:41–42) discusses evidence for hermits as patronized domestic servants; as Bullock-Davies points out of minstrels (1978:18), all household servants “while they were on duty at Court … had their commons provided.” Hanna also examines (40–41) the limited begging the few surviving rules allow hermits: these require, following Matt. 6:34, that a hermit seek no more than his day’s fare, especially in urban settings.
45–47 The lomes … seuene psalmes: Recall lines 12–21 above; the dreamer may, once again, rely on Statute language. To forestall wage inflation, Parliament requires open hiring meetings, to be held in a public place in boroughs; to these laborers are to “bring openly in their Hands … their Instruments” (25 Edw. III, c. 2.1; SR 1:311). The dreamer shifts allegorical—and argumentative—levels in a way that anticipates more powerful shifts of this kind later in this vision, where spiritual values become the metaphorical meanings of agrarian acts—see 7.161ffnn and the later reformulations of 8.1–4n etc., as well as the citation of B 15.125 above. Here, in self-defense, Will inverts the later technique and claims a literal hard labor out of spiritual action, cf. 48 here soules.
The word lome recalls other themes. For not only does it refer to a laborer’s instrument, at GGK 2309 it refers to military weaponry, a sense that looks ahead to line 58 and Will’s claim to belong to a nonmilitary aristocracy. Moreover, when at line 35, the dreamer may imply that his education has been like a maiming, he suggests that he has (or should have) exchanged one lome, his penis (see WA 4877 and cf. 22.195), for a second, the (prayer-)book—and if priestly, for chastity as well. He should no longer sow physical seed but spiritual; his plowshare (cf. the uses of the implement in Jean de Meun’s Rose and Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale, and the lengthy discussion, Barney 1973) is prayer—or what Will often substitutes for it, the composition of his poem. His claim for an equality of manual and spiritual work is perhaps affirmed in B 6.247–49, lines revised out in the C version.
The locution þat y… with must be read with both verbs in line 45. One might further notice that deserue, an echo of lines 12 and 32, here seems to attract honorific overtones (“merit”) largely absent in the previous use in line 42 (where the word seems to mean only “earn”). Both uses pun on Statute language, where “servantz” and “servir” define, respectively, those covered by the legal prescription and the act that they are to perform; cf. the climax of this argument in Crist for to serue 61, in context opposed to to labory and lordes kyn to serue 69.
When he comes to list his lomes, Will mentions a series of common prayers that he routinely repeats on behalf of others. At least in part, he is thinking of Conscience’s visionary prediction at 3.464–65 (q.v.), where these prayers, and not the manual labor enjoined on everyone else, constitute the appropriate duties of perfect, messianic-age priests. Such a memory leads up to Will’s claim to perfection in line 84, itself in part an appeal to the Conscience who spoke the lines in C 3 to defend him as fulfilling an ideal status. For the “Pater noster,” see 16.322–23n.
To the prayers Conscience has already mentioned, Will here adds the primer. The word describes the “Book of Hours [of the Virgin],” the customary private prayer-book for laity. Such volumes typically include the penitential psalms and Office of the Dead as well as the hours; for their usual contents and a good introductory statement about their use, see de Hamel 1986:159–64. A much more detailed survey (unfortunately,
