(ibid. 23).
71 And barones bastardus haen be Erchedekenes. Lords were expected to provide benefices for their servants, household chaplains, and clerical staff, and certainly expected to look after their families. Pantin cites (1962:32) the Liber Niger Edwardi IV, which assumes that magnates will reward clerics in their service with “officialships [an erchedeken was a bishop’s chief administrative officer; cf. Pantin 1962:26–27], deaneries, prebends …”
72–75 And sopares … kynges worschipe: The word sopar has been persistently misconstrued (including by MED) and has nothing to do with soap. It means simply “shop-keeper, merchant,” as in the London street “Sopare(s) Lane” in Cheapside. The etymon is British Medieval Latin soparius, derivative of scopa/shopa/sopa “shop,” all presumably representing an unrecorded OE *scopa, *scopere. Cf. Nightingale 1995:81–82. London soap-making seems to have been a post-Langlandian industry; cf. Thrupp 1948:10; Stow, Survey 1:251.
Thrupp discusses at length (1948:234–87) the efforts of merchants to penetrate the ranks of genteel landed society. Perhaps particularly interesting is the case of the grocer John Wiltshire, who could purchase his knight’s fee but could not persuade others to let him perform the associated coronation services in 1377 (see 259). Cf. O’Connor’s description (1994) of the activities of John Pyel, a fringe player who escaped prosecution by the Good Parliament in 1376. In fact, the only London merchants elevated to knighthoods in the period, mayor William Walworth and three companions, received the honor for “military service,” their aid in dispatching Wat Tyler at Smithfield in 1381; cf. Barron 2000:410–12. Here the reversal of roles resembles the exchange knight/mercer that Covetise describes at 6.248–52; the knight’s son must become a laborer, impoverish himself, in order to perform his appropriate military duty (lines 74–75 recall 1.90–106).
76–77 And monkes … ypurchased: The income of monasteries, which should be expended in the conventional monastic alms, hospitality to the sick and dying, and weekly doles of bread and ale, has been diverted to the militaristic aggrandizement of relations. Under William Gray, bishop of Lincoln 1431–36, the severest visitation formula for an ill-run house states, “elemosina consumitur; hospitalitas non observatur” (the funds for alms are dissipated; the rules of hospitality—often opulent and extended to wealthy patrons, not the poor—not observed) (cited Knowles 1957:211 n1). Instead of this socially useful occupation, in which the monk of genteel birth performs with proper spiritual gentility, a place in a religious establishment has become an extension of the family household and the assets of the community are transferred to private use (cf. the examples of abbots making personal use of revenues mentioned by Knowles 211, 213). Reason hears this complaint and addresses it in his sermon, lines 156–67 below (esp. 165–66).
78–79 Popes … to kepe: The dreamer addresses two similar abuses, both involving a purchase from which an individual like him, poor but noble by birth, would be excluded. From Popes, one would receive a provision to occupy a certain benefice (see Pantin 1962:47–75); patrones would hold the advowson of, the right of appointment to, a particular benefice (cf. again the discussion of 13.104–14). The notion that such appointments might be purchased leads to the charge that successful applicants are Symondus sones, the children of Simon Magus (Acts 8:18–24); cf. 2.65–66n.
83–88 For in my Consience … alle thynges: Given the current state of the world, no external spiritual guidance is trustworthy. The individual can only rely on his own conscience as he pursues justice. The dreamer appeals to Conscience for support in claiming that his whole mode of lowly living—which Reason identifies as having no regimen but that lines 86–88 define in terms of the B version’s doctrine of nonsolicitousness—amounts to a penitential act (as Will will in passus 9 claim of the deserving poor en masse).
However different the modality, the phrase penaunce discrete (84) recalls the end of the upcoming vision in the A and B versions. There Piers, the poem’s closest approximation to a parfit man, takes on penaunce discrete as his primary métier. This passage is “the displaced form of Piers’s tearing of the Pardon sent from Truth that is cancelled in C” (Middleton 1997:263, cf. 292). Here the dreamer’s effort to replace Piers and to enact this promise (in lines 105–8 below) only turns out to be a further example of the recursion he will shortly describe, a fall back into the habit of sleeping (and of poetic composition).
Will also attempts to wrap himself in the ne solliciti sitis ethic prominent in AB. Skeat compares B 7.126–35, and one might also notice resemblances to the lunatic lollers of 9.105–39. But Will’s behavior might be distinguished from Patience’s invocation of the same verses at 15.244–49 and his seriousness perceived as tempered, a self-serving joke. Given the description of line 46, the pater noster, with other associated prayers, is completely responsible for any fyndyng he manages to obtain!
Links between Will and Conscience particularly intrigue L in his revision of early portions of C. In Prol.125–38, the personification takes over materials spoken by the dreamer in B, and in their outspoken antipathy to Meed, they are progressively isolated figures throughout passus 3. The dreamer will invoke Conscience again at 9.236–40. This association is renewed in the Dowell banquet scene, especially 15.175–83, and lasts until the end of the poem (following on Clergy’s remark at B 13.203–4). Recent criticism, to which one may now add Wood 2012, following Jenkins (Martin) 1969, has typically perceived Conscience as a figure nearly as subject to mistakes as the dreamer.
84 Preeyeres of a parfit man and penaunce discrete: Later passages offer conflicting evidence about how to read Will’s implicit claim in the on-verse. On the one hand, Will’s self-associations with perfection have been inherited from B 12.24, where the dreamer alleges that not laboring, failing to say his Psalter so as to write the poem, approaches perfection. Writing is “play,” not just an opposite of labor but a foolishness easily deprecated; yet ancient wise men “Pleyden þe parfiter to ben.”
On the other hand, Will’s “perfection” reminds one of Piers’s rejection at 8.131–38 of the wasters’ excuse that they laze about in order to pray. Perhaps a more relevant gloss appears at 11.174 and 13.230; the claim to be a parfit man reflects the dreamer’s “pruyde/pruyde or presumpcioun of parfit lyuynge,” and links this self-defense to Will’s desperate immersion in the inner dream of the Land of Longing (first noted Clopper 1989:274, 278). Such associations intensify the connections with the later self-defense, Recklessness’s huge rant (including its assertion that indigence of any stripe is blessed), and with its conclusion in another rebuke from Reason (see 11n above).
The phrase penaunce discrete is equally difficult to define discursively. The English phrase, so far as is known, appears in only two other places, the Lollard tracts “On Clerks Possessioners” (“Wycliffe,” English Works, EETS 74:117, cited Godden 1990:55) and “On Church Temporalities” (Arnold SEW 3:213), in both instances apparently to describe a life of self-directed penitential meekness. In these terms, private penaunce discrete would contrast with Will’s prayers undertaken on behalf of others.
But equally, the phrase may reflect the technical language of penitential theory. “Confessio … discreta” routinely appears in widely distributed verses that enumerate the conditions (up to twenty-seven of them) for a proper confession. In this context, “discreta” means using appropriate and modest language in the confessional, intruding no trivial concerns, and, perhaps most relevantly here, following lines 70–81, concentrating upon one’s own sins rather than revealing those of one’s neighbor (so DTC 3:957). For the verses and discussion, see Millett 1999.
Alternatively, as Sarah Wood points out to me, an authoritative source, Raymund of Penyaforte’s Summa 3.34.26, sees “discrete penance” in slightly different terms: “Likewise, confession ought to be discrete,
