one of my sins” (Discreta similiter debet esse confessio, scilicet vt distincte, ac separatim confiteatur singula peccata, iuxta illud: ‘Lauabo per singulas noctes lectum meum,’ etc. Id est, per singula peccata conscientiam meam). Godden (1984:132) notes that preeyeres and penaunce forms a persistent alliterative doublet in the poem and (132–33) gives examples of penance meaning “the ascetic life” elsewhere in ME.
86–88 Non de solo … nec in pane, Fiat … : Matt. 4:4, itself a quotation of Deut. 8:3, reads “Non in solo pane vivit homo” (It is written: Not in bread alone doth man live, [but in every word that proceedeth from the mouth of God]). But as Burrow argues (1993:104), L splits and extends the verse so that it reads as a rejection of the entire food cycle, production and consumption: “Man does not live of the soil, nor in bread or other food.” The subsequent Latin from the Pater Noster, Matt. 6:10 (Thy/God’s will be done), of course defines the word of God. L ultimately allows Patience to offer something like a definitive reading of these conjoined verses (see 15.244–49, 83–88n above, and 7.260Ln); given Patience’s association with holy suffering, one might also consider the analogue of Luke 22:42, “But yet not my will, but thine be done.” On the Pater Noster throughout the poem, see Gillespie 1994. Middleton (1997:246) signals the implicit connection with Matt. 10:19–20, where God will give the arrested apostle sufficient answer to hold off his tormentors. Mann (1979:30–32, followed by Barney 1988:121), adduces John 4:34: “My meat is to do the will of him who sent me.”
89–91 Quod Consience … to mynistre: Skeat and Pearsall suggest that Conscience here responds to 84 parfit, but one might equally argue that he is actuated by the dreamer’s claim to a clean, and extraordinarily perspicacious, conscience in the preceding line. Whitworth (1972:6) distinguishes Reason, at this point silent, as concerned with theory, Conscience with practice; the latter figure sees that the dreamer’s behavior does not entirely accord with his claims. For Conscience, the issue then becomes, not the claim of perfection per se, but a sad (stable) life of that sort (cf. 103–4). Following good monastic precedents, Conscience associates this, not with the individual will to be perfect, but with a stable social status, overseen by someone in an official capacity, a position analogous to the emphases of Reason’s subsequent sermon.
Conscience invokes legal discourse as well and draws attention in line 91 to the statutory exception to the status Reason has attacked at 29–31. If Will looks like a “lewed” hermit (but isn’t “lewed”) and may be a priest (but may have tainted that status through sexual indulgence), he still potentially has a licit claim to beg (as Godden 1990:181 notes). The 1388 Statute extends this privilege to “People of Religion and Hermits approved (heremytes approvez) having letters testimonial of their Ordinaries” (12 Rich. II, c. 7; SR 2:58). Such supervisory figures would include the prior or mynistre (cf. MED ministre, sense 2b, usually of Franciscan provincial officials) mentioned here, although Will has already suggested (line 76) that his status may reflect precisely a failure by supervising clergy to aid deserving beggars like himself.
89 lyeth: Skeat and Pearsall1 gloss “applies, is to the point.” But Godden (1984:155), although noting OED sense 13, directs attention to the adversative Ac in the following line (glossing the word as Skeat and Pearsall do would seem to require “For”) and suggests translating “I cannot see that this doctrine (that prayer and penance is the best life) is false; and yet.…” A similar ambiguity occurs at B 10.112.
92–101 That is soth … shal turne: At this point, Will simply caves in (beknowe 92 is an admission). He accepts Reason’s earlier charges of his irregularity (see line 28) and, in return, can only offer his good will; cf. Imaginative’s discussion at 14.23–29 and Conscience’s at B 13.190–97. But here Will’s proffer, rather than fusion of his soul with “voluntas dei” (88), veers back into the very unregulated status for which he is being chastised. For all that Will can promise is compulsive and repetitive effort, the same acts over and over again—a reflection of what he has earlier identified as Romynge in remembraunce (see 11n and esp. Middleton 1988). He promises such behavior in the good hope (94 and 99, not in his later despairing behavior as Recklessness) that such repetition will somehow once manage not to be loss (as it has always been in the past) but profit (wynnyng 98). As Piers sees, when in the AB versions he tears the pardon, such a profit (salvation) can only come to pass independently of Will’s, or any individual’s, efforts to obtain it, through the mysterious infusion of grace; see further Recklessness at 12.205–9 and more distantly, Imaginative’s flailing blind man at B 12.103–12.
Chaffare provides a powerful metaphor for this complex activity. Just as in the mercantilistic parables on which he relies to create his apostolic status (see 7n, 23–25n, 45–52n, 98Ln, 100–101n), Will invokes a widespread analogy between commerce and spirituality. Both, as in the earlier example of the dishonest steward, involve a calculus of risk and disaster; for Will, the likelihood of utter failure, total waste and loss, and concomitant repetition, overwhelms any immediate sense of possible success. (This point is taken up at length in a draft, unpublished version of Middleton 2013, which I am grateful that the author shared; and more distantly, at her 1990:46, 1997:234.) The suggestion here, intensified by wyrdes as well as the impersonal verbs of 95 and 98, is that chaffare is purely blind luck, that the mode by which salvation occurs is incomprehensible and bears no apparent relation to either desire or effort. Thus equally, the dreamer asserts that what appear to Reason his undisciplined flailings about serve a deep purpose, even if one incomprehensible, and are not to be measured by ostensible in-transit results alone. For a different reading, see Lawler 1979.
Of course, this promise of repetition and recursion to the lost hopes of youth defines not simply a spiritual status and a biography but also the very métier of L’s poetry (cf. 1.80). Indeed the three are very nearly coterminous. At the very opening of his project, in A 1.119–20, L inscribes, through Holychurch, a Dantesque prospect that it will be possible to “enden … in perfite werkis.” But the working of the poem involves L in the discovery that he can only “ofte chaffare.” See further 1–108n.
Such chaffering marks the poem in the most large scale and most obvious ways. It determines its gross form, its incessant visioning, the repetitive effort to approach more nearly to the heart of that mystery that Will here identifies as grace itself (and the form of his identification acknowledges, of course, his distance from it). Moreover, L’s visions are not simply repetitive but recursive: each seems to begin at some point before the last had started (see, e.g., 126n, 180–90n below), and none seems to achieve finality, only a new conflicted restatement of the issues. See further Middleton 1982, Smith 2001:184–87, and 110n.
But such repeated visioning only vaguely signals the great act of recursive chaffering that L undertakes. This is the determination to write the poem over, head to end, to create Versions. Rather than some climax, some moment of prophetic vision, re-vision is the very métier of the poem and of L’s biography as the poem represents it. And, as the reader will find in the conversations parallel to 5.1–108 that comprise passus 6, such biographical re-vision and irresolvable verbal conflict proves to be the poem’s version of gracelessness, of scapegraceism, of sinful life itself.
97 sette … at a leef: Translate: “regarded … as of no consequence” (so MED lef n.1, sense 1d); apparently an allusive use of such idioms as “not worth a kres” or “not worth a leaf.” However, this sense underlies L’s common (and often provocatively placed) idiosyncratic use of leef as “bit, small part” (MED sense 2d): cf. 6.209, 15.103; B 6.254, 7.111 (the archetypal, not edited, version) and 181.
98L Simile est … dragmam: Will continues the chorus of gospel citations that began at line 86. The first text is Matt. 13:44 (The kingdom of heaven is like unto a treasure hidden in a field). Middleton comments (2013:133): “The field [Will] has obtained for development is Piers’s half-acre, and his project, idiosyncratically specified as penance by other means, now becomes his work, neither idleness nor courtly
