has settled on the Pied Friars, an offshoot of the Carmelites who did beg.
A small piece of evidence on the matter is provided by Chaucer’s translation of the Romance of the Rose (ll. 7456–60), listing five orders, Dominicans, Franciscans, Augustinians, Carmelites, and Sacks (where the French text [ed. Lecoy, ll.12102–7] lists four: it has the Sacks but not the Augustinians). Andrews 2006:221 asserts that the Friars of the Sack were gone by early in the fourteenth century, but argues (222) that this line in RR helped keep their memory alive.
Despite Ralph Hanna’s conclusion, and despite Chaucer’s keeping the Sacks, when I weigh all the evidence it seems to me that the likeliest candidate for the fifth order—unless it is an ironic reference to the hermits on the highway who beg in friar-clothing and are called friars, C.9.189–255—is indeed the Crutched Friars, for whose activity in London in the late fourteenth century there is ample evidence. They had a house in St Olave’s parish near the Tower, on a street adjacent to the street still called Crutched Friars Street (in the City, a block south of Aldgate Street) (Röhrkasten 2004:62). Their strong presence in London is evident in the taxation rolls cited in McHardy, 1977; see her index, s.v. Crutched Friars. For the phrase “five orders,” see especially Röhrkasten 1996:473 and Virginia Davis, “Mendicants” and Clergy, passim. Davis in Clergy 33n says that the Crutched Friars, though “not technically a mendicant order” were “usually treated as such,” and says that in “many London wills” “bequests are left ‘to the five orders of friars’”; she cites one such will. See also her “Mendicants,” esp. p. 4. and n23. Even more aptly for our purpose, Röhrkasten, whose study of bequests to friars in wills is definitive, says that “Only about 10 per cent of the testators mentioned the number of five mendicant orders while 18.5 percent indicated that as far as they were concerned there were only four friaries in the city. This does not mean that they ignored the Crutched Friars; on the contrary, many of this group not only included the smallest of the convents in their wills but actually named them together with the others, maintaining the differentiation” (1996:473). In a note he cites a typical such differentiation: “Cuilibet domui fratrum XII denarios ac etiam domui S. Crucis XII denarios” (To each house of friars twelve pence, and twelve pence also to the house of the Holy Cross). This suggests that Langland’s “four” and “five” are both normal. Hayden 1995 lists English ordinations to the order, and shows ample activity, mostly in London, throughout the second half of the fourteenth century. P. L. Heyworth, in his edition of Jack Upland, p. 119, opts for the Crutched Friars. They were still around in 1534: see Roth 1966: 2.445–46.
Meanwhile, Robert Swanson, whose knowledge of the fourteenth-century English church is unrivaled, has suggested that the fifth order may be the Trinitarians, who were not friars but were often thought to be friars, and were more numerous and prominent than the Crutched Friars. See Swanson 2007: 63–64, 144–45.
82–83 (B.13.76–77) They preche … tholede: The friar preaches penance, as the apostles did when they went out in twos (Mark 6:12), and as Francis did in imitation of them (Celano, First Life, 1.22, 23, Habig 1983:247); and he preaches “Christ crucified,” as St Paul did (1 Cor 1:23), and as Chaucer’s Host says “freres doon in Lente,/To make us for oure olde synnes wepe” (Clerk’s Prologue, E12–13). See Fleming 1977:126 and Owst 1926:147, who quotes Chaucer’s lines. Faus Semblant, of course, preaches penitence too, in the forms of poverty, distress, and abstinence; see the note to 68–73a above.
84 decretistre of Canoen: Canon lawyer, one versed in the decretals.
86 (B.13.79) Hath no pyte on vs pore: i.e., won’t pass the mortreux; see 115 (B.13.107–8). Will complains that the friar preaches penance without practicing it; but he seems no more willing to suffer himself. He has utterly forgotten Ymaginatif’s counsel “no clergie to despice/Ne sette shorte by here science, whatso þei doen hemsulue/…/Laste cheste chaufe vs to choppe vch man oþer” (14.64–68, B.12.121–25).
B.13.83 Mahoun: I.e., a devil; see 20.293 and OED, s.v. Mahound, n. Will’s basic wish is that the doctor were in hell, and undergoing this Dantesque punishment. The C version is much milder.
91 (B.13.84) iurdan, iuyste: the former is a vessel doctors used for urinalysis, the latter a drinking-pot with handles; see OED. s.v. jordan, n.1 and just, n.2. Since both had a narrow neck and a round belly, the line is pleonastic. Iurdan, however, suggests strongly that we have here a satiric portrait of Friar William Jordan, O. P., Doctor of Theology, a major Dominican spokesman (Gelber 2004:50) who had engaged in controversy with Uthred of Boldon: see Marcett 1938:57–64, Gwynn 1943:2–4, 19–24; Russell 1966:113; Middleton 1987:31–32n; Kerby-Fulton 2006:375. (Clopper 1997:239n accepts the “one-liner directed at Jordan” a little reluctantly “as a local allusion that does not detract from the overall Franciscan character of the scene.”
B.13.85 raþer: I.e., three or four days ago at St Paul’s, B.13.65–66 (C.15.69–70).
B.13.86 Pacience … preynte on me to be stille: See also 120 (B.13.113), where Conscience winks on Patience to pray Will to be quiet, and 20.19 (B.18.21), where Faith “printe” (B preynte) on Will when he asks after Piers. Here, the word is an editorial conjecture for “wynkede” in the majority of B mss; clearly the archetype had already substituted the more common verb. Burrow 2000:80–82, 2002:103–5 discusses “prinken” and concludes that the gesture is our modern wink of the eye, but that it carried more weight then. Stephen Barney has suggested to me that it is more a wince than a wink.
92 apose hym what penaunce is and purgatorie on erthe: i.e., ask him if he realizes what a penance it is to be poor, and have one’s purgatory on earth: see 82, 86–87 above, and, on purgatory on earth for the poor, 9.279 (B.7.106, A.8.88) and “The Simonie,” ed. Dean, 1996, l. 509.
Patience calms Will down (93–105, B.13.86–98)
94–105 (B.13.87–98) Thow shalt se … penaunce: Patience, true to his name, advises passiveness, not action: “Let him talk first,” doing so in a supercharged version of the extravagant language that will turn out to be his hallmark. He utters a satiric tour de force of prediction of what the doctor will say, namely that in eating and drinking as he did he was actually doing penance. His predictions, however, are not borne out at all in the lines that follow: instead, rather anticlimactically, the doctor just coughs and gapes 108 (coughs and carps B.13.101, and nearly all C mss.), and then Patience asks him about the three Do’s. But of course L could hardly have shown the doctor fulfilling the prediction in any detail; the point rather is for Patience to quiet Will down by saying, “Let him convict himself”—and the doctor apparently does that by coughing and gaping, that is, revealing how ill his overeating has made him, though the unspecified “carping” in B (and the C majority) may consist of the sort of arrogant self-justification Patience has predicted. The details of the passage are hard, since Patience speaks with his usual playful irony (see 32–33n above, and Simpson 2007:142–43); I shall do my best to explicate them one by one.
95 (B.13.88) poffe: pant, breathe hard: his stomach pain makes speaking painful. See OED 1.b, which cites this passage.
96 (B.13.89) And thenne shal his gottes gothelen: as Glutton’s did, 6.398; cf. also 108 Cowhede to 6.412, where Glutton “cowed vp a caudel.” Patience is clearly playing on Will’s mention of penaunce 92 (B.13.85); in C he may be playing further on the idea of purgatorie on erthe: the doctor has purgation problems right now.
97–100 (B.13.90–93) For now he hath dronke … fode for a penante: a most difficult passage of satiric hyperbole. Its gist is that the doctor will defend himself ingeniously by arguing either that rich food is penitential because,
