is the patient way—the way of the Samaritan, and of Christ himself. At 21.109–14 (B.19.109–14), it is clear that “Love your enemy,” Patience’s message, is Christ’s special message. I argued at the end of my 1995 essay that Conscience’s utter commitment to patience explains his decision to admit Friar Flatterer to Unity in the final scene of the poem. And Will too is committed to patience from now on.
152 properliche: “Appropriately, correctly,” MED; “with due modesty,” Kane, Glossary. But its emphatic position before the verb suggests the more pregnant meaning, “in his own person, himself.” Piers has just praised patience and the patient, and now that Piers is gone, Patience himself speaks. And what he says is anything but modest, as the doctor sees. “I could win all France without shedding a drop of blood!”
B.13.136 so no man displese hym: “As long as no one will be offended.” The doctor, it turns out, will be very much offended.
B.13.139 a lemman, loue was hir name: See C.20.185. The word lemman calls up the Song of Songs. Cf. its use in two contemporary passages clearly derived from the Song of Songs, Miller’s Tale, A3700, 3705 and Pearl 763.
B.13.140 wordes … werkes … wil: This series of terms goes back to Holy Church’s answer to Will 1.84–85 (B.1.88–89, A.1.86–87); see B.14.14 and note; B.15.198–200, 210; Alford 1988:52, 55; and Burrow 1969.
B.13.141 loue leelly þi soule: On this important Christian concept (which boils down to “do well”), see the notes to 17.125–49 (sixth paragraph), 17.140a, and 17.143–49; and cf. the doctor 15.112 above.
153–56a That loueth lely … vincunt &c (B.13.148–50 Ac for to fare þus wiþ þi frend … no catel but speche): Though these passages correspond in the two versions, they say quite different things. In B, Patience rounds out his lemman Love’s remarks on loving one’s enemy by adding, rather superfluously, that you don’t have to cast coals on the head of your friend, who unlike an enemy does not want to annex your land but only wants you to talk to him. (Galloway, though, argues [1995:96] attractively that speech between friends is an arena that allows for riddling: thus the riddles that follow.) In C, Patience picks up where Piers left off, and goes in an entirely different direction from B, confirming Piers’s praise of love by asserting that one who loves has no interest in annexing land—but asserting (since patience conquers) that by the peaceful means of patient love he could win all France, if he wanted to. He will continue that boast—see the note below to 157–69 (B.13.158–71a).
155 bruttenynge of buyren: Cutting men to pieces. In this line about war, L wittily imports the diction of alliterative battle poetry, as Chaucer famously does for battle scenes in KnT A2601–16 and The Legend of Good Women 629–53.
B.13.151–71 Wiþ half a laumpe lyne … Pacientes vincunt (Cf. C.153–69 That loueth lely … techest): The structure of this riddling passage in the B version is quite clear, even if the riddle is not. Herwith and it 156 refer to the bouste, and so to the riddle. Vndo it 157 means “solve it”; þerInne means “in it.” It 163, 164 (either the bouste or the riddle or just “love”) and þis redels 167 complete the references. The riddle ought to be the equivalent of dilige inimicos, caritas nichil timet, and pacientes vincunt, which are all roughly synonymous: see Lawler 1995:93. If you love your enemies you will not fear them; if you heap coals on their head, that is, if you are patient and loving toward them, you will conquer them. Indeed, in 15.159 the it of B.13.163 is replaced by pacience, which is itself clearly apposed in 15.164a to Caritas. Thus charity = patience (1 Cor 13:4: “Caritas patiens est”) = the answer to the riddle. Skeat: “The general solution to the riddle … is Charity, exercised with Patience.” Its simplest expression is perhaps “love,” an imperative verb (dilige) that must be completed by an object: when “love” is transitive, that is, when you love another or others or your enemies, you’ve got Dowel in a nutshell. The passage reprises Holy Church’s teaching on love, 1.141–204 (B.1.142–209, A.1.130–83); see also the words of Peace after the Harrowing, 20.456–58 (B.18.413–15). (The specific solution is “cor,” heart, as Galloway 1995 showed; see note below. Ex vi transicionis is a common grammatical phrase: a transitive verb governs its accusative object “by the power of transitivity” [Kaske 1963:38, Middleton 1972:179 n12, 181; Alford 1982: 755; Bland 1988].) Kirk 1978:100 says that Patience (amusingly) gives away the solution in the next passus when he “opens his bundle and we see the contents,” namely “fiat voluntas tua.” That works too: to love is to do the will of God. Kirk goes on, (reflecting on the two appearances of fiat voluntas tua in the Gospels—in the Lord’s Prayer and as uttered by Jesus in Gethsemane), “‘Thy will be done’ is the phrase that links man’s daily acceptance of God’s will with Christ’s acceptance of the Passion in the Garden of Gethsemane. Clearly, for Langland, as for the Patience poet, any positive definition of patience must see it as imitatio christi.”
The C passage is parallel but without the riddle—though it adds a riddle of its own at 161; see below.
B.13.151 half a laumpe lyne in latyn: Galloway 1995:91–92 takes this as the equivalent of “The myddel of the Moone” 155, like it meaning “cor”; see the note there. Bradley 1910 reached the same solution in a different way: taking “lamp line” to mean the line a lamp hangs from, he posited a Latin word “cordella,” and cut it roughly in half to yield “corde” as the solution to the riddle. Stephen Barney, in a private communication, cites in support of Bradley’s solution, from Latham’s Dictionary of Medieval Latin, both the word chorda (in the Durham accounts, ca. 1367) and the word chordula (in the rolls of St Swithin’s Priory, 1485) used in connection with lamps, and in all likelihood meaning the hanging-cord rather than the wick. That seems to me a more straightforward explanation than Galloway’s.
B.13.152 in a bouste: A conjecture by KD-B, who discuss it on p. 186, convincingly to me (though not to Schmidt, who rejects it in both editions and discusses it in the commentary to his 1995 edition). A bouste (MED, s.v. boist) is a box or vessel: either the heart as the vessel of love, or the riddle as a handy little container. The whole idea of Dowel is contained in the word love; love is a synonym for Dowel. Kaske 1963:47–49 associates it with Magdalen’s “box of salue” (B.13.194), alabastrum unguenti (Luke 7:37), and cites Hugh of Saint-Cher’s interpretation of that box as cor penitentis, the heart of a penitent. Watson, who is out to discredit Patience, sees him in this speech as “recenter-[ing] the scene around himself,” and says that his claim to have Dowel bound fast is “uncomfortably reminiscent of one made by the glosing friars in B.8” (2007:101), but to me he does not seem nearly as smug as they are. All he is saying is “Dowel is really simple: it’s love.”
B.13.153–54 þe Saterday þat sette first þe kalender … þe wodnesday of þe nexte wike after: As Galloway says, these references, perhaps to the first Sabbath, when God rested after the six days of Creation, and to Wednesday of Holy Week, the week of “Re-creation,” connected with charity and prudence, respectively (Ben H. Smith, Jr. 1961:681, 1966:53; Kaske 1963:43–44), “have not been … satisfactorily explained” (1995:92). Schweitzer 1974:319–27 chooses Holy Saturday and the Wednesday after Easter, and makes some arguments from the liturgy—also unsatisfactory. Anna Baldwin 2001:103–4 applies the passage, including Patience’s recommendations for a loving foreign policy, to relations between England and France in June 1377, and suggests that particular days are dropped in C “because their significance was now forgotten.”
B.13.155 The myddel of þe Moone: Galloway shows convincingly that this phrase (which has been used by Conscience,
