taken at face value his account of himself as an important cog in the food chain. In C he says he is Piers’s apprentice, and in B, in the course of confessing his covetousness, he speaks of plowing. Though the details of his sins are often hard to take as further actual characterizations of our waferer, his mentioning plowing is interesting because twice before in the poem the adjective “actyf” has been applied to a husbandman. At C.7.299, the man who cannot come with Piers because he has wedded a wife is “oen hihte actif; an hosbande he semede.” And at A.11.182–83, Scripture says of Dowel that it is “a wel lele lif … among þe lewide peple;/Actif it is hoten; husbondis it vsen.” Both these places seem relevant to the present episode. The man in C.7.299 has been plucked directly from Haukyn’s account at B.14.3–4 of the way married life smears his coat; both quote Luke’s Vxorem duxi et ideo non possum venire, so that one might argue that Actyf’s first appearance in C is not here but in passus 7. And Scripture’s using his name to define Dowel suggests that, at least on first glance, that is what he is: Dowel, in the flesh. As Godden says, that should be what we surmise from the fact that Conscience and Patience are carping of Dowel when they meet him (189–90, B.13.220–21): he is “the ultimate personification of Dowel” (1990:110). Carruthers calls him “the most complex figure of Dowel Will has yet encountered” (1973:122). The name Dowel comes, of course, from the wording of the pardon, Qui bona egerunt (as if Qui bene egerunt, Those who have done well), and activa comes from the past participle of the same verb. Though not everyone calls him Dowel—he is, after all, quite the sinner—associating him somehow with Dowel, or a superficial form of it, has been the critical consensus from Chambers 1939:151–52 on (well summed up by John Alford in Alford 1988:50–51); Chambers does not actually call him Dowel but “the hard-working Christian man.” Here is the gist of this consensus: as a hard-working sort who can’t keep his coat clean, Actyf stands for the inadequacy of the active life to win salvation; he is finally Dowel only in the sense that he is no better than he should be, i.e., clearly not Dobet; or he is not so much Dowel as Try-to-do-well-but-end-up-doing-badly. Gillespie 1994:107 nicely calls him “an embodiment of … the seed that falls among the thorns.” In short, critical tradition itself undermines the penchant for treating him as Dowel at all. In fact he seems to be everything that the man described in Psalm 14, destined to rest on God’s holy hill, is not. He does not walk without blemish, he of the stained coat; he has used deceit in his tongue and taken up a reproach against his neighbor (B.13.319–30, 363–64); he has put out his money for usury, and taken bribes against the innocent (375–82); the name Actyf implies the opposite of one who “shall not be moved forever.” Piers in the B version pardon scene rejected the active life for one of prayer and penance, and here Patience tries to get Actyf to do the same thing. Alford (51) quotes Godden 1984:149–50: “The two contrasting roles played by Piers in the pardon scene are here manifested in Haukyn and Patience, worker and pilgrim-hermit,” and continues, “In both cases, a preoccupation with hard work gives way to ne solliciti sitis.” And this mainline critical tradition also sees Patience’s appeal as wholly in keeping with Langland’s adherence to originary Franciscan ideals.
However, David Aers (2004), in the course of demolishing Patience’s arguments (see above, 15.32–33n), offers a sympathetic view of the value of Actyf’s work both for himself and others. This view is taken up at length by Watson 2007, who sets Actyf’s “bottom up heaven” against Patience’s “top down heaven” (91), sympathizes like Aers with the system of production or “social structure” that Actyf is part of, and like Aers points out that “it is in fact only such a structure that can support the zealous indifference to worldly goods Patience himself advocates” (109). He sees Actyf as browbeaten into his final state of wanhope and self-loathing by Patience the “spiritual elitist” with “his slogans, his swagger, his certainty,” and “ever more self-absorbed answers, until [Actyf] ends the passus, and leaves the poem, bewailing everything he has done and been since the moment of his baptism, wishing that he were not who he is” (108). Kirk more positively associates Actyf’s tears with a series of earlier moments of weeping or mourning; she calls it a “cathartic awareness” on his part, and on mankind’s, argues “that a larger reality surrounds and redefines” him and it, and concludes sympathetically that “The B Poet’s final definition of DoWell is not a formula but an image: Haukyn weeping in his dirty coat” (1972:158).
For a similarly balanced view, guided by Konrad Burdach’s findings long ago that the doctrines of poverty and ne solliciti sitis were associated with the idealization of labor, see Frank 1957:32–33, 76 (Burdach 1926–32: 294–96, 351–54). Watson’s sympathy for Actyf is perhaps more a function of his dislike of Patience than of any genuine appeal, aside from victimhood, in Actyf. I wish he had paid some attention to the C text, which substantially rewrites the scene, perhaps because L felt some of the very objections Watson feels, or just found the whole presentation ambivalent. The coat is gone, the confession of sins is gone, the wanhope and tears at the end are gone. Patience’s offer of food from his bag comes right after Actyf’s initial account of himself. The inadequacy of the active life compared to the “patient” life is still the point, of course, but Actyf is not in this version subjected to humiliation the way he is in B. As Anna Baldwin finely says, “Patient poverty is desired by the Activa Vita of the C-text for its own sake, and not primarily as a weapon against his own sin” (1990:83).
In B, then, Actyf’s chief mark is his sinfulness, the chief events the confession and repentance he goes through under the guidance of Conscience and Patience. (For his likeness to Will, see below, 193–98n.) But all the matter in the confession was moved in C to the Seven Deadly Sins section in passūs 6 and 7; leaving Actyf as ignorant and boastful as he was in B, but not notably marked by sinfulness. This probably accounts for the disappearance of the somewhat derogatory name Haukyn, though calling him Actyf still accentuates his role as Patience’s opposite. He has in the second half of the passus a role like the doctor’s in the first half: as Patience and Conscience shone there against the doctor’s arrogance, they will shine here against Actyf’s ignorance, for Will’s edification. Probably the most important thing about him in C is that he provides food: that sets him against all the spiritual dishes that Patience liked so well at the dinner in the first half, and sets him up for Patience’s offer of the food fiat voluntas tua.
In both versions Actyf is prompted in part by the agere/pati topos (for which see Crampton 1974) implicit in the role of Patience, in part by the prominence earlier in the passus, and in the several previous passūs, of the “Do” triad (not to mention Patience’s and Conscience’s present conversation), in part by the food theme; and perhaps also by Psalm 14, as I have argued earlier in this note.
I don’t think Active vs. Contemplative, the rubric Pearsall invokes, is of much importance. In the phrase “Activa Vita,” “vita” probably just translates English “life,” that is, in a frequent Langlandian usage, “estate,” “occupation,” or even just “person.” So we should probably think of him as just “an Active Man,” rather than, allegorically, as “the Active Life.” But Pearsall’s note is in general good, and he stresses the way that in B Actyf is “a compelling portrait of sinful and repentant humanity,” in C mostly just set up to be instructed by Patience. In both versions his major purpose seems to be to serve as a foil for Patience, and as an opportunity for Patience to expound his views. In C he turns out to have a “leader,” Liberum arbitrium, who is not mentioned, and plays no role, until 16.158 when he suddenly replaces Patience and Conscience, but is presumably leading Actyf the whole time.
Curtis Perrin makes the excellent point that Actyf takes on Will’s earlier role of “clueless questioner” in a new “comedy of correction” (2006:169). Many critics, including Robertson and Huppé 1951:169, Carruthers 1973:121–22, and, most notably, Staley 2002 try to connect Actyf’s dirty coat to Matthew’s parable of the man without a wedding garment, unconvincingly to me.
190 (B.13.221) They mette with a mynstral: Not “We met.” Even in the C version, where Will says he followed Patience and Conscience, L seems bent on not letting him do anything in this episode but look and listen, until Liberum arbitrium, Actyf’s
