place, these lines bear an interesting relation to Conscience’s dinner; Conscience has invited the poor, Will and Patience, and not fool sages, liars, and flatterers (though the doctor of divinity may be all three), and consequently has heard some quite salutary after-dinner conversation, has in effect heard the minstrel Patience fiddle the story of Good Friday. See Simpson 2007:138; Walling 2007:73–74. Gruenler 2017:162–63 associates the passage with riddling, and considers Patience one of the good minstrels. Compare the story of St Francis going outside before Easter dinner and knocking to be invited to his own table, then criticizing the brothers for not inviting the poor (Golden Legend, trans. Ryan 2.222). It is hard not to sense a desire on L’s part to be invited somewhere to dinner, and to read from his poem after dinner. Lines B.13.436–53 appear only in mss. RF, and so may represent revision; see Hanna 1996:215–29, esp. 222; Donaldson 1949:142–43.
Original though the passage clearly is, it has biblical antecedents: particularly Luke 14.12–14 (when you have a dinner, don’t invite your rich friends; invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, and the blind; quoted loosely at 12.103a [B.11.191a] and probably alluded to at B.9.92–94a); also Deut 14:29, 26:12, Isa 58:7 (all say, “Invite poor strangers”; the Isaiah is quoted at 9.125 and 11.65 [B.10.85]), and the whole of Ps 100, whose third verse is quoted at 432a; behind the decretal maxim Consentientes quoted at 427a is Rom 1:32. And L’s favorite moralists are relevant as well. See Peter the Chanter, Verbum abbreviatum 1.47 (ed. Boutry 2004:313–20), urging prelates to get the entertainers out of their houses, and citing the Gloss on Tob 4:18: “Cum hystrionibus … noli communicare, sicut hii qui nutriunt hystriones et desides, cum esuriant Christi pauperes” (316) (Have nothing to do with actors, like those who feed actors and idlers while Christ’s poor go hungry), and again in 1.63 (textus prior, ed. Boutry 2012a:385–90), on shunning bad society. Peter quotes the same verse (7) of Psalm 100 (Boutry 2012a:386) as L does at B.13.432a; it is also quoted by Peter of Blois, Letter 18 (PL 207:65–69), in which he explains why he refuses to come to dinner in the house of a lax bishop. Finally, in its large outlines, which set lavish entertaining against “philosophical banquets,” John of Salisbury’s Policraticus 8.6–10 provides an analogue.
Back to Actyf’s coat (B.13.457–59, 14.1–28; not in C)
B.13.457–59 Thus haukyn … brusshe: Actyf abruptly returns after the discourse on dinner guests. His full title haukyn þe Actif man, not used since line 272, by its formality signals the close of the passus. Acouped hym þerof: accused him about it.
Passus B.14: As Alford 1977 argues, the parable of the great supper, Luke 14:15–24, from which Actyf’s Latin remark in line 3a, Vxorem duxi & ideo non possum venire, is taken, provides the theme of the passus: the rich will turn away the invitation to heaven; the invitation will then go to the poor, who will “eat bread in the kingdom of God” (Luke 14:15). The parable accounts for all the emphasis on rich and poor. The poor eat the bread “fiat voluntas tua” here and so will feast there: a new version of the pardon is implied, “Qui paupertatem passi sunt ibunt in vitam eternam.” The rich do their own will, rejecting God’s, and thus sinning and losing heaven: “Qui vero divites erant ibunt in ignem eternum.” Of course the poor often sin too; thus the emphasis on contrition and confession. Sin is overcome by redemption, but the rich are excluded from the parchment of acquittance because they won’t become poor of heart. The whole passus is a good example of semi-Pelagianism. The redemption is essential, but one must also be poor of heart, and treat others with ruth. The passus only makes full sense if Actyf is taken to be a rich man (even if he only owns one coat), as he is clearly a man driven by the profit motive; we have to take his question about wealth well earned and well spent (103; C.15.277–78) as implying his view of himself.
Alford argues further that the passus is structured by the Latin quotations, which fall into two groups, “according to the structure of the parable itself”: the first, based on Luke’s verses 18–20, treat the matter of “solicitude” (as displayed in the excuses the invitees offer for not coming to the supper), concording on the words “bread” and “will.” The second treats the consequences for the supper, concording on the words “rich” and “poor.” His argument has not won unqualified assent, but at the very least he has demonstrated clearly that the quotations fall into groups of biblical verses frequently “concorded” by commentators.
See also Staley 2002, whose focus on Matthew’s parable of the Wedding Feast (22:1–14), treating Haukyn with his coat as the man without a wedding garment, is to my mind not as apt as Alford’s sticking to Luke; Carruthers 1973:121–23 draws effectively on both parables.
B.14.1–35 Actif’s confession that his coat is dirty; the replies of Conscience and Patience: In lines 1–4, the coat is momentarily a literal coat or hater (1): Actyf says he cannot wash it because it is the only one he has, and so on him all the time, even at night (this may remind us of his earlier complaint that he has no robes from patrons—unless he sleeps naked, and his coat is here “literally his flesh,” as Alford 1974:133 takes it); and it is spattered and soiled by his family and servants in the close encounters that characterize the active life of the household. Those lines have their moral level, of course: as his body is his only body, his soul is his only soul, and wife, children, and servants soil it because they incite him to lust, anger, and unkindness, or more generally because they represent the dust and heat of everyday life in which sin is inevitable (and the call to the great supper of heaven refused, as the allusion in line 3a to Luke’s parable of the Great Supper emphasizes). Starting in line 5, however, the discourse presents the moral level directly: the coat is Actyf’s cristendom (11) (as it was originally called at B.13.273, He hadde a cote of cristendom), his baptized soul, washed by penitence, resoiled again and again by sin. What seems the trouble with this unhopeful process is that Actyf’s contrition is shallow, driven by bodily sickness, a soap that probably seeks less wonder depe (6) than he likes to think, or material setbacks (which, he has admitted at B.13.383–98, prompt him to very imperfect penitence) and his motivation inadequate, as his attempt to use the word coueitise neutrally in line 11 suggests: the desire merely to keep his coat clean is indeed a kind of coveitise in the bad sense, self-centered, hardly caritas. (For a better neutral use, see B.5.52, “lat truþe be youre coueitise.”) Furthermore, the admissions of insincerity at B.13.383–98 raise the question whether this apparent process of contrition, confession, and satisfaction has produced any cleansing at all. Nor does Actyf say that he did the penances, only that the priest gave them (9–10); see B.13.411. Conscience offers a far more searching contrition that will “claw” the coat clean, a better will to amend, and a new level of good works (Dobest) to maintain it. (Patience will celebrate the same process of contrition, confession, and satisfaction, but without the allegory of washing, in B.14.83–97.)
Nevertheless it is hard to see what Conscience offers that Actyf has not already tried; one is made to feel that the happy prospect Conscience holds out is a function of his characteristic optimism, and there seems little likelihood of a major transformation in Actyf. Patience then takes the optimism still further, offering him an endless supply of dough for his wafers without benefit of plowing or sowing; Actyf laughs at him. But Patience, who seems very close to being Christ here, is speaking of food for the soul. Actyf has seemed capable of understanding that his coat is his Christendom, but does not seem capable of thinking of food in any but material terms. Nevertheless, the laugh is brief, and starting at line 36 Patience seems finally to rouse Actyf from his self-absorbed despair by transforming the discourse from cleansing to nourishment. But the opening passage through line 35, for all its accurate sacramental theology, leaves one, not for the first time in the poem, more convinced of the intractability of ordinary human drives than of the possibility of transcending them.
The three parts of penance—contrition, confession, and satisfaction—are a commonplace of late medieval writing, and the comparison to washing is equally commonplace, inscribed in the very word “contrition,” rubbing away. A classic place is Psalm 50, one
