aftur bring the waking Will into Elde, as in the dream? More likely, it is the conventional expression of the passage of time that the rhetoric of the waking situation often seems to demand, comparable to “Alle a somur seson” (10.2; B.8.2, A.9.2), “wonder longe” (B.15.1), “al my lyf tyme” (20.3; B.18.3).
5–23 (B.13.5–20) Furste how fortune … he vanschede (B passed): This summary of the third vision offers hints about both Langland’s structure and his process of revision. Structurally, the summary is remarkable in that it begins with the so-called “inner vision,” omitting the encounters with Thought, Wit, Study, Clergie, and Scripture, and at the other end carries through to the encounter with Ymaginatif, ignoring the waking that takes place at 13.214 (B.11.406). Evidently Langland could think of the sequence Fortune-through-Ymaginatif as a unit; at least he treats it here as a “meteles” (4) all its own, separable from the sequence Thought-through-Scripture and undivided within itself. Thus our notion of an “inner vision” may be mistaken. Or perhaps in summarizing he was focusing on what he had written new for the B version: the encounters omitted from the beginning of the summary were all in the A version. In the only other waking summary of a dream, at 9.301–2 (B.7.152–53) only two events late in the vision, the granting of the pardon and the priest’s impugning of it, are summarized, suggesting a tendency to focus on what is most recent.
Perhaps, however, one should think not of Langland but of Will: the selective memory, the editing out of most of the optimistic materials of the vision, may be a function of Will’s near-witlessness and sense of doom. On this reading, the entire opening sequence is of a piece, constitutes a specific reaction to at least some of the events and warnings of the vision, and establishes Will’s need for the comfort (B.13.22) that Conscience and Patience will bring him in the ensuing scene. (For a different opinion, see Burrow 1981:37; he finds the summary merely “amnesic,” and the “‘autobiographical episodes’ of Passus XI–XII … strangely lacking in consequence.”)
As a summary of the sequence Fortune-through-Ymaginatif, the passage is less arbitrary than may at first appear, though not without its difficulties. In the B version its character as a summary is marked rather baldly: eight events are listed, the first introduced by “First how” and the other seven introduced by “And how”; six of the eight are given one line each. Lines 5–10 cover B.11.7–83, 5–6 echoing Elde’s threat at B.11.28–29; the friar material is given disproportionate weight in the summary. There is also, indeed, some amnesia: as Donaldson 1949:81 points out, “According to B’s account of the quarrel, the Dreamer refused to be buried with the Friars, but according to the line in which he mentions the matter [i.e., B.13.9–10], the Friars refused to let him be buried among them.” Lines 11–13 cover at least B.11.283–319, which treat avarice and ignorance in priests and imply the betrayal of the lewed (but see below on lines 12–13), and can be thought to cover the entire disquisition on love and poverty, B.11.154–319, since that passage is arguably addressed to priests from the beginning (see Lawler 2002:98–107): the word preestes doesn’t appear until line 283, but men of holy chirche in line 160 must mean priests. However, the sequence Lewte-Scripture-Trajan (B.11.84–153) is not summarized. Lines 14–20 summarize B.12.217–97, and deftly take in the vision of middle earth in B.11.320–441.
Lines B.13.12–13 are perhaps troubling, since the criticism of ignorant priests in B.11.283–319 does not say explicitly that their ignorance brings damnation on their parishioners. But see the variants to B.11.302, and p. 193 of the B introduction, where KD report that they have omitted from the text as scribal a pair of archetypal lines: “I haue wonder for why and wherfore þe bisshop/Makeþ swiche preestes þat lewed men bitrayen.” The lines sound scribal indeed (though Schmidt prints them), and yet they provide an explicit referent for 13.12–13. KD (p. 193) suppose that the scribe who made them wanted to “participate in criticism of the clergy,” but we might better suppose he was bothered by lines 13.12–13, and felt moved to provide a specific basis for them.
The passage shows incomplete revision in the C version. Some attention has been paid to varying the list of eight events: in the last two (21, 23) the “And how” formula is varied, and now only the first and last are confined to one line. Lines 5–12 are essentially unchanged from B.13.5–10, even though there is now more material in the passage they cover (C.11.166–12.22) than there was before. As Donaldson points out (1949:68–69), the lines on the friars’ burial practices (11–12) should have been omitted, since the B passage they referred to, 11.64–67, has been omitted (at 12.15). On the other hand, covetousness is now said (13–14) to overcome not just priests but al kyne sectes, a change that seems to recognize better than in the B version the place of covetousness in Fortune’s program for us all, and, in its greater breadth, to be suited to the significant extension by Recklessness of the praise of patient poverty. Lines 15–16, unchanged from the B version, cover C.13.100–128, and make it plain, pace that interfering scribe of B, that L thought the passage clearly implied that a lot of people go to hell because their priests are ignorant. (Meantime the scribal couplet of B.11 has been replaced in C by lines 13.115–16.) C.15.17–23 have the same effect as B.13.14–20, although C.15.20 (referring to C.14.161–63) improves the rather fatuous B.13.18. For C.15.22, see the note below.
5 (B.13.5) fortune me faylede At my moste nede: at 12.13 (B.11.61), though the phrasing here reflects Elde’s threat at 11.188 (B.11.29).
6–8 And … lotus (B.13.6 And … mete): “And how Old Age threatened me, if I should live long, (that) he would leave me in debt, and all my good looks and all my powers vanish.” The C lines repeat accurately Elde’s threat to Will at 11.187–89 (B.11.28–30) that Fortune would fail him and Concupiscencia carnis forsake him. So myhte happe / That y lyuede longe translates, in C’s way, the more metaphorical B myʒte we euere mete—though the B phrase is closer to what Elde originally said in both versions, “yf y mete with the” (11.187, B.11.28). As the conjunction with fayre lotus (which may mean “fair speeches” or “loving glances” rather than “good looks,” but which appears regularly in romantic contexts; cf. MED, s.v. lote, sb. 1) suggests, vertues refers in particular to sexual powers (which do vanish, thanks to Elde, at 22.193–98 [B.20.193–98]).
9–12 (B.13.7–10) And how þat freres … quyte here dettes: For a definitive, nuanced discussion of bequests from Londoners to the various orders of friars in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, see Jens Röhrkasten’s article of 1996 and his book of 2004. Bequests fluctuated, he shows, and were waning in Langland’s time, but still frequent, especially among the rich.
21–22 And y merueyled … how ymaginatyf saide / That iustus … non saluabitur bote vix helpe (B.13.19 And siþen how ymaginatif seide “vix saluabitur iustus”): B is straightforward and noncommittal, but C offers a playful version of Ymaginatif’s dictum (14.203; B.12.281), turning it into a little grammatical-legal narrative. Since vix (scarcely) is almost a synonym for “non” (not), the poet seems to posit an underlying statement non saluabitur iustus (the just man will not be saved), of which the statement Vix saluabitur iustus is what we would call a “transformation.” Vix (an “auxiliary” word) “helps” the statement mean something new, and so “helps” the just man to be saved. It is a way of saying just what Ymaginatif said: salvation almost doesn’t happen. Salter and Pearsall (1967:13) instance the passage as an example of “embryonic allegory”: the Latin phrase is “dramatized, in simple but striking terms, as a court scene, with ‘vix’ personified, and interceding for ‘justus.’” Later, in annotating the passage on p. 131, they assert (adding a notion of Wyclif’s cited by Skeat) that the wordplay depends on the “interpretation of vix as the Five (V) wounds of Jesus (I) Christ (X),” and Pearsall repeats it ad loc. in his edition; “depends” is perhaps strong, but the further meaning is certainly welcome. Fiona Somerset accepts both meanings: “The word ‘vix’
