as he will disappear when he finishes speaking (148–49). But when RK-C appeared in 1997, with the reading Ilyke (in three manuscripts) and a semicolon at the end of line 32, and the editors’ account (on p. 156) of their reasoning, along with their identification (156n) of 130 ʒent as “yonder,” Piers’s role in the scene was put on a sounder footing: he does not appear out of the blue after dinner, but has been at the dinner all along. See Kane, Glossary, s.v. ylike, and the note to 130 below. (I was present at a plenary session of the Langland conference in Cambridge in 1993 when the scene was being discussed, and George Kane stood up and electrified the room by declaring that the word was “ilyke,” likewise: Patience came and likewise Piers Plowman. We all had a feeling of great clarification, and the reading has become standard. [Kane then also referred to it in his plenary address to the conference, subsequently printed in YLS; see Kane 1994:16.])
If as he a palmere were simply meant that Piers begged his meal as if he were a palmer, it would have come after the verb; in view of its position, and of what he says and does at 8.56–65 (B.6.57–64, A.7.52–58), it almost certainly means “dressed like a palmer.” Why he is begging dinner is unclear, though if the C version had not erased the tearing of the pardon and its aftermath in AB, we might associate it with Piers’s determination there to cease sowing and be less busy about his belly-joy (B.7.122–35, A.8.104–17). It does seem suitably humble for both Piers and Patience to beg dinner, even though Liberum arbitrium will later insist, at the end of passus 16 and the beginning of 17, that Charity does not beg, nor did the apostles, the desert fathers, and other saints.
This is Patience’s first appearance as a character, although in certain parts of Recklessness’s long speech on patient poverty the virtue has already been half-personified (e.g., 13.2, 21). (Donaldson sees him as a development of Recklessness, and sees Piers as a further development still [1949:174–75].) As a virtue and not an intellectual faculty, he is symptomatic of a shift in emphasis that has been taking place in the poem: from “speculative to practical morality,” in the words of Stella Maguire (1949:100), or “toward a more active engagement of the will” (Alford 1995: 97), or from understanding to doing—except that patience of course means “being acted upon” rather than “acting.” His presence imparts an ironic dimension to the “do” triad, suggesting that another way to parse “do” besides comparing its adverb is to change it to the passive voice. (Morton Bloomfield used feminine pronouns for Patience in his 1962 book, as he did also for Anima and even Conscience, despite the proposed marriage to Meed, apparently on the basis of the gender of the underlying Latin nouns, but L himself uses masculine pronouns and clearly conceived of Patience, like the others, as male.)
From this inauspicious entrance as beggar and table companion to Will at the edge of the dinner party, Patience will come to dominate this scene, first as Will’s adviser and then as the giver of the best answer to Conscience’s after-dinner challenge, then go onto the road with Will and Conscience, where he will tutor Will and Actyf until his place is suddenly taken by Liberum arbitrium (Anima) at 16.157 (cf. B.15.12). In the dinner scene he is a playful ironist, and though he later gets preachy he never altogether loses the comic, understated quality his name implies. In Gregory’s oft-quoted definition, “patientia vero est aliena mala aequanimiter perpeti,” patience is to suffer the evil others do to you with equanimity (Homilies on the Gospels, 2.35, PL 76.1261), and he never loses his aplomb. Kirk 1978:98 speaks refreshingly of his sense of humor, and the “spirit of high comedy” that suffuses the dinner scene; see also her witty account in her 1972 book, pp. 145–53, and Lawler 1995. Pearsall too recognizes the comedy in Patience’s long discourse: see 279–16.21 (B.14.104–65)n below. Clopper (1997:241–45) sees him in Franciscan terms as advocating “a kind of reckless abandonment,” merry and unlearned like Francis: “Both Francis and Patience are able to penetrate the Scriptures and to reveal Treuthe through divine inspiration and by their delight in their poverty” (244–45). Simpson 2007:142 offers an excellent analysis of his “specifically New Testament poetics, a poetics of paradox.” Gillespie 1994:105 regards him as a “minstrel of God,” apostolic in his mission like the “lunatyk lollares” of 9.107–40. Latin writers like to speak of suffering for Christ “patienter, immo gaudenter” (patiently, nay joyfully), citing Acts 5:41.
He plays a positive role by moving Will toward a deeper understanding of suffering, poverty, and the patient acceptance of both, as other critics such as Shepherd 1983 and Anna Baldwin 1990 have insisted. Kirk 1978:101 stresses his “grounding … in Charity,” and in general terms it seems right to say that he, Charity, and the Samaritan are versions of the same set of values, the major values of the poem; see also Bloomfield’s eloquent treatment of patience (the virtue rather than the character) and its central place in the poem, 1962:140–42. In Lawler 1995:98–99, I argued that Patience is Christ, especially since there is a continuous bilingual pun between the Latin participle patiens, the suffering one, i.e., Jesus, and the English word Patience, pronounced nearly the same way; see 15.152n below. As Reason says to Will (13.197, B.11.380), “Ho soffreth more then god?” (see Kirk 1978:101–2). Of course we should all be “pacient as pilgrimes for pilgrimes are we alle” (12.131, B.11.242), so that Patience (like Piers) is also Everyman, or what Everyman should be: what Will should be, and what Patience’s opposite Actyf, the central figure in the second half of the passus, should be. (The pun perhaps extends to the word “passus”: it means “step,” yes, and reminds us of Will’s quest, but it is also the past participle of patior and means “one who has suffered,” reminding us of the object of the quest, Christ.)
Curtis Gruenler argues persuasively that the entire dinner scene draws on riddle–literature, and that Patience is the “low-status outsider” so central to that tradition. He offers as analogues Solomon and Marcolf and Jacobus’s legend of “St Andrew and the Three Questions,” in which the saint makes a sudden appearance as a pilgrim at a dinner party, and poses three riddles that unmask a beautiful woman guest at the bishop’s table as the devil: “It is rather as if Langland had blended “St Andrew and the Three Questions” with the dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf” (2017:154). Given L’s close knowledge of Jacobus’s book (which also gives essentially the same story of St Bartholomew), however, we might even consider his accounts as a source rather than an analogue. Patience has not only the patience but the insight of a saint.
Watson 2007:99n says, “All critics concur that Will meets Patience because he needs to learn Patience.”
36 hym: Piers. Schmidt in his textual note to line 34 aptly cites B.13.131, where Conscience says, “I knowe Piers,” and B.7.134, C.8.13, where Piers speaks of Conscience’s teaching and counsel. hem all: I.e., them both. Conscience knew Piers well, and welcomed both him and Patience. All perhaps emphasizes how general Conscience’s hospitality is. Multi are called to this mangerye.
41 a syde table (B.13.36 a side borde): not the lowest possible place; see 14.137, 140 (B 12.197, 200).
The guests are seated and dinner is served (38–64, B.13.33–60)
42–46 (B.13.37–41) Clergie (B Conscience) cald aftur mete … potages: The nature of the food should not come as a surprise, given who the hosts are—what else would Scripture serve?—but in this deadpan account it always surprises us readers as much as it surprises the doctor. Jill Mann’s essay of 1979 is central here; I have already cited her assertion that the scene is the product of L’s rumination on “Not by bread alone.” Also relevant, surely, is Jesus’s saying, “My meat is to do the will of him that sent me” (John 4:34). And remarks from the fathers can be multiplied almost indefinitely. “Scriptura cibus est” (scripture is food), Rabanus PL 110.561; Gregory’s Moralia PL 76.573 on the crib (praesepe) of Job 39:9: “Praesepe hoc loco ipsa Scriptura sacra non inconvenienter accipitur, in qua verbi pabulo animalia sancta satiantur” (The crib in this passage is taken not inappropriately as Holy Scripture itself, in which holy animals are filled with the food of the word). Or see Gregory on Job 1:4,
