At least one major impulse behind the subsequent confrontation with Reason is precisely the desire to explicate this complex of issues. If PP reflects a personal longing to understand salvation in some experiential fashion, what animates the person engaged in this pursuit? From what perspective can he claim, as an individual, any warrant (or license; see 5.45–52n) for his desire to avoid all “normal” forms of work to pursue understanding and, then, to write his quest? And what might lead him to believe that he can efficaciously pursue topics over which greater (and better equipped) minds have fretted for centuries?
The dreamer customarily approaches the question, a major theme in the second vision, in two ways. On the one hand, he seeks to accommodate his disorderly appearance to that of some status that might confer upon its holder license and authority. More positively, as he does with lollares here, he attempts constructive redefinitions of terms in such a way as to distinguish himself from those negative examples with which he might be confused. But this very attempt proves every bit as problematic as the impulse that drives it. The dreamer looks like a lollare but will quickly claim (3–5) to be the enemy of such persons; yet on the other hand, whatever his claims to some responsible clerical status (see 5.35–67), these may already have been qualified by his status as sexual being.
The word lollare—and L is the first English writer known to use the noun—has obviously been the site of numerous contentions; for discussion in various veins, see Scase 1989:147–55; Middleton 1997:242–43, 276–88, 291; Cole 2003, 2003a, 2008:25–45; Pearsall 2003; on L and his relation to specific Wycliffite points of doctrine, see Gradon 1980; Lawton 1981; Hudson 1988:398–408, 2003, von Nolcken 1988; Bowers 1992 is distinctly odd man out.
lollare appears a single time in the B Version, at 15.213, “[Charity] lyueþ noʓt in lolleris ne in londleperis heremytes.” This usage occurs within the important passage (B 15.198–215) that introduces Piers as scrutinizer of wills and “as if Christ.” The sense here, “gyrovague, feigning holy man” (cf. þei faiten B 15.214), appears consonant with the remainder of L’s uses, without exception. In this context, in contrast to Piers, who looks like a grubby plowman and yet, in the exegetical discourse from which “id est” is derived, “is” Christ, lollares cloak a worldly will in the ostentatious garb of holiness. In Will’s first attempt, of a number of efforts in C, to subsume the role of Piers, he here develops his sense of his own “good will,” as opposed to theirs (cf. 61–69n).
This appearance of the word in B 15.213, which must indicate its currency in the 1370s, predates the word lollard, to indicate “Wycliffite believer.” As is well known, the earliest record of that term occurs in mid-1382, when Henry Crumpe, who had been a member of the Blackfriars Council that condemned a selection of Wycliffe’s opinions in May, was suspended from the University of Oxford for using the term Lollardi derogatorily of the theologian’s adherents (see Hudson 1988:2–4, 87–88). Thus, these two terms are distinct, and, as several commentators have pointed out (Pearsall nn. passim and 2003, Cole 2003), like the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt, contemporary issues “overtook the poem.” A word L had used in one sense had become, in current religious culture, so similar as to be potentially associable with another, and with another sense—not necessarily what the poet had had in mind at all.
Moreover, as I am grateful to Michael G. Sargent for pointing out to me, the two terms must be seen as etymologically distinct (whatever the hash OED and MED make of reporting their various uses). lollare is a transparent actant noun in OE -ere, and L at 9.214–19 offers an etymology that purports to link the noun with a parallel English verb, lollen (see further the note there). In contrast, lollard must represent a loan word from a Continental language; see the discussion at OED -ard suffix and Hudson’s reference 1988:2 n.4. Unfortunately, in contemporary usage, the two separate items had overlapped by 1390 (cf. OED’s comments on -ard/-art replacing -er/-ar in many words—a fact which implies that, confusingly, the reverse might occur as well), as the variants in Ch’s Man of Law’s Endlink will indicate. (Quite in contrast to variable Chaucerian scribal usage, only one PP manuscript, the Irish Douce 104, copied 1427, shows any evidence of having fused the words, and that fitfully; much more frequently, when they err, the scribes of PP follow the poet, who occasionally implies that a proper synonym for the word might well be lorel/losel; cf. 8.74, 9.137.)
As I have suggested above, B 15.213 proves entirely consonant with the poet’s usage elsewhere—and having been virtually invisible in the earlier versions, lollare appears in C thirteen times. Like Pearsall (2003), I doubt very much whether this profusion reflects L’s effort to distinguish his views from others deemed erroneous (although see 9.214–19n), but rather C’s attention to issues related to the dreamer, labor, and poverty. Most especially, one might draw attention to the concentration of uses (eight of them) in passus 9. There, in the context of Piers’s pardon, L offers extensive insertions that substitute for the two great enigmata he has excised from C, the tearing of the document and that passage from B 15 that most clearly addresses Piers’s powers. See further the notes there: on the whole, L is as negative about the feigningly poor holy vagrant as many contemporaries were about Wycliffites, although for very different reasons (cf. Hudson 1988:407). For differing views, not exceptionally responsive to the text, see Cole 2003a, 2008:25–45.
Thus, L, as Scase and Middleton indicate, adopts a Dutch term for an ostentatious (hence, perhaps hypocritical) pray-er, which also designates a probably fraudulent religious wanderer. However, the uses of the word in the C Version second vision must involve some measure of contestation, since they occur subsequent to recorded examples of the noun “lollar(d)” in spring 1382 as a designation for Wycliffite heretics. Probably by the time L came to write this line, the Merciless Parliament in spring 1388 had instituted the examination of written materials for possible heretical content (see Richardson 1936).
Theological speculation in the vernacular had become suspect, and, just as the poet might be (mis)appropriated in the interests of rebellion in 1381, so he might be construed in the post-1382 context as a religious troublemaker. L’s insistence on lollare to mean “gyrovague, un-licensed/-learned hermit” quite literally cloaks him; it distances him from being misperceived as religiously vagrant, although he still, as Harry Bailey claims of the Parson (see CT II.1173, 1183), intrudes religion into situations where it may be out of place. The waking interlude as apology indicates that the dreamer-poet does not randomly force his ideas upon the secular world, but that he must do so, since that forms his unique vocation.
5 made: “composed verses” (following Skeat and Kane 1965:64n), although Salter and Pearsall gloss “judged” (similarly Donaldson 1949:201: “whom he treated as Reason taught him,” but 1990:243/5 “wrote rhymes”). If made means “composed,” it associates the dreamer explicitly with the practice of poetry and thereby exposes him to his own condemnations, expressed at Prol.35–40 (cf. 9n, 11n below). There the C version has removed the AB distinction between mirth-makers and janglers; L will later try to reassert such a distinction (see 7.81n below, as well as 2.240–41, 13.33–99).
Given the animosity referred to in line 3, Will’s verses appear to have been satiric (and might be construed as subsumed in 9.139–61, 188–219, 241–55). Then, the “For” that opens line 6 apparently indicates that the ensuing scene explains how the dreamer has followed Reason’s teachings in dealing with “lollares.” In those terms, the “makynges” must be absolutely self-referential—this poem, the C Version, already