29–30 Or beggest thy bylyue … | Or faytest: From the earliest publication, the Statute of Laborers reflects attitudes that had developed in response to “the new poverty” of the fourteenth century, attitudes that will exercise L throughout later stages of this vision (see the citations in 7–8n above, as well as 8.209n). In the 1388 Statute, the longstanding claims that such able-bodied individuals are merely criminous produce particularly draconian measures. For the drafters of the Statute, able-bodied beggars may be construed as simple vagabonds or vagrants, lacking any defense. Like all other unlicensed wanderers, they should be returned to their homes and put to work: “Of every Person that goeth begging, and is able to serve or labour, it shall be done of him as of him that departeth out of the Hundred and other Places aforesaid without Letter Testimonial” (12 Rich. II, c. 7; SR 2:58). See 22–25n above for Will’s effort at preempting this charge.
29 beggest … at men hacches: Note the echo in Will’s willingness to beg with Charity at 16.337–38. But, according to Liberum Arbitrium, Charity never begs (352): his food, as described at 16.318–22, 372–74L resembles what the dreamer will ultimately here claim as his own (see 86–88) and what Patience will later show Activa Vita (15.237–59L).
30 faytest vppon frydayes or festedayes in churches: The line echoes Prol.43, where the note discusses the root faiten; see also B 15.215n. Here Reason additionally charges Will with being so irregular as to carry on what pretends to be “work” at forbidden times. He would, Reason implies, come to church only because it is an efficient way to find almsgivers. The claim of misusing church may look ahead to line 105 (and cf. 21.1–8), where, rather than honoring God, the dreamer falls asleep. But cf. 9.241–47; although Will averts the charge here, such behavior would be preferable to that he there ascribes to the inimical lollares, who find service-time handouts inadequately attractive.
frydayes recur throughout the poem as those days of special obligation that they were (e.g., B 1.101, 6.182 and 352, 9.94, implicitly 9.231–35). The author of FM, who argues (214/4) that the day should be called Freday (the day of our redemption), indicates its importance with a verse mnemonic (Walther Initia, cited 214/10–12): “Salve, festa dies, que vulnera nostra coherces. | Est Adam factus et eodem tempore lapsus. | Angelus est missus, et passus in cruce Christus” (Hail, festival day, that contains our wounds. On Friday Adam was created and fell on the same day. The angel [of the Annunciation] was sent, and Christ suffered on the cross).
32 ryhtfulnesse: Justitia, essentially Reason’s self-reference. One might recall Reason at 4.144: “lawe shal ben a laborer and lede afelde donge.” His form of interrogation suggests that he desires to realize immediately that purification of Justice that he earlier couched in the terms of messianic prophecy. The related personification Righteousness (Iusticia at 20.464L) later appears as one of “the four daughters of God,” and “spiritus Iusticie” is one of the four seeds, “cardinales vertues,” Piers sows at 21.274–309.
32L Reddet … : Rom. 2:6 (God who will render to every man according to his works). Although it may simply mean “wherever,” the biblical context could identify 32 There with the Last Judgment (cf. 7n and 28n), when reward will be given in accord with “truth” (cf. Rom. 2:2, 8; the passage includes other relevant echoes). Both the Latin and the preceding line also echo the parable of the dishonest steward, evoked in lines 22–25. Rom. 2:6 recurs, again in a discussion of doubtful heavenly reward for uncategorizable worldly efforts (Dismas and Trajan), at 14.152L. Alford lists (1992:80) the numerous biblical variations on the verse.
35–44 When y ʓut ʓong was … and vp london bothe: The opening of Will’s very lengthy response (it runs to line 88) again combines an acute attention to the 1388 Statute with other materials, in this case a represented biography. Will wishes to emphasize the tender age at which he was enrolled in school—a kind of maiming, ultimately the tonsure—as his quasi-jesting response to Reason indicates. Other aspects of the scene (see 2n) would imply that Will is relatively young at this narrative moment, and thus that many ʓer hennes is exaggerated.
But the dreamer, conscious that he faces interrogation under the 1388 Statute, has very good reason to emphasize his youthful education. In the absence of his dead frendes, it may be his only claim not to be required to perform agricultural labor, for the Statute declares that “He or she, which use to labour at the Plough and Cart, or other Labour or Service of Husbandry, till they be of the Age of Twelve years, that from thenceforth they shall abide at the same Labour, without being put to any Mystery or Handicraft” (12 Rich. II, c. 5; SR 2:57). Merchandising and guild crafts had always been considered occupations that placed one outside those restrictions addressed to agricultural labor (see 23 Edw. III, c. 1; SR 1:307); the 1388 Parliament, in keeping with its desire to impress apprentices for field work (see 12–21n above), sought to close off one possible evasion of manual labor by limiting entry to mercantile or craft status altogether. The argument looks ahead to Will’s claim to a quasiaristocratic status at line 54, and L will return to another version of this scenario at 9.204–13L; there he worries self-protectively over the genesis of lewede Ermytes out of such a cadre of disaffected agrarian teenagers. With both this passage and that in C 9, compare the diatribe at JU 40–47, directed against those “comoun peple” who “leue her trewe laboure and bicome idil men,” especially feigned religious.
The reference to this particular statutory prohibition may indicate L’s knowledge of more than the published statute. For as Tuck demonstrates (1969), the Commons petition from which the Statute derives takes an even narrower view of this point. Commons (as Tuck shows, reported at Westminster Chronicle 363) wishes to prohibit either laborers or their children from learning any craft, should they be required in agriculture. Reason’s usage, Can thow 12, implies that knowing how to perform field work (as, for example, the knight does not at 8.19–22) would identify Will as a laborer’s child and without real recourse under the Commons petition. Will subsequently takes up the Commons’s position as his own; cf. children 68. See further 44n.
In line 36, the dreamer avails himself of the logical opening Reason has provided at lines 26–27 (and will turn this argument violently against his interlocutor at 53–67). He has had a fyndyng. And his youthful training emphatically distances him both from those hermits whom he defines as lewede in line 4 (see further 45–52n) and from Sloth at 7.53–54L. (See further Godden 1984:154.) Moreover, in this return to origins, L’s language comes closest to that of Wimbledon’s sermon; in his own account, at least, Will’s youthful preparation has instilled in him ideals of which the homilist would have approved: “Who stirid þe to take vpon þe so hiʓe astaate? Wheþer for þou woldest lyue on Goddis contemplacion, oþer forto lyue a delicious lif vpon oþer mennis trauayle and þyself trauayle nouʓt? Why also setten men here sones oþer here cosynes to scole? Wheþer forto gete hem grete auauncementis oþer to make hem þe betere to knowen how þey shulden serue God?” (lines 181–87).
The passage has often been pressed hard for biographical detail about L. Skeat wished to associate the scole, apparently as a guess faute de mieux, with a grammar school at Great Malvern Priory (to which L would have been sent as a younger son; see 2:xxxii). Pearsall (24n) believes the word specifically refers to university training—interrupted when L lost his support through death. More recent students, e.g., Galloway (1992:93–95, 97) and Hanna (1993:18–21), have emphasized the ambiguity of the passage, the extent to which it fails to provide any very specific information about Will’s career, much less L’s.
However, two details perhaps imply that Pearsall’s view is at least tilted toward the more likely extreme. First, Tyl y 37 implies that Will’s training may have persisted for quite some time. Certainly, his claims for knowledge of Holy Scripture (37–39), readily substantiated in the poem, of course, imply an education beyond simply the basics, some training in sacra pagina. And further, the economics of fourteenth-century education suggests that frendes