84 Preeyeres of a parfit man and penaunce discrete: Later passages offer conflicting evidence about how to read Will’s implicit claim in the on-verse. On the one hand, Will’s self-associations with perfection have been inherited from B 12.24, where the dreamer alleges that not laboring, failing to say his Psalter so as to write the poem, approaches perfection. Writing is “play,” not just an opposite of labor but a foolishness easily deprecated; yet ancient wise men “Pleyden þe parfiter to ben.”
On the other hand, Will’s “perfection” reminds one of Piers’s rejection at 8.131–38 of the wasters’ excuse that they laze about in order to pray. Perhaps a more relevant gloss appears at 11.174 and 13.230; the claim to be a parfit man reflects the dreamer’s “pruyde/pruyde or presumpcioun of parfit lyuynge,” and links this self-defense to Will’s desperate immersion in the inner dream of the Land of Longing (first noted Clopper 1989:274, 278). Such associations intensify the connections with the later self-defense, Recklessness’s huge rant (including its assertion that indigence of any stripe is blessed), and with its conclusion in another rebuke from Reason (see 11n above).
The phrase penaunce discrete is equally difficult to define discursively. The English phrase, so far as is known, appears in only two other places, the Lollard tracts “On Clerks Possessioners” (“Wycliffe,” English Works, EETS 74:117, cited Godden 1990:55) and “On Church Temporalities” (Arnold SEW 3:213), in both instances apparently to describe a life of self-directed penitential meekness. In these terms, private penaunce discrete would contrast with Will’s prayers undertaken on behalf of others.
But equally, the phrase may reflect the technical language of penitential theory. “Confessio … discreta” routinely appears in widely distributed verses that enumerate the conditions (up to twenty-seven of them) for a proper confession. In this context, “discreta” means using appropriate and modest language in the confessional, intruding no trivial concerns, and, perhaps most relevantly here, following lines 70–81, concentrating upon one’s own sins rather than revealing those of one’s neighbor (so DTC 3:957). For the verses and discussion, see Millett 1999.
Alternatively, as Sarah Wood points out to me, an authoritative source, Raymund of Penyaforte’s Summa 3.34.26, sees “discrete penance” in slightly different terms: “Likewise, confession ought to be discrete, so that the penitent confess distinctly and separately every one of his sins. This follows from Ps. 6:7, ‘Every night I will wash my bed,’ that is, I will wash my conscience of every one of my sins” (Discreta similiter debet esse confessio, scilicet vt distincte, ac separatim confiteatur singula peccata, iuxta illud: ‘Lauabo per singulas noctes lectum meum,’ etc. Id est, per singula peccata conscientiam meam). Godden (1984:132) notes that preeyeres and penaunce forms a persistent alliterative doublet in the poem and (132–33) gives examples of penance meaning “the ascetic life” elsewhere in ME.
86–88 Non de solo … nec in pane, Fiat … : Matt. 4:4, itself a quotation of Deut. 8:3, reads “Non in solo pane vivit homo” (It is written: Not in bread alone doth man live, [but in every word that proceedeth from the mouth of God]). But as Burrow argues (1993:104), L splits and extends the verse so that it reads as a rejection of the entire food cycle, production and consumption: “Man does not live of the soil, nor in bread or other food.” The subsequent Latin from the Pater Noster, Matt. 6:10 (Thy/God’s will be done), of course defines the word of God. L ultimately allows Patience to offer something like a definitive reading of these conjoined verses (see 15.244–49, 83–88n above, and 7.260Ln); given Patience’s association with holy suffering, one might also consider the analogue of Luke 22:42, “But yet not my will, but thine be done.” On the Pater Noster throughout the poem, see Gillespie 1994. Middleton (1997:246) signals the implicit connection with Matt. 10:19–20, where God will give the arrested apostle sufficient answer to hold off his tormentors. Mann (1979:30–32, followed by Barney 1988:121), adduces John 4:34: “My meat is to do the will of him who sent me.”
89–91 Quod Consience … to mynistre: Skeat and Pearsall suggest that Conscience here responds to 84 parfit, but one might equally argue that he is actuated by the dreamer’s claim to a clean, and extraordinarily perspicacious, conscience in the preceding line. Whitworth (1972:6) distinguishes Reason, at this point silent, as concerned with theory, Conscience with practice; the latter figure sees that the dreamer’s behavior does not entirely accord with his claims. For Conscience, the issue then becomes, not the claim of perfection per se, but a sad (stable) life of that sort (cf. 103–4). Following good monastic precedents, Conscience associates this, not with the individual will to be perfect, but with a stable social status, overseen by someone in an official capacity, a position analogous to the emphases of Reason’s subsequent sermon.
Conscience invokes legal discourse as well and draws attention in line 91 to the statutory exception to the status Reason has attacked at 29–31. If Will looks like a “lewed” hermit (but isn’t “lewed”) and may be a priest (but may have tainted that status through sexual indulgence), he still potentially has a licit claim to beg (as Godden 1990:181 notes). The 1388 Statute extends this privilege to “People of Religion and Hermits approved (heremytes approvez) having letters testimonial of their Ordinaries” (12 Rich. II, c. 7; SR 2:58). Such supervisory figures would include the prior or mynistre (cf. MED ministre, sense 2b, usually of Franciscan provincial officials) mentioned here, although Will has already suggested (line 76) that his status may reflect precisely a failure by supervising clergy to aid deserving beggars like himself.
89 lyeth: Skeat and Pearsall1 gloss “applies, is to the point.” But Godden (1984:155), although noting OED sense 13, directs attention to the adversative Ac in the following line (glossing the word as Skeat and Pearsall do would seem to require “For”) and suggests translating “I cannot see that this doctrine (that prayer and penance is the best life) is false; and yet.…” A similar ambiguity occurs at B 10.112.
92–101 That is soth … shal turne: At this point, Will simply caves in (beknowe 92 is an admission). He accepts Reason’s earlier charges of his irregularity (see line 28) and, in return, can only offer his good will; cf. Imaginative’s discussion at 14.23–29 and Conscience’s at B 13.190–97. But here Will’s proffer, rather than fusion of his soul with “voluntas dei” (88), veers back into the very unregulated status for which he is being chastised. For all that Will can promise is compulsive and repetitive effort, the same acts over and over again—a reflection of what he has earlier identified as Romynge in remembraunce (see 11n and esp. Middleton 1988). He promises such behavior in the good hope (94 and 99, not in his later despairing behavior as Recklessness) that such repetition will somehow once manage not to be loss (as it has always been in the past) but profit (wynnyng 98). As Piers sees, when in the AB versions he tears the pardon, such a profit (salvation) can only come to pass independently of Will’s, or any individual’s, efforts to obtain it, through the mysterious infusion of grace; see further Recklessness at 12.205–9 and more distantly, Imaginative’s flailing blind man at B 12.103–12.
Chaffare provides a powerful metaphor for this complex activity. Just as in the mercantilistic parables on which he relies to create his apostolic status (see 7n, 23–25n, 45–52n, 98Ln, 100–101n), Will invokes a widespread analogy between commerce and spirituality. Both, as in the earlier example of the dishonest steward, involve a calculus of risk and disaster; for Will, the likelihood of utter failure, total waste and loss, and concomitant repetition, overwhelms any immediate sense of possible success. (This point is taken up at length in a draft, unpublished version of Middleton 2013, which I am grateful that the author shared; and more distantly, at her 1990:46, 1997:234.) The suggestion here, intensified