84 decretistre of Canoen: Canon lawyer, one versed in the decretals.
86 (B.13.79) Hath no pyte on vs pore: i.e., won’t pass the mortreux; see 115 (B.13.107–8). Will complains that the friar preaches penance without practicing it; but he seems no more willing to suffer himself. He has utterly forgotten Ymaginatif’s counsel “no clergie to despice/Ne sette shorte by here science, whatso þei doen hemsulue/…/Laste cheste chaufe vs to choppe vch man oþer” (14.64–68, B.12.121–25).
B.13.83 Mahoun: I.e., a devil; see 20.293 and OED, s.v. Mahound, n. Will’s basic wish is that the doctor were in hell, and undergoing this Dantesque punishment. The C version is much milder.
91 (B.13.84) iurdan, iuyste: the former is a vessel doctors used for urinalysis, the latter a drinking-pot with handles; see OED. s.v. jordan, n.1 and just, n.2. Since both had a narrow neck and a round belly, the line is pleonastic. Iurdan, however, suggests strongly that we have here a satiric portrait of Friar William Jordan, O. P., Doctor of Theology, a major Dominican spokesman (Gelber 2004:50) who had engaged in controversy with Uthred of Boldon: see Marcett 1938:57–64, Gwynn 1943:2–4, 19–24; Russell 1966:113; Middleton 1987:31–32n; Kerby-Fulton 2006:375. (Clopper 1997:239n accepts the “one-liner directed at Jordan” a little reluctantly “as a local allusion that does not detract from the overall Franciscan character of the scene.”
B.13.85 raþer: I.e., three or four days ago at St Paul’s, B.13.65–66 (C.15.69–70).
B.13.86 Pacience … preynte on me to be stille: See also 120 (B.13.113), where Conscience winks on Patience to pray Will to be quiet, and 20.19 (B.18.21), where Faith “printe” (B preynte) on Will when he asks after Piers. Here, the word is an editorial conjecture for “wynkede” in the majority of B mss; clearly the archetype had already substituted the more common verb. Burrow 2000:80–82, 2002:103–5 discusses “prinken” and concludes that the gesture is our modern wink of the eye, but that it carried more weight then. Stephen Barney has suggested to me that it is more a wince than a wink.
92 apose hym what penaunce is and purgatorie on erthe: i.e., ask him if he realizes what a penance it is to be poor, and have one’s purgatory on earth: see 82, 86–87 above, and, on purgatory on earth for the poor, 9.279 (B.7.106, A.8.88) and “The Simonie,” ed. Dean, 1996, l. 509.
Patience calms Will down (93–105, B.13.86–98)
94–105 (B.13.87–98) Thow shalt se … penaunce: Patience, true to his name, advises passiveness, not action: “Let him talk first,” doing so in a supercharged version of the extravagant language that will turn out to be his hallmark. He utters a satiric tour de force of prediction of what the doctor will say, namely that in eating and drinking as he did he was actually doing penance. His predictions, however, are not borne out at all in the lines that follow: instead, rather anticlimactically, the doctor just coughs and gapes 108 (coughs and carps B.13.101, and nearly all C mss.), and then Patience asks him about the three Do’s. But of course L could hardly have shown the doctor fulfilling the prediction in any detail; the point rather is for Patience to quiet Will down by saying, “Let him convict himself”—and the doctor apparently does that by coughing and gaping, that is, revealing how ill his overeating has made him, though the unspecified “carping” in B (and the C majority) may consist of the sort of arrogant self-justification Patience has predicted. The details of the passage are hard, since Patience speaks with his usual playful irony (see 32–33n above, and Simpson 2007:142–43); I shall do my best to explicate them one by one.
95 (B.13.88) poffe: pant, breathe hard: his stomach pain makes speaking painful. See OED 1.b, which cites this passage.
96 (B.13.89) And thenne shal his gottes gothelen: as Glutton’s did, 6.398; cf. also 108 Cowhede to 6.412, where Glutton “cowed vp a caudel.” Patience is clearly playing on Will’s mention of penaunce 92 (B.13.85); in C he may be playing further on the idea of purgatorie on erthe: the doctor has purgation problems right now.
97–100 (B.13.90–93) For now he hath dronke … fode for a penante: a most difficult passage of satiric hyperbole. Its gist is that the doctor will defend himself ingeniously by arguing either that rich food is penitential because, as 95–96 (B.13.88–89) say, it gives you a stomach ache, makes you suffer, or that what appears to be brawn and so on is in fact merely bread and soup. Bacon and brawn are flesche, i.e., meat, blaunmanger and mortrewes contain meat; mortrewes can also contain fische. Though he will deuyne, that is, argue ingeniously a difficult theological point (cf. B.10.185–88), his manner of argument will in fact be typically Langlandian, “preving” by taking a text or person or anecdote “to witness”—cf., e.g., Recklessness proving that the poor are close to God, 12.98–176a, where the word “witness” is used four times, “preven” twice, “testify” and “accord” once each, and ll. 170–75 are a special rush of authorities testifying and proving. See 20.275–76 for a similar statement about phony friar-argumentation, proving by Seneca that all things should be in common.
Sui generis though this outburst seems, it is actually like Study’s tirade in B.10 at a number of points. The basic idea, that the doctor will be too addled by food and drink to talk sense, is just what Study has said: he is one of those who “puten forþ presumpcion to preue þe soþe” and “dryuele at hir deys … whanne hir guttes fullen” (B.10.56–58). Drawing on Job, Jeremiah, and the Psalms, Study all through her speech contrasts the prosperous wicked to the just poor, just as Will contrasts this prosperous, arrogant doctor to himself, poor deserving Will. The doctor is “a frere to seke festes” (B.10.95), a “maister” “moving motives in his glory” (cf. B.10.117). Since Will and Patience are offered none of the good food, he “þus parteþ wiþ þe pouere a parcell [i.e., turns them away] whan hym nedeþ” (B.10.64); he is one of those who “in gaynesse and glotonye forglutten hir good/And brekeþ noʒt to þe beggere as þe book techeþ:/Frange esurienti panem tuum &c” (B.10.84–85a). He “prech[e3] at Seint Poules” “that folk is noʒt … sory for hire synnes” (B.10.74–76). He speaks of “a trinite” if not “þe Trinite” (B.10.54). And so on; we see L here reworking a set of ideas he has already used.
The first witness here, here pocalips, is probably not (pace Pearsall and Schmidt) The Apocalypse of Golias, though that text does satirize corrupt clergy and ends in a long scene featuring gluttonous monks, who at one point assert that by the “sore pains” of drinking they come to know heaven’s bliss (ed. Wright, 1841, ll. 379–80), but why it should be “their” Apocalypse is troubling. Alternatively, the phrase may mean “their (the friars’) mumbo-jumbo, their clever apocalyptic way of speaking” or “their own ‘Revelation,’” in which they reveal such things as why bacon and so on are penitential foods, or that this or that angel mentioned in the Book of Revelation is Francis. Certainly the long association between the Franciscan Spirituals and Joachism is a sufficient background for accusing friars of having made the Apocalypse their own, even though the Spirituals characteristically used their apocalypticism to argue for a life of poverty, not indulgence. See Leff 1967a:1.51–255 and, for Peter John Olivi, Burr 1993; in his first two chapters, he gives a full review of Franciscan Joachism before Olivi. On the internal Franciscan disputes, see Lambert 1998, Clopper 1997:27–54, and Burr 2011.
Another possibility is opened up by this verse from St Paul [1 Cor 14:26]: “Quid ergo est, fratres? Cum convenitis, unusquisque vestrum psalmum habet, doctrinam habet, apocalypsin habet, linguam habet, interpretationem habet. Omnia ad aedificationem fiant.” “How is it then, brethren? When you come together, every one of you hath a psalm, hath a doctrine, hath a revelation [an apocalypse], hath a tongue, hath an interpretation. Let all things be done unto edification.” Although Paul is not speaking disparagingly, the exhortation