The C passage is parallel but without the riddle—though it adds a riddle of its own at 161; see below.
B.13.151 half a laumpe lyne in latyn: Galloway 1995:91–92 takes this as the equivalent of “The myddel of the Moone” 155, like it meaning “cor”; see the note there. Bradley 1910 reached the same solution in a different way: taking “lamp line” to mean the line a lamp hangs from, he posited a Latin word “cordella,” and cut it roughly in half to yield “corde” as the solution to the riddle. Stephen Barney, in a private communication, cites in support of Bradley’s solution, from Latham’s Dictionary of Medieval Latin, both the word chorda (in the Durham accounts, ca. 1367) and the word chordula (in the rolls of St Swithin’s Priory, 1485) used in connection with lamps, and in all likelihood meaning the hanging-cord rather than the wick. That seems to me a more straightforward explanation than Galloway’s.
B.13.152 in a bouste: A conjecture by KD-B, who discuss it on p. 186, convincingly to me (though not to Schmidt, who rejects it in both editions and discusses it in the commentary to his 1995 edition). A bouste (MED, s.v. boist) is a box or vessel: either the heart as the vessel of love, or the riddle as a handy little container. The whole idea of Dowel is contained in the word love; love is a synonym for Dowel. Kaske 1963:47–49 associates it with Magdalen’s “box of salue” (B.13.194), alabastrum unguenti (Luke 7:37), and cites Hugh of Saint-Cher’s interpretation of that box as cor penitentis, the heart of a penitent. Watson, who is out to discredit Patience, sees him in this speech as “recenter-[ing] the scene around himself,” and says that his claim to have Dowel bound fast is “uncomfortably reminiscent of one made by the glosing friars in B.8” (2007:101), but to me he does not seem nearly as smug as they are. All he is saying is “Dowel is really simple: it’s love.”
B.13.153–54 þe Saterday þat sette first þe kalender … þe wodnesday of þe nexte wike after: As Galloway says, these references, perhaps to the first Sabbath, when God rested after the six days of Creation, and to Wednesday of Holy Week, the week of “Re-creation,” connected with charity and prudence, respectively (Ben H. Smith, Jr. 1961:681, 1966:53; Kaske 1963:43–44), “have not been … satisfactorily explained” (1995:92). Schweitzer 1974:319–27 chooses Holy Saturday and the Wednesday after Easter, and makes some arguments from the liturgy—also unsatisfactory. Anna Baldwin 2001:103–4 applies the passage, including Patience’s recommendations for a loving foreign policy, to relations between England and France in June 1377, and suggests that particular days are dropped in C “because their significance was now forgotten.”
B.13.155 The myddel of þe Moone: Galloway shows convincingly that this phrase (which has been used by Conscience, prophesying at the end of the Mede episode, at 3.480 [B.3.327]) is a translation of the beginning of a Latin hexameter riddle, “Lune dimidium solis pariterque rotundum/Et pars quarta rote; nil plus deus exigit a te,” Half of a moon and equally the round of a sun,/And the fourth part of a wheel; nothing more does God demand from you. Half a moon is the letter C; the round of the sun is the letter O; one-fourth of rota is the letter R: the solution is COR: all God wants from us is love. Cf. Luke 8:15: the seed that falls on good ground is those who “in a good and perfect heart hearing the word, keep it and bring forth fruit in patience.” Galloway shows further that to cite the first phrase is to cite the whole riddle, and argues that “half a laumpe lyne” is a rendering of “lune dimidium,” so that line 152 also refers to the whole riddle by its first words (1995:87–88, 90–92).
B.13.157 Vndo it: lat þis doctour deme if dowel be þerInne: Gruenler 2017:159: “Patience’s challenge … uses a typical way of closing a riddle to tell the doctor to look into his own heart.” This “goading address to the doctor,” as Galloway calls it (1995:96), is dropped in C. Actually he is addressing Conscience, the master of ceremonies, urging him to let the doctor deem.
156 holy writ: See above, note to B.13.135a.
157–69 For, by hym þat me made … techest (B.13.158–71a For, by hym þat me made … vincunt): Patience continues his speech in somewhat the same way in both versions. The first sentence is very clear in B: if you have the bouste, which is love, with you, you will fear no danger from man, devil, or nature, because love fears nothing. C is equally clear, really, though it adds pacience 159 to love (since they have been established as synonyms), and, having dropped B’s earlier riddle, throws in a new one: 161 In þe corner of a cartwhel with a crow croune. Galloway 1995:94 shows adroitly that the first half of the line refers to the Latin riddle given above, being the equivalent of pars quarta rote, and so means cor; that the second half also means cor, the caput corvi, head of the word “crow,” and that cor or its anagram cro occurs thrice in the line. In short, bear in your bosom, in Galloway’s words, a “heart given to God, the essence of patience in the Christian tradition” (94).
The second sentence is much shorter in C, listing fewer authority figures, and is rhetorically a little stronger, but both say essentially the same thing: with this bouste you will conquer everybody. A brash peroration indeed.
164a Caritas expellit omnem timorem (cf. B.13.163a Caritas nichil timet): Charity drives away all fear: 1 John 4:18, “perfecta caritas foras mittit timorem,” perfect charity casteth out fear. Maybe compare 17.5a, Caritas omnia suffert (1 Cor 13:7), perhaps yet one more way of saying “Love your enemies.” For B, see Ambrose, Letter 78 (PL 16.1269), “charitatem habens nihil timet”: Paschasius Radbertus, De fide, spe, et caritate 1990:110: “Caritas nihil timet sed excludit foras timorem.”
The dinner comes to a sudden end (170–84, B.13.172–215)
170–84 This is a dido … y folowede (B.13.172–215 It is but a dido … pilgrymes as it were): Patience’s stunning answer (Piers’s too, in C) brings the dinner to an abrupt end. In B, Conscience has responded ambivalently to Clergie, deflecting his dissatisfaction into a wish that Piers will come; he has looked to Patience for something better. He gets it, and yet what Patience says polarizes the company: the doctor erupts in contempt, and expects Clergie and Conscience to support his move to throw Patience out. Conscience surprises him by siding with Patience, and is ridiculed by Clergie, who like the doctor treats Patience as if he were an itinerant minstrel; the rift between Clergie and Conscience, quite tentative and unclear at 131, is now hard to deny. Nevertheless, Conscience, gracious host to the last, takes courteous leave of the doctor at 198, then tries to treat his rift with Clergie as a friendly disagreement, 199–201. Clergie rejects this as a parting gesture, soberly foretelling a time when Conscience will need him, which seems to change the mood, so that they part with expressions of mutual respect. What appeals to Conscience in Patience is presumably his combination of simplicity, hopefulness, and experience: he has cut through not only the doctor’s arrogant learning but the helpless quality of Clergie’s more thoughtful and humble learning; he has a charisma (þe wil of þe wye 190) that Conscience seems to find refreshing enough to want to test further (182); or he wants to test his own capacity for patience, which is Clergie’s view (214).
In C, as earlier in the serving of the dinner, the characters are less sharply differentiated. Clergie’s speech has had the same gist but was far less academic, and Conscience did not reply to it at all; in place of his wish for Piers in B, Piers is actually here and speaks—and says the first half of what Patience said in B (love your enemies) but minus the riddles. Patience then picks up where Piers leaves off, and the doctor’s contemptuous response is the same, although he does not explicitly suggest ejecting Patience. Conscience’s farewell to Clergie has the essential combination of respect and disagreement, but there is no subtle interplay