215 (B.13.240) Mihelmasse to Mihelmasse: “Michaelmas (September 29), the feast of St Michael and all Angels, marked the beginning and ending of the husbandman’s year. At that time harvest was over, and the bailiff or reeve of the manor would be making out the accounts for the year…. At once after Michaelmas, if not before, the planting of the new field of rye and wheat would begin, the field which had lain fallow during the year past” (Homans 1941:354). Homans was writing of the thirteenth century, but clearly the custom continued.
215 drynke: I.e., beer and ale, made from grain.
B.13.242 folk wiþ brode crounes: Parish priests with their tonsure (see Lawler 2002:111 n30).
216–31 Y fynde payn for þe pope … made (B.13.243–259 I fynde payn for þe pope … payn defaute): The passage is much clearer in B than in C. There, Actyf has been listing his various customers in order to emphasize the universal need for bread. That brings him to the pope (not, as Skeat supposes, because Actyf contributes to the annual papal collection called Peter’s Pence, but merely because he has gotten on to clerics in the previous line, and the pope, too, needs his daily bread), and ends the list, because mention of the pope brings him back to his complaint that the powerful reward him poorly for his service. What it would be nice for the pope to throw his way, instead of a useless pardon, would be a salve that would cure pestilence: then Actyf would be busy indeed (B.13.251), that is, business would be excellent. In the process of developing this happy fantasy, Actyf imagines yet another phony job for himself, this time not minstrel but minister, not pastryman but pastor (prest B.13 250: “eager, active,” but punning on “priest”), a kind of quack cleric like Chaucer’s Pardoner, armed with not only the magic salve but with bulls and the papal seal. This move depends first (as Skeat notes) on a pun on prouendre: I give the pope provender for his palfrey, why can’t he give me provender, that is, a prebend (stipend), a personage (benefice) in return? The pun is extended in the word paast B.13.250, which is at once “paste,” the miraculous salve he will hawk, “pastry,” for he will continue to sell bread as well, and “what a pastor has to give.” The disrespectful attitude toward the papacy that drives the passage appears first in the derisive phrase for the papal seal (which featured the heads of Saints Peter and Paul), a peis of leed and two polles amyddes (B.13.246), continues in the fiction of the pope’s sending off to Actyf, in response to his letter (dictated to his secretary) requesting it, the pot of salve that would transform his business, and ends, as Skeat (citing Whitaker) points out, in what, given the actual wealth of the papacy, can only be an ironic reference to St Peter’s “Silver and gold I have none” (Acts 3:6). The implication of B.13.254a is that the current pope would have to say just the opposite: “Might of miracle (cf. B.13.255) I have none, and I do not give you what I do have, silver and gold.”
Finally, however, the anti-papal satire is supererogatory. The basic point of the B passage is to present Actyf as dissatisfied with his lot, a businessman on the make for better profits; for in B.13.256 he acknowledges sadly that, however the papacy has fallen in spiritual power since Peter, the real source of the pestilence is general human pride (cf. 11.52–65; 5.114–17), and the only cure for that is famine, which is, of course, bad for the bread business.
In the C version, L seems to have realized that the anti-papal satire was a distraction, and has muted it, in the process obscuring somewhat Actyf’s reasons for mentioning either the pope or the pestilence at all. Nevertheless the essential point remains: Actyf longs for more business (222) and still imagines getting it through winning the franchise for the pope’s salve: for though the salve is no longer spoken of explicitly as being sent to him, the only way lines 222–23 can make sense is if they envision Actyf displaying the bull and selling the salve. Still he seems less roguish in C, more merely solicitous, and by 230 virtually in despair for his livelihood over the realization that it is precisely plente of payn that is responsible for the pestilence. The difference of emphasis in the two versions is brought about by what follows each: since in B Actyf will become an emblem of sinful man, his cynicism is featured here. In C, however, the interest is, as Pearsall says, “in preparing Active as an erring pupil for instruction by Patience,” and so he is made to appear merely too solicitous for his livelihood rather than inclined to sharp practice.
217 pestilence (B.13.248 þe pestilence); 218 (B.13.249) bocches; 219 luythere eir: All apparently references to the recurrence of bubonic plague in 1368; cf. B.13.268–69. Bocches were its characteristic glandular swellings (“bubos”).
221a Super egros manus inponent & bene habebunt &c (B.13.249a In nomine meo demonia ejicient & super … habebunt): Both versions cite Mark 16:17–18, at the very end of Mark’s Gospel, Jesus’s words when he appears after the Resurrection “to the eleven as they were at table” (16:14): “In nomine meo dæmonia ejicient; [linguis loquentur novis; serpentes tollent, et si mortiferum quid biberint, non eis nocebit;] super ægrotos manus imponent, et bene habebunt” (In my name they shall cast out devils; [they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents, and if they shall drink any deadly thing it shall not hurt them;] they shall lay their hands upon the sick, and they shall recover). The phrase myhte of myracle 225 (B.17.255) probably implies all the super-powers Mark lists, not just healing. And the reference to Peter’s power, to pardoun (B.13.252) and mercy (221) and þe pott with þe salue, i.e., the power both to forgive sins and heal disease, suggests that L is thinking of the last two chapters of John’s Gospel as well, in which (21:23) the eleven are given the power to forgive sins, and (22:15–17) Peter is given special responsibility to feed the flock.
We are not to suppose that the verses from the Vulgate that creep into Actyf’s monologue starting here—there are three all told in C, seven in B—are uttered by him. Schmidt (226a note) distinguishes subtly between the thought (Actyf’s) and the form (L’s), but I’m not so ready even to give the thought to Actyf: rather we simply have L reverting to his default mode of writing, what I have called elsewhere “a kind of teacherly citation of authority, as if in the margin” (Lawler 1996:171); see further pp. 169–78 of that essay; Mann 1994:34, 41–46; and Lawler 2008:150–51. It was careless of him to use the style for Actyf.
224 (B.13.254) þe pott with þe salue: A brash phrase for the powers of forgiving and healing, pardoun [that]/Miʒte lechen a man (B.13.252–53), granted the apostles. The phrase is perhaps a translation of alabastrum unguenti, the “alabaster box of ointment” applied to Jesus’s feet in Luke 7:37, called a “box of salue” at B.13.194 (the phrase also occurs in the slightly different anointing story in Matt 26:7 and Mark 14:3). Unlike in passus 22 (B.20).306,336,372, where “salue” is simply the sacrament of Penance, and “to salue” is to administer the sacrament (305, 347), illness here is real illness, not just spiritual. At B.17.122, where the Samaritan says, “I haue salue for alle sike,” it means healing on one level (for the man