The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman, Volume 4. Traugott Lawler

at first only to asking God to have mercy on the rich and give them the grace to amend, and then it returns to the poor at 14.174, though at 180 it expands once more, reminding Christ that he comforts “all creatures,” and finally asserting with full explicitness in 182 that Christ’s invitation to turn to him and be saved (181a) was made to riche and to poore. It lasts at least through line 188, as the second-person pronouns show, although Patience’s rhetoric is already moving from prayer-mode to lecture-mode. Thus the revision makes the prayer move in C to a broad sympathy for rich and poor alike much more swiftly and decisively than in B, taking back the greater harshness towards the rich achieved in the revision at C.16.8–9. Both versions end the prayer in a clarification of the pardon (chartre 35, Acquitaunce B.14.190), insisting that in view of the redemption to repent is to do well (as I have argued in Lawler 2000). C does so more explicitly, taking B’s general terms (Confession and knowlichynge and crauynge þi mercy/Shulde amenden vs 187–88) and converting them (16.25–34) into the triads both of the three Dos and of contrition, confession, and satisfaction (which in B Patience had brought up to Actyf in the course of his confession, 14.83–97; see note there). The assertion in both versions that the redemption is offered to all echoes Will’s meditation at 12.54–71 (B.11.119–36), a passage that also speaks of contrition and confession, and uses charter imagery (see below).

      See 6.1–2 (B.5.60–61, A.5.43–44)n.

      17 (B.14.164) sende hem somur: For a different use of the idea of heaven as summertime, see 1.112–25.

      19–21 For al myhtest þou … som pore and ryche (B.14.166–67 For alle myʒtestow … if þee wel hadde liked): The idea (which also occurs at B.11.197–98) that God might have made all equally rich, but it is better that he didn’t, is something of a commonplace, and L’s lines here are virtually a translation. See, e.g., PL 39.2330 (a sermon attributed to Augustine): “Potuit enim omnes homines divites facere; sed nobis per pauperum miseriam voluit subvenire ut et pauper per patientiam et dives per eleemosynam possint Dei gratiam promoveri” (God could have made everybody rich, but he wanted to help us by means of the plight of the poor, since the poor man could be advanced in the grace of God through patience, and the rich man through almsgiving). The PL has plenty more examples. Job 34:19 and Prov 29:13 both say that God made both rich and poor. “Alike witty and wise” is apparently Langland’s extension of the basic idea, and a sly one, since it may imply that as the poor lack money, the rich lack brains—an idea voiced more boldly at 16.49–50 (B.14.208–9) below.