B.13.26 lowe louted and loueliche to scripture: A bit of estates satire; for friars’ attentions to women, see CT, General Prologue, A211, 217, 234, 253–55 and SumT, D1797–1815. For the way they have of showing up at dinnertime (against their rule; see next note), see SumT D1774, 1836 ff., and B.10.95 above. In B the friar seems to be already in the house when Conscience gets home; in C they seem to meet on Conscience’s way home, but perhaps not altogether by chance.
29 a maystre, a man lyk a frere (B.13.25 a maister, what man he was I nyste): usually called this doctour starting at line 65, and identified as definitely a friar in lines 69–87; in line 84 he is doctour and dyuynour … and decretistre of Canoen, i.e., very learned, and he may be named as a particular Dominican in 91; see the note there. Maister is a loaded word in antifraternal satire: it means “Pharisee,” thanks to Matt 23:7–10 and John 1:38; see Szittya 1986:35–37 and SumT, D2184–88. Of course plenty of friars, especially Dominicans and Franciscans, were Masters of Theology and Doctors of Theology; see Glorieux 1933–34:1.27–222 (Dominicans); 2.5–248 (Franciscans); Courtenay 1987:56–87; Cobban 1999:164–67; Lawrence 1994, Chapter 7.
It is evidently part of L’s purpose to present Will as not at first recognizing this master as the man he heard preach three or four days before, though the development to that recognition in B (from “what man he was I nyste”) is more startling than in C. That he is at the dinner at all is not quite right. The Dominican Constitutions of 1220 declare that “In places where we have a convent, our friars, both priors and others, should not presume to eat outside the cloister except with bishops or in houses of religious, and that rarely” (ed. Thomas, 1.8, p. 319). But the Summoner’s Tale suggests that the rule was little regarded—and Conscience may be a bishop; again see B.13.207–10n. Gruenler 2017:155 compares him to the bishop in the story of St Andrew and the Three Questions from The Golden Legend that he posits as an analogue to the scene.
Ralph Hanna has suggested above (8.73–74n) that Faus Semblant in Roman de la Rose 11204–06 (in the Lecoy edition) gives us a model for this doctor. I would add lines 11007–19; see the note to 68–73a below. As a hypocrite relying on a surface of religiosity, he is certainly among the progeny of Faus Semblant, though not so thoroughly like him as Chaucer’s Pardoner.
31 (B.13.28) They: Why not “We?” Surely Will was invited to wash too, as Patience is a few lines later. The friar, it turns out, has a traveling companion, whom Patience mentions at line 101; this pronoun includes him. Friars always went about in pairs: see Luke 10:1 (and note to line 44a below), and supra, 10.8n. Clopper 1990:74n34 asserts that since there are two friars they must be Franciscans, for “the Franciscan rule required that brothers go about in pairs in order to imitate Christ’s apostles; the Dominican provisions for preaching and itinerancy (Distinctio 2.12–13) make no reference to this practice.” And yet Distinctio 2.12 (of Raymond of Pennaforte’s redaction, ed. Creytens 1948, which Clopper used) in fact says of preachers, “eis socii dabuntur a priore” (they will be assigned companions by the prior, p. 63). The Constitutions of 1228, ed. Thomas 1965, have the same sentence of preachers (2.30, p. 363), and, of itinerants, “socius datus praedicatori ipsi ut priori suo in omnibus obediat” (the companion given to a preacher is to obey him in everything as his superior) (2.34, p. 366). In Dominic’s famous dream in St Peter’s, when Peter and Paul order him to preach, he sees his sons “setting out two by two” (Golden Legend, trans. Ryan, 2.47). Jack Upland 310, Friar Daw’s Reply 771, and Woodford, Responsiones pp. 162–63 all write as if going in pairs was the practice of all orders. The issue matters because of the identification of the doctor with the Dominican William Jordan; see 91n. Cf. the phrase socius itineris in Gen 33:12 and 35:3.
Patience and Piers (C only) show up and are welcomed (32–37, B.13.29–32)
32–33 Pacience … Ilyke peres the ploghman, as he a palmere were (B.13.29–30 Ac Pacience … heremyte): B is plain enough, but C surprises: Piers is here! This is the first reference to him since the second vision, in the course of which he took on the role of “a pilgrym at þe plouh” (8.111), dressing accordingly (8.56–65). “Palmere” here clearly just means “pilgrim” and is not pejorative (as it probably is at Prol.47 and 7.180). The revision suggests that readers of B are perhaps to intuit from 29 in pilgrymes cloþes, along with all the praise of patient poverty in passus 11—including lines such as B.11.243–44, “And in þe apparaille of a pouere man and pilgrymes liknesse/Many tyme god haþ ben met among nedy peple”—that Patience is “Piers-like” and will speak authoritatively. But readers did not intuit that, apparently, so C, in typical fashion, makes everything plain by having Piers actually accompany Patience to the dinner.
Ilyke is a crucial word; the adverb “likewise, also,” OE ġeliċe. Skeat printed “Ilik,” the reading of ms. X and many others—i.e., the adjective “like”—and Schmidt has followed him (though he apparently takes it as the adverb, which can appear [unhistorically] without the final e: see both his note and his textual note to his line 34). Consequently readers for years thought the poet was saying here that Patience was dressed as a palmer “like Piers Plowman,” and that when Piers suddenly speaks at line 137, he has simply appeared out of the blue, just as he will disappear when he finishes speaking (148–49). But when RK-C appeared in 1997, with the reading Ilyke (in three manuscripts) and a semicolon at the end of line 32, and the editors’ account (on p. 156) of their reasoning, along with their identification (156n) of 130 ʒent as “yonder,” Piers’s role in the scene was put on a sounder footing: he does not appear out of the blue after dinner, but has been at the dinner all along. See Kane, Glossary, s.v. ylike, and the note to 130 below. (I was present at a plenary session of the Langland conference in Cambridge in 1993 when the scene was being discussed, and George Kane stood up and electrified the room by declaring that the word was “ilyke,” likewise: Patience came and likewise Piers Plowman. We all had a feeling of great clarification, and the reading has become standard. [Kane then also referred to it in his plenary address to the conference, subsequently printed in YLS; see Kane 1994:16.])
If as he a palmere were simply meant that Piers begged his meal as if he were a palmer, it would have come after the verb; in view of its position, and of what he says and does at 8.56–65 (B.6.57–64, A.7.52–58), it almost certainly means “dressed like a palmer.” Why he is begging dinner is unclear, though if the C version had not erased the tearing of the pardon and its aftermath in AB, we might associate it with Piers’s determination there to cease sowing and be less busy about his belly-joy (B.7.122–35, A.8.104–17). It does seem suitably humble for both Piers and Patience to beg dinner, even though Liberum arbitrium will later insist, at the end of passus 16 and the beginning of 17, that Charity does not beg, nor did the apostles, the desert fathers, and other saints.
This is Patience’s first appearance as a character, although in certain parts of Recklessness’s long speech on patient poverty the virtue has already been half-personified (e.g., 13.2, 21). (Donaldson sees him as a development of Recklessness, and sees Piers as a further development still [1949:174–75].) As a virtue and not an intellectual faculty, he is symptomatic of a shift in emphasis that has been taking place in the poem: from “speculative to practical morality,” in the words of Stella Maguire (1949:100), or “toward a more active engagement of the will” (Alford 1995: 97), or from understanding