From this inauspicious entrance as beggar and table companion to Will at the edge of the dinner party, Patience will come to dominate this scene, first as Will’s adviser and then as the giver of the best answer to Conscience’s after-dinner challenge, then go onto the road with Will and Conscience, where he will tutor Will and Actyf until his place is suddenly taken by Liberum arbitrium (Anima) at 16.157 (cf. B.15.12). In the dinner scene he is a playful ironist, and though he later gets preachy he never altogether loses the comic, understated quality his name implies. In Gregory’s oft-quoted definition, “patientia vero est aliena mala aequanimiter perpeti,” patience is to suffer the evil others do to you with equanimity (Homilies on the Gospels, 2.35, PL 76.1261), and he never loses his aplomb. Kirk 1978:98 speaks refreshingly of his sense of humor, and the “spirit of high comedy” that suffuses the dinner scene; see also her witty account in her 1972 book, pp. 145–53, and Lawler 1995. Pearsall too recognizes the comedy in Patience’s long discourse: see 279–16.21 (B.14.104–65)n below. Clopper (1997:241–45) sees him in Franciscan terms as advocating “a kind of reckless abandonment,” merry and unlearned like Francis: “Both Francis and Patience are able to penetrate the Scriptures and to reveal Treuthe through divine inspiration and by their delight in their poverty” (244–45). Simpson 2007:142 offers an excellent analysis of his “specifically New Testament poetics, a poetics of paradox.” Gillespie 1994:105 regards him as a “minstrel of God,” apostolic in his mission like the “lunatyk lollares” of 9.107–40. Latin writers like to speak of suffering for Christ “patienter, immo gaudenter” (patiently, nay joyfully), citing Acts 5:41.
He plays a positive role by moving Will toward a deeper understanding of suffering, poverty, and the patient acceptance of both, as other critics such as Shepherd 1983 and Anna Baldwin 1990 have insisted. Kirk 1978:101 stresses his “grounding … in Charity,” and in general terms it seems right to say that he, Charity, and the Samaritan are versions of the same set of values, the major values of the poem; see also Bloomfield’s eloquent treatment of patience (the virtue rather than the character) and its central place in the poem, 1962:140–42. In Lawler 1995:98–99, I argued that Patience is Christ, especially since there is a continuous bilingual pun between the Latin participle patiens, the suffering one, i.e., Jesus, and the English word Patience, pronounced nearly the same way; see 15.152n below. As Reason says to Will (13.197, B.11.380), “Ho soffreth more then god?” (see Kirk 1978:101–2). Of course we should all be “pacient as pilgrimes for pilgrimes are we alle” (12.131, B.11.242), so that Patience (like Piers) is also Everyman, or what Everyman should be: what Will should be, and what Patience’s opposite Actyf, the central figure in the second half of the passus, should be. (The pun perhaps extends to the word “passus”: it means “step,” yes, and reminds us of Will’s quest, but it is also the past participle of patior and means “one who has suffered,” reminding us of the object of the quest, Christ.)
Curtis Gruenler argues persuasively that the entire dinner scene draws on riddle–literature, and that Patience is the “low-status outsider” so central to that tradition. He offers as analogues Solomon and Marcolf and Jacobus’s legend of “St Andrew and the Three Questions,” in which the saint makes a sudden appearance as a pilgrim at a dinner party, and poses three riddles that unmask a beautiful woman guest at the bishop’s table as the devil: “It is rather as if Langland had blended “St Andrew and the Three Questions” with the dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf” (2017:154). Given L’s close knowledge of Jacobus’s book (which also gives essentially the same story of St Bartholomew), however, we might even consider his accounts as a source rather than an analogue. Patience has not only the patience but the insight of a saint.
Watson 2007:99n says, “All critics concur that Will meets Patience because he needs to learn Patience.”
36 hym: Piers. Schmidt in his textual note to line 34 aptly cites B.13.131, where Conscience says, “I knowe Piers,” and B.7.134, C.8.13, where Piers speaks of Conscience’s teaching and counsel. hem all: I.e., them both. Conscience knew Piers well, and welcomed both him and Patience. All perhaps emphasizes how general Conscience’s hospitality is. Multi are called to this mangerye.
41 a syde table (B.13.36 a side borde): not the lowest possible place; see 14.137, 140 (B 12.197, 200).
The guests are seated and dinner is served (38–64, B.13.33–60)
42–46 (B.13.37–41) Clergie (B Conscience) cald aftur mete … potages: The nature of the food should not come as a surprise, given who the hosts are—what else would Scripture serve?—but in this deadpan account it always surprises us readers as much as it surprises the doctor. Jill Mann’s essay of 1979 is central here; I have already cited her assertion that the scene is the product of L’s rumination on “Not by bread alone.” Also relevant, surely, is Jesus’s saying, “My meat is to do the will of him that sent me” (John 4:34). And remarks from the fathers can be multiplied almost indefinitely. “Scriptura cibus est” (scripture is food), Rabanus PL 110.561; Gregory’s Moralia PL 76.573 on the crib (praesepe) of Job 39:9: “Praesepe hoc loco ipsa Scriptura sacra non inconvenienter accipitur, in qua verbi pabulo animalia sancta satiantur” (The crib in this passage is taken not inappropriately as Holy Scripture itself, in which holy animals are filled with the food of the word). Or see Gregory on Job 1:4, PL 76.540, to the effect that scripture is sometimes food (in darker passages), sometimes drink (in more open passages). That remark is repeated by writer after writer. In any case, that scripture was food was an utter commonplace—L didn’t really have to ruminate about the matter at all. (On allegorical food in Old French poetry, see Barney 1988:126–28 and Owen 1912:103–7.)
44a (B.13.39a) Edentes … sunt &c: “Eating and drinking such things as they have,” Luke 10:7. The passage (Luke 10:1–16) is Christ’s instructions to the seventy-two, which the friars tried to follow, but which their detractors used against them: see Szittya 1986:43–47, 209. Here in Luke 10 the disciples are told to stay in one house and eat what they are offered; the next verse repeats, “eat such things as are set before you” (this verse appears in the Franciscan Rule of 1223, Chapter 3, as Clopper points out [1997:239]). But our friar has no appetite for scripture. Patience, on the other hand, loves the food: he eats such things as they have. Will “mourns” at it (64, B.13.60), envying the friar’s substitute menu; he appears not to eat it, but hasn’t the gall or status to ask for something else, as the friar does.
45 of this mete þat maystre myhte nat wel chewe (B.13.40 þis maister of þise men no maner flessh eet): Þise men (B only), namely Austin, Ambrose, and the evangelists. Gruenler associates the doctor with the hyperlogical thought of Scotus and Ockham, who, so differently from Aquinas, “wrote very little about scripture” (2017:275–76).
KD-B rightly edit out the doctor’s “man” who is in almost all B mss, and does appear in Donaldson’s translation (1990); see their explanation on pp. 179–80. Kirk and Anderson, the editors of Donaldson’s translation, point out that a man “would presumably not be at the high table in any case.” Benson 2004:55 argues for the man because friars traveled in pairs, and because of the plural pronouns þei, hem, and hir in lines 42–43. But a companion would not be called “his man,” and the plural pronouns are in C too (47–48), though there is no question there of the man; L simply wanders here from strict focus on the dinner to make a general hit at friars; see the next note.
47–50a (B.13.42–45a) Of þat men myswonne … euometis &c: Though Scripture apparently does go back to the kitchen for mortrewes and potages, since later Will actually watches the friar eating mortreux, Conscience’s house would not be stocked with food bought from miswinnings. Thus the sentence beginning at line 47 (B.13.42) is best read as a general statement: the friar’s regular diet was more costly food—at his convent,