Appendix A: The Layman’s Complaint
The verses that stand at the head of this book are known to scholarship as “The Layman’s Complaint,” a title supplied by the poem’s modern editors rather than by the manuscript. The earliest copy we have appears in a fifteenth-century hand in a manuscript of Pore Caitiff, a fourteenth-century devotional work associated with the rise of the Lollards.1Utley, The Layman’s Complaint and the Friar’s Answer, 141. Pore Caitiff itself, “like most English compositions of the time,” was “once ascribed to Wycliffe.”2Allen, Some Fourteenth Century Borrowings, 4. The poem’s author is unknown, but its company and its complaint place it in the Lollard current of protest: a layman turns a mendicant friar from his door because the friar sells the word of God. The manuscript preserves alongside it a second poem answering in the friar’s voice. As printed in the manuscript, with italics marking expanded abbreviations, the poem reads:3Utley, The Layman’s Complaint and the Friar’s Answer, 144.
Þou þat sellest þe worde of God, + Be þou berfot, be þou schod, + Cum nomore here. + Inprincipio erat verbum + Is þe worde of God, all and sum, + Þat þou sellest, lewed frere.
Hit is cursed symonie + Eþer to selle or to bye + Ony gostly þinge; + Þerfore, frere, go as þou come, + And hold þe in þi hows at home + Til we þe almis brynge.
Goddis lawe ȝe reuerson, + And mennes howsis ȝe persen, + As Poul beriþ wittnes. + As mydday deuelis goynge abowte + For money lowle ȝe lowte, + Flatteringe boyþe more and lesse.
A few of the poem’s words and gestures need unpacking for a modern reader.
Be thou barefoot, be thou shod. Some friars went barefoot to demonstrate their vow of poverty and their dependence on others; the layman dismisses the seller of God’s word whichever sort he is.
In principio erat verbum. “In the beginning was the word”—John 1:1 in Latin. Reciting this verse was a standard greeting of the mendicant friars, associated with their practices of begging. The layman turns it against the friar: the very word in his mouth is the word of God, “all and some” (part and parcel), and he sells it.
Lewd frere. An ignorant, unlearned friar. Frere is the poet’s word for friar.
Ghostly thing. A spiritual thing. The couplet states the classic definition of simony that this book examines: it is “cursed simony” either to sell or to buy any spiritual thing.
Hold thee in thy house at home / Till we thee alms bring. The layman inverts the mendicant program: rather than the friar going about to beg, let him stay home until the laity choose to bring him alms.
Men’s houses ye pierce. An allusion to 2 Tim. 3[:6] in the Lollard Bible, where Paul warns of those who “pierce” (creep into) houses.
Midday devils. The midday devil is a personification of the sin of acedia—a neglect of duty.
More and less. Rich and poor; the friars flatter high and low alike as they bow for money.
The epigraph gives the poem in modernized spelling, following this book’s practice for early English sources: the spelling is updated, but the poet’s words and word order are kept, which preserves most of the original’s rhymes (thing/bring, about/lout—to lout is to bow). Frere is retained rather than respelled friar so that it still rhymes with here. One rhyme no spelling can recover: simony and bye rhymed in the poet’s pronunciation, but the sounds of English have since moved apart.