The fourteenth-century Franciscan author of the sermons found in the Fasciculus Morum is another preacher who demonstrates that certain moralisations preserved in ‘Properties’ had become part of a pool of conventional imagery available to writers. He includes at least one passage that is extremely close to Bartholomew’s wording, although without any such acknowledgement. Apparently echoing ‘Properties’ Book 13 on the sea, the preacher elaborates on the trope of the pilgrimage of the soul in his example of the person who ‘has his own body for his ship in which he carries a most precious merchandise, namely his soul … Reason, our captain, sits at the stern, which means that he must remember the wretchedness of his beginning. The mast in this ship is hope.’ The world is an ocean of danger for the soul: ‘Hidden rocks and sandbanks, sirens, Scylla, Charybdis, currents of pitch are the dangers at sea to be feared.’^[31]

Similarly, the author of Dives and Pauper uses the imagery of the sea voyage to illustrate how a person, like a steersman:

The two authors just quoted may not agree about why one should sit in the stern of the boat, but their common use of the allegory shows its currency and its flexibility. ‘Properties’ need not have been the only available source of the idea of pilgrimage across the sea of worldly life. Indeed, it has been suggested that by the end of the century the trope of the ship of the soul was a worn cliché in the mouths of Franciscan friars.^[33] At any rate, we know from maps, misericords and other graphic representations that fourteenth-century and later viewers could contemplate perdition in the forms of the siren, or of Scylla and Charybdis, whether or not they were directly acquainted with Bartholomew’s work.^[34]

The parable of the vineyard, which as we saw earlier is such an important source of Bartholomew’s imagery, became another well-worn but very flexible source of representations of labour, reward and lordship.^[35] It appears as a motif in fourteenth-century devotional literature, but it also provides a setting in poems and sermons for dramatisations of labour relations between ranks. In the poem Pearl and in other devotional works, it becomes a vehicle for doctrines about grace, eternal life and mystical unio with God.^[36] As in Gower’s Vox Clamantis and Langland’s Vision of Piers the Plowman, we find the figure of the ploughman and his co-labourers the ass, the ox and the dog used to represent ideals of obedient service and the subversion of those ideals. We can see from many literary examples that the figure of the ploughman with his oxen, itself a microcosm of hierarchy, provided an extremely adaptable and powerful image that could represent the Lord and the preacher or Langland’s Christian seeking Do-well; but also the ordinary labourer in the field, the oppressed labourer feeding the spendthrifts of the land.^[37] In a late-fourteenth-century Lollard sermon, God Himself is ‘an erþe tilier … in whose teme alle Cristen men shulden draw as oxen, vnder þe softe and liʒt ʒocke of loue’; but the preacher, though unworthy, is himself ‘set here at þis tyme to dryue þis worþi teme’ of parishioners with the goad of sharp sentences.^[38] Recalling Bartholomew’s vignettes of the ox and the ox-herd in Book 18, we can see how they can represent different ideals of labour from the perspective of the different estates.