PIERS THE PLOUGHMAN

Nothing is known for certain about the life of WILLIAM LANGLAND, an obscure fourteenth-century cleric, but a tentative outline can be made from supposedly autobiographical elements in the manuscripts of his poem. Born in about 1332 at Cleobury Mortimer in Shropshire, the son of a small Oxford-shire landholder, he was probably educated at the monastery of Great Malvern; he trained to be a priest but due to the death of his patrons he only took Minor Orders and was unable to advance in the Church. He wandered a good deal in England and was clearly familiar with London; he also lived for some while in a cottage on Cornhill with his wife Kit and his daughter Colette, making a meagre living by singing the Office of the Dead for wealthy patrons. Langland lived an unconventional life, constantly writing verse, and was thought by some to be crazed. Tall and thin, he was nicknamed ‘Long Will’. He died at the end of the century.

FRANK GOODRIDGE was Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Lancaster from 1965 until his death in 1984. Born in 1927, he graduated from Magdalen College, Oxford, and after teaching English for four years he was Senior Lecturer at St Mary’s College of Education, Twickenham, until 1965. He published poems, criticism and educational articles in various journals and was the author of a critical study of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.

PIERS THE PLOUGHMAN

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APPENDIX B: ‘The poorest folk are our neighbours’. C Text, Book x, lines 71–97

INTRODUCTION

WILLIAM LANGLAND was an obscure fourteenth-century cleric, of whom no contemporary record exists and of whose life nothing is known for certain. The only reliable external evidence we have for the authorship of Piers Plowman¹ is an ascription on the reverse side of the last leaf of one of the manuscripts,² which gives his name and parentage. Apart from this, we have to rely solely on the clues given in the successive versions of the poem, where the dreamer of the visions is gradually identified with a self who is also their author. Here we are on uncertain ground, since the poem cannot be read as spiritual autobiography. The dreamer is primarily a dramatic persona whose function, as in other medieval dream-poems, is to provide a link between the reader and the visions. Yet he reveals his baptismal name as William; in one place (XV, 145) he appears to surrender his full name by means of a cryptogram (a common method of signature in medieval poems); and in the later versions of the poem he takes on a waking existence that is convincingly life-like.^* There is no reason to doubt that there are here elements of genuine autobiography. On this basis we may work out a tentative outline of the poet’s life.

He was born about the year 1332 at Cleobury Mortimer in Shropshire and lived till the end of the century. He was the son (possibly illegitimate) of Stacy (Eustace) de Rokayle, who held land under the Despensers at Shipton-under-Wychwood in Oxford-shire. He was probably educated at the monastery of Great Malvern, where he passed through the usual theological training of a priest. But owing to the death of his patrons he only took Minor Orders and was unable to advance in the church. Mr W. A. Pantin³ describes the class of unbeneficed clergy to which Langland belonged as a clerical proletariat: ‘Socially and economically, this class must have been poles apart from the “sublime and literate persons”, though the case of Langland shows us that a more or less submerged cleric might be the intellectual equal of anybody.’

Langland seems to have wandered a good deal from place to place and mixed with all kinds of people. He knew London well and worked on his poem there. He tells us that he lived with his wife Kit and his daughter Colette in a cottage on Cornhill, and made a meagre living by singing the Office of the Dead for wealthy patrons. He certainly knew poverty at close quarters.^* We also hear his nickname, Long Will, and he frequently refers to his own tallness and leanness. He sometimes lived an unconventional life, dressed like a beggar; he was inclined to treat self-important people with little respect; he was constantly preoccupied with writing verses and some people thought him mad.

Langland must have spent a large part of his life revising and adding to his poem, for the surviving manuscripts belong to three distinct types representing three different stages in the poet’s conception. These are known as the A, B and C texts. The B text is the best known, and has therefore been chosen for the present translation.

The A text consists of a Prologue and eight books of the Vision of Piers Plowman followed by four books of the Life of Do-well – so that it ends inconclusively with the dreamer’s rejection by Learning and Scripture. The B text has a Prologue and twenty books and the C text, a revised and expanded version of this, a Prologue and twenty-three books. Langland calls his Books Passūs, which suggests the idea of steps in a developing argument.

Professor J. A. W. Bennett has brought forward convincing evidence⁴ to show that the A text was composed about the year 1370, and the B text recension between 1377 and 1379. The C text must have been composed some time after 1390. The controversial theory of multiple authorship has now been disposed of⁵ and students of the poem may safely regard the three versions as the work of one author.

To judge from the large number of manuscripts that still survive, Piers Plowman was very much a ‘living’ text in its day, being widely read throughout the fifteenth century and well into the sixteenth.⁶ But in the latter part of the sixteenth century its West Midland dialect began to present serious difficulties. Langland’s terms seemed (as Puttenham put it⁷) ‘hard and obscure’, and he came to be regarded chiefly as ‘a malcontent of his time’ – a precursor of the Reformation, admired for the bitterness of his invective against the Roman church. Between 1561 and 1813 no edition of Piers was printed and its reputation remained more or less unchanged. Whenever it was mentioned it was described as a satire, and Dr T. D. Whitaker, Langland’s first modern editor, referred to Langland as ‘the first English satirist’, praising him chiefly for his rich Hogarthian scenes of medieval life. The more allegorical parts were considered ‘insipid’.

The rediscovery of Langland’s full range as a great English poet – representative of his age as Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth or Yeats were of theirs – has been a slow process. There have been genuine difficulties, as well as prejudices, to overcome. In the nineteenth century many readers were still dominated by the image of Langland as a dour Wycliffite preacher, and tended to regard his allegorizing as a mode of abstraction. Even in this century progress has frequently been held up – by controversy over side-issues, by misleading ideas about the limitations of allegory and also by the largely groundless assumption that Langland wrote carelessly and was no artist. As recently as the fifties, when the present translator was working on this version, there was surprisingly little help to be gleaned from the mass of scholarly material available, and no up-to-date editions of the texts. I was consequently obliged to do a good deal of pioneer work in interpreting the more neglected parts of the poem, and some of this was embodied in a lengthy Introduction and Appendices, large parts of which have been dispensed with in the present edition, since adequate criticism is now available elsewhere. For textual criticism, students should go to George Kane’s edition of the A text and his discussion of the evidence for authorship; for closer critical study, to works like those of Elizabeth Salter and John Lawlor.⁸

In common with Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise Lost, Piers Plowman deals with the largest of all themes: the meaning of man’s life on earth in relation to his ultimate destiny. Like Milton, Langland seeks to ‘justify the ways of God to men’. But his perspective is different from either Dante’s or Milton’s. He does not take us on a journey through worlds other than this, or ask us to look back on life from the point of view of hell, purgatory or heaven. Nor does he remove us, as Milton does, to a distant vantage-point in time from which to survey human history. His poem is no epic in the ordinary sense of that word. Langland’s cycle of visions begins and ends with fourteenth-century England. His pilgrimage, like Bunyan’s, is that of man’s individual life and his life in society, as it has to be lived on this middle-earth between the ‘Tower of Truth’ and the ‘Dungeon of Falsehood’. Langland was concerned, as Blake was, both with the condition of society and with the history of the human soul struggling to ‘cleanse the doors of perception’ and come to terms with ultimate truth. But for Langland, this meant translating his visions, at every point, into an art that had an immediate application to practical life. Though epic in scope and constantly rising to a prophetic point of view, Piers Plowman is cast in the didactic form of medieval moral allegory – a spiritual journey which, though it takes place in a series of dreams dreamt by an imaginary dreamer, is constantly related to life as it has to be lived. The form allows various different time-scales, and with them different levels of meaning, to operate side by side, or be superimposed on one another. First there is the ‘literal’ life-span of the dreamer or poet. He is represented at the beginning as a lazy vagabond or ordinary human wayfarer whose interest in Truth amounts to little more than idle curiosity. But through his dreams he sees the world with fresh eyes, is bewitched into thinking seriously and is sent forth by Holy Church on a pilgrimage in search of Truth, which he can only find through learning the law of Love. So he must progressively meet and assimilate every aspect of reality, and rise from his preoccupation with physical, economic, social and political facts to the level of moral and spiritual vision.

Though the story of Will’s growth in knowledge and understanding provides the poem’s one consistent thread of narrative, it is no regular step-by-step progress. It is as irregular and unpredictable as life itself – there are moments that are crowded with vivid impressions, or flooded in solitude with the wonder of new realization, followed by long barren years of intellectual debate, uncertainty or, perhaps, complete unawareness. In Book XI the poet ironically allows forty-five years of the dreamer’s life to drop out as if they had never existed, so that he passes in a moment from the struggles of early manhood to those of old age. Erratic, obstinate and often misguided, he constantly has to double back on his tracks to rediscover what he had half known before.

Unlike Milton or Blake, Langland was a master of comic effects. He could survey the world with humour, sometimes mocking or playful, more often wry and sardonic. So the pilgrimage is partly burlesque – the dreamer’s over-eager curiosity and general lack of solemnity lead to many setbacks on his quest. Both he and the personae of his dreams bear witness, dramatically, to the absurdity of the human situation in the face of eternity’s uncompromising demands. For Langland seems to combine opposite qualities – on the one hand, an almost exasperating sense of the absolute, that insists on following up every hint and will never leave a subject till the truth of it has been pursued to its final conclusions (‘I shal tellen for treuth sake, take hede who so lyketh!’); on the other hand a sense of man’s almost incurable folly and waywardness, and an awareness of the plain ungarnished facts of life as it has to be lived from moment to moment. He likes to show common sense confounding theory, but likes even better to show idealism confounding worldly common sense – as Conscience confounds Lady Fee, or Patience subdues the worldly Haukyn by showing him poverty. So the poem sometimes swings back and forth between extremes: harsh prophecy or solemn warning, and Rabelaisian satire that is not afraid to expose contradictions in terms of farce. These opposites are most effectively combined in the swift, sure satire of the final Book – and it is hard to see how such a resilient response to experience can ever have given rise to the idea of Langland as a grim pessimist. There is very little in his poem of the ‘Nordic strain’.

One of the effects of Langland’s self-mockery is to associate the dreamer, and ourselves, with the action, so that we are directly involved, and made to feel the difference between knowledge and full participation, which is one of the poem’s main themes. But the dreamer seldom occupies the centre of the picture. The visions themselves, with their ‘higher’ time-scales, dominate his life, and the prime mover is an unseen providence that is always a little beyond the horizon of vision. So we gain from the poem a sense of reality as something objective and ineluctable, penetrating and overshadowing life as we know it in the world.

Superimposed on the time-scale of a single fourteenth century life-span, with its direct references to current political events, are the further time-scales apprehended in higher moments of vision. The painstaking allegorical expositions that describe the long way of the commandments are broken by sudden moments of illumination – hard surfaces of doctrine and argument dissolve into kaleide-scopic pictures, each revealing more than the last. One important scale that holds these dramatic variations together, especially in the last five Books, is that of the liturgical year, and we can observe in Langland the process of ritual being turned into. drama. Beginning with the Nativity in the middle of Book XVI, the dreamer passes on rapidly through Epiphany and Lent to the climax of Passiontide and Easter (Book XVIII), then returns by way of Pentecost, in Book XIX, to Advent in the final Book. Coupled with this liturgical cycle run the main themes of sacred history – the story of the patriarchs and prophets followed by that of Christ and his church, which leads on inevitably to the terminus a quo of the present.

But in Langland the contemporary scene is itself shifting and multi-dimensional. Here, as in the realm of spiritual experience, his clairvoyance can penetrate beyond appearances and show us what lies behind the façade of church and state. He is one of the few writers in whose work it is difficult to distinguish between prophetic insight – that sometimes works on a historical or eschatological level – and plain truthfulness, especially (as John Lawlor has put it) his ‘unerring eye for woes that are actual’. He did not sympathize with the poor at a safe distance; he felt need and hunger as immediate sensations and could express them in sharply physical and kinaesthetic terms. His denunciation of hypocrisy therefore carries conviction. We do not dismiss his prophetic role as a preacher’s mannerism. At almost any stage in his narrative, he can rise easily to a point of view from which he can relate present facts to first causes and final ends. The present fulfils past warnings and shows portents of what is still to come. Christ and Antichrist are here and now. This gift of prophetic vision lends to the poem a time-scale vaster than that of any epic, and fills it with glimpses of a divine economy that may ultimately lead to the salvation of all mankind. Behind Langland’s ‘animated foreground’, there is always ‘the long vista of eternity’.⁹

All these perspectives are present within the poem – in its flexible language and varied dramatic sequences : we need not look outside it to find the ‘meaning’. Other medieval allegories are more formal and diagrammatic, but Piers Plowman does not depend on a fixed scheme of symbolic reference. There is little need, for example, to explain what ‘Meed’ (which I have translated ‘Fee’) is or was – her words and actions provide as full a context by which to judge her as any that Dickens could give. Allegory was for Langland a dynamic way of thinking or ‘making out’ the truth in pictorial and dramatic form, by intuition as well as by observation and logical argument. To do this, he freely used all the resources of the vernacular language, and the potentialities of the dream form. He moved easily from brisk reportage to grotesque nightmare, or from angry theological disputation to the dream-within-a-dream that is close to mystical vision. There is no infallible key to such dramatic poetry – we must be constantly alert to changes in tone and direction that would be impossible in the stately verse of a poem like Paradise Lost. We are required, in Book III, for instance, to move rapidly from a world that exhibits the perverse power of money, and jingles with thousands of florins, to a moving statement of the divine law of reward and restitution. This in turn is later associated with one Robert the Robber, who can never hope to repay his debts, and so is compared with the penitent thief on Calvary. The essence of Langland’s dream technique is its capacity for what Elizabeth Salter has called ‘rapid contraction and expansion of reference’ – where vivid realism can play its part within a progressively widening field of religious vision.

Langland’s imagination was essentially visual and dramatic, and there are parts of his poem that might make good material for a film. We are struck at once by the fullness and variety of his picture of the Plain of the world, with its crowded panoramas and ugly close-ups, its noisy comings and goings and its intimate details. In the early books we witness a constant clash of opposing forces, and the truth about human society is revealed in the guise of a powerful and absorbing drama. Familiar vices and virtues no longer appear commonplace, but grotesque or disturbing. The ‘real’ characters – pardoners, lawyers, friars or thieves – are so placed alongside allegorical ones that the latter assume the semblance of life. Guile, Fee, Civil-Law, Conscience and Reason become the dynamic forces that move the world, and all the others fall under their direction.

A character like Sloth or Fraud is the personification of a propensity found in many men; and by embodying it in a single person, the poet shows us what shapes it assumes in human society. He reveals to us our moral qualities, stripped of all the conventions by which we seek to hide them. A schoolboy who uses a nickname, or the dramatist who gives one of his characters a name like Sir Francis Wronghead, is usually pointing to some social foible which characterizes a particular type. Langland employs a similar idiom, but places his types in surprising contexts that shock us out of our stock associations, so that we cannot mistake the enormity of the evils they represent and the perversions of truth that they bring about. By this method of contrast and opposition, familiar virtues also take on a dramatic interest which they rarely have in naturalistic drama or fiction.

Each of the Deadly Sins carries a load of sins greater than any man could possibly carry: the dominant vice is displayed in all its grossest forms. Sloth is not merely a lazy priest who goes hunting when he should be saying his Office; he is all kinds of sloth, lay and clerical, rolled into one. The world is foreshortened, and the gluttony of Glutton is reflected in a crowd of others whom he meets in the tavern. In the description of the soiled coat of Haukyn the Active Man, all the sins of the Plain are run together, flourishing under the cloak of self-important worldliness – and it is he whom Langland chooses to test the power of the Christian absolutes, Patience and Poverty. After the dreamer’s frustrating struggles with a succession of intellectual faculties and pursuits (Thought, Study, Intelligence, Imagination, etc.), he meets a being, Anima, in whom all the powers of the human soul are combined; and when he has afterwards encountered the separate god-given virtues in incarnate form, he falls in with the Samaritan who unites all these graces in the one attribute of Love. The Samaritan in turn dissolves into the person of Piers-Christ; and it is important to bear in mind that Christ himself in this poem is also an ‘allegorical’ person, representing a god-like potentiality in the soul – for Langland shared something of the view of Meister Eckhart that ‘a good man is the only-begotten Son of God’.

So the dramatis personae of Piers Plowman are not static abstract categories. Each is a mirror that reflects those aspects of life that stand out at a particular stage of mental or spiritual development, defining its categories of thought or modes of perception. They are the means by which the relevance of those categories and concepts to everyday life can be put to the proof. Langland does not offer us the ‘plane mirror reflection’ of the comedy of manners, but rather a comedy of humours, where single properties assume a life more powerful than that of ordinary individuals and gather into themselves a large number of observations and experiences. The great strength of such a method lies in its power to cut across habitual expectations – our conceptions, for example, of classes of people or individual ‘character’ types, or our common notions of what we ourselves are or may become. Langland’s form of allegory reorganizes human experience according to new patterns. The cells of the dreamer’s thoughts and perceptions keep dividing and coming together again around fresh nuclei. The simplicity of Holy Church’s teaching gives way to the multiplicity of Falsehood’s following; that of Piers into the contradictions of the mental faculties encountered in the search for Do-well, which is a kind of psychological drama: the dreamer’s attention is turned inwards as he seeks the truth among the conflicting powers of the mind. Here the dramatic effect lies in the individual confrontation between the dreamer and his various alter egos (‘single figures or incidents etched in sharp relief’¹⁰) and in the vigorous to and fro of intellectual debate and homily. What Learning, Study, Intelligence and the rest have to say to him is seldom more than he is capable of seeing for himself at the time. They all reflect his limitations. But as he increases in self-knowledge, the selves whom he at first had failed to recognize slowly coalesce, and their powers are gathered round new centres, the heavenly graces or virtues. The dramatic technique again changes, leaving the dreamer a passive spectator: in place of personal encounters we have dramatized narrative or parable, culminating in the ritualized drama of religious contemplation. The various narrative modes of picture and dialogue, action and comment are now combined, since all the faculties and virtues are concentrated on the person of Piers or Christ. But though the texture is here multi-layered and demands the reader’s full attention on various levels, the poem never loses its dramatic and pictorial impact. At the climax of the Harrowing of Hell Lang-land’s style still has much in common with that of the Miracle Plays that were performed in the streets.

Langland was never wilfully an obscure poet: he sought strenuously to make all his meanings clear, weaving all the glosses and explanations into the body of his narrative. He preferred simple similes to complex symbols and metaphors; he transposed abstruse doctrines into everyday terms or embodied them in dramatic dialogue so as to render them immediately applicable to practical life; he carefully spelt out each step in an argument and exhibited the truth from many different sides. If the resulting structure is still in places confusing and complex, this is only because, to him, the application of simple truth to actual experience was no simple matter.

Langland’s willingness to follow, at times, wherever the spirit leads – a characteristic of most medieval devotional writing – occasions many digressions, stoppings-short and unexpected transitions. The pattern is incomplete in parts, yet unified on a higher level as the dreamer becomes caught up in the mystery of Christ and his spokesman, Piers. Piers represents the human ideal which is the ultimate object of the search. In Books VI and VII he is the good ploughman who alone knows how to obey the natural law. During the debates of Do-well he disappears, for the dreamer has lost sight of his ideal and only hears of him in hints and riddles. When he reappears, he has undergone a change corresponding to the change in the dreamer’s understanding of what Truth is and where it is to be found. He is the perfect Christian and the representative of Christ mirrored in the soul of everyman. Having failed to discover him in the priesthood of his day, the dreamer must look for his image reflected in the powers of his own soul.

Allegory, as Langland employs it, is a way of testing and proving experience. It allows him almost unlimited scope to vary his modes of thought and feeling as the subject-matter demands. He can mix realism and fantasy in whatever proportion he chooses, and reinterpret for himself – in the concrete language of everyday life – traditional doctrines, symbols, legends and sacred histories. Since he did not write, like the ‘court’ poets, for a select audience of listeners, but rather for a wider literate public who were to read his poem in manuscript, he was able to employ every variety of speech, ranging from that of the theological lecture to the coarse vernacular of the street or tavern. There could be any number of personae – new ones might suddenly appear, while others merged together or disappeared. Through their mouths he could say whatever he wished, twisting the narrative this way and that as his mental and spiritual horizon expanded or contracted. The secret of the poem’s appeal to a modern reader may lie partly in this irregularity of construction, for instead of giving us a finished picture of the Christian view of life, it registers all our ‘uncertainties, mysteries, doubts’ and shows a continuing process of thought: Truth is something to be appropriated to oneself, not merely understood by the mind.

Langland was not faced with the problem of finding a voice through which to project his response to the problems of his time. He had not to struggle for a style amid conflicting standards of poetic decorum. The alliterative verse that he used provided a comparatively easy, natural mode of utterance; its flexibility was perfectly adapted to the play and dramatic movement of the dream-allegory. In his day this form of verse seems to have been popular in the west and north of England – and though a court poet like Chaucer may have regarded it as provincial and old-fashioned, it is worth remembering that Langland was an educated cleric and also a Londoner, able to widen its range and assimilate into it many different traditions of speech. His was an age of oral learning and theological disputation, when the style of the homilist provided a matrix out of which writers could draw what they chose – even the Canterbury pilgrims tend to lecture one another. As Mr Owst has shown¹¹, the medieval sermon was a repository of vernacular speech, where graphic similes and proverbial phrases jostled with learned terms. In Langland’s day, the English language was not stratified according to class, function or level of literacy so much as it has been since. The reservoir on which he was able to draw contained no less than the whole spoken and written speech of his time. Glutton with his Great Oaths, Sloth with his ballads of Robin Hood, the lazy workmen singing a snatch from a bawdy French song did not seem out of keeping in a poem that drew much of its finest language from the Vulgate, the Fathers and the mystics. Religious discourse was not a solemn and mannered performance, remote from the common vernacular, and Langland’s medley of tongues is the characteristic voice of fourteenth-century England. His art consists largely in deploying all its arresting combinations and contrasts. One of his favourite devices is to allow the hieratic and the demotic, the learned riddle and the popular joke, to fall out in quick succession or change places. At its simplest, this is the means by which a particular speaker turns the tables on his opponent, unexpectedly adopting his mode of talk. So Langland’s two-edged irony repeatedly plays on the contrasts between Latin and English, clerical and lay, elaborate commentary and simple text, learned word-spinning and proverbial wisdom – seeking thereby to distinguish what is genuinely profound from specious sophistry.

The weaving of heterogeneous dialects (typified by the voices of Piers and the priest flinging abuse and Scriptural texts at one another ‘till their noise awoke me’) provides a basis for all those bold contrasts and connexions on which Langland’s purpose depends – to reconcile irreconcilables and break down men’s defences against the divine command to seek perfection.

Such a design required a form of verse that could enlist without strain all the dramatic and rhetorical devices of prose. Langland had fortunately inherited a form of alliterative verse, ultimately derived from Old English, which had broken free from the strict ‘classical’ rules and reappeared as a fluent, ‘free’ verse that did not depend on poetic diction. Other poets of the ‘Alliterative Revival’ – the courtly poets of the north and north-west – developed for their special audiences a new and sometimes elaborate poetic diction, loading their lines with colourful words and strong alliteration. But in that part of the West Country from which Langland derived his basic style, the verse was comparatively unadorned and the alliteration was unobtrusive. This made possible a stark simplicity of statement and a sensitive use of natural speech responsive to the pressure of immediate feeling.

Middle English alliterative verse has no regular metre, but each line is divided by a natural speech-pause into two halves that are linked by three or four stressed syllables beginning with the same sound. In Piers Plowman there are usually two alliterative syllables in the first half-line echoed by one in the second – as in this passage from Book XX:

Somme lyked nouzte pis leche and lettres pei sent,
zif any surgien were in pe sege pat softer couthe plastre.
Sire lief-to-lyve-in-leccherye lay þere and groned;
For fasting of a fryday he ferde as he wolde deye.

It will be noticed that the language and rhythm are colloquial, the length of line varies considerably and there can be any number of ‘slack’ syllables.

In verse that is based on metrical feet, the way we read each word and phrase depends on its placing in relation to a regular pattern of stresses. In alliterative verse the basic unit is simply the half-line, which is an ordinary phrase or speech-unit, to be read just as it would normally be spoken. Its poetic effect depends on the way it completes or contrasts with the other half-line, and on its rhythmic and dramatic relation to the sequence of phrases to which it belongs. The poet did not think so much in grammatical sentences, as in balanced, antithetical or accumulative sequences of phrases, each a separate unit that chimed or clashed with others. Sometimes they interact sharply as in the alternations of dialogue. At other times they grow from one another like the momentary inspirations of an eloquent speaker augmenting and amplifying his theme, and playing on his hearers by constant variations of pace. The effects nearly always appear spontaneous, even in the more laboured passages. Though he obeyed no formal pattern, Langland could build up his contrasted patterns of sound with the skill of a great dramatist. Sometimes the spate of his eloquence appears to flow on unchecked, running over from line to line and eddying hither and thither; but there comes a point of climax where the whole force of a speech is gathered together in a single transparent image, or breaks against an unexpected obstacle that gives an entirely new direction to the argument.

Langland’s art is strictly functional: his language is always shaped for a specific didactic or religious purpose – to bring home some spiritual truth, either to himself or his contemporaries. But even from a prose translation the reader should gain some appreciation of the varied resources of poetic speech by which he sought to turn moral and spiritual truths into imaginable realities. I hope to have caught something of his sharp feeling for physical things, whether loathsome or lovely; of the limpid simplicity of single lines and arresting images; of the broad comedy and the bold dramatic turns and contrasts; of the ironic juggling with words and meanings, and the elaborate rhetorical climaxes built up by insistent repetition and parallelism, that suddenly turn inward on the reader; and occasionally, the magnificent cadences that remind us of the language of the King James Bible.

To discover all these riches, and many more, the reader must turn to the original text, for which a translation is no substitute. My chief aim here has been to render the full sense of the poem in a form that will be easily accessible to the general reader. I have put sense first, because Langland, more than any other poet, subordinated style to subject-matter – and because I think it essential for a person approaching the poem for the first time to gain some impression of his complete scope and design.

I have striven especially hard to do justice to those long homiletic and theological passages which are sometimes omitted, and to bring out their full depth and power. A comparison of the three texts shows Langland more scrupulous even than Wordsworth in his concern for detail, striving for clarity and precision in word and phrase and anxious that his intentions should not be mistaken. A prose translation that strives for the same clarity in a modern idiom may help to clear away the impression of looseness and archaism which some verse translations convey. My anxiety has been to present the poem in a form that will make a direct impact on a modern mind.

I experimented with alliterative verse for some time before deciding to write in prose. Verse certainly proved the easier, and I found in writing alliterative verse a facile tendency to blur the sense in order to retain an equivalence of sound alone. A hybrid language of Middle and Modern English appears to relieve the translator of the necessity to find a correct modern equivalent.

I think, too, that a great deal of Langland’s strength and suppleness has survived among preachers and pamphleteers, and that the style of radical social commentary and journalism at its best, where abstract statements are lit up by vivid pictures and vernacular expressions, is derived from the preaching and satire of the Middle Ages. These, together with the prose of the medieval mystics and the translators of the Bible, may provide models for rendering Langland that are as good, at least, as the work of any modern poet.

The chief temptation in writing prose, which I have been careful to avoid, is to produce a tightened summary version, jettisoning part of Langland’s cargo of phrases in order to improve the grammatical structure. I have also tried to avoid ironing out Langland’s idiosyncrasies – asides, repetitions, parentheses and play on words – and have retained a good deal of the alliteration. The prose has this at least in common with Langland’s verse, that it is meant to be read with the ear rather than the eye.

For Langland’s texts I have substituted the Authorized Version or, in the case of the Psalms, that of the Book of Common Prayer. All the scriptural and other references are given in the Notes. I have also placed in the Notes a brief Book-by-Book commentary on the allegory, which the reader would do best to ignore, until he has read the poem.

I wish to thank those friends who have helped me with particular passages, and I am especially grateful to my wife for extensive revisions. I owe my first interest in Piers Plowman to Professor J. A. W. Bennett, who has kindly discussed with me several difficulties in the text and corrected some errors. Naturally, he is not responsible for those that remain, and there may be readings here with which he disagrees.

Finally, I am grateful to Dr E. V. Rieu and Mrs Betty Radice for continued kindness and patience while the original work, and its recent revision, were in progress.

THE PLAIN FULL OF PEOPLE

THE STORY. The poet takes to the roads, and sets out to roam the world in search of marvels. One day he falls asleep, and dreams of the plain of this world, set between the Tower of Truth and the Dungeon of Falsehood. On this plain he sees a motley crowd of people, most of them seeking worldly gain, among whom the greedy, unscrupulous churchmen are the most conspicuous. He also sees a king set up to maintain law, and, in the fable of the rats and mice who tried to bell the cat, witnesses the failure of the Commons to hold their lawless master in check. Then once more he surveys the throng of people, moving about in a great bubbub of noise.

ONE summer season, when the sun was warm, I rigged myself out in shaggy woollen clothes, as if I were a shepherd; and in the garb of an easy-living hermit¹ I set out to roam far and wide through the world, hoping to hear of marvels. But on a morning in May, among the Malvern Hills, a strange thing happened to me, as though by magic. For I was tired out by my wanderings, and as I lay down to rest under a broad bank by the side of a stream, and leaned over gazing into the water, it sounded so pleasant that I fell asleep.

And I dreamt a marvellous dream: I was in a wilderness, I could not tell where, and looking Eastwards² I saw a tower high up against the sun, and splendidly built on top of a hill; and far beneath it was a great gulf, with a dungeon in it, surrounded by deep, dark pits, dreadful to see. But between the tower and the gulf I saw a smooth plain, thronged with all kinds of people, high and low together, moving busily about their worldly affairs.

Some laboured at ploughing and sowing, with no time for pleasure, sweating to produce food for the gluttons to waste. Others spent their lives in vanity, parading themselves in a show of fine clothes. But many, out of love for our Lord and in the hope of Heaven, led strict lives devoted to prayer and penance – for such are the hermits and anchorites who stay in their cells, and are not forever hankering to roam about, and pamper their bodies with sensual pleasures.

Others chose to live by trade, and were much better off – for in our worldly eyes such men seem to thrive. Then there were the professional entertainers, some of whom, I think, are harmless minstrels, making an honest living by their music; but others, babblers and vulgar jesters,³ are true Judas’ children! They invent fantastic tales about themselves, and pose as half-wits, yet they show wits enough whenever it suits them, and could easily work for a living if they had to! I will not say all that St Paul says about them; it is enough to quote, ‘He who talks filth is a servant of the Devil.’⁴

And there were tramps and beggars hastening on their rounds, with their bellies and their packs crammed full of bread. They lived by their wits, and fought over their ale – for God knows, they go to bed glutted with food and drink, these brigands, and get up with foul language and filthy talk; and all day long, Sleep and shabby Sloth are at their heels.

And I saw pilgrims and palmers⁵ banding together to visit the shrines at Rome and Compostella.⁶ They went on their way full of clever talk, and took leave to tell fibs about it for the rest of their lives. And some I heard spinning such yarns of the shrines they had visited, you could tell by the way they talked that their tongues were more tuned to lying than telling the truth, no matter what tale they told.

Troops of hermits with their hooked staves were on their way to Walsingham, with their wenches following after. These great, long lubbers, who hated work, were got up in clerical gowns to distinguish them from laymen, and paraded as hermits for the sake of an easy life.

I saw the Friars there too – all four Orders of them⁷ – preaching to the people for what they could get. In their greed for fine clothes, they interpreted the Scriptures to suit themselves and their patrons. Many of these Doctors of Divinity can dress as handsomely as they please, for as their trade advances, so their profits increase. And now that Charity has gone into business, and become confessor-in-chief to wealthy lords, many strange things have happened in the last few years; unless the Friars and Holy Church mend their quarrel, the worst evil in the world⁸ will soon be upon us.

There was also a Pardoner, preaching like a priest. He produced a document covered with Bishops’ seals, and claimed to have power to absolve all the people from broken fasts and vows of every kind. The ignorant folk believed him and were delighted. They came up and knelt to kiss his documents, while he, blinding them with letters of indulgence thrust in their faces, raked in their rings and jewellery with his roll of parchment! – So the people give their gold to support these gluttons, and put their trust in dirty-minded scoundrels. If the Bishop were worthy of the name, if he kept his ears open to what went on around him, his seal would not be sent out like this to deceive the people. But it is not by the Bishop’s leave that this rogue preaches; for the parish priest is in league with the Pardoner, and they divide the proceeds between them – money which, but for them, would go to the poor of the parish.

Then I heard parish priests complaining to the Bishop that since the Plague⁹ their parishes were too poor to live in; so they asked permission to live in London, where they could traffic in Masses,¹⁰ and chime their voices to the sweet jingling of silver. Bishops and novices, Doctors of Divinity and other great divines – to whom Christ has given the charge of men’s souls, and whose heads are tonsured to show that they must absolve, teach, and pray for their parishioners, and feed the poor – I saw them all living in London, even in Lent. Some took posts at Court counting the king’s money, or in the Courts of Exchequer and Chancery, where they claimed his dues from the wards of the City and his right to unclaimed property. Others went into the service of lords and ladies, sitting like stewards managing household affairs – and gabbled their daily Mass and Office without devotion. Indeed, I fear that there are many whom Christ, in His great Consistory Court,¹¹ will curse for ever.

Then I understood something of that power which was entrusted to Peter, to ‘bind and unbind’¹² as the Scripture puts it. Peter, by our Lord’s command, left it in the hands of Love, sharing it out among the four greatest virtues,¹³ which are called Cardinal. For these are the hinges on which swing the gates of Christ’s kingdom, closing against some, and opening on the bliss of Heaven to others. But as to those other Cardinals at Rome who have assumed the same name, taking upon themselves the appointment of a Pope to possess the power of St Peter, I will not call them in question. The election of a Pope requires both love and learning. There is much more I could say about the Papal Court, but it is not for me to say it.

Then there came into the field¹⁴ a king, guided by the knights. The powers of the Commons gave him his throne, and Common Sense provided men of learning to counsel him and to protect the people.

The king, with his nobles and counsellors, decided that the common people should provide them with resources; so the people devised different trades, and engaged ploughmen to labour and till the soil for the good of the whole community, as honest ploughmen should. Then the king and the people, helped by Common Sense, established law and order, so that every man might know his rights and duties.

Whereupon a long, lean, crazy fellow¹⁵ knelt before the king and said gravely: ‘God save you, your majesty, and protect your kingdom. May He grant you grace to be so just a ruler, that you may win the love of your loyal subjects, and the reward of Heaven hereafter.’

And then from the air on high an angel of Heaven¹⁶ stooped down and spoke something in Latin – for the ignorant folk could not speak for themselves, they could only suffer and serve; so the angel said:

‘Sum rex, sum Princeps, – neutrum fortasse deinceps; –
O qui iura regis Christi specialia regis,
Hoc quod agas melius iustus es, esto pius!
Nudum ius a te vestiri vult pietate;
Qualia vis metere talia grana sere.
Si ius nudatur de iure metatur;
Si seritur pietas de pietate metas!’*

A garrulous fellow, with his head full of quotations, took offence at these words, and retorted to the angel:

‘Dum rex a regere dicatur nomen habere,

Nomen habet sine re nisi studet iura tenere.’^†

Whereupon all the common people, wishing to add their own piece of advice to the king, shouted out a line of Latin – let him make what he could of it –

Then all at once there ran out a horde of rats, and with them more than a thousand little mice,¹⁷ all coming to hold a Council to discuss their common safety. For a cat¹⁸ from a certain court used to come when he chose, to pounce on them and paw them, toss them about and play with them in the most alarming manner. ‘We’re surrounded with so many dangers,’ they said, ‘that we scarcely dare to move. And if we complain of his games, he’ll plague us all the more and never let us alone – he’ll scratch and claw us and trap us between his paws, till our lives are not worth living! If we could only think of some scheme to stop him, we could be lords in our own domain and live at ease.’

Then a certain rat, well known as an eloquent speaker, put forward an excellent plan of his own invention: ‘I have noticed,’ he said, ‘certain liveried men in the City, who wear bright gold chains around their necks, and fancy collars. They behave like dogs off the leash, straying about wherever they like over warrens and commons; and I’m told that they sometimes go wandering off and cause trouble elsewhere. Now it has often occurred to me, that if they had bells attached to their collars, people could hear them coming and run away!