William Langland’s Piers Plowman

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ARTICLE SUMMARY Piers Plowman is an English alliterative poem composed by a shadowy late fourteenth-century cleric named William Langland. Notoriously complex, the poem is among the most imaginative, urgent, and influential works of medieval literature. It presents a series of visions in which a dreamer witnesses or encounters kings, beggars, personified vices and virtues, loquacious mental faculties, Satan’s army, and Christ incarnate (embodied by the title character, Piers the Plowman). The dreamer’s goal is to complete the metaphorical pilgrimage to St. Truth and to learn what it means to do well in the Christian community. This article surveys the major features and problems of Piers Plowman and of its textual, literary, and intellectual traditions. William Langland, whose dates of birth and death are unknown, appears to have published Piers Plowman in three successive versions in the 1370s and 1380s. The poem survives in more than sixty complete manuscripts and manuscript fragments and in two sixteenth-century print editions, making it a late medieval best seller. Langland chose the alliterative meter for Piers Plowman, thereby affiliating his work with the medieval poetic tradition that includes Beowulf (likely written between 700 and 750), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1375), and many others. In organizing the poem around a sequence of visions, punctuated by waking episodes, Langland reimagined a popular late medieval literary genre, the dream vision. The poet’s experimental approach to genre matches his approach to all other components of literary style. Piers Plowman pushes traditional literary techniques to their limits in relentless pursuit of spiritual and social reform. The poem is at the same time an amalgam of Latin and French source texts and a strikingly original composition. Its central questions are “How can I save my soul?” and “What does it mean to do well?” These are personal questions, but for Langland they are always social and institutional questions too. The psychedelic mixture of allegory, disputation, prophecy, social satire, and spiritual contemplation in Piers Plowman works to synthesize the personal and the social on the level of literary representation. At once archconservative and radical, Langland’s vision of poverty is so powerful that Piers the Plowman became the rallying cry for the Peasants’ Revolt (1381), a popular uprising in southern England. Piers Plowman commands the attention of modern readers as a superbly imaginative composition, a document of social change, and a commentary on late medieval culture. Authorship The author of Piers Plowman was William Langland, but William Langland is little more than a floating name. The best evidence for the authorship of the poem is a Latin note in a fifteenth-century manuscript, which mentions a “William Langland” as the son of “Stacy de Rokele” and as one who “made the book that is called Piers Plowman” (Cole and Galloway 2014, 85). Langland evidently did not share his father’s surname, either because he was of illegitimate birth or because Langland was a nickname. Membership in the well-to-do Rokele family meant that Langland was of significantly higher social rank than other named authors of Middle English poetry, such as Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400) and Thomas Hoccleve (c. 1368–1450?), both of whom worked as bureaucrats. To have written in English at all, rather than the more prestigious Latin or French (languages he clearly knew well), was a conscious provocation on Langland’s part. Other information about the author of Piers Plowman must be gleaned from the poem itself. At one point Langland seems to pun on his name, declaring, “I have lyued in londe … | my name is longe wille” (I have lived in the land … my name is Long Will; Kane and Donaldson 1975, 543). The dreamer and narrator of the poem is intermittently named Will, at once a common abbreviation for William and a personification of human will. Langland’s dialect indicates that he hails from western England, where the action of the poem also begins. The sophistication of the poem’s spiritual contemplation implies that Langland had professional training in theology, in that case at Oxford or Cambridge. The poem aims its social critique with special ferocity at those who, inferentially, most resembled Langland himself: parish priests, itinerant friars, and the profligate rich. The poem’s social commentary builds up a picture of a wealthy, educated cleric living in and around London. Langland mentions a wife, Kit, and a daughter, Calotte (Pearsall 2008). These are stock names, but marriage would explain Langland’s evident low-ranking position in the church hierarchy. Versions Piers Plowman survives in three textually distinct versions, called A, B, and C, since the nineteenth century. Piers Plowman A is the first and the shortest at around 2,500 lines; B and C are over 7,000 lines apiece and substantially different from one another. Langland is thought to have composed the three versions in sequence. Internal evidence places A around 1370, B before 1380, and C after 1381 but probably before 1390. Piers Plowman was the work of a lifetime. From A to B to C, Langland refined his ideas and honed his literary presentation of them, yet none of the versions of Piers Plowman is authoritative in the modern sense. The A text has the feel of an incomplete draft, in which the poet poses certain spiritual and social questions clearly but does not yet answer them to his own satisfaction. B sketches out solutions to the problems of A but creates severe interpretive difficulties in some places. C cleans up and rearranges much of B but leaves the end of the poem intact, probably only because Langland never got around to revising it. Nor are the three versions definitive as stages of revision. They represent three moments of publication (intentional or unintentional) over the course of a literary career. Broadly speaking, Langland’s process of revision was a process of expansion—most spectacularly from A to B, turning a more compact dream vision into a literary tour de force. From B to C, Langland extended and amplified his use of Latin alongside English and refocused the discussion around key topics, particularly the relationship between poverty and salvation. The three versions also track with fourteenth-century English social and political history. A and B represent the heady last years of the reign of Edward III (1312–1377) in the wake of the Black Death (1348), while C speaks to the aftermath of the Peasants’ Revolt (1381), the most serious challenge to the established political order in Langland’s lifetime. Manuscripts and Printed Editions Like other British literature composed before the advent of print technology in England, Piers Plowman survives primarily in manuscripts (handwritten copies). Multiple copies of each version of the poem survive, in several combinations: freestanding copies of A, B, and C; splices of A and C; and more complicated arrangements. Medieval scribes considered Piers Plowman a single work, not three distinct texts, and their consultation of copies of more than one version (a phenomenon known as conflation) has increased the complexity of the surviving texts. The manuscripts range in formality from deluxe books, made by professional scribes for wealthy patrons, to more modest personal copies. Piers Plowman also appeared in two sixteenth-century printed editions. In 1550 the Protestant polemicist Robert Crowley edited Piers Plowman, presenting it as a prophecy of the English Reformation. Crowley’s edition was popular enough to go through two reprints in the same year. It was reissued by the printer Owen Rogers in 1561. Piers Plowman would not be edited again until the nineteenth century. The manuscripts and early printed editions of Piers Plowman offer evidence of the habits of Langland’s medieval and early modern readers. The presentation and annotation of the texts show scribes and readers grappling with the English-Latin bilingualism of the poem, its various literary genres, and its theological thought, among other facets. One manuscript, shelfmark Oxford Bodleian MS Douce 104 (a C text), has a program of illustrations, depicting characters and personifications from the poem, such as Lady Meed riding a sheriff. Given the proliferation of texts of the poem, editing Piers Plowman is a tricky business. Before 1960 the text of Piers Plowman was what scholar Derek Pearsall calls in his 2009 essay in Poetica “one of the great uncharted bogs of English literature” (75). The Athlone Press editions of 1960–1997, particularly the monumental edition of B (1975) by scholars George Kane (1916–2008) and E. Talbot Donaldson (1910–1987), established authoritative texts and stirred up controversy about editorial methodology. In producing a hypothetical version of Langland’s original, the Athlone editors considered all variant readings from all extant manuscripts—a laborious and radical procedure. Readers of Piers Plowman must always keep in mind the multiple versions of the poem and the practical difficulty of extracting Langland’s original (and revised) wording from the changes that scribes and later, printers, have introduced into the text. Alliterative Verse Piers Plowman is composed in alliterative meter, the verse form of Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and roughly 300 other medieval English poems. Though conventionally known by the modern term alliterative, this meter is defined less by alliteration than by the division of poetic lines into two metrical and syntactical units (half-lines) and the organization of syllables into larger metrical units (lifts and dips, or strong and weak metrical positions). Unlike syllabic meters such as iambic pentameter, which has five alternations of unstressed and stressed syllables, the alliterative meter does not require a certain number of syllables per verse or the alternation of stressed syllables. Instead, each verse fulfills a set of minimum independent requirements. Here is a scansion of the opening line of the poem, with S for a stressed syllable and x for an unstressed syllable: xxSxSxxSxxxSx In a somur sesoun whan softe was þe sonne. (In the season of summer, when the sun was mild.”) Note division into two half-lines, breaking after sesoun; alliteration on s; and the nonalternating pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. Langland chose the alliterative meter over several other possibilities, most notably iambic tetrameter (the template of which is xSxSxSxS). His position within his metrical tradition is paradoxical. On the one hand, Piers Plowman is the most widely copied alliterative poem and did the most to bring alliterative verse to the literary mainstream at a time when it was falling out of fashion. On the other hand, the genre and style of Piers Plowman make it an outlier in the alliterative tradition. Most alliterative poems are romances set in the distant past and brimming with specialized vocabulary for horses, swords, and warriors; Piers Plowman is a prophetic commentary set in the poet’s present and avoiding much of the alliterative vocabulary. Langland’s most daring move was to integrate Latin into English meter on a large scale. Consider this line spoken by Holy Church, the personification of the institutional Church: x S x x x S S x Sxx xx x S x The fader þat me forth brouhte filius dei he hoteth. (The father who brought me forth is called the son of God.) Here a Latin epithet for Christ is seamlessly incorporated into English grammar, meter, and alliteration. In this way Langland turned a familiar vernacular metrical tradition into something strange and wonderful. Structure The structure of Piers Plowman is unconventional. The poem is divided into a prologue and passÅ« s (singular passus), a Latin term meaning “steps.” The A text breaks off after eleven or twelve passÅ« s; the B text extends A to twenty passÅ« s; and the C text reorganizes B into twenty-two passÅ« s. The major structural divisions of the poem come at the beginnings and ends of Will’ s multiple dreams. The dreamer’s awakening marks the boundary between the two principal movements of the poem, named the visio (vision) and vita (life) in manuscripts of Piers Plowman. The visio and the vita are concerned with the same problems but traverse them from different directions. In the visio, the dreamer witnesses the foundation of society, with its three estates or classes (nobility, clergy, and laborers), and the challenges posed by corruption and vagrancy. The visio culminates in a pardon sent by Truth (a byname of God) stating that those who do well will go to heaven. The pardon initiates the action of the vita, in which Will turns to mental faculties, virtues, and Old Testament prophets in search of the path to salvation, represented by three virtuous ways of life: Dowel (do well), Dobet (do better), and Dobest (do best). The vita is “a person-shaped poem,” analyzing the ideal Christian self (Cole and Galloway 2014, 104). It culminates in a vision of the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus and a showdown between the forces of good, led by Conscience, and the forces of evil, led by Antichrist and the wicked friars. Bridging the visio and vita is the figure of Piers the Plowman, the leader of the failed social project of the visio and the embodiment of Christ incarnate in the vita. In the B and C texts, Antichrist and the friars penetrate the institutional Church, represented by the Barn of Unity, and Conscience sets out from the ruins in search of Piers Plowman once again. The poem itself develops a variety of metaphors for the movement from visio to vita: introspection (from the world to the soul), penance (from sin to absolution), pilgrimage (from secular to sacred), prophecy (from expectation to fulfilment), salvation history (from the Old Law to the New), and most vividly plowing (from fallow ground to fertile). From the perspective of the dreamer’ s spiritual education, the passÅ« s of the vita register a deepening of understanding. Yet Piers Plowman resists every form of closure it proposes, and its structure is essentially recursive, not progressive. The poem is always beginning afresh. This is its most peculiar feature and the reason why it is misleading to view Piers Plowman as a narrative in which events occur sequentially. Genre, Style, and Sources Piers Plowman makes use of every genre known to fourteenth-century English readers, in a restless tour through the literary landscape. Broadly allegorical and recurrently a dream vision, the poem also often sounds like biblical commentary, a sermon, and social satire. At intervals it resembles disputation (legal and theological), prophecy (biblical and political), chivalric romance, and the liturgy. Like everything else in Piers Plowman, literary genre is not permitted to recede into the background; it always contributes to the metaphorical force of Langland’s ideas. A key feature of Langland’s poetic style is the way he habitually plays one genre off of another, as when a theological analysis of the Seven Deadly Sins takes the form of lively public confessions by personifications of each sin or when the Crucifixion takes the form of a chivalric tournament. At the center of the style of Piers Plowman is the world of Latin learning—the elite world of clerics and lawyers. More than any other medieval poem, Piers Plowman flaunts its “bilingual embrace” of English and Latin (Steiner 2013, 6). Much of the English text of Piers Plowman is generated directly and explicitly by Latin quotations. The most memorable example is the feast scene in the B and C texts, in which the Latin text of the Psalms becomes the spiritual and literal main dish for the dreamer and his table companion Patience. Here, Langland delightfully pulls apart the medieval metaphor of scriptural interpretation as ruminatio (Latin for “rumination; chewing the cud”). For these and other literary effects, Langland had many models. Piers Plowman draws on texts from disparate literary traditions, including the Latin Bible, especially the Psalms and the synoptic Gospels; the Latin Consolation of Philosophy, a sixth-century philosophical dialogue in prose and verse by Roman scholar Boethius (d. 524); and the French Roman de la Rose, a thirteenthcentury allegorical dream vision in verse. These texts were all widely influential in late medieval Europe, but Langland remixes their genres and styles in unprecedented ways. Thought Piers Plowman centers on a set of socially, spiritually, and intellectually significant questions. Chief among these are “How can I save my soul?” and “What does it mean to do well?” The dreamer puts the first question to Holy Church near the beginning of the visio, and he puts the second to a variety of interlocutors throughout the vita. These questions generate Piers Plowman, not in the form of a coordinated answer (as in the wildly popular early fourteenth-century English verse treatise The Prick of Conscience) but as a record of the process of searching out practicable solutions. Contemplation and debate lead the dreamer to consider a variety of case studies in the relationship between belief, conduct, and salvation, from the pagan emperor Trajan to Old Testament prophets to Muhammad (d. 632), prophet of Islam. The questions of salvation and ethical conduct assumed particular urgency in the wake of three interrelated fourteenth-century cataclysms: the Black Death (1348), which wiped out one quarter of England’s population and threatened established social hierarchies; the controversy over the writings of Oxford theologian John Wyclif (d. 1384) and, inspired by him, a social and theological avant-garde known by the pejorative name Lollards; and the Lollard-led Peasants’ Revolt (1381), partly a reaction to legislation intended to curb social mobility after the Black Death. Langland’s responses to these crises are orthodox and conservative. He represents the plague as divine punishment for human sin, implicitly dismisses Lollardy as theologically naive, and indirectly characterizes the Peasants’ Revolt as illicit rebellion against divinely ordained poverty. Dame Study tells Will that, because of human pride, “preieres haue no power | þise pestilences to lette. / For god is def nowadayes” (prayers have no power to stop these plagues, for God is deaf nowadays; Kane and Donaldson 1975, 411). Recognizably Lollard ideas about God and poverty thread through the poem as tempting, but dangerous, propositions. Langland’s deletion of a scene at the end of the visio, in which Piers Plowman tears up the pardon from Truth and argues with a priest, is often understood by scholars as the poet’s conservative response to the real burning of official documents by the rebels of 1381. Yet Langland attacks easy conservatism with equal relish. His poem repeatedly castigates the complacent rich, friars who produce theologically unobjectionable but self-serving readings of scripture, and bureaucrats who follow the letter but not the spirit of the law. For example, one friar attempts to explain to Will why sinning the proverbial seven times a day does not threaten one’s salvation. The friar’s position seems convenient, even if it is technically in accordance with the doctrine of venial and mortal sin. Langland practiced an “exceptionalist poetics,” combining and subdividing categories of people and ideas in provocative ways (Steiner 2013, 66). Thus, in Piers Plowman the poor are both the prime agents of social disintegration (when they shirk the hard work they owe to their lords) and the ideal of Christian patience (as typified by the laborer-savior Piers Plowman). Langland’s thought always cuts both ways. Reception To judge from the large number of surviving manuscripts containing Piers Plowman, Langland’s poem was a fourteenth-century best seller. A different measure of its popularity is the appearance of the character Piers the Plowman as a code word in the writings of the radical preacher John Ball (d. 1381), whose letters helped incite the Peasants’ Revolt (1381). Reception influenced revision in turn, as Langland sought to distance his poem from the raging peasants and low-level officials who had burned documents and executed the Archbishop of Canterbury Simon of Sudbury (d. 1381) and the Lord High Treasurer Sir Robert Hales (d. 1381). At the end of the fourteenth century and into the fifteenth, Piers Plowman inspired a sub-tradition of didactic and satirical alliterative verse, for which scholar Helen Barr has popularized the name “the Piers Plowman tradition” (1994). These poems are the medieval equivalent of fan fiction. Their authors elaborate characters, styles, and ideas from Langland in Langland’s chosen meter, though at the expense of the kaleidoscopic poetic imagination of Piers Plowman. In the sixteenth century, Piers Plowman was much discussed if increasingly difficult to understand. Of particular interest to sixteenthcentury readers, both Catholics and Protestants, were the religio-political prophecies embedded in the poem. These circulated on their own, in a variety of manuscript contexts, from the late fifteenth through the sixteenth centuries. In the preface to his edition, Crowley sought to categorize Piers Plowman as strictly religious (not political) prophecy. In his Arte of English Poesie (1589), one of the first treatises on English poetics, George Puttenham (1520–1590) refers to Langland in passing as “a very true Prophet” of the English Reformation (Weiskott 2016, 28). At the turn of the seventeenth century and for some time afterward, Piers Plowman was hardly ever read or studied. The publication of Thomas Whitaker’s edition in 1813 marks the beginning of modern scholarly study of the poem, which reached a high point in 1975 with Kane and Donaldson’s edition of Piers Plowman B. BIBLIOGRAPHYPrimary sources, works cited, and further readings Barr, Helen. Signes and Sothe: Language in the “Piers Plowman” Tradition . Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994. Cole, Andrew, and Andrew Galloway, eds. The Cambridge Companion to “Piers Plowman.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Davis, Rebecca, and Emily Steiner, eds. Yearbook of Langland Studies. International Piers Plowman Society. . Hanna, Ralph III. William Langland. Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 1993. Kane, George, and E. Talbot Donaldson, eds. Piers Plowman: The B Version. London: Athlone, 1975. Pearsall, Derek. Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the C-Text. Exeter, UK: Exeter University Press, 2008. Pearsall, Derek. “The Text of Piers Plowman: Past, Present and Future.” Poetica 71 (2009): 75–91. Phillips, Helen. “Dream Poems.” In A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture c. 1350–c. 1500, edited by Peter Brown, 374–386. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. Simpson, James. Piers Plowman: An Introduction. 2nd ed. Exeter, UK: Exeter University Press, 2007. Steiner, Emily. Reading “Piers Plowman.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Warner, Lawrence. The Myth of “Piers Plowman”: Constructing a Medieval Literary Archive . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Weiskott, Eric. “Prophetic Piers Plowman: New Sixteenth-Century Excerpts.” Review of English Studies 67 (2016): 21–41 Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition) Weiskott, Eric. "William Langland’s Piers Plowman." Major Authors and Movements in British Literature, edited by Kirilka Stavreva, Gale, 2017. Gale Researcher, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/HNWPEI585919060/GLRS?u=gale&sid=GLRS&xid=1516251600000~6cf3ac99. Accessed 18 Dec. 2017. Gale Document Number: GALE|HNWPEI585919060