Piers Plowman (Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature)

Cambridge Histories Online http://universitypublishingonline.org/cambridge/histories/ The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature Edited by David Wallace Book DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521444200 Online ISBN: 9781139053624 Hardback ISBN: 9780521444200 Paperback ISBN: 9780521890465 Chapter 19 - Piers Plowman pp. 513-538 Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521444200.024 Cambridge University Press Chapter 19 PIERS PLOWMAN1 kathryn kerby-fulton The three versions of Piers Plowman, as most scholars today believe, were the lifelong labour of a single author named, or at least pen-named, William Langland (c. 1325–c. 1388).2 A unique note in Trinity College, Dublin, MS 212 supplies both the author’s name (‘willielmi de Langlond’) and his father’s (‘Stacy de Rokayle’), describing Stacy as a man of gentle birth (‘generosus’) and a tenant of the Despensers at Shipton-underWychwood in Oxfordshire. A note in the hand of John Bale on the pastedown of Huntington Library, San Marino, California, MS 128 asserts that Langland himself was born in Cleobury Mortimer ‘within viii myles of Malborne hylles’, and this is generally corroborated by the evidence of dialect, which links him unquestionably to south-west Worcestershire. The Malvern Hills, which figure so memorably in the poem’s setting, were also held by the Despensers, whose ‘spectacular rise and as spectacular fall in royal favor and power roughly brackets the period of the poet’s lifetime’, as Middleton has noted.3 Of his means of livelihood we know nothing beyond what can be gleaned from the treacherous territory of apparent autobiographical reference within the poem; in Langland’s case the usual uncertainties of authorial attribution in a manuscript culture were 1. I would like to thank most especially Derek Pearsall, Nicholas Watson and Steven Justice for their generous advice and enthusiasm, and David Wallace for his encouragement and patience. For other recent general studies see Middleton, ‘Piers Plowman’; Alford, ed., Companion to ‘Piers Plowman’; Simpson, Introduction to the B-text. 2. For the biographical information here, see Kane, Evidence, pp. 26 and 38 (on Trinity College, Dublin, MS 212 and Huntington Library, MS 128); Hanna, Langland, pp. 6–10; Bale, Catalogus, p. 474; Samuels, ‘Dialect’, p. 210; Middleton, ‘“Kynde name”’; Justice and Kerby-Fulton, eds., Written Work. Quotations from the three versions of the poem are from: Kane, ed., A Version; Kane and Donaldson, eds., B Version; Pearsall, ed., C-Text. (Russell and Kane, eds., C Version, appeared as this volume was in press.) In quoting A and B, I have preserved the editorial brackets, but not the italicized expansions of abbreviations. Particular reference will be made in this chapter to the following manuscripts: Dublin, Trinity College, 212; Liverpool University Library f.4.8; London, British Library, Add. 35287; British Library, Add. 16165; London, Society of Antiquaries, Burlington House 687; Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 851; Bodleian Library, Douce 104; Bodleian Library, Digby 102; Bodleian Library, Digby 145; Bodleian Library, eng. poet.a.1 (the Vernon MS); Bodleian Library, Laud Misc. 581; San Marino, California, Huntington Library 114; San Marino, Huntington Library 128; San Marino, Huntington Library 137; Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, 669/646; Cambridge University Library dd.1.17; Cambridge University Library ll.4.14; Cambridge University Library gg.4.31. 3. ‘“Kynde name”’, p. 20. [513] Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 129.74.250.206 on Mon Apr 14 23:31:37 BST 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521444200.024 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014 514 kathryn kerby-fulton apparently exacerbated by the need for anonymity which the polemical nature of his writing demanded. Ambiguity, often apparently the ‘functional ambiguity’ of the political poet, characterizes Piers Plowman and everything about it.4 Conceived as a series of dream-visions in alliterative metre, it shares the penchant for social and ecclesiastical satire of other ‘Alliterative Revival’ poetry, but it is infinitely more complex than any poem in that tradition because it delivers its pungent commentary in a bewildering array of voices, both realistic and allegorical. The impressions of the earliest readers of the poem, navigating it without modern editorial punctuation and quotation marks, must have been of a compelling contemporary critique of nearly stream-of-consciousness fluidity. The narrative is only loosely held together by the narration of the dreamer, ‘Will’, whose very name is loaded with both allegorical and self-referential significance, and whose voice shifts in tone and authority without warning. Will’s progress is ostensibly towards spiritual awareness: in the first section (called in many manuscripts the ‘Visio’), he initially sets o◊ in search of wonders, but is soon inspired by Lady Holy Church to search for his own salvation, a journey, in e◊ect, through the ills of the world. In the second section (in some manuscripts, the ‘Vita’), the search becomes focused on the three grades of spiritual perfection, ‘Dowell’, ‘Dobet’ and ‘Dobest’, but is carried out under the direction of a barrage of competing, often contradictory, interior voices. As if to emphasize both the progressive nature of the work, and yet the inherent di√culty of any progress, each chapter is called a ‘passus’, a word which (like so much else in the poem) has multiple meanings: in Classical Latin, a ‘step’ or ‘track’, with the added sense in medieval Latin of a ‘pass through mountains or woods’ (or any di√cult territory), and also ‘a passage of a text’.5 Although the authorial authenticity of the poem’s division into Visio and Vita has been questioned by some scholars, it suggestively reflects the external and then internal nature of Will’s quest, and is unlikely to be scribal in origin. The poem’s hero, Piers, a simple, devout plowman who maintains his integrity and courage in a world of moral and o√cial corruption, undergoes a kind of progress himself, from the active life of labour and leadership beneficial to the community to a mysteriously charismatic life of contemplative experience and ecclesiastical guidance. The fact that his name is an anglicized version of ‘Peter’ is neither an allegorical nor a national accident: the poem was begun during the dismal period of French domination of the 4. On ‘functional ambiguity’ see Patterson, Censorship, p. 15. 5. See Latham, Medieval Latin Word-List, and Niermeyer, Mediae Latinitatis Lexicon Minus. Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 129.74.250.206 on Mon Apr 14 23:31:37 BST 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521444200.024 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014 Piers Plowman 515 papacy at Avignon, and was under revision when the Great Schism of 1378 erupted. The poem’s brilliant Victorian editor gave it the English title The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman, a translation of the Latin title used by several of its scribes; it remains the most accurate description of the poem, and the best guide to its genre.6 The modern textual heritage So far as we know, the writing and persistent revision of this poem was the main and perhaps only literary work Langland undertook. From this process there emerged the well-attested outlines of three versions which modern scholars designate as A, B and C.7 The A-text, which is presumed by most to have been written first, has a Visio and an abruptly truncated Vita; its narrative covers three dreams and it has eleven passus of certain authenticity; the narrative of both B and C covers eight dreams, taking up twenty and twenty-two passus respectively. Dating of the first two versions can only be estimated by internal evidence: the A-text is likely the product of the 1360s (given its historical allusions), although the poet may not have released it for copying until 1368–75; his B-text contains allusions to events of 1376–9, and appears to have been first copied about this time; the C-text (or at least a substantial portion of it) was apparently in circulation before 1388 because Thomas Usk borrowed from it in composing his Testament of Love. Usk was executed in March of 1388, so he either read or heard at least parts of the C-text before that date.8 The final publication of C may have taken place a little later, and, judging from the fact that the last two passus of B were never revised, scholars have surmised that it may have been posthumously issued by a literary executor after Langland’s death (although other explanations are possible). Langland 6. Skeat’s base-text (Huntington Library, MS 137’s) rubric is: ‘hic incipit visio Willelmi de petro plouhman’. ‘Visio’ is the word most often used by scribes to describe the poem’s genre, but a group of manuscripts particularly in the B-tradition use the word ‘dialogus’ in the scribe’s explicit (for example, ‘dialogus petri plowman’, in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 581; see also British Library, MS Add. 35287, Cambridge University Library dd.1.17 and ll.4.14); medieval scribes sometimes just used the short title Piers Plowman or Liber Piers Plowman, and often no title at all; sometimes ‘the prophecies of piers plowman’, as in Cambridge University Library gg.4.31 (see Uhart, ‘The Early Reception of Piers Plowman’). 7. John But, who added all or most of a twelfth passus to A, mentions ‘oter werkes’ (a.12.101), although this may refer to other versions or separately circulated passages of the poem (on which see below); see Middleton, ‘John But’. For the opinion that A comes after B, see Mann, ‘Alphabet’, but the pattern of Langland’s inclusion and deletion of historical allusions in revision makes Mann’s theory untenable. 8. See: Pearsall, ed., C-text, p. 9; Kane, ‘The Text’, pp. 184–6; Hanna, Langland, pp. 7–10 and 14–17; Middleton, ‘Acts of Vagrancy’ (on 1388) and Kerby-Fulton, ‘Langland and the Bibliographic Ego’ (on Usk); Kerby-Fulton and Justice, ‘Langlandian Reading Circles’. Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 129.74.250.206 on Mon Apr 14 23:31:37 BST 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521444200.024 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014 516 kathryn kerby-fulton was clearly a poet more concerned with ‘process’ than with ‘product’ (to use Northrop Frye’s distinction), but his method was broadly typical of what Derek Pearsall has described as the medieval habit of ‘composition and recomposition’, which often resulted in ‘versions of the text at any stage “leaking” into circulation’.9 Modern scholars can only dimly perceive the stages of composition of Piers Plowman through the filter of the fifty-six extant manuscripts and fragments, plus the early printed editions of the poem,10 none of which likely represents Langland’s final (or indeed even provisional) intentions in a pure form. Many medieval scribes and ‘editors’ of the poem seem to have known that di◊erent versions were circulating, and especially in the case of the A-text, they often tried to ‘finish’ the poem by combining it with one of the longer versions (usually C) or even by supplying a home-made ending, as John But did. Still others (such as the Huntington Library MS 114 redactor) chose from among the three texts to create a ‘better’ poem, or attempted to otherwise ‘improve’, elaborate or censor it. The poem was, in Kane’s words, ‘a living text . . . to its scribes’, and may never have been widely available in a canonical version in the modern sense. As Ralph Hanna has pointed out, ‘Piers Plowman has approached being a canonical – and thus socially available – text at only four points in its history – s. xiv/xv for extensive local circulation in Worcestershire and neighbouring counties in the C version; simultaneously in London (mainly in the B version, but C as well); c. 1560 as Protestant apologetics in the B version’ and in modern scholarship.11 Piers therefore represents a special challenge to modern textual criticism (and Kane and Donaldson, its most recent editors, in turn, have been responsible for some of the most important developments in the field of textual criticism as a result).12 Modern canonicity begins with Skeat: although Ritson had distinguished between B and C as early as 1802, and Price, the editor of the 1824 edition of Warton’s History of English Poetry, had distinguished A, it was Skeat who first made sense of the entire tangle of manuscript evidence, discerning in it (some would say imposing on it) the three stages of A, B and C in his milestone EETS edition of 1867. In 1886 he published the parallel-texts edition which, despite the serious flaws in his base A and C manuscripts, was tremendously helpful in 9. Frye’s theory appears in ‘Age of Sensibility’, in Fables of Identity, pp. 130–7; for Pearsall’s quotation see his Life of Chaucer, p. 189. 10. See Kane, ‘The Text’: there are ten A, thirteen B, eighteen C and twelve conjoint manuscripts; three printed editions by Robert Crowley in 1550, and one by Owen Rogers in 1561. 11. Kane, The A Version, p. 115; Hanna, ‘Studies in the MSS’, p. 23. 12. See Patterson, ‘Textual Criticism’, in Negotiating the Past, pp. 77–115; for the editions and textual studies cited in this paragraph see Knott and Fowler, eds., ‘Piers the Plowman’, 5; Skeat, The Vision of William; Donaldson, ‘MSS R and F’, p. 211; Pearsall, Life of Chaucer, p. 189. Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 129.74.250.206 on Mon Apr 14 23:31:37 BST 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521444200.024 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014 Piers Plowman 517 establishing the primacy of Langland’s revision process for modern study of the poem. Although some scholars (including Donaldson and Pearsall) have questioned the validity of rigidly enshrining as canonical texts that are perhaps only moments in a fluid revision process, such was the pressure from the modern literary academy – especially in the era when Practical Criticism reigned supreme – that the B-version, boosted by its apparent textual superiority in Skeat’s edition, attained exclusive canonical status for most critics. However, Chambers demonstrated in 1935 that C’s apparent flaws were mainly those of the meddling scribe of Huntington Library MS 137, Skeat’s copy-text, and in 1955 Donaldson, who authored a superb study rehabilitating C, could write: ‘I sometimes wonder whether the C-text, the B-text, and even the A-text are not merely historical accidents, haphazard milestones in the history of a poem that was begun but never finished, photographs that caught a static image of a living organism at a given but not necessarily significant moment of time’. But even Donaldson eventually acquiesced in the canonization of B. He edited with George Kane the monumental Athlone Press edition of the B-text, which provoked both admiration for its editorial brilliance and distrust in its claim to have recovered Langland from the depredations of the scribes. While Piers scholars will be forever grateful to Kane and Donaldson for firmly establishing for once and for all Langland’s strengths as a poet, more recent study of medieval reader response and of Landland’s own revision process shows that the aesthetic criteria the Athlone editors so often applied in editorial decisions may be at times an anachronism projected on to the poem from our post-Romantic vantage point. The lesson seems to be that while modern scholarship needs critical editions in order to function, any modern edition of Piers Plowman can only be, as Pearsall warns, ‘a convenient and artificial creation of the editorial process’. In fact, the A-B-C model probably best reflects (or does the least violence to) the manuscript evidence as we have it today, but it is helpful as a guideline rather than as the canonical orthodoxy print culture conditions us to assume – it should be remembered that Langland may not have formally released any of the texts for publication.13 The di◊erence between what Bruns calls the ‘open’ and ‘closed’ text of pre-print culture is crucial here: scribes often kept their own copies, perhaps as part payment, of a work which had been returned to an author who would then often further revise it, and might never formally release it beyond a coterie readership. 13. Adams, ‘Editing Piers Plowman’, p. 33 n. 3, argues that B was ‘finished’; however, for evidence that B survives in more than one authorial version, see Justice’s ‘Introduction’ to Written Work; for Bruns’ terminology, see his ‘The Originality of Texts’, p. 113. Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 129.74.250.206 on Mon Apr 14 23:31:37 BST 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521444200.024 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014 518 kathryn kerby-fulton Leakage (approved or surreptitious) was common, especially given a work as current (at times, indeed, sensational) as Piers Plowman. As Pearsall and, more recently, Scase have shown from their work on the Ilchester Manuscript (London University Library MS v.88 [olim Ilchester]) and Huntington Library MS 114 respectively, portions of the text new to C were in circulation well before Langland had decided how to integrate them into the B-passages for which they were destined. The fact that the two pieces in question (C. Prologue. 91–127 and 9.66–281) were on the most topical of socio-ecclesiastical issues is very significant and suggests that readers were willing to snatch even unfinished material from Langland’s pen (in Prologue 91–127 the alliteration is not yet finished).14 This episode highlights the fact that, as Charlotte Brewer has argued with respect to the problematic A-tradition, more than one reading in a given ‘version’ can be authorial. It has never been possible, for instance, to break the A manuscripts down into families satisfactorily. Three manuscripts contain interpolations from both B and C; three contain varying amounts of the fascinatingly dubious passus 12; still others contain insertions from a single version, transpositions of passages, perfected alliteration, and ‘sophistication’ of various sorts. Anne Middleton has drawn attention to the (widespread) phenomenon of scribal ‘making’ and Langlandian imitation in her study of John But’s completion of A. Using many of Langland’s words and phrases, even from other versions of the poem, But created his own allegorical episode depicting the death of Will, thereby ‘explaining’ its unfinished state – perhaps for a Langlandian coterie.15 However, he was not alone in feeling that Langland’s A-text required clarification, elaboration, closure or integration with another. Adding to A’s textual complexities is the existence of the ‘Z’ version (named for the sigil Skeat gave the unique manuscript in which it survives, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 851). Some scholars believe this to have been Langland’s earliest surviving attempt at writing the poem, but this view of ‘Z’ is controversial, and battles over its status have been acrimonious. My decision not to include it here among the undoubtedly authentic versions is based on an assessment of the evidence and arguments, although it is not intended to be dogmatic. The most straightforward explanation of the evidence (and the one preferred here) is to see it as a conjoint A–C manuscript, the A portion of which is doctored with B and C readings and heavily elaborated by an enthusiatic ‘editor’ – hereafter, to 14. Pearsall, ‘The “Illchester” MS’, pp. 181–93; Scase, ‘C-Text Interpolations’, pp. 456–63; Brewer, ‘Kane’s A-text’, pp. 67–90. 15. See Kerby-Fulton and Justice, ‘Langlandian Reading Circles’. Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 129.74.250.206 on Mon Apr 14 23:31:37 BST 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521444200.024 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014 Piers Plowman 519 give him his due, the Z-‘maker’. In 1983, Rigg and Brewer challenged this view, publishing the unique text of Z’s Prologue-8, and arguing that ‘Z’s peculiarities can all be explained more satisfactorily as early and rejected readings than as corruption of the A-text’.16 But to make this view tenable one has to accept that Langland wrote many lines for Z which he then cancelled in A, but reinscribed in B or C. One also has to be willing to accept that when composing Z Langland (1) wrote a good deal of radically inferior verse, often illogically disruptive to the sense of a passage (as in z.5.34–40) or unnecessarily repetitive (e.g., z.7.245); (2) that he held some opinions markedly di◊erent from, indeed contrary to, those in A, B and C (see, for instance, Z’s avid defence of physicians at 7.260–78); and, finally, (3) that he adopted some styles of writing not found in any other text of Piers Plowman (such as the extraordinary outburst of nature mysticism at z.6.68–75). None of this is impossible, but the combined weight of the uncharacteristic passages, compounded by doubts cast on the palaeographical and textual evidence by Kane, Doyle and Hanna, makes it unlikely.17 However, every once in a while the Z-maker does come up with a dead ringer for a real Langlandian line, like his remark that Glutton ‘casteth men of the cardyacle into the kyrke yerdus’ (z.7.277). His (sporadic) skill with Langlandian lines, together with the fact that some passages unique to Z depend for their intelligibility on the reader’s knowledge of other versions, suggests that the Zmaker was not only an enthusiast, but also an imitator, ‘editing’ with a Piers reading circle in mind. Although Z is a fascinating text, the manuscripts which in many ways bring us closer to the authentic work of Langland are Huntington Library MS 114 and the Ilchester Manuscript, both of which preserve the two authorial passages from the C-text in their ‘pre-publication’ state. In Huntington Library MS 114, the alliteration in these passages is defective, perhaps never finished, while in Ilchester an editor has corrected and ‘improved’ these lines, sometimes so adroitly that modern scholars have had di√culty distinguishing his work from Langland’s own.18 One of the C-draft passages (on ‘lollars’, and ecclesiastical loafers of all kinds, from false hermits to lax bishops) has been moved to greater prominence in the Ilchester Prologue, suggesting just how current Landland’s poetry was for its earliest readers: it was eagerly snatched up for circulation in varying 16. Rigg and Brewer, eds., The Z-Version, p. 2. For a more detailed examination of Z than is possible here, see Kerby-Fulton and Justice, ‘Langlandian Reading Circles’. 17. Conveniently summarized in Hanna, ‘Studies in the MSS’. 18. See note 14 above; on the scribe, Doyle and Parkes, ‘The Production of Copies’, pp. 163–210; also Kerby-Fulton and Justice, ‘Scribe D and Ilchester’. Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 129.74.250.206 on Mon Apr 14 23:31:37 BST 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521444200.024 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014 520 kathryn kerby-fulton states of readiness, and every aspect, from the personal fate of its author (which so interested John But) to its satirical energy (which intrigued Z) to its sensational ecclesiastical politics (which fascinated the Ilchester editor), was of immediate, engaging and topical interest to its first audience. They and many of their nameless colleagues had a hand in the ‘social authorship’ of the poem, and, although it is through the filter of their involvement with the text’s transmission that we must read the poem today, that involvement – when accorded the historical respect it deserves – is endlessly illuminating. Langland’s revisions and temporal sensitivities Although we may never be able to recapture Langland’s textual intentions with certainty, we know from the manuscript evidence that he made (at least) two momentous revisions to his poem: the first resulting eventually in B, apparently, to solve the crisis which led to the breaking o◊ of A; the second resulting in C, a dramatic but not complete or thorough overhaul of B in response to political, ecclesiastical, literary and perhaps even palaeographical problems. Although it is di√cult and possibly misleading to briefly characterize the di◊erences between the three versions, it may be helpful to mention some of the key points and examples. A is a poem more obviously rooted in a West Midlands alliterative tradition and in a rural perspective; its ‘I’ speaker can be more closely associated with the traditional ‘scop’ figure one finds, for instance, in Winner and Waster, and like that poem it indulges in the unbuttoned socio-political satire for which alliterative poetry is known. Nothing in this tradition, however, not even a poem like In the Ecclesiastical Court, totally prepares one for the ecclesiastical critique implied in a bold gesture like A’s tearing of the Pardon. This version is apparently unfinished and seems to founder on questions of salvation (of the righteous heathen, the Old Testament patriarchs, and the learned, all likely to be damned, while the thief on the cross, Mary Magdalene and other ‘last minute’ converts, were, in Will’s opinion, too easily redeemed). As the poem breaks o◊, the dreamer has found fault with almost every famous case in the history of salvation and has adopted a pugnacious anti-intellectualism which borders on unorthodoxy, and certainly smacks of despair. (The one much-debated medieval case he does not mention, Trajan’s, with its promise of salvation to an unbaptized, unconverted heathen, was apparently crucial in breaking the deadlock, judging by its prominence at the point of the B-continuation). B is not simply a continuation, however; the rewriting manifests itself Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 129.74.250.206 on Mon Apr 14 23:31:37 BST 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521444200.024 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014 Piers Plowman 521 right from the Prologue. In B Langland has achieved full-grown poetic sophistication (and a new penchant for lengthy digression). His world is now firmly London; politics play an even more important role, and there is a new audacity in his political allusions, alongside a new urgency in denunciations of ecclesiastical abuse. He has also discovered the power – latent in A – of bilingual textuality. Additions to the B Prologue, for instance, include a barrage of new voices o◊ering advice, often in Latin, to a king: a lunatic, an angel, a ‘goliard’ and even the ‘commons’ speak, the latter poignantly and startlingly voicing their servitude in a language they do not understand (143–5). Also added to the B Prologue is the fable of the belling of the cat (likely an allegorical reference to the Good Parliament’s unsuccessful attempts to control John of Gaunt in 1376), after which Langland teases the reader (and the authorities, no doubt) with one of his many allusions to the climate of constraint in late fourteenth-century England: ‘What tis metels bymenet, ye men tat ben murye, / Deuyne ye, for I ne dar, by deere god in heuene’ (209–10). Ecclesiological concerns are more pressing in B, too (see below). We can only guess at what eventually allowed Langland to finish the poem after his inability to see a way (either theological or poetic) out of the mire of salvation issues which led to the breakdown of A. The preoccupations of b.11, however, give some clues in their dramatization of Will’s own encounter with the doctrine of predestination and his humiliation at the hands of Scripture (b.11.1–5), here arrestingly portrayed not as the portal of divine wisdom, but as the closed door of intellectual exclusiveness and arbitrary judgement (11.107–18). When Scripture begins to preach, Will remarks ‘Ac te matere tat she meued, if lewed men it knewe, / Te lasse, as I leue, louyen tei wolde / [The bileue [of oure] lord tat lettred men techet]’ (108–110) – the ‘matere’, of course, is predestination. The resolution seems to come with the reassuring thought that Christ called all who thirst: ‘Saryens and scismatikes and so he dide te Iewes: / O vos omnes sicientes venite &c, / And bad hem souke for synne [saufte] at his breste’ (120–2). This Bernardian image of Jesus as mother is sharply juxtaposed to the scorn of the o√cial face of Scripture in the harshness of academic theology. In typically Langlandian fashion this moment of Christological devotion is not laboured, but neither the poetic glories of the Harrowing of Hell scene, nor anything else in the long Salvation History of the Vita of B would be possible without this turning point in b.11. The C-text is an e◊ort to clarify and streamline the chaotic intensity of B; there is a new sense of moral responsibility and a new awareness, especially since the rising of 1381, of injudicious readers who must be set straight (one of the purposes of the ‘autobiographical’ addition to c.5 is to Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 129.74.250.206 on Mon Apr 14 23:31:37 BST 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521444200.024 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014 522 kathryn kerby-fulton portray the poet as a member of the gentle classes, although currently down on his luck).19 Langland’s latent social conservatism is forced out into the open, the political edge is softened, the apocalyptic is heightened (for example, the dangerous implication (b.10.336) that the nobility’s forcible disendowment of the monasteries constitutes ‘Dowell’ is deleted, the Blackfriars Council of 1382 having just condemned this view in the Lollards, but, strategically, Langland retains the prophecy that it might happen). Like a prime minister shu◊ling his cabinet under duress, Langland moves stronger allegorical players into key roles and quietly demotes political liabilities (Kynde Witt takes over from the Lunatic, Activa Vita takes over from Haukyn). But his reformist passion, like energy which can neither be created nor destroyed, is rechannelled into spiritual vision of a more powerfully charismatic sort, where it is out of the reach of censorship (whether of scribes or the authorities) and volatile readers. It will be seen already that the events of history are crucial to an understanding of Langland’s text. In light of Bloomfield’s often-cited comment that reading Piers Plowman is like reading a commentary on an unknown text, one could say that at least one of the major ‘unknown texts’ upon which Langland was commenting is current history (personal, national and ecclesiastical), and this gives us one more good reason for viewing the poem not as a fixed textual moment but as a textual continuum. The revisions are the record of how Langland and his audience (see c.5.3–5) responded to the various external pressures which shaped the poem so dramatically – in particular, the creeping political and ecclesiastical intimidation which finally limited what he felt able to say on the subject of socio-political oppression and clerical abuse. It is impossible to grasp this without at least briefly examining one of the many sites of constant revision across the three versions: we might take passus a.8 (= b.7 = c.9). This is the last passus of the Visio in all three texts; in all three it begins with the description of Piers’ Pardon from Truth; all three end with the dreamer ‘meatless and moneyless’ on the Malvern Hills, musing on the validity of dreams. What happens in between is significantly di◊erent in each; the deletion of the much-discussed tearing of the Pardon from AB in creating C is the best known of these revisions, but more important, at least to his medieval audience, was his lengthy C-addition to this passus, which contained material so topical that either he or someone close to him (perhaps a scribe) leaked it prior to the publication of C – indeed the ink could hardly have been dry at the time, because Langland had not yet even made the 19. Kerby-Fulton, ‘Langland and the Bibliographical Ego’. Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 129.74.250.206 on Mon Apr 14 23:31:37 BST 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521444200.024 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014 Piers Plowman 523 necessary changes in the B-lines into which the addition was to be inserted when it was snatched up. The A–B revisions reveal some fascinating clues to Langland’s changing sense of audience and narratorial role in modifications to the long description of the various social and professional groups included, excluded or marginalized (literally) in the Pardon. For instance, in A Langland seems to assume a more clerical audience than in B (compare a.8.16–17, where the concern is with how bishops should preach to parsons in their diocese, to b.7.15–16). Moreover, in all three texts the merchants, who represent a group not yet fully welcome to the medieval Church, weep for joy at their inclusion in the Pardon (albeit on the margin of the document). But only in A is the narrator recognized as the writer (both scriptor and auctor) who, in an important sense, makes it all possible: they ‘yaf wille for his writyng wollene clotis; / For he co[pie]de tus here clause tei [couden] hym gret mede’ (44–5). Given Langland’s extraordinary knowledge of legal documents and terminology, it has often been observed that this passage may allude to his own work as a legal scribe; whatever the case, it has significance as a moment of authorial self-consciousness, but this (and others like it in A) disappears in the B revision. b.7 is full of uncharacteristically feeble writing which adds little but verbosity to the power of what remains of A, and Langland’s dissatisfaction must have been both artistic and ideological.20 In the BC revision process he added the lengthy pasage on lollars, deleting B’s more technical, but less socially sympathetic, discussion of almsgiving (most of b.7.75–89). It is perhaps no wonder that the resulting long C-addition was leaked: it contains the unusually socially sensitive description of poor women, apparently single parents, struggling to retain some vestige of dignity in miserable cottages; it contains the charismatic portrait of the lunatic lollars; it retains B’s lines about beggars who ‘lyue in no loue ne no lawe holde’ (b.6.90), adding a new note of post-Revolt social snobbery, and a diatribe on false hermits and friars (i.e., not just corrupt but fake ones). To this group he gives the umbrella term ‘lollares, / As by te Engelisch of oure eldres, of olde mennes techynge’ (c.9.213–14), with a full etymological derivation, perhaps of his own invention.21 This passage reveals two di◊erent temporal sensitivities, one ecclesiastical and one linguistic: first, it suggests Langland’s consciousness of a new ‘buzzword’ in socio-ecclesiological controversy. The earliest recorded use of it in English ecclesiastical disputes is in 1382, and the C-revision (or most of it) was in 20. See Kane and Donaldson, eds., ‘Piers Plowman’: the B Version, pp. 123–7; Alford, Quotations, pp. 28–9. 21. See Middleton, ‘Acts of Vagrancy’; Scase, New Anticlericalism, p. 154. Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 129.74.250.206 on Mon Apr 14 23:31:37 BST 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521444200.024 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014 524 kathryn kerby-fulton circulation at least by the early months of 1388 (i.e. before Usk’s death), so the pre-publication transmission of this passage must have been very early indeed in the period of the word’s new currency. Moreover, although Langland’s use is well before its fixed association with the followers of Wyclif, the word was drifting in that direction even as he wrote, and the passage is probably his attempt to arrest the drift. Secondly, the note of pride and defensiveness about English linguistic tradition is exactly the kind of sensitivity one would expect of an alliterative poet from the southwest Midlands confronting a foreign loan-word (the Dutch ‘lollaert’) on the rise. This long C-addition ends with a harsh denunciation of bishops in the form of the ancient reformist motif of the negligent shepherd ‘Simon quasi dormit . . .’ (9.257–281), apparently developed from A-lines (8.16–17) he had dropped in B. The C-addition rejoins B as the priest interrupts this exercise in social organization (and perhaps ‘social cleansing’) to point out that the Pardon is not a pardon, and it is here that Langland deleted the tearing of the Pardon and Piers’ renunciation of the active life from the Ctext. The reasons for this excision may now be clearer, especially in the hothouse political atmosphere in which these revisions were conducted. In the immediate wake of 1381, Langland no longer felt comfortable being seen to advocate, even in Piers, the radical renunciation of peasant labour for the apparent ease of an unregulated contemplative life (Piers, it should be noted, does not indicate in AB that he will join a religious order, or take any formal step which would lend legitimacy to his new abdication of the active life (cf. c.5.89–91)). Langland by this time realized that he had readers who would (and had) read this subversively (Piers was now publicly the hero of the rebels through the John Ball letters). He replaced Piers’ charismatic conversion to the evangelical life of holy carelessness with several things, among them: a blunt description of what becomes of peasants who take on the outer garments of the contemplative life for the wrong reasons (‘lollars’), and a description of the only lay charismatics who can really be trusted (‘lunatic lollars’ – a group whose life is so hard that no one could be tempted to emulate them, and who take upon themselves, and perhaps safely contain, the stigma of insipiens which the priest applied to Piers in b.7.141). The overt charismatic gesture, which Langland loves, but can no longer trust to responsible audience reception, is transferred from Piers, whom he wishes to keep impeccably orthodox, to the lunatic lollars and the dreamer, through the c.5 autobiographical passage and the promotion of Recklessness (a bit part in B) to a starring role in C. In deleting the Tearing scene, he also took out the implication of direct confrontation with the Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 129.74.250.206 on Mon Apr 14 23:31:37 BST 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521444200.024 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014 Piers Plowman 525 Church and lack of respect for o√cial documents, which the high profile of document destruction on the part of the 1381 rebels would have made a very sensitive point.22 Instead he returned to a tradition dating back to the Gregorian Reform in his choice to develop A’s motif of the negligent shepherd topos so acerbically; just as he is conscious of an Anglo-Saxon linguistic heritage, he is also conscious of pre-Wycli√te reformist traditions, as someone with Langland’s knowledge of monastic ideology would be (see below, p. 530). He also eliminated with this scene the allegorical awkwardness of Piers destroying something from Truth, or something he had thought was from Truth – Langland’s allegorical abilities were so acute that this apparent inconsistency must have worried him. The arguing of the priest and Piers awakens the dreamer in all three texts, and in C even the musings of the dreamer are purged of dangerous material: Daniel’s interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, that ‘vncoute knyytes shul come ti kyngdom to cleyme; / Amonges lower lordes ti lond shal be departed’ (b.7.161–2) must have sounded too provocative after 1381. In the more charismatically orientated C, however, the dreamer no longer declares his disapproval of dreams (cf. b.7.154 and c.9.304). Langland’s revision process is endlessly complex, and we will never know what motivated much of it, but among the reasons were certainly: personal and humanitarian concerns for salvation; growing disillusionment with the institutional Church, the o√cial doctrine it propounded, and the learning it controlled; insecurities about authorship and authorial credibility; the ever-changing climate of ecclesiastical and political opinion; restrictions (either real or intimated) on what could safely be published; dissatisfaction with the artistic quality of what he had written and with the disorganization of it (especially in B); dismay with the inaccuracies of the scribal copy we know he used in the BC revision; and the simple passage of time, which made some matters more urgent and others outdated. The idea that Langland’s poetic powers waned after B is no longer tenable: the historical factors which determined his C-revisions reveal the exigencies which drove him to eliminate or sublimate some of the political sensationalism and progressiveness modern readers hold dear. But their retention would not have been worth the loss to literary history of the passages Langland wrote to replace them, such as the long c.9 passage foregrounded by the Ilchester redactor or the c.5 apologia pro vita sua. The latter is the result of perhaps the most poetically reassuring C-revision Langland made: the deletion and radical reworking of the passage at the 22. See Justice, Writing and Rebellion. Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 129.74.250.206 on Mon Apr 14 23:31:37 BST 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521444200.024 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014 526 kathryn kerby-fulton opening of b.12 in which Imaginatif rebukes the dreamer for meddling with poetry: by the time Langland wrote C, he had had ample and dramatic evidence of the impact of his poetry. The fact that he no longer needed the b.12 justification of his work should be cause for modern critical celebration, not (the usual) defamation of C. Scholars who would deny him the right to mature beyond B surely miss the crucial point: the only ‘canonical’ or preferred text of Piers Plowman worth having and cherishing is the one all three versions give us – together, and only together, can they bear witness to the complete growth of a breathtaking poetic mind. Langland’s formal, intellectual and polemical heritage The problem with searching for the influences which shaped Piers Plowman is that there is nothing prior to it which is much like it, at least not in Middle English. It is commonplace for scholars to comment on the extent to which Langland had to anglicize Latin or French terminology, or invent new words entirely in order to discuss intellectual concepts which had never before been discussed in Middle English, but the corollary of this point – which is that most of the texts that served as literary models for the poem were not vernacular – is less commonly acknowledged. Nor, in many instances, were they poetic narratives. This means that Langland’s materia was unusual for a vernacular poet, and so his forma tractandi had to be, too. In an age when literary authorship consisted mainly of the translating and/or reworking of old stories, Langland was a maverick indeed, even among dream-vision poets, whose genre allowed them a degree of freedom from this model of authorship. For instance, in a versified preface to a literary collection, Langland’s younger contemporary, John Shirley, tells his readers: ‘Thankete tauctoures tat teos storyes / Renoueld haue to youre memoryes’ (British Library, MS Add. 16165; my italics). The description suits Chaucer, Lydgate, Trevisa and the others in Shirley’s anthology, but it would not suit Langland.23 Certainly there are identifiable analogues and even sources for some of the non-biblical passages and quotations in Piers Plowman, but what underlies most of its narrative is still a mystery. Moreover, because we know so little of Langland’s educational background, and because under his pen every piece of materia for poetry is transformed beyond recognition into Langlandian idiom, tracing his reading is a di√cult job. It is instructive that neither he nor the scribes who 23. Ed. Hammond, English Verse, p. 196. Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 129.74.250.206 on Mon Apr 14 23:31:37 BST 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521444200.024 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014 Piers Plowman 527 copied and annotated his works seem to have thought source identification necessary; this is especially striking in comparison with the penchant for source annotation one finds in Canterbury Tales manuscripts.24 Langland’s was not the audience of humanist scholars which surrounded Chaucer, but his scribes do show concern for the reader’s education, although of a di◊erent kind. Most Piers manuscripts contain (1) some attempt to highlight the Latin quotes (either through more formal script or rubrication); (2) some system of running heads, ‘rubrics’ and incipits and explicits, which, along with the passus divisions, delineate progress through the narrative; (3) some system (sometimes elaborate) of reader annotation for mnemonics and for internal reference within the poem. The first and second features may be authorially derived, but the third likely not; together they tell us something about both Langland’s habits of composition and his audience’s habits of reading, i.e., that people who read Piers Plowman apparently studied it (often meditatively) – not other books in relation to it, not even the Bible. Nor is this because Langland himself had not studied the Bible formally; his use of biblical citation often depends on an awareness of exegetical context.25 It has to do, rather, with his sense of audience – or rather audiences, because his readers came from educationally and socially diverse groups. Pastoral care and the broader moral, social and legal issues it raised, however, were primary concerns for all of them. In fact, he seems to have taken many of his non-biblical and non-liturgical quotations from manuals of pastoral care. These texts were aimed initially at clerics, but were ultimately written for the benefit of all; some were available in English, many were not, and the shifting quality of audience address in the poem reflects this diversity. The manuals also use scholastic modes of argument from time to time just as Langland does. That Langland used such manuals has been long recognized, but two further aspects of his use deserve more attention: first, that he derived not just information but ideology from them, and, second, that he apparently even derived elements of plot from them. For instance, the Verbum Abbreviatum by Peter Cantor contains more of his quotes than any other known manual (as in fact Skeat recognized), so it is not surprising that Langland and the Chanter share the same opinions on a variety of issues, such as the role of lawyers, or even minstrels (joculatores) in society. From these sources 24. See Russell, ‘Some Early Responses’; Uhart, ‘The Early Reception of ‘Piers Plowman’; Kerby-Fulton and Despres, Iconography and the Professional Reader; even Latin Piers annotations (as in Cambridge University Library ll.4.14 and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 102) are not source glosses. 25. Quick, ‘The Sources of the Quotations’, pp. 12, and on his use of scholastic sources, pp. 23–5; see also Middleton, ‘Audience and Public’, pp. 101–23. Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 129.74.250.206 on Mon Apr 14 23:31:37 BST 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521444200.024 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014 528 kathryn kerby-fulton Langland derived not simply quotations, then, but social and ideological perspectives; as Quick says, ‘Langland shares with the manuals the viewpoint of the concerned, uneducated priest’,26 or, one might add, clerk-inwaiting (since the unbeneficed clergy are a crucial part of his audience, too). In relation to the narrative of the poem one might cite, for instance, the very influential English pastoral manual, the Oculus Sacerdotis, which is likely the source for the attack of proud priests on Unity (in fact there is a fine illustration of priests in worldly dress violently destroying a church in a late fourteenth-century copy of the Oculus (Hatfield House, MS CP 290, f. 13; cf. c.22.217–20).27 This is exactly the kind of literature many of Langland’s readers were interested in: a well-to-do canon of York Minster, Walter de Bruge, even bequeathed a copy of the Oculus along with his Piers Plowman and Bible in 1396. But what was in the Oculus simply a condemnation of lax priests, in Langland’s hands becomes a fully dramatized narrative moment. It is no wonder we have so much trouble tracing his sources. One of the misconceptions which has bedevilled the study of Langland’s learning is the notion that he was an uneducated man (the reasons usually given are that he wrote in the vernacular, that he appears to ‘misquote’ Latin, and that many of his quotations are ‘commonplaces’). In fact this view is no longer tenable either; we know, for instance, that altering quotations to make them fit a new context was a skill taught in ars dictaminis, and Langland often subtly changes his quotations for good reason, sometimes adding a pun to enrich the meaning (for example, c.5.86–8), sometimes deliberately sensationalizing, or providing a slanted translation (for example c.11.290a–295) of a Latin text. Moreover, scholars who have tried to master even one area of his knowledge have been staggered by the complexity they have found.28 Two important factors would appear to have governed his use (or non-use) of sources: immediate access to texts during the composition process (if, as Kane and Donaldson have shown, he had to revise his own B-text from memory, he may have had to rely on memory for some of his other sources), and his awareness of the educational level of his audiences – he was writing, after all, not to show o◊ his own erudition, but to accommodate, at least partly, a vernacular audience. What is most startling about the poem is the range of his knowledge; clearly he was an interested participant and observer in several communities or circles, 26. Quick, ‘The Sources of the Quotations’, p. 26. 27. See Boyle, ‘The Oculus Sacerdotis’, pp. 81–110; Kerby-Fulton and Despres, Iconography and the Professional Reader (on this iconography); on Walter de Bruge, see Middleton, ‘Audience and Public’, p. 147. 28. See, for instance, Coleman, Piers Plowman and the Moderni; Alford, Legal Diction; Scase, New Anticlericalism; Kerby-Fulton, Reformist Apocalypticism. Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 129.74.250.206 on Mon Apr 14 23:31:37 BST 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521444200.024 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014 Piers Plowman 529 both reading and ‘non-reading’. For instance, he seems to know a surprising amount about, and to value, many types of labour, such as clothmaking, or even the mundane domestic work of women, like the making of rushlights (the remarkable passage on poor women in c.9.70–88 describes both in detail).29 As a male clerical author and poet he was surely unusual in this regard (which he realizes at 9.82) – the mere fact of recording, and thereby according a scholarly dignity to domestic work verges on the sanctification of women’s work which one finds in uncloistered female visionary writers like Margery Kempe. This may suggest why medieval women readers were drawn to Piers Plowman, a text modern scholars usually think of as entirely clerical in orientation. (Surprisingly, several Piers manuscripts contain names of women owners or readers, and at least one woman reader, Anne Fortescue, left some annotations (in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 145)).30 Langland, we might note, shows relatively little of the anti-feminism many clerical writers indulge. The centrality of his interest in pastoral care may be the clue here, since conscientious pastoral care had to concern both men and women equally (see, for instance, the context of Piers in Huntington Library MS 128). Aspects of the poem also indicate that he participated to some extent in the kind of reading communities associated with the universities or some other elite academic institution, perhaps a studium generale (and certain manuscript a√liations indicate that such readers, in turn, read his text). Derek Brewer speaks of the ‘university habit of mind’ Langland had acquired; Coleman points to his knowledge of the debates of the moderni, and perhaps more importantly to the evangelical impetus which many university trained priests felt. She cites S. Harrison Thompson’s comment: ‘The universities of the fourteenth century were thronged by clerics who came, studied, wrote a Bachelor of Theology thesis . . . then returned to be simple parish priests. A surprising number of these [theses] . . . reflect a religious groping one can only call evangelical.’31 This, as Coleman has shown, throws light on both Langland himself and on part of his audience. However, while his composition habits reflect some dialectical systems of thought, they also reflect more profoundly the older monastic habit of mind (it can hardly be accidental that the pastoral manual he most quotes 29. Pearsall, ‘Langland and London’; on the sanctification of women’s work, see Barratt, ed., Women’s Writing, p. 178. 30. In addition to Digby 145, women can be associated with: Liverpool, Chaderton f.4.8, Huntington Library, MS 128, Cambridge, Gonville and Caius MS 669/646, the Westminster Manuscript, the Vernon Manuscript and, more dubiously, with Cambridge University Library dd.1.17. 31. ‘Pro Saeculo XIV’, Speculum 28 (1953), p. 807, cited in Coleman, Piers Plowman and the Moderni, p. 151. Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 129.74.250.206 on Mon Apr 14 23:31:37 BST 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521444200.024 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014 530 kathryn kerby-fulton was written by a monk; that the later theologian he most quotes is the great monastic reformer, Bernard; that, as Bloomfield showed, he had a deep interest in the monastic concept of perfection, which influenced the very structural fabric of the Vita and many of its crucial episodes, such as the Tree of Charity). Among the regular clergy, Langland shows most respect for monks, and this, coupled with his nostalgia for the cloister (c.5.152–5) and what may be an allusion to the chancel of Little Malvern Priory (c.6.398), may suggest that he was schooled in this Benedictine establishment as a boy.32 More important to his mode of composition is the older symbolic, associative mode of the monastic tradition rather than the newer logical mode of the schools, as the fluid quality of his allegory betrays. And his interest in endowment issues is more acute than one would usually expect of a member of the secular clergy, whose mentality he shares in so much else. Although he knew intimately the literature of the clerical controversies of his day (especially the polemics of the endowment and mendicant controversies), his perspective is much more complex than has normally been understood. It is an unusual, and characteristically independent blend of progressively reformist monastic and pastoral positions – theologically orthodox and spiritually imaginative, a combination the subtleties of which were increasingly open to misinterpretation after 1381. Unlike the anti-mendicant writers (with whom he is too often lumped by modern scholars), Langland believed in the friars’ original mission, and saw their need (which he conceived as the single most complex problem of the modern Church) as their downfall, and called for their reform through endowment. Langland retained his belief in endowment for regular clergy; in A he had even wholeheartedly supported endowment for secular clergy, especially bishops (see the description of Dobet and Dobest at a.11.195–203), but in BC this passage disappears, and bishops are later threatened with disendowment for their abuse of wealth, and told to live on tithes and o◊erings (b.15.553–67; c.17.217–32). Sometime between the writing of A and B, he became convinced that the abuse of Church temporalities was rampant, and in BC he expresses his indignation in the traditional monastic mode of reformist apocalyptic prophecy. One of the great monastic manuscripts of Piers Plowman, Cambridge University Library dd.1.17, in fact, contains one of these prophecies (◊. 203v–204r) as well. Langland had apparently been part of a monastic literary community at some earlier point in his life, and he may have retained associations of 32. See Kaske, ‘Local Iconography’, pp. 159–69; Bryer, Little Malvern, p. 24. Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 129.74.250.206 on Mon Apr 14 23:31:37 BST 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521444200.024 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014 Piers Plowman 531 some sort (noteworthy here is the fact that of the fourteen manuscripts of the poem with identifiable provenances listed by Hanna, six have Benedictine a√liations, and three others have marks of unidentified monastic ownership). At least four major genres of monastic literature had a powerful impact on him (I include here those which originated in or were largely disseminated by monasteries): (1) Latin religious visionary writing, (2) chronicles, (3) Latin satirical literature, (4) early alliterative poetry. To take each, briefly, in turn: (1) Toleration and encouragement of visionary writing was traditionally the province of the monasteries (arising no doubt as a natural extension of the contemplative life). It was usually monastically trained men who were defenders of visionary experience against scholastically trained clerics. Langland very shrewdly dramatized this interclerical tension in his Feast of Patience episode, where the hardheaded, theologically correct doctor dismisses Patience’s charismatic optimism as ‘a Dido’ (c.15.171), and, alone among those present, misses the significance of the Emmaus-like appearance and vanishing of Piers (138–52). Such ‘apparitions’ are the stu◊ of monastic and eremitical autobiography (in England one could point to a similar episode in which Christ appears as a mysterious guest in Christina of Markyate’s Vita); it is but a short step from these to the fluid allegory of the great monastic visionaries, some of whose works Langland certainly knew (see below, p. 535). (2) Among chronicles, Langland knew both the kind which trace the patterns of Salvation History, and those more preoccupied with current a◊airs. The influence of the former on the poem needs no elaboration here, nor indeed does his interest in current a◊airs, but the fact that the monastic chronicle was a likely source for such material does need stressing – it is worth noting that he actually mentions in c.5.178 that ‘cronicles’ were the source of his prophecies. (3) Langland made much use of Latin satirical and polemical texts; in fact, the Feast of Patience provides two such instances as well. Among so-called ‘anti-clerical’ satire which flourished in monasteries and the schools, Langland was certainly acquainted with some of the unholiest (this was actually satire written by clerics for clerics, targeting di◊erent clerical communities, and is more accurately called interclerical satire).33 One of these is the ‘Apocalypsis Goliae’, to which he apparently alludes (c.15.99), and which is, like all the Golias texts, associated with the influential Anglo-Latin tradition of Walter Map, and often copied in monastic miscellanies with a hodgepodge of 33. Scase’s use of the term ‘anti-clerical’ is problematic in this regard. Yunck gives a detailed list of satirical texts Langland may have known in ‘Satire’, pp. 135–4. Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 129.74.250.206 on Mon Apr 14 23:31:37 BST 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521444200.024 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014 532 kathryn kerby-fulton anti-mendicant and interclerical satire (as, for instance, in the Glastonbury Miscellany). That Langland’s poem was associated with such texts is evident from its presence, along with a host of ‘Mappian’ items, in manuscripts like Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 851 (the Z manuscript) from Ramsey Abbey. The fact that at the opening of the Feast (in line 15.51a) Langland almost certainly alludes to the anti-mendicant prophecy ‘Insurgent gentes’, may be the result of his perusal of some such collection (both the ‘Apocalypsis Goliae’ and ‘Insurgent’ are found in numerous monastic and university manuscripts). However, the fact that he does not anglicize either any detail of the shocking ‘Apocalypsis’ or the bitter import of the equally shocking ‘Insurgent’ citation (which he gives in Latin only) is extremely significant. Certain criticisms of the clergy (whether of monks or friars) were not intended for the eyes and ears of vernacular readers and Langland did not wish to betray that trust, although in the heat of indignation he flirts with it. Rather, he often seems concerned to be recognized as a member of the clerical club. For instance in the same scene he refuses to translate periculum est in falsis fratribus: ‘I wol noyt write it here / In englissh’ in case, he suggests, it harms good friars (b.13.71–3a); in C he is even more explicit about his own clerkly status and loyalty: ‘Ac me thynketh loth, thogh y Latyn knowe, to lacken eny secte, / For alle be we brethrene, thogh we be diuersely clothed’ (c.15.79–80). Here, as so often at the interface of Latin and English in the poem, is the evidence of a necessarily implied dual audience, and his behaviour at such points suggests not so much that he was part of a ‘new anti-clericalism’, but of ongoing interclerical controversies in which he respected jurisdictional boundaries. (4) Finally, we should briefly mention the early poetry of the so-called Alliterative Revival – that much-studied phenomenon about which we know so little. Pearsall has argued that ‘the serious historical and didactic concern of nearly all the alliterative poetry of the revival is itself the product of monastic culture’, most likely originating in a southwest Midland monastic context.34 The great monastic houses of the south-west Midlands, especially Worcester and Gloucester, attracted powerful (royal, aristocratic and episcopal) patronage, and it was the Diocese of Worcester itself, where Langland was apparently born and schooled, that had most persistently been associated with maintaining the ancient traditions of Anglo-Saxon literary culture. This complex tradition fostered not only the lively realism and arresting allegorical prose of Ancrene Wisse – the closest thing to Langland’s fluid allegorical style in 34. Pearsall, ‘The Origins’, p. 14; for a di◊erent account, see chapter 18 above. Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 129.74.250.206 on Mon Apr 14 23:31:37 BST 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521444200.024 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014 Piers Plowman 533 Middle English – but also the sophisticated ‘anti-clerical’ satire of alliterative poems like In the Ecclesiastical Court, which portrays a layman at the mercy of the clergy (‘Ne mai no lewed lued libben in londe, . . . So lerede vs biledes’, 1–3).35 The relation of poet, narrator and audience in this Harley lyric is the complex one familiar to readers of Piers, and not simply vox populi protest; it was apparently, as Kane has remarked, penned by a clerk himself, at least in part for appreciation of clerks. Much has been made (as Samuels says, too much) of Langland’s perhaps deliberate pruning of south-west Midlands vocabulary from his poem; that this area was where his linguistic, literary (and metrical) roots were is abundantly evident; that he returned to those roots (or at least his literary executor did) is suggested by the dialectal distribution of the C-manuscripts, and the early association of his text with monasteries in nearby Sta◊ordshire (in the Vernon manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley eng. poet. e. 1)) and Abergavenny Priory (in Trinity College, Dublin, MS 212). Two further pertinent traditions remain to be mentioned, the Franciscan and the eremitical. With regard to the first, Langland makes no use whatsoever of the tradition of a◊ective piety, particularly its devotion to Christ’s physical su◊ering which the Franciscans had increasingly popularized. However, two Franciscan preoccupations fascinated him: poverty, and missions to the heathen (there are three, if one counts the internal Franciscan reformist critique that also fascinated him, and for which ‘anti-mendicant’ is a misnomer). Monastic miscellanies show a kind of armchair interest in the non-Christian peoples (for example, the Vernon Manuscript), probably a branch of their interest in history, geography, marvels, religious romance and the exotic generally. But Langland’s urgency about the matter is more practical, and smacks of Franciscan sources, many of which are reformist or apocalyptic or both, some of which were banned during Langland’s time.36 Since these authors wrote precisely the kind of material from which Langland drew some of his ideas on the non-Christian peoples, Church authority, poverty and apocalypticism, it is perhaps no wonder that he found himself in a defensive position in the 1380s. Like Richard Rolle, whose pastoral and eremitical works he probably knew, Langland struggles within his writings to establish his own authority from what is apparently a position outside the clerical elite. With four out of five clerics unbeneficed in 35. Turville-Petre, ed., Alliterative Poetry, p. 28; Kane, ‘Some Fourteenth-Century Political Poetry’, p. 86; on Langland’s south-west Midlands origins, see Samuels, ‘Dialect’, p. 204. 36. See Kerby-Fulton, Reformist Apocalypticism; Hudson, Lollards and their Books, p. 49; see also Daniel, Franciscan Concept of Mission. Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 129.74.250.206 on Mon Apr 14 23:31:37 BST 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521444200.024 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014 534 kathryn kerby-fulton Langland’s London, the rise of a ‘clerical proletariat’ who made a ready audience for his work is hardly surprising. As Rolle had written in Incendium Amoris, ‘So I o◊er this book for the consideration not of philosophers, not of the worldly-wise, not of the great theologians enwrapped in endless quaestiones, but of the simple and untaught who strive more to love God than to know many things’ (‘rudibus et indoctis, magis Deum diligere quam multa scire conantibus’). Even in this short quotation one sees many ideas (and even some of the Latin vocabulary) familiar to Langland’s readers. The fact that Langland also uses the conventions of religious vision and probatio in Piers Plowman points to an autobiographical concern not unlike Rolle’s, who presented himself to his readers ‘as passionate, audacious, frank; as sensual, charming, di√dent and ingenuous’, according to his most recent literary biographer.37 Certainly Rolle’s involvement in interclerical controversy and in the composition of pastoral material in the vernacular (and even for women readers) is similar. By Langland’s time, however, there was a new urgency and political uneasiness attached to some of these things. Many older literary traditions, topics and issues appear to have come under suspicion or become more controversial between the writing of B and C. Langland’s active literary life, then, spans a period of significant shifts in attitude (not all positive) towards the vernacularizing of intellectual thought – shifts which no poet could ignore.38 Langland’s literary method and its influence Allegory – not a dead but a living language for Langland – was a remarkably natural medium for him. It was also both politically expedient and poetically flexible. Many excellent studies of his allegory exist, the best and most accessible of which is Elizabeth’s Salter’s detailed taxonomy of the various types of allegory he actually used.39 Most helpful in some ways is her identification of ‘embryonic allegory’, which appears, as Pearsall says, in ‘those momentary flowerings of allegorical visualization which spring from every fissure in the surface of the text (e.g. vi.140; xv.22, xvi.330)’. One cannot help but notice how often it is a Latin word that springs from the fissure (as is the case in this list of Pearsall’s); Langland’s embryonic 37. For both quotations, see Watson, Richard Rolle, pp. 114–15; for Langland’s presumed status as an unbeneficed cleric, see Donaldson, The C-Text and its Poet, and Swanson, ‘Chaucer’s Parson’, pp. 41–80. 38. See Simpson, ‘Constraints on Satire’, and Watson, ‘Censorship and Cultural Change’. 39. Salter and Pearsall, ‘Piers Plowman’: Selections from the C-Text, p. 13; Pearsall, C-Text, p. 16. Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 129.74.250.206 on Mon Apr 14 23:31:37 BST 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521444200.024 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014 Piers Plowman 535 allegories are frequently macaronic and seem to be inspired by the economy of Latin. His larger-scale allegories work the way the psychologically sophisticated French allegories of the thirteenth century do; like the Roman de la Rose,40 the Vita of Piers dramatizes in macro the forces and faculties at work upon and within the individual mind in conflict. His satirical method, however, is much more subtle than anything in even the Rose (a comparison of the portraits of the Sins in both poems, for instance, is much to Langland’s advantage). Among French allegorical poems generally, he may well have known some of those to which Wenzel has given the helpful generic label of ‘pilgrimage of life’ poems, especially Deguileville’s Pelerinage trilogy – certainly the designer of the only illustrated manuscript of Piers Plowman, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 104, recognized that he was dealing with a work in this genre. The French allegories closest in tone and purpose to Langland’s, like the Roman de Carite and the Roman de Fauvel, have been insightfully studied by Melanie Kell-Isaacson as ‘unachieved quests for social reformation’: ‘Emphasis in these quests is not on completion, [but] rather . . . on the e◊ect of the unattainable goal on the yearning seeker’, that goal being the ‘restoration of the community’.41 The seeker in the ‘unachieved quests’ is usually either looking for some virtue which has been exiled from the community, or is himself a personification of some outcast virtue seeking a return. This is apparently the aspect of the poem which attracted many of its earliest readers, because these are precisely the plot elements most often picked up by Langland’s English imitators. But what is most striking about Langland’s use of allegory (and what sets it apart from all the works just mentioned) is his fluidity. Dronke pointed this out some years ago in his superb article, ‘Arbor Caritatis’, and suggested a number of continental mystics, such as Mechtild of Magdeburg, as models, or at least analogues for Langland’s ‘shifting’ allegorical method. A more likely model, however, is another Helfta visionary, Mechtild of Hackeborn, whose Liber Specialis Gratiae did actually circulate in England (and was perhaps known to Julian of Norwich). Mechtild’s Liber has the same startling fluidity as Piers Plowman: some of Langland’s very enigmatic embryonic allegories, like the promised vision of Truth sitting ‘in tyn herte / In a cheyne of charity as tow a child were’ (b.5.607–8), and some of his larger, abruptly shifting allegories (like the Tree of Charity, the coat of Haukyn, the bread of Patience, Christ’s drink of love) have 40. Muscatine, ‘The Emergence of Psychological Allegory’, pp. 1160–82; on relations with French allegories, see Kell-Isaacson, ‘The Unachieved Quest’. 41. Kell-Isaacson, ‘The Unachieved Quest’, p. 19. Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 129.74.250.206 on Mon Apr 14 23:31:37 BST 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521444200.024 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014 536 kathryn kerby-fulton surprising parallels in Mechtild.42 The fluidity of his allegory is rooted in a monastic meditative tradition of exegesis which involves loose association of symbolism, further encouraged by the development of concordances and other tools for biblical study.43 Perhaps the best instance of this type of allegory in an English text prior to Piers comes in Ancrene Wisse; like the Wisse-author, Langland uses biblical quotations associatively, homely images unabashedly, and awkward allegories graciously. Like Langland, too, the Wisse-author even expects his audience – in this case, enclosed women – to share (at least vicariously) in the dishonours of an evangelical modus vivendi: begging, wandering, being socially reviled, serving as humble beadswomen even to those of lower rank.44 These are the ‘dishonours’ which exercised such a hold over Langland’s imagination, most dramatically in the image of the social outcast he created of himself in c.5, and in his ‘lunatic lollars’. Langland’s earliest imitators (and the one illustrator we know) found this leitmotif in the poem fascinating. In combination with the image of a Christ-like working man as hero (a motif which recurs in monastic women’s visions prior to Langland, by the way) it became irresistible. Richard the Redeless, Mum and the Sothsegger, Piers the Plowman’s Crede and, to a lesser extent, The Plowman’s Tale all make use of the motif, but only in Mum does the resulting quest become a truly internal narratorial search in the Langlandian mode. Neither the Crede nor the Tale (which is much more indebted to the Langland tradition than to its pseudonymous author, Chaucer) attempts Langlandian personification allegory, perhaps for ideological reasons: both are Lollard in sympathy, and the Crede repeatedly condemns the use of images in the visual arts and miracle plays. All four poems unabashedly borrow diction, phrasing, and sometimes whole lines, as well as plot elements from Langland, but only Richard reveals a real grasp of Langland’s personification methods, as in this clever use of synedochic personification which arises as Wit is being cast from the halls of the rich and fashionably dressed: ‘He was halowid and y-huntid and yhotte trusse, / . . . “Let sle him!” quod the sleues that slode vppon the erthe, / And alle . . . / . . . schorned him, for his slaueyn was of the olde schappe’ (Richard, 3.228, 234–6; cf. Piers c.2.227–8; 11.44–50). The dreamer in Mum is given the archetypal visionary commission (latent in Langland) to write down what 42. For the Latin text see Paquelin, ed., Revelationes Gertrudianae ac Mechtildianae; for the fifteenth-century English version see Booke of Gostlye Grace, ed. Halligan. 43. See Alford, ‘The Role of the Quotations’, pp. 146–9; however, as Jane Phillips shows in ‘Style and Meaning’, there are limitations to the applicability of Alford’s thesis across the whole poem. 44. Ancrene Wisse, ed. Shepherd, p. 7. Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 129.74.250.206 on Mon Apr 14 23:31:37 BST 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521444200.024 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014 Piers Plowman 537 he sees, but shortly thereafter the poet’s book suddenly becomes a whole bag of books to be unfolded before the king (Mum, 1343 ◊.), a shift which is very Langlandian in its dream-like fluidity. A catalogue ensues of almost every type of document, book or pamphlet made in the Middle Ages, suggesting the author’s detailed knowledge of document and book preparation, and his interest in the transmission of controversial thought – all of which is quite characteristic of Langlandian imitators. Like Langland himself, many no doubt came from that group of unbeneficed clerics who made their livings as scribes, scriveners or civil servants, a group whose importance for the development of Middle English literature we are just beginning to understand.45 However, the extent to which such clerks formed a socially radical ‘clerical proletariat’ is dubious. Both the Tale and the Crede authors, like Langland himself, express disapproval of the upwardly mobile: indeed the Crede author, despite his heterodox leanings, even exceeds Langland’s social conservatism in a vicious satire of labourers with economic aspirations, modelled on c.5.53–81 (cf. Crede, 744–67). But the sense of constraint on political and ecclesiastical satire is an equally wellaired theme in these works, as James Simpson has shown. The Richard-poet even exploits these tensions by hinting that his poem is as yet ‘secrette’ to a political coterie (Prologue 61). In so openly lamenting the fact of poetic constraint, Langland’s poem had obviously touched a nerve. Moreover, its presence in manuscripts like Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 102 (a ‘low-budget’ anthology of political poems) and London, Burlington House, Society of Antiquaries, MS 687 (which contains the Lollard-interpolated Prick of Conscience and a list of the o◊ences which merit ecclesiastical censure) suggests what kinds of concerns his early readers brought to the poem. Langland’s influence throughout the fifteenth century has been overshadowed in the minds of modern scholars by Chaucer’s, but it may be traced in a variety of anonymous alliterative works, in Hoccleve’s handling of poetic persona and ‘embryonic’ allegory, as well as in moments of Langlandian tone or allusion in writers like Audelay, Dunbar and Douglas.46 The same penchant for political complaint and denunciation of ecclesiastical abuse which so attracted the first Langlandian imitators also ensured Piers Plowman an audience among poets and pamphleteers during the Tudor period. As Spearing has pointed out, Chaucer was no real model 45. See Kerby-Fulton and Justice, ‘Langlandian Reading Circles’. 46. For a concise summary of Langland’s influence on contemporary and near-contemporary medieval writers see Hudson, ‘The Legacy’; and Barr, ed. The ‘Piers Plowman’ Tradition; for Hoccleve, see Kerby-Fulton, ‘Bibliographic Ego’. Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 129.74.250.206 on Mon Apr 14 23:31:37 BST 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521444200.024 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014 538 kathryn kerby-fulton (except of taciturnity) for an age of political upheaval, and so one finds Langland’s methods of mixing vivid realism, biting satire and arresting word play in Tudor poems like Skelton’s Collyn Clout,47 which at times reaches back beyond Piers to the Apocalypsis Goliae and other medieval Latin satires (for example in ll. 448–56). During the sixteenth century, Piers was copied as an orthodox poem, printed as Protestant propaganda, excerpted as Tudor prophecy, or plundered casually by poets like Drayton. But for the real verdict of English literary history, one must go to Spenser, who could see both Chaucer and Langland from his vantage point (after Rogers’s 1561 edition, Langland’s poem was not to be reprinted again until 1813). Not only did Spenser advise his ‘lyttle Calender’ to ‘adore’ the footsteps of ‘the Pilgrim that the Ploughman playde a whyle’ from a respectful distance, but he paid Langland the compliment of making a plowman the foster-father of the Redcrosse knight, the future St George. Spenser recognized a forefather – both literary and ecclesiastical – when he saw one. 47. Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance, pp. 232–3; on Langland’s later influence and use in Protestant propaganda, see Hudson, ‘The Legacy’, pp. 251–66; on its use in Tudor prophecy, see Jansen, ‘A New Piers Fragment’, pp. 93–9. Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 129.74.250.206 on Mon Apr 14 23:31:37 BST 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521444200.024 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014