The World is a wikkede wynd to hem that wolde treuthe." -- Piers Plowman, C-text, ed. Derek Pearsall, XVIII.31
William Langland
For further information, please refer to the website of the International Piers Plowman Society.
Teche me to no tresour but telle me this ilke / How Y may saue my soule, that saynt art yholde. With these words, William Langland signals the underlying mission of his dazzlingly complex, sprawling, penetrating, and moving poem Piers Plowman. The poem was Langland's life work, and modern scholarship has revealed at least three major redactions of the poem, a witness to its author's long-term preoccupation with its subject materials: ecclesiastical corruption, social injustices, and the renewal and redemption of the Christian soul.
Teche me to no tresour but telle me this ilke / How Y may saue my soule, that saynt art yholde. With these words, William Langland signals the underlying mission of his dazzlingly complex, sprawling, penetrating, and moving poem Piers Plowman. The poem was Langland's life work, and modern scholarship has revealed at least three major redactions of the poem, a witness to its author's long-term preoccupation with its subject materials: ecclesiastical corruption, social injustices, and the renewal and redemption of the Christian soul.
Almost nothing is known of Langland other than the few hints one can glean from his work, though some scholars have quite plausibly identified him as the son (perhaps the natural son) of Stacy de Rokayle, a gentleman landowner in Oxfordshire. He was likely born around 1325-1330 and received a thorough clerical education; there are records of a "William Rokele" being tonusred as a clerk in 1340. He may have entered minor orders and may even have served as a parish priest for some time. On the other hand, in the C-text of Piers Plowman (generally considered the most authoritative version of the poem), the narrator mentions a wife (Kitte) and daughter (Calote). It is, indeed, difficult to establish many about Langland's life, though several references to himself as "Long Wille" suggest that Langland was perhaps especially tall.
Nonetheless, despite how little we can glean about Langland personally, the poem, written in a commanding alliterative long verse line, speaks for itself. Piers Plowman is a dream-vision, or, more properly, a series of interconnected dream-visions, occupying a potent space between allegorical abstraction and a keen and sobering sense of realism. Langland is at his most vivid when he describes the suffering of the poor and the all-too-prevalent corruption of church authorities. The poet likewise moves deftly between the citation of various theological authorities (Augustine, Gregory, Jerome, etc. ) to a deep and often piercing reliance upon the Bible itself, especially the Gospel stories of the life of Jesus. Indeed, for Langland, it seems that the Biblical emphasis on the grace of God and the exemplary life of Christ often eclipse the authority of the fourteenth-century Church as an institution. In this, Langland in many respects resembles his near-contemporary John Wyclif, though his poem seems to shy away from many of Wyclif's more radical heterodoxies, especially his teachings on predestination and the transubstantiation. Still, later generations would look back on Langland as a proto-Reformer, a Protestant avant la lettre who testified to the woes visited on the world when the Church did not function properly and when men more generally did not espouse a more Biblical sense of morality.
Nonetheless, despite how little we can glean about Langland personally, the poem, written in a commanding alliterative long verse line, speaks for itself. Piers Plowman is a dream-vision, or, more properly, a series of interconnected dream-visions, occupying a potent space between allegorical abstraction and a keen and sobering sense of realism. Langland is at his most vivid when he describes the suffering of the poor and the all-too-prevalent corruption of church authorities. The poet likewise moves deftly between the citation of various theological authorities (Augustine, Gregory, Jerome, etc. ) to a deep and often piercing reliance upon the Bible itself, especially the Gospel stories of the life of Jesus. Indeed, for Langland, it seems that the Biblical emphasis on the grace of God and the exemplary life of Christ often eclipse the authority of the fourteenth-century Church as an institution. In this, Langland in many respects resembles his near-contemporary John Wyclif, though his poem seems to shy away from many of Wyclif's more radical heterodoxies, especially his teachings on predestination and the transubstantiation. Still, later generations would look back on Langland as a proto-Reformer, a Protestant avant la lettre who testified to the woes visited on the world when the Church did not function properly and when men more generally did not espouse a more Biblical sense of morality.
Now, Lord, sende hem somur somtyme to solace and to joye |
Although it might seem easy, initially, to summarize Langland's theological and political positions, in fact the complexity of his poetics soon confounds any facile attempt at simplfying his thought. The poem progresses through a series of visions that highlight a large cast of allegorical characters—Holy Chirche, Conscience, Treuthe, Resoun, Rechelesness, Patience, Imaginatyf, and many others—all of whom offer various lenses through which to regard different aspects of fourteenth-century society and different, if often overlapping, models of the relationship between theology, the institution of the Church, and the actual, lived Christian life. Certain figures command the reader's attention at greater length and with greater vividness: Lady Meed, who represents graft and other monetary corruptions, is memorably drawn, and her misdeeds — narrated through an elaborate confession and trial before the king — occupy several passus. But although he does not appear until Passus VII, the figure of Piers Plowman dominates the poem, which rightly draws its title from him. Piers first appears Yparayled as a paynyem in pilgrimes wyse, his clothing representing the idea of human life as a pilgrimage as well as suggesting that he represents Everyman. Yet Langland also associates Piers, as a plowman, closely with the hardworking poor, and later even with the working of the Holy Spirit. In short, Piers becomes the poem's consummate mouthpiece for Langland's call for a renewal of society along more sincerely Christian lines.
As it stands, Piers Plowman — especially in Langland's final revision (the so-called C-text) — serves as a useful corrective to the view of the Middle English literary canon centered around a more sophisticated and metafictional Chaucerian aesthetic. Langland's sense of the folly and selfishness that beset human nature is certainly more theologically-inflected and less ironic than Chaucer's, but he more than makes up for it with his compassion for hardship, his penetrating diagnoses of a multitude of social ills, and his inspiring vision for a more harmonious human future. |
Further Reading
- David Aers, Beyond Reformation? An Essay on William Langland's Piers Plowman and the End of Constantinian Christianity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2015)
- David Aers, "Piers Plowman: Poverty, Work, and Community," in Community, Gender, and Individual Identity: English Writing 1360-1430 (Routledge, 1988)
- Michael Calabrese, An Introduction to Piers Plowman (University Press of Florida, 2016)
- Maureen Quilligan, "Langland's Literal Allegory," Essays in Criticism 28 (1978): 95-111
- Elizabeth Salter, Piers Plowman: An Introduction (Blackwell, 1962)
- Sarah Wood, Conscience and the Composition of Piers Plowman (Oxford English Monographs, 2012)