Piers Plowman Read online

  5. Where the rhyme letter is a vowel, any vowel is acceptable.

  6. A sounded H may be either disregarded or treated as a consonant and rhymed with other Hs.

  7. Lines may contain a subsidiary repeated sound.

  8. Alliteration may roll over from one line to the next.

  The Approach to the Translation

  It has not been possible to keep to Langland’s exact sound pattern because many of his words are obsolete. A line of the original may use W as its rhyme letter, for instance, while the same line in the translation may have to use R or F. However, alliteration is carried over from one line to another, subsidiary sounds are included, the caesura is broadly maintained, and the apparent rules for unstressed syllables are observed. Both masculine and feminine endings are used, but the former is now more usual because of changes in grammar and pronunciation.

  In the interest of fluidity, the translation uses alliteration between any three out of the four stressed syllables in each line. Also, much use is made of pairs of alliterating syllables since it would have looked like incompetence to place only two alliterating syllables in a line. This results in the patterns abab, abba and aabb, rather than Langland’s occasional axay and xaay, where x and y do not alliterate with anything. Furthermore, the rhyme letter is placed consistently on stressed syllables, although stress patterns may vary from reader to reader. V and F are treated as rhyming, as are T and TH, S, X, SH and soft C, and Q, K and hard C. The division into paragraphs is mine.

  The names of the abstract characters presented some problems. The lady here called “Money” was originally “Meed,” which means “reward,” either a deserved recognition of work well done, or an undeserved bribe: “Money” now fulfills much the same role. “Kynde Wit” is translated as “Native Wit,” but “Wit” on its own is translated as “Intelligence,” while “Waryn Wisdom” and his friend “Witty” have become “Warren Witwell” and “Wily.” I capitalize these abstract qualities only when they are clearly personified, not necessarily always as the same character or with the same gender. “Truth” is capitalized throughout when it is a synonym for God.

  The poem contains over 300 Latin quotations, the vast majority from the Vulgate, the Latin Bible of the Catholic Church, and references to chapter and verse are given in the footnotes. Many of these would have been familiar to readers and listeners from church services, even if they did not grasp every word, and they were often left incomplete in the original text. Here, they are given in full, and in order to reproduce a mixture of familiarity and alienation, the earliest possible English translation of the Vulgate is used, the so-called Douay-Rheims Bible.17 This differs at many points from the “Authorized” or “King James Version” (KJV) commissioned for the Church of England in 1611, and footnotes point to these differences.

  In the original, longer biblical quotations (whether accurate or not) are generally treated as asides, and are excluded from the line numbering, while shorter quotations and non-biblical, proverbial and unattributed quotations are often integrated into the text, sometimes mixing Latin and English within so-called “macaronic” lines. The translation is more consistent than the original in this practice, non-biblical and non-liturgical Latin quotations being freshly translated and incorporated into the text in order to give some feel of the macaronic original. For that reason, and because of the moving of some lines and the omission of repetitions, especially English explanations of Latin quotations, the line numbering differs in places from the Middle English editions.

  Langland sometimes plays on the fact that his Latin will not be fully understood, and at two points where a Latin insert runs to several lines (in the Prologue and Step XIV), this effect is imitated in the translation by the use of a jumble of Latin, French and high-flown English.

  No attempt is made to soften three aspects of the poem that may trouble the modern reader. The first is the intolerance shown toward the Jews (see especially XVIII 92 ff), who are seen as rightly excluded from society. The second is the belief that Mohammed was a lapsed Christian (XV 397 ff). In order to stress that this is a medieval myth, the spelling of the names Mahomet and Mahon has not been changed. The third is the repugnant tale of Agag (III 255 ff), taken from the Old Testament, in which Saul is punished for not obeying God’s command to slaughter King Agag along with his entire people. Instead of pointing out how this differs from the Christian message of love, Langland uses the story to warn of the dangers of greed. Some readers may also be disturbed by a fourth point, the frequent use of the word “men” to mean “people.” However, the poem belongs to its era, and the translator has the duty to be faithful.

  The Imagery of the Poem

  The imagery in the poem is extremely rich. It includes numerous triads such as the Holy Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the Three Wise Men and their three gifts, the three days of Christ’s Easter Passion, and the faith, hope and charity of Saint Paul, which are matched by the threefold division of society into knights, laborers and clergy, itself subdivided into lay clerics, priests and bishops. Three props support the Tree of Charity in Step XVI, with its three fruits—marriage, widowed continence and virginity—while several attempts are made at identifying the meaning of Do-well, Do-better and Do-best. In Step XVII the three defects that may force a man to leave home—a nagging wife, rain and smoke—are bizarre symbols of the flesh, sickness and avarice. In the same Step, the Trinity is explained through the extended analogy of a hand, with its fist, fingers and palm, and of a torch with its wax, wick and flame.

  Much of the imagery is allegorical and would have been understood at three levels: the superficial or literal meaning, the deeper moral implications, and the underlying spiritual truth. It was commonly said, for example, that the tree of the cross on which Christ was crucified had grown from the seeds of the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden (XVIII 140). This is not literally true, but it is true in the sense that Christ died on the cross because of the evil done by people, from which they should desist, and that by dying, he redeemed them through the mystery of his divine love. Similarly, Langland does not literally mean that a single judge will one day sit in a combined court, but that a single set of principles will be adopted, based on honesty (“True-tongue,” III 318).18 The most complex image is that of Piers himself, who is plowman, prophet, saint, the Church, and finally Christ, and the most puzzling is the tearing of the pardon (Step VII).19 Perhaps for that reason, the pardon was cut out of the C version, and the appearances of Piers were much reduced.

  Reflections of spiritual reality were also seen in physical phenomena such as trees upturned, light and darkness, flood, fire, famine and disease, and even in topography. The tower that Langland glimpses on the hill at the start of the poem becomes in his mind the home of God in heaven, and the house with the moat down below becomes the dwelling of the devil, between which poles people live out their lives. God is associated with light, the tower therefore being in the east, and the devil with darkness and death, and his dungeon is therefore in the west.

  Langland did not invent most of his images. The wind beating at the tree of Charity (XVI 27 ff) can be traced to the early Church Fathers, for example,20 while the fall of Lucifer and the naming of Longinus, the Roman centurion who acknowledges Christ on the cross, occur in the Apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus.21 Langland adds his own variations, however, turning Longinus into a Jewish knight who jousts with Jesus, just as Jesus jousts for mankind in a deadly tournament (XVI 163, XVIII 22 ff) to which he rides in the person of the Good Samaritan (XVII 51). But the Samaritan is also the embodiment of Charity, one of the many abstract qualities in the poem that slip in and out of human shape.

  Images are thus not only plentiful, but also intertwined, shifting and cross-referenced, and each carries a wealth of connotations. I hope that readers enjoy discovering and reflecting on them.

  1Dreams were used, for example, by Chaucer in The Romaunt of the Rose and The Boke of the Duchesse.

  2Henry W.
Wells, “The Construction of Piers Plowman,” in Edward Vasta, ed., Middle English Survey (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1965), 168.

  3T.P. Dunning, “Structure of the B Text of Piers Plowman,” in Edward Vasta, ed. Interpretations of Piers Plowman (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), 261.

  4W.W. Skeat, ed. William Langland, The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman in Three Parallel Texts Together with Richard the Redeless, Vol. I: Text; Vol. II: Notes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1886, 10th ed., 1923, latest reprint 2001). Editions of individual versions of the poem had been published by T.D. Whitaker in 1813 and T. Wright in 1856.

  5A.V.C. Schmidt, ed. William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Critical Edition of the B-Text Based on Trinity College Cambridge MS B.15.17, 2d ed. (London: J.M. Dent Everyman, and North Clarendon, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, 1995.

  6A.V.C. Schmidt, ed. Piers Plowman: A Parallel-Text Edition of the A, B, C and Z Versions revised edition in 3 vols. (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University Medieval Institute, 2011). Vol. I London: Longman, 1995, Vol. II Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 2008.

  7George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson, eds. Piers Plowman: The B Version—Will’s Visions of Piers Plowman, Do-Well, Do-Better and Do-Best: An Edition in the Form of Trinity College Cambridge MS B.15.17, Corrected and Restored from the Known Evidence, with Variant Readings, rev. ed. (London and Los Angeles: Continuum, 2002); Elizabeth Robertson and Stephen H.A. Shepherd, eds., William Langland, Piers Plowman (London and New York: W.W. Norton, 2006).

  8For example, through web.archive.org, the University of Virginia Piers Plowman Electronic Archive (www.piers.iath.virginia.edu) and the University of Michigan hosting of the Oxford Text Archive Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse.

  9The Schmidt C numbers are taken from his 1995 Longman edition.

  10A.V.C. Schmidt, trans. Piers Plowman: A New Translation of the B-Text, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

  11R.W.V. Elliott, “The Langland Country,” in S.S. Hussey, ed., Piers Plowman: Critical Approaches (London: Methuen, 1969), 228.

  12See inter alia: Stephanie Trigg, “The Rhetoric of Excess in Winner and Waster,” in John A. Alford and M. Teresa Taormina, eds. Yearbook of the International Piers Plowman Society Vol. 3. (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1989), 91–108.

  13See, for example: Helen Barr, ed. The Piers Plowman Tradition (London: J.M. Dent Everyman, 1993); T. Turville-Petre, The Alliterative Revival (Cambridge: Brewer, and Toronto: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977).

  14T. Turville-Petre, The Alliterative Revival, 59.

  15See, for example: John Burrow, “An Alliterative Pattern in Piers Plowman B,” in Andrew Cole, Fiona Somerset and Lawrence Warner, eds., The Yearbook of Langland Studies vol. 25 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2011), 117–129.

  16See Noriko Inoue and Myra Stokes, “Restrictions on Dip Length in the Alliterative Line: The A-Verse and the B-Verse,” in Fiona Somerset and Lawrence Warner, eds., The Yearbook of Langland Studies vol. 26 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2012), 231–260.

  17The New Testament was completed in Rheims in 1582, and the Old Testament in Douai (as it is usually spelled) in 1609, both being revised by Bishop Challoner from 1749 to 1752. The edition used here is The Holy Bible translated from the Latin Vulgate (London: Baronius, 2012), a reproduction of the 1899 edition published by the John Murphy Company of Baltimore under the imprimatur of Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop of Baltimore.

  18For a discussion of Langland’s imagery and the meaning of the poem see, inter alia: Priscilla Martin, Piers Plowman: The Field and the Tower (London: Macmillan, 1979); A.V.C. Schmidt, Earthly Honest Things: Collected Essays on Piers Plowman (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2012).

  19For a discussion of the pardon see, inter alia: Myra Stokes, Justice and Mercy in Piers Plowman: A Reading of the B Text Visio (London: Croom Helm, 1984); Rosemary Woolf, “The Tearing of the Pardon,” in S.S. Hussey, ed., Piers Plowman: Critical Approaches (London: Methuen, 1969), 50–75.

  20Rosemary Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 408.

  21Nicodemus is named as one of those taking Christ’s body for burial in John xix 39.

  The Identity of the Author

  There are three well-known sources for the identity of the author. One is a note appended in Latin to an early manuscript of the poem held in Trinity College Library, Dublin. This states that the father of “Willielmus de Langlond” was Stacy de Rokayle, a gentleman who held land in Oxfordshire from the Despensers. The second is the 1550 printed edition, the preface to which says that the author was “Roberte Langelande, born in Cleybirie about viii miles from Malverne hilles,” although the name Robert stems from a misreading of the poem, and Cleobury Mortimer, as the town is now known, is 28 rather than eight miles from Malvern.

  The third source is the poem itself, in which the narrator says he is called Will—often punning on the name—places his opening vision on the Malvern Hills (Prologue 5), refers to himself as a poet (XII 16) who is no respecter of persons (XV 5–9), names his wife and daughter (XVIII 431), describes himself as balding (XX 186), and may imply in Step XI that he once led a dissolute life. From his descriptions of the Seven Deadly Sins (Step V), the demons in hell (XVIII 263 ff) and old age (XX 185 ff), he has a lively sense of humor, which has echoes of the comic sections of the miracle plays performed by townsmen up and down the country. However, he can also be self-righteous and prudish in his dismissal of popular songs, ribaldry and vulgar “japes” (especially Steps V, VI, XIII).

  He has much to say about trade, learnt presumably from observation, and he has some knowledge of the law. He opens a charter (II 74) and a reprieve (XIV 190) with legalistic terminology, he understands the distinction between secular courts and clerical courts, which he accuses of simony (Steps II and III), and he hints that he is acquainted with the practices of legal scribes (XI 290 ff). He may also know French, since he complains that students no longer learn any language other than English and Latin (XV 377), although his two French quotations (X 437, XI 370–371) are merely proverbial sayings and he pokes fun at the pretentiousness of using French words (VI 308).

  Steps VIII, XIII and XV suggest that he has undertaken a physical as well as a spiritual journey, and in the “autobiographical” passage from the C version (here at the end of Step XIV) he speaks of his later life in London, living humbly with his wife and singing offices for the sick and the dead. He says that his father and friends paid for his early education and that he has always had a clerical occupation, and he suggests that he is tall and ungainly. From the dating of the B version of the poem to the late 1370s, and the statements that Lovely-to-look-at and Imagination have accompanied him for 45 years (XI 47, XII 3) and that Piers has followed Truth for forty-something (V 543), it can be inferred that he was born between 1330 and 1332, although the number forty may well be notional and there is no guarantee that the author of the poem is identical to its narrator.

  There is a strong local tradition that he was born and educated in Shropshire or in the Malvern area, on the borders of Worcestershire and Herefordshire, and the dialect of the poem confirms the author’s western origin. In Shropshire, Cleobury Mortimer parish church, which dates to the twelfth century, boasts a large stained-glass window installed in 1875 to celebrate Langland and his poem. It shows heaven at the top, flanked by hope and faith, Christ in glory in the second tier flanked by peasants and gentry, the Passion and biblical miracles lower down, and Langland, flanked by Truth and Falsehood, lying at the foot with the Malvern Hills in the background. In support of the town’s claim to Langland, it is argued that the Latin abbreviation pat in the Dublin manuscript stands for patronus (patron) rather than pater (father), and that he came from a “Longelond” family living in nearby Kinlet.1 A Shropshire website states unequivocally: “His father owned some land and William, the second son, was destined to be a clerk. He was se
nt to the Austin Friars at the Woodhouses to be educated.”2

  This parentage seems unlikely since pater is the normal meaning of pat.3 However, the belief that he was a pupil at the Augustinian Priory outside Cleobury is rather more persuasive in view of his frequent allusions to “hermits,” a term applied particularly to the Augustinians, and less commonly to other religious orders to this day.

  As for Malvern, Great Malvern Priory, which was a remote daughter house of Westminster Abbey in Langland’s day and is now the parish church, displays a recent poem by Patric Dickinson suggesting that he was educated there. However, the display in Malvern Museum, located in the fifteenth-century gatehouse to the Priory, states that he was probably educated at Little Malvern Priory, three miles farther south. This was a dependency of Worcester Priory at the time, to which recalcitrant monks were allegedly sent. The belief that Langland had his schooling there is reinforced by four features of Little Malvern Priory identified by R.E. Kaske. First, a carving of two sows that can still be seen is thought to have inspired one of the lines about Gluttony (V 341). Secondly, there was until 1967 “over the nave entrance door a small wooden figure of an angel … and it is suggested that Langland had this in mind when he wrote of the ‘angel of heaven stooping down’” (Prologue 148), while “the stone carving of a lion … bears a resemblance to the curious description of the personification of Anima,” here translated as “Soul” (XV 13). And finally, Saint Giles, whose legend is recounted in the poem (XV 272 ff), was the Patron Saint of Little Malvern Priory.4 Much of the Priory church was demolished in the Reformation, but the remainder still functions and displays three stained-glass roundels commemorating Langland.

  It has also been argued that he was born in the Malvern area, taking his name from a section of land that is still known as “Longland” and lies to the west of the Malvern Hills, between Colwall and Ledbury. The sixteenth-century reference to “Cleybirie” is said to be a misspelling of “Ledbury,” which is indeed “about viii miles from Malverne.”5 However, it seems more likely that “viii miles” is the scribal error, especially as medieval miles were not standardized and there is no shortage of “Longlands.”