Piers Plowman Read online

  A further claim that Langland was ordained an acolyte in Bromyard, about ten miles west of the Hills, on December 20, 1348, is yet more dubious, even though the Bishop’s records confirm that a William of Colwall was ordained on that date.6 Nine out of 65 ordinands were called William, which was the commonest name of the day.7

  The author who made these claims in the 1920s, A.H. Bright, whose family had occupied a house below the Malvern Hills for generations, is more convincing in his identification of a point on the Hills which fits the topography of the opening vision.8 From here, where one of many springs issues from the Hills, it is possible to look up on a “morning in May” to the summit of the Herefordshire Beacon, albeit more to the south than the east, where a Norman fortification once stood, and down toward houses in the west which retain some suggestion of a “Moat,” according to local maps. Even though Langland’s description need not be taken literally, this view may have been in his mind.

  It is generally supposed that William called himself Langland either to disguise his identity or because he was illegitimate, in which case the opprobrium that he heaps on the illegitimate is explained by the emotional need to overcompensate. Even if illegitimate, he might nevertheless have been acknowledged by members of the Rokayle or Rokele family, various branches of which were major landholders in half a dozen English counties and in Ireland. Their offices included justices of the peace, a bailiff to the Queen, and a sheriff of London, as described in Robert Adams’ book.9 One of the holdings of their feudal superiors, the Despensers, was Hanley, close to Little Malvern Priory, and it may be that the Despensers paid for Langland’s education. They owed a debt to the Rokayles because Peter Rokayle, Stacy’s father and therefore William’s putative grandfather, had been involved in a plot to rescue King Edward II, who was accused of having a gay relationship with Hugh Despenser and was imprisoned by the Queen’s lover Earl Mortimer in Berkeley Castle, a short way down the Severn.10 One beneficial consequence of a religious education would have been that minor holy orders subjected William to clerical rather than to royal or feudal criminal courts, an important consideration given these dangerous associations.

  Professor Adams suggests that Langland went on to take full vows, and he identifies him with a priest named William de la Rokele, who held a number of prominent public offices, was legitimate, and was accepted in high society. The main difficulty with this theory is the likelihood that Langland was married. That problem can be overcome if he completed his vows after the death of his wife, but she is still mentioned in the “autobiographical” lines of the late C version of the poem. If these lines are to be believed, his education was interrupted by “the death of my friends,” presumably chiefly his Despenser patron, who probably succumbed to the Plague of 1348–49 when Langland was aged about seventeen. The same outbreak may have accounted for his father as well.

  Estimates of how he spent his time between leaving the Priory and arriving in London vary from years spent as a peasant farmer, according to the Colwall Village Society,11 to further study at University, although possibly without completing a degree.12 He certainly knew Latin and had a grounding in religious education, but the only direct evidence again comes from the poem, and it is inconclusive. Aside from the Bible and books of prayer and the liturgy, he repeatedly cites the “four doctors” of the Church, Saints Ambrose, Augustine, Gregory and Jerome, who, according to a former Dean of Worcester Cathedral, “not uncommonly appear on medieval screens and pulpits.”13 He also names Peter Comestor, the twelfth-century “Master of Histories,” the late sixth-century Saint Isidore of Seville, and the writer known as Saint John Chrysostom. He appeals to the authority of the conventional founders of monasticism, he mentions Constantine, the first Christian Roman Emperor, and he quotes from Boethius, the sixth-century Roman philosopher.

  His knowledge of earlier Greek and Roman literature is confined to the few names that were common currency (Aristotle, Plato, Seneca, Trajan, Hippocrates, Virgil and Alexander). The only exception is the collection of moral proverbs attributed to the third-century Dionysius Cato, who was confused in many minds, perhaps including Langland’s, with the earlier politicians and writers Cato the Elder and Cato the Younger. Langland quotes Dionysius Cato on eight occasions, and it is therefore likely that whoever taught Langland Latin in his youth used Cato’s Distichs as a text.

  Moreover, his quotations are sometimes vague: “As the Bible sensibly says” (XI 379), or “As Scripture describes” (XIV 62). He makes no distinction between Pope Gregory I and Pope Gregory IX, or between Saint Augustine of Hippo and Saint Augustine of Canterbury, and he fails to name some of the other authorities whom he quotes: the twelfth-century French theologian Peter Cantor, Pope Innocent III of the early thirteenth century, and his own contemporary, Bishop Brinton of Rochester.

  However, some texts, including “Lives of the Saints,” were so well known that there was no need to name the author, and many quotations would have become proverbial, such as those traced to John of Bridlington (IX 185–186), Alexander of Villedieu (XI 260) and Godfrey of Winchester (XII 50). Allowance must also be made for the shortage of books before the age of printing and the need to memorize or note down quotations from a range of sources.

  There is nevertheless speculation that he knew the work of a few Christian authors at first hand, including Saint Augustine of Hippo,14 the prolific twelfth-century theologian Alan of Lille,15 and perhaps the thirteenth century John of Hoveden, who also wrote in Latin.16 He may have taken some of his righteous indignation from manuals on morals,17 and his style may have been influenced by the prose of Saint Bernard18 and by Latin hexameter versification,19 both learned in school.

  Whether this means that he attended the university is another matter, as he may have relied, after his initial education, on sermons from pulpits and preaching crosses, reading and conversation.20 A large number of anthologies of religious, scientific and historical knowledge were in circulation, including two compiled by an early fourteenth-century prior of Little Malvern, copies of which may have been preserved there.21

  The poem refers to a number of historical events: the campaign of Edward III in France in 1346–47 (III 186 ff), the attempt to restrict wages in the wake of the Plague of 1348–49 and the collapse of the bonded labor system (VI 309), the destructive storm of January 1362 (V 14), the famine of 1370 when Chichester was Lord Mayor of London (XIII 271), which was one of a series of bad harvests, the sermon preached by Bishop Brinton in 1376 and the associated parliamentary debates (Prologue 166 ff), the disputed election of a pope in 1378 (Prologue 110 and XIII 176), the difficulty of making peace with France in the 1370s (XIII 177), and the murder of Edward II (III 124 and 184) before Langland was born. It has also been suggested that the learned Doctor at the banquet (Step XIII) may refer to an actual person, Friar William Jordan.22

  This awareness not only of natural events but also of political affairs suggests that Langland moved in relatively high social circles, and a further possible sighting of the poet in such company has come to light recently. Michael Bennett has identified someone referred to as “William called Long Will” (Willelmus vocatus Longewille) in a list of persons named as accessories to a murder committed in 1385 in the north of England by the half-brother of the King.23 The odd soubriquet stands out because all the other accused bear conventional forenames and surnames. Despite his apparent poverty and clerical allegiance, did Langland perhaps occupy a privileged status in disaffected noble households because of his prowess as a poet, saying things about the government that few others dared to utter? This role would neatly coincide with the description of his life in London, with the overall tenor of the poem, and with the revisions made to the C version.

  It is not known when he died, although the period 1385–87 is likely from a reference in a poem by John But to the death of the author of Piers Plowman, But himself having died in 1387.24

  In the absence of firmer evidence, the figure that emerges from the shadows is thus that o
f a tall, awkward son of the minor nobility who was born about 1330 in Cleobury, Shropshire, and was sent to school, perhaps at first at a local Augustinian priory, and then about thirty miles away at Little Malvern Priory, at the expense of Sir Hugh Despenser of nearby Hanley Castle. After Sir Hugh died in the Plague of 1348–49, he spent some time wandering the country observing life, and arrived in London in the 1360s. There he made a living as a poet, copyist for lawyers and “chantry priest” in minor orders. This enabled him to marry, and his poetic skill allowed him eventually to move in elevated social circles opposed to the government, even though he still lived very modestly. He probably began the earliest version of the poem around 1360, gave it up around 1365, returned to it in the 1370s, and produced a final version in the 1380s, by which time the poem was well known and, in his view, misunderstood by rebels attacking the structure of the state and organized religion.

  Nothing is definite, however, and Langland’s autobiographical statements may be as allegorical as much of the poem. No other writing has been definitively attributed to him, although there are indications that he wrote other work before Piers, including a translation from French of the poem William of Palerne.25 All that can be said with certainty is that he was a caustic critic of pretension and corruption among clerics, courtiers, merchants and lawyers—and a gifted poet.

  1John Corbett, “William Langland—Poet and Hermit,” Transactions of the Shropshire Archaeological Society lvii (1961–64): 224–230; Gwyneth Nair and David Poyner, “Concerning the Langland Family of Kinlet,” Transactions of the Shropshire Archaeological and Historical Society, lxxxiv (2009): 15–20.

  2www.shropshire-promotions.co.uk

  3Adriano Hoepli, Dizionario di Abbreviature Latine ed Italiane (Milan: Ulrico Hoepli, 1973).

  4Ronald Bryer, Not the Least: The Story of Little Malvern (Hanley Swan, Worcs: Self-Publishing Association, 1993), 24, citing an earlier work by W.J.C. Berington, owner of the neighboring Little Malvern Court.

  5A.H. Bright, New Light on Piers Plowman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928).

  6Joseph Henry Parry, ed., The Register of John de Trillek, Bishop of Hereford (AD 1344–1361), vols. I & II (Hereford: Wilson and Phillips, 1910), Vol. II, 475–6.

  7Joe Hillaby, Ledbury: A Medieval Borough (Ledbury, Herefs.: Ledbury and District Society Trust in assoc. with Logaston, 2005), 43.

  8See also Bruce Osborne and Cora Weaver, Celebrated Springs of the Malvern Hills (Andover, Hampshire: Phillimore, 2012), 69–71, “The Pewtriss Spring, also known as Primeswell.”

  9Robert Adams, Langland and the Rokele Family: The Gentry Background to Piers Plowman (Dublin: Four Courts, 2013). See also British History online, www.british-history.ac.uk.

  10Adams, 67. See also www.edwardthesecond.blogspot.com.

  11Colwall History Map (Colwall, Herefordshire: Colwall Village Society, 2000). See also A.H. Bright, New Light on Piers Plowman.

  12Anna Baldwin, A Guidebook to Piers Plowman (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 5–6.

  13R.L.P. Milburn, Saints and Their Emblems in English Churches (London: Oxford University Press, 1949), 15.

  14David Lawton, “The Subject of Piers Plowman,” in John A. Alford and M. Teresa Taormina, eds., Yearbook of the International Piers Plowman Society vol. 1 (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues, 1987), 10.

  15A.V.C. Schmidt, Earthly Honest Things: Collected Essays on Piers Plowman (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2012), 63–67.

  16Schmidt, Earthly Honest Things, 79–81.

  17G.R. Owst, “A Literary Echo of the Social Gospel,” in Edward Vasta, ed. Interpretations of Piers Plowman (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), 22–53; Rosemary Woolf, “The Tearing of the Pardon,” in S.S. Hussey, ed., Piers Plowman: Critical Approaches (London: Methuen, 1969), 50–75, esp. 58.

  18Schmidt, Earthly Honest Things, 69.

  19Traugott Lawler, “Langland Versificator,” in Andrew Cole, Fiona Somerset and Lawrence Warner, eds., The Yearbook of Langland Studies vol. 25 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2011), 37–76.

  20E. Talbot. Donaldson, “Piers Plowman: The Religious Allegory of the C Text,” in Edward Vasta, ed., Interpretations of Piers Plowman (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), 133.

  21Brian Smith, A History of Malvern 2d ed. (Malvern: Alan Sutton and the Malvern Bookshop, 1978), 100.

  22Anne Middleton, “The Passion of Saint Averoys: ‘Deuynyng’ and Divinity in the Banquet Scene,” in John A. Alford and M. Teresa Taormina, eds., Yearbook of the International Piers Plowman Society vol. 1 (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1987), 31–40.

  23Michael Bennett, “William Called Long Will,” in Fiona Somerset and Lawrence Warner, eds., The Yearbook of Langland Studies vol. 26 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2012), 1–25.

  24See, for example, the Introduction to Schmidt’s 1995 Everyman edition, xxiii.

  25Lawrence Warner, The Myth of Piers Plowman. Constructing a Medieval Literary Archive (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 22ff.

  Prologue

  In which I fall asleep on the Malvern Hills and see in my first dream all manner of folk caught between a tower and a dungeon: beggars and burghers, priests and pilgrims, lawyers and laborers, tradesmen and tramps, knights and their king. A parliament of rats and mice meets to discuss belling the cruel cat from court, but I dare not say who the cat is.

       One summer season when the sun was still soft,

       I set off like a sheep in a shaggy woolen smock,

       The unholy habit of a wandering hermit,1

       And went seeking wonders in the wide, wide world.

    5  And one morning in May on the Malvern Hills

       I witnessed a wonder which I warrant was magic.

       Quite weary with walking I wanted to rest

       On a broad grassy bank beside a small brook.

       As I lay down I leant and looked in the water,

   10  Which babbled so sweetly I soon fell asleep.

       And sleeping I saw the strangest of dreams:

       That I wandered a wilderness, not knowing where,

       And high in the east, looking up at the sun,

       Saw a tower on a toft, built sturdy and true2;

   15  To the west, further down, were a dale and a dungeon

       With deep, dark ditches that I gazed on with dread.

       Between them I found a fair field full of folk,

       All manner of men, both moneyed and poor,

       Either walking or working at what the world wants.

   20  Some were pushing a plow with no time for play,

       And were sweating as they scattered and sowed the seed

       And gathered the grain that the greedy would squander;

       Some were pouting like popinjays, strutting with pride,

       Bedecked in dandified, elegant dress;

   25  And many were practicing penitence and prayer,

       Living soberly and strictly for the sake of our Lord

       In the hope that they’d have their reward in heaven,

       Such as anchorites, hermits who aren’t seen abroad

       And don’t go roistering round the roads

   30  Or lead lives of luxury, lechery and lust.

       And some were making their money as merchants,

       Successfully it seemed from what I could see,

       And others as minstrels, through music and mirth,

       Not sinning but singing amusing songs,

   35  While japing jackasses, Judas’s children,

       Feigned uncouth fancies and foolish affronts

       
Yet well had the wit to work if they would.

       I will not repeat Saint Paul’s great reproof;

       He who speaks slander is Satan’s slave.3

   40  Beggars and tramps were bustling about,

       Their bellies and bags crammed to bursting with bread,

       Telling falsehoods for food, fighting in taverns

       And going to bed as gorged as gluttons,

       Then rising like vagabonds, ribald as rogues,

   45  Pursued as ever by slumber and sloth.

       There were pilgrims and palmers pledging to go

       Conjointly on journeys to Rome and Saint James,4

       Which would let them tell lies for the rest of their lives,

       And some were saying they’d already seen shrines

   50  And were citing wise stories they said they had heard.

       But the way that they spoke showed their stories were slim

       And their tongues were attuned not to truth but to lies.

       A whole army of “hermits” with hook-ended staves

       Were walking to Walsingham with wenches in tow.5

   55  They were great tall lummocks who disliked hard labor6

       And dodged hard work by donning strange dress,

       Hooded long habits that made them look holy.

       And further, I saw all four schools of friars