William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman
Contemporary with The Canterbury Tales, The Vision of Piers Plowman is a dream-vision written by an obscure minor clergyman called William Langland. It was almost as popular as Chaucer’s more famous collection, surviving in almost 60 manuscripts. Of the author, we know nothing definitive beyond his name, and the fact that he wrote Piers Plowman. We know this from the poem itself, for the narrator is Langland himself, who also tells us that he was a tall and thin man from Shropshire, and that the death of his patron meant that he was unable to progress far in the church.
If Piers Plowman is anything to go by, however, the 14th-century church was much the poorer for not promoting ‘Long Will’ beyond the minor clergy. Piers Plowman is a text with an enormous scope, providing a vivid snapshot of everyday life and taking satirical aim at it, within the pilgrimage of man’s soul to ultimate truth. The pilgrimage takes place within the narrator’s 6 individual visions, in which he is guided by the character of Piers Plowman. In the visions Will sees allegorised versions of sins and the challenges to man’s soul on the earthly journey, beset by vice.
Piers Plowman begins with a dream-vision of earth: ‘some laboured at ploughing and sowing, with no time for pleasure, sweating to produce food for others to waste. Others spent their lives in vanity, parading themselves in a show of fine clothes. But many, out of love for our Lord in the hope of heaven, led strict lives devoted to prayer and penance’ (I). We also see a satirical scene of a parliament of mice and rats ruled over by a tyrannical cat, whose scheme to tie a bell around its neck fails because none is brave enough to do so.
The clergy are also criticised: ‘in their greed for fine clothes, [friars] interpreted the Scriptures to suit themselves and their patrons’ (Ibid.) This encapsulates Langland’s vision of 14th-century England: people too poor to do anything but work, the vain and self-obsessed, a weak parliament afraid of their king, and widespread corruption amongst the clergy. His visions swiftly leave the earthly plane, and he follows Piers Plowman on the quest for truth and salvation. The simple truth he finds is that good deeds are all that matter in the eyes of the Lord, however corrupt the ministering church may become.
Piers Plowman embodies the eternal wisdom of Christ, unmediated through the corruption of the Church. This allows Langland as a poet to expand the vision of the poem beyond the specificities of the 14th century and to see the whole passage of Christian history, from the Crucifixion to the coming of the Anti-Christ. At the poem’s end, the personification of Conscience cries out: ‘I will become a pilgrim, and walk to the ends of the earth in search of Piers the Plowman’ (XX). The basic theme, of trying to live a good life in a corrupt world, still resonates.