Pierce the Ploughman's Crede

Surviving in two complete 16th-century manuscripts and two early printed editions,[1] the Crede can be dated on internal evidence to the short period between 1393 and 1400.

The text in British Library MS Royal 18.B.17 appears before a C-text version of Piers Plowman in the same hand; that in Trinity College Cambridge MS R.3.15 is by a clerk in Archbishop Matthew Parker's household, who added Chaucer-related materials before a deficient 15th-century Canterbury Tales manuscript, and the Crede at the end of the manuscript.

This latter revision is a conservative one, undoubtedly motivated by the security of attacking a defunct institution following the dissolution of the monasteries rather than an aspect of Catholicism which survived in the Church of England.

Like much political or religious poetry of the Alliterative Revival (i.e., Piers Plowman, Mum and the Sothsegger), the poem takes the form of a quest for knowledge.

As he returns home, the narrator encounters a poor Plowman, dressed in rags and so emaciated that men myyte reken ich a ryb (432).

Perhaps written within eight years of the C-text of Piers Plowman, the Crede thus testifies to the appeal of Langland's more subversive, anticlerical sentiments among some of his early readers.

The character of Piers thus escapes from the confines of William Langland's vision and takes on a life, an authority, and an authorial career of his own.

With clear Lollard sympathies, the Crede praises John Wycliffe and as well as Walter Brut who is mentioned concerning his heresy trial.

Most of the charges against the friars are familiar from other works such as Jack Upland, the Vae Octuplex or Wyclif's Trialogus, and most are ultimately derived from William of Saint-Amour's De Periculis Novissimorum Temporum (1256).

As in all Wycliffite satire, the friars are lecherous, covetous, greedy, vengeful, demanding extravagant donations for even the most elementary services.

They are the children of Lucifer rather than Saint Dominic or St Francis, and follow in the footsteps of Cain, the first treacherous frater.

But the fact that the poem's main approach is dramatic rather than didactic or polemic, and its frequent passages of striking physical description, elevate it beyond the vast bulk of antifraternal writing.

Plus, as von Nolcken and Barr have shown, there is a remarkable subtlety to the poem, as it draws on even the most purely philosophical aspects of Wyclif's system.