Piers Plowman

Like the Pearl Poet's Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Piers Plowman is considered by many critics to be one of the greatest works of English literature of the Middle Ages, preceding and even influencing Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

[3] The poem, a mix of theological allegory and social satire, concerns the narrator/dreamer's quest for the true Christian life in the context of medieval Catholicism.

This journey takes place within a series of dream visions; the dreamer seeks, among other things, the allegorical characters Dowel ("Do-Well"), Dobet ("Do-Better"), and Dobest ("Do-Best").

A man named Will (which can be understood either simply as a personal name or as an allegory for a person's will, in the sense of 'desire, intention') falls asleep and has a vision of a tower set upon a hill and a fortress (donjon) in a deep valley; between these symbols of heaven and hell is a 'fair field full of folk', representing the world of humankind.

Then Conscience and Patience meet Haukyn the Active Man, who wears a coat of Christian faith which is, however, soiled with the Seven Deadly Sins.

Anima tells Will off for his pride in wanting to know too much, but goes on to talk about charity, in particular how the Church should care for its flock, but how its priests and monks do not always fulfil this duty.

The attribution to William Langland is also based on internal evidence, primarily a seemingly autobiographical section in Passus 5 of the C-text of the poem.

Some medievalists and text critics, beginning with John Matthews Manly, have posited multiple authorship theories for Piers, an idea which continues to have a periodic resurgence in the scholarly literature.

Also, scholars like Charlotte Brewer suggest that scribes and their supervisors be regarded as editors with semi-authorial roles in the production of early modern texts like Piers Ploughman.

According to the three-versions hypothesis, each version represents different manuscript traditions deriving from three distinct and successive stages of authorial revision.

Some scholars see it as a conservative revision of B that aims at disassociating the poem from Lollardy and the religious and political radicalism of John Ball during the Great Rising of 1381.

[citation needed] Skeat believed that the A-text was incomplete and based his editions on a B-text manuscript (Oxford, MS. Laud Misc.

The Kane, Kane-Donaldson, and Russell-Kane editions of the three versions, published by the Athlone Press, have been controversial, but are considered among the most important accomplishments in modern editorial work and theory in Middle English.

More recently, Lawrence Warner has shown that what was thought of as B in fact incorporates matter produced as part of the C-revision: if B circulated before C, it looked nothing like what previous editors had assumed.

John Ball, a priest involved as a leader in the Great Rising of 1381 (also known as the Peasants' Revolt), included Piers and other characters in his writings.

Or, as the ideal character of the poem, Piers might be seen as a kind of alter-ego for the poet that was more important to his early readers than the obviously authorial narrator and his apparent self-disclosures as Will.

In some contemporary chronicles of the Rising, Ball and the Lollards were blamed for the revolt, and Piers began to be associated with heresy and rebellion.

The earliest literary works comprising the Piers Plowman tradition follow in the wake of these events, although they and their sixteenth-century successors are not anti-monarchical or supportive of rebellion.

Like William Langland, who may have written the C-text version of Piers Plowman to disassociate himself from the Rising, they look for the reform of the English church and society by the removal of abuses in what the authors deem a restorative rather than an innovative project.

[6] The first recorded owner of a copy of Piers Plowman was the Irish judge Walter de Brugge, who died in 1396.

Robert Crowley's 1550 editions of Piers Plowman present the poem as a proto-Protestant goad to the reformation of religion and society.

In the passus summaries in the second and third editions, Crowley emphasizes material in the poem warning of political instability and widespread corruption when the king is a child (as was then the case).

Milton cites "Chaucer's Ploughman" in "Of Reformation" (1641) when he is discussing poems that have described Constantine as a major contributor to the corruption of the church.

The end of Piers Plowman, Passus 15, makes this point at length—but it is also made briefly in one stanza in The Ploughman's Tale (ll.

Then, as before in the English Reformation, this project was driven by a need for a national identity and history that addressed present concerns, hence analysis and commentary typically reflected the critic's political views.

Travail, ordre social et croissance en Europe (XIe-XIVe siècle)" (Albin Michel 2012) historian of medieval labour Mathieu Arnoux devotes particular attention to "Piers Plowman" in a breakthrough attempt to identify theological causes for the growth of agricultural production from the 11th century to the 14th century.

According to the historian Christopher Dawson, the poem represents “a precious and almost unique record” of medieval religious culture in the minds of the masses as opposed to that of the courts or of the schools and universities.

Langland’s poem “is a voice from the underworld of the common people, speaking their language, using their imagery and sharing their ideals”.

Many more texts were written with similar themes and characters, though not directly borrowing from Piers Plowman, until around the end of the 16th century.

[10] In 2023, Eloise Peniston adapted and directed a Middle English performance of the Trinity B Text at St Edmund Hall.