The Piers Plowman tradition is made up of about 14 different poetic and prose works from about the time of John Ball (died 1381) and the Peasants Revolt of 1381 through the reign of Elizabeth I and beyond.
And prove thy puissant armes, as seemes thee best became.Like Thomas More and Robert Crowley, Bishop Hugh Latimer valued "commune wealth" more than "private commodity."
The early modern dissemination and reception of Visio Willelmi de Petro Ploughman ("William's Vision of Piers Plowman") from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century reveals a great deal about changes in English society and politics.
Clearly orthodox Roman Catholic in doctrine but reformist in that it posed social criticism and advocated moral, economic, and political change, the original poem(s)--and the figure of Piers in the popular imagination—were often viewed quite differently.
William Tyndale's memorable statement to a "popish priest," recorded in John Foxe' Acts and Monuments, is an echo of Erasmus' Paraclesis, which also resonated with popular images of the pious plowman: "If God spare my life ere many years, I will cause a boy that driveth the plow shall know more of the scripture than thou dost."
What is notable about the Piers/plowman literature of the Elizabethan era is the general absence of the old religious radical who speaks the plain truth for the poor, godly commons against corrupt elites and hypocritical English clergy.
Criticism of the wealthy and powerful continued, but rather than directly addressing complaints to them and to the monarch and parliament as Edwardians like Crowley, Latimer and Thomas Lever had done, they became the subject of comic, often satiric, popular entertainment.
Plays and pamphlets became the vehicle of social analysis, concerned with class identities and rivalries that were rendered with greater complexity and detail than in found in the earlier literature.
With the division and collapse of Christendom in the Reformation, the medieval conception of the social hierarchy, as well as Purgatory and Hell, so central to Langland's poem, were vestigial remnants of a passing order.
The moral and apocalyptic aspects of Piers flourished briefly at mid-century but then dissipated along with the idealism of the Edwardian reformers and their vision of a united commonwealth of interdependent estates.
Perhaps this is why in the Elizabethan era, Piers and Piers-like figures began to appear as itinerant laborers and tradesmen: tinkers, cobblers and shoemakers who claimed to represent true Englishness over against effete, pretentious elites.
To the extent that the popular opposition between plain and ornate, honest and dissembling was associated with courtiers, (South European) foreignness and Catholicism, the plowman tradition continued to be anti-Catholic and staunchly Protestant.
Hutchins notes that "Even in the most unremittingly absolutist interpretations of Tudor theories of rule, the qualities that Elizabethans claim make a good ruler include dignified concern for the common people" (229).
University educated, aspiring courtier-writers with poorer, often rural, backgrounds (e.g., Spenser and Harvey) may have been uneasy with a tradition that sometimes cast a cold eye on the lives and ambitions of upwardly mobile urbanites like themselves.