The plowboy trope appears in Christian rhetoric and literature in the form of various bucolic, lowly, pious or even unsavoury characters who would benefit from being exposed to Scripture in the vernacular.
John Chrysostom (c. 400) invokes a related set of characters who can understand Christ's few and plain words to love God and neighbour: And these things even to a ploughman, and to a servant, and to a widow woman, and to a very child, and to him that appears to be exceedingly slow of understanding, are all plain to comprehend and easy to learn.Amalarius's Liber officialis (c. 830) does not supply a cast of characters, but makes the cantor of the Mass, by analogy, into a ploughman, and so utilizing the trope's the other elements of ploughing, singing and simple sincerity:[3]: 51 The earth is furrowed as the oxen drag the plough when the cantors, drawing their innermost breath, drag forth a sweet voice and present it to the people.
Quocumque te verteris, arator stivam tenens allelujah decantat, sudans messor Psalmis se avocat, et curva attondens vitem falce vinitor aliquid Davidicum canit.
...would that the farmer sing some portion of them at the plow, and the weaver hum some parts of the them to the movement of the shuttle, the traveler lighten the weariness of the journey with something of this kind, and that the discussions of all Christians would start from these books.
[10]In the same material, Erasmus noted with approval that Jerome encouraged "virgins, wives and widows" to read but spoke against the mangled, unfit interpretations of "the garrulous hag, the delirious old man, the loquacious sophist."
In fact I frankly confess that it is better for the common people to learn through the spoken voice, viva voce, if a good teacher is availableA French Carthusian opponent of vernacular translation, Petrus Sutor, in 1524 wrote of the dangers that a woman engrossed in the Scriptures would neglect her domestic duties, and a soldier would be slow to fight.
[12] Margaret Deansly quotes a poem (before 1400), of an (illiterate) ploughman, taught orally by the community, going to his annual confession where the priest had to check his knowledge of the Creed and Gospel: In Lenten times the parson him did shrive: He said "Sir, canst thou they believe?"
In place of that anachronism, it posits what some might consider another: the characteristic Catholic emphasis of a liturgy-centred Christian life,[19] in which scripture is experienced through the liturgy (or the Mass or of the Hours): (You must not imagine that in the primitive church)...the translated bibles into vulgar tongues were in the hands of every husbandman, arbiter, prentice, boies, girles, mistresse, maid, man: that they were sung, played, alleged, of every tinker, taverner, rhymer, minstrel: that they were for table talk, ale benches, for boats and barges.
[note 4]The plowboy trope has also been attributed, perhaps in confusion with Tyndale, to John Wycliff[20] and Martin Luther[21] A 16th-century Catholic controversialist Johann Cochlaeus also weighed in: ... even tailors and shoemakers, yea, even women and ignorant persons who had accepted this new Lutheran gospel, and could read a little German, studied it with the greatest avidity as the fountain of all truth.
[22]A modern variant, with a different singing motif, is In October 1536, at only 42 years of age, Tyndale's one-note voice was silenced as he was tied to the stake, strangled by the executioner, and then consumed in the fire.
[23]In Hilary Mantel's fiction Wolf Hall, her character Thomas Cromwell adopts the antagonistic mode of Tyndale:[24] "The sheep farmers are grown so great that the little man is knocked off his acres and the plowboy is out of house and home.