Piers Plowman — The Vision of William Langland

notes

Piers Plowman (also known as The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman, or simply The Vision of Piers Plowman) is a long allegorical poem in Middle English, written by William Langland (c. 1332–c. 1386), of whom almost nothing is known beyond what can be inferred from the poem itself. He probably came from the West Midlands (the poem is full of references to the Malvern Hills) but spent time in London, where he lived in modest circumstances as a minor cleric. The poem exists in three versions (called A, B, and C by scholars), representing successive revisions by Langland over decades of his adult life — the A-text of the 1360s, the much-expanded B-text of the late 1370s, the C-text of the 1380s. The B-text (about 7,300 lines) is the most widely read. The poem is a dream-vision in the tradition of the Roman de la Rose, but transformed for a specifically English social and religious purpose. The dreamer Will falls asleep on the Malvern Hills and sees a "fair field full of folk" — the whole society of medieval England, from king and clergy to peasants and labourers — set between the Tower of Truth and the Dungeon of Wrong. Through a series of dream-episodes, the dreamer searches for the answer to Holy Church's teaching that "when all treasures are tried, Truth is the best." The poem's radical social criticism — its indictment of corrupt clergy, its championing of the honest labourer, its allegorical figure of Lady Meed (Reward, or Bribery) — was invoked by the leaders of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. John Ball's coded letter refers to "Piers Plowman." Translation: Walter W. Skeat, "The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman," Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1886 — text modernized here for readability while preserving structure. Public domain.

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