Piers Plowman by William Langland

*contains spoilers*


In a daze on the Malvern Hills is where we meet our narrator, Will, who dreams a vision of Heaven, Hell, and Middle Earth in between, as represented by a tower, a dungeon and a green field full of toiling human folk, respectively. What follows is a journey of theological allegory and social commentary on the conflict between the demands of Heaven and the impulses of Man, which, of course, can come to no good at all. Written in the fourteenth century, circa 1370-90 (there are three texts, A, B and C – the edition I read was a recent translation of the supposedly more poetic Text B, by A.V.C Schmidt), ‘Piers Plowman’ absorbs and questions the suppositions of some of the most profound texts on the nature of being and doing, including Cato’s ‘Distichs’, St Augustine’s ‘On the Trinity’ (after two millennia, someone must now be able to work out what this “Trinity” guff all means, surely…), Bede’s ‘Ecclesiastical History’, and Jacobus a Voragine’s ‘Golden Legend’, amongst countless others (you can count them if you like – I won’t!)


As well as coherently translating the allusions to and debates about these integrated texts, Schmidt also manages to constantly but subtly remind the reader of the form these original visions took – alliterative verse – even as he keeps the narrative ticking in a languid prose. I’ll give you a taster from Passus XIV, as the personified construct of the abstract concept of Patience attempts to explain to an increasingly impatient Haukin, a representation of the Active Man seeking repentance, the qualities of Poverty;


“The seventhe is welle of wisedorn and fewe wordes sheweth,

For lordes alloweth hym litel or listneth to his reson.

He tempreth the tonge to trutheward, that no tresor coveiteth:

Sapience termperatrix.”


You can already see how Langland creates a metrical rhythm of a sort through the alliteration in the first line with ‘w’, the second line with ‘l’, and the third line with ‘t’, using the Latin resolution as a kind of envoi. Let’s compare this with Schmidt’s prose;


“And so the seventh feature of poverty. Poverty is a deep source of wisdom, taciturn and reserved of speech as he is. For powerful men are unwilling to favour poor ones, and give little heed to what they argue. Oh yes, the man free from the itch for money can afford to tune his tongue to truth alone; hence, call poverty ‘wisdom’s tuning-teacher’ – ‘sapientiae temperatrix’.”


Schmidt has taken it upon himself to almost over-elaborate on delicate implications in the original text, but with the beautifully crafted “the man free from the itch for money can afford to tune his tongue to truth alone”, one can imagine a line break appearing so as to turn it into alliterative verse in the mind, giving it rhythm and accentuation, thus;


“The man free from the itch for money

Can afford to tune his tongue to truth alone…”


Often ‘Piers Plowman’ spun me in circles and figures of eight. It’s clear to see that Langland is criticising many aspects of Middle English life, but none more so than the Holy Church, as he ponders sometimes so long on theological concepts that even Will, our narrator, feels utterly baffled at the intricacies of marrying Christian values with everyday life in Middle English society; “My understanding would grow, and then decrease, till I ended up reduced to a state of idiocy.” This rather aptly resembles how confused the layman must have felt at church on a Sunday when confronted by the philosophical treatises of the expensively educated clergymen preaching from their pulpits. Most people of the time probably just wanted to know, simply, what good and bad were, and to have their sins forgiven so they could toddle off back to their farms.


Of course, money comes into play nine times out of ten, and in ‘Piers Plowman’, Langland is clearly well aware of the power that the clergy maintained over their flock in demanding payment for pardons and confession, which were unavoidable at the risk of being suspected. Amongst this dubious practice you also had the holy representatives jostling for positions of power and wealth within the organisation itself, and Langland expresses his frustration at such counterproductive infighting as he proclaims in the voice of a world-weary vicar in the penultimate Passus, XIX; “But God, dear God, put the Pope right! He’s busy plucking the church bare…He even pays armed men to shed Christian blood…”


As we all now know, the blood continued to spill, and the money gushed out of communities and into the hands and pockets of the cardinals.

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