William Langland and Piers Plowman

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William Langland and Piers Plowman

William Langland and the Allegorical Will.

The long philosophical dream vision—or series of dreams—that editors title Piers Plowman is perhaps the finest example of the use of the dream vision for social, political, and spiritual commentary. Composed in alliterative verse in a Northwest Midlands dialect of Middle English, the poem twice was revised and enlarged over the course of the second half of the fourteenth century. Authorship by William Langland is based on internal evidence in some of the more than fifty surviving manuscripts (approaching the number of extant manuscripts of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales) whose large number indicates both the high demand for copies of this long and difficult text and, thus, the high regard in which Langland's text was held in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. What little concrete evidence about the author's life and background is known comes from inside the text itself. Langland was probably born about 1331 in the region of the Malvern Hills. He was most likely some form of cleric educated at a Benedictine school in that region, judging from his extensive knowledge of, and allusions to, scriptural passages and his use of Latin quotations throughout the poem. Like his narrative persona, Langland seems to have spent much of his life wandering and making a living from offering prayers for the dead for fees. Langland also seems to know a lot about the workings of the royal court and contemporary politics in London, so it is likely that he also lived in London at about the same time that Chaucer was working and writing there, though there is no evidence that they knew one another. The poem's narrator is called "Will"—a pun referring to the author's first name as well as signifying the abstract "human will," rendering Will the Dreamer an Everyman figure. For convenience, modern editors divide the large sprawling allegorical plot into two major parts: the Visio and the Vitae. Langland subjected his first draft of the poem to two consecutive major re-writings and the three versions have been designated by modern editors the A, B, and C Texts, all of which are divided into chapters or parts called (in both singular and plural) Passus (paces or steps). These "steps" on the road to salvation are undertaken by Will through an allegorical pilgrimage whose goal is attaining a life devoted to "Truth."

Langland 's Visio.

The A Text (1360s), the shortest version, includes only Passus 1–11, the Visio (vision) dreamed by Will about the everyday political and economic life of man in society. This section culminates in the appearance of the allegorical character Piers Plowman, an agricultural worker and pilgrim figure who leads Will on the pilgrimage to Truth throughout the remainder of the poem. All three texts begin on a May morning, typical of the dream vision, when the narrator, a wandering cleric named Will, falls asleep in the Malvern Hills and has a vision of a "fair field of folk," a cross-section of the fourteenth-century English population similar to that achieved by Chaucer in the pilgrim portraits of the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. This initial dream, which merges into a political allegory on the subject of good kingship (presented as an animal fable in which rats and mice—the laboring and middle classes—attempt to bell the cat or king in order to limit his power) becomes highly abstract. Like Boethius and Lady Philosophy or Dante and Beatrice, Will is visited by a female authority figure Lady Holychurch, standing for the institutional Christian Church. To Will's question, "How can I save my soul?" Holychurch replies cryptically, "When all treasure is tried, truth is best." She warns him against the temptations of money and worldly goods by showing him a vision of the failed metaphoric wedding of "Conscience" to another female allegorical figure, Lady Meed (fee or payment), who represents all the possible beneficial or corrupting influences of money, whether offered as a just reward or as a bribe. The Lady Meed episode, structured around the metaphor of marriage, illustrates various fourteenth-century crises in language, the economy, politics, and interpersonal relations. Both Langland's allegorical use of marriage metaphors and his designation of "Truth" as the eventual goal of the Visio's pilgrimage can be read in typical patristic fourfold allegorical interpretation as

literal marriage between an individual and his spouse;
political harmony between an individual subject and his king;
social and economic harmony between the individual and the larger community of his fellow men; and
spiritual union between the individual's soul and God.

The Allegory of the Seven Deadly Sins.

In his dream, Will then witnesses the confession of the Seven Deadly Sins, a parade of allegorical personifications, illustrating various social types from medieval estates satire—also employed by Chaucer in his General Prologue to type his Canterbury pilgrims—that embody in their lifestyles the practice of pride, wrath, avarice, envy, sloth, gluttony, and lechery. This is one of the most allegorical and at the same time most "realistic" sections of Langland's poem. Gluttony's overindulgence and vomiting in the tavern, Pride's preening in her fine apparel, the slothful priest's ignorance of the words to his Pater Noster (the Lord's Prayer) when he knows by heart the rhymes of Robin Hood, all give fascinating glimpses into daily life of fourteenth-century London. When the plowing of a half-acre of land is disrupted by the workers' laziness (here Langland is seen incorporating aspects of the new post-Black Death economy), the allegorical figure Piers the Plowman suddenly appears, offering to guide the group on a pilgrimage to "Truth." This multifaceted virtue represents the abstract ideal of what is right, especially through the keeping of promises or contracts. Overall, in its many concrete references to and images of social, political, and economic life, the Visio is more "realistic" than the Vitae.

The Vitae of Do Well, Do Better, Do Best.

The B Text (1370s), three times the length of A, adds to the Visio Passus 12–20 comprising the "lives" of the allegorical triad of Do-wel, Do-bet (Do Better), and Do-best (lives of doing well, doing better, and doing best), whose subject is less the reform of general society than an exploration of how the individual Christian (represented by the narrator Will) can strive for spiritual perfection by practicing (with emphasis on do-ing) the virtue of Charity. B incorporates many more forms of allegory than A, each of which becomes increasingly more abstract, including the allegorical representation of the frustrating search for spiritual improvement through clerical and academic study, represented in Will's ultimately inconclusive engagement with various personifications of the intellectual faculties such as Wit, Dame Study, Thought, and Scripture. Will's quest to learn how to practice a virtuous life is represented in his attendance at a satirical banquet shared by personifications such as Patience, Conscience, and Haukyn the breadmaker, who represents the Active Life. The Vitae speak provocatively about such late medieval social problems as the hypocritical lifestyle of friars, who live luxuriously despite the pervasive poverty in the general populace. Will's dream vision turns nightmarish in the concluding Passus, in which the narrator witnesses an attack on the Church's unity by Antichrist, who leads an army of the Seven Deadly Sins. Apprehensive about the imminent collapse of society, the collective Conscience undertakes another pilgrimage to find Piers Plowman (who had disappeared from the plot of the dream), thus reprising themes from the Visio. Will awakens abruptly in the last lines of the poem to the stricken sound of Conscience's perhaps unanswered cries for grace, leaving the conclusion of the quest for Truth uncertain.

PILGRIMAGE
in Medieval Literature

Making pilgrimages was a popular devotional practice that sometimes became more pastime than penance in the Middle Ages. Christians from all corners of Europe flocked to the major pilgrimage destinations to venerate relics of saints and to undergo spiritual renewal through self-denial. Pilgrims traveled to both nearby shrines and to far-flung destinations such as Compostela in northern Spain, Rome, and Jerusalem. The Wife of Bath in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales visited all these pilgrim sites and more. Her real-life counterpart, Margery Kempe, who had visions of a bleeding, crucified Christ while on pilgrimage, wrote The Book of Margery Kempe, an account of many of her travels and spiritual experiences.

Although shrines were dedicated to many different international and local saints, medieval devotion to the Virgin Mary was especially widespread. There was special interest in the Virgin in England starting from the Anglo-Saxon period when many cathedrals, monasteries, and convents were rededicated to Mary. The foremost site for veneration of the Virgin in England was a shrine established in 1131 by Richelde de Fervaques, a widow who, after being inspired by a series of visions, ordered the construction of a chapel to Our Lady in Walsingham, a town on the Norfolk coast. Walsingham became a popular local, national, and international pilgrimage destination in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, reaching its zenith in the fifteenth through sixteenth centuries, when visitation of Walsingham's shrine surpassed even that of Canterbury.

In the fourteenth century Walsingham became a shrine of national prominence, as indicated by William Langland, who, though he never once mentions Canterbury, describes the Walsingham pilgrimage experience several times in Piers Plowman, where Will observes, "A heap of hermits with hooked pilgrim staves/Went to Walsingham with their wenches following them" and "They were clothed in pilgrim weeds to be distinguished from others" (Prologue: 53-54, 56; modernized by Lorraine K. Stock). Here Langland observes that pilgrims wore a distinctive costume to proclaim their penitent status. These lines also indicate that not all pilgrims practiced sexual abstinence during what was supposed to be a penitential exercise. During the peak of Walsingham's popularity, ordinary travelers as well as royalty stopped at the "Slipper Chapel" at Houghton (circa 1348), less than two miles from their destination, to remove their shoes and walk barefoot the rest of the way to the shrine. This degree of self-denial throws into sharp relief the much more comfortable situation of Chaucer's well-dressed and well-shod pilgrims on horseback to Canterbury. Like the crypt containing the remains of St. Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral, Walsingham also displayed saintly tokens that pilgrims venerated. In addition to a famous statue of the Virgin and a pair of wells noted for their healing waters, the Walsingham shrine displayed a relic of Mary's milk, which was reputed to aid the lactation of mothers. Perhaps because of such superstitions, at the end of the fourteenth century the shrine was a target of the reforming Lollards, led by John Wyclif, who decried Walsingham's Virgin Mary as the "witch of Walsingham."

Agricultural Imagery and Pilgrimage.

The longest version of Piers Plowman, the C Text (written in the late 1380s, about the same time Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales), is largely the same as B, except for a few details, such as the addition of purportedly autobiographical details about the author and the deletion of certain controversial segments. In both B and C, Langland unifies the disparate themes of his complex philosophical vision through a series of agricultural and organic images and tropes begun in the Visio with the "field" of folk, the plowing of the half-acre, and the figure of Piers the Plowman, and continuing in the Vitae with the organic metaphor of the Tree of Charity, the plowing of the four Gospels, and the Universal Church imaged as a Barn called Unitas ("unity") at the poem's end. If this set of rural images reflects England's agricultural foundations, then another motif, that of pilgrimage, ties the poem to a more contemporary concern: the popularity of pilgrimages. Langland's selection of an allegorical "pilgrimage" to find Truth as his governing metaphor parallels Chaucer's far more secular employment of the theme of a literal pilgrimage to the shrine of Thomas Becket in Canterbury in the Canterbury Tales. Increasingly, as the Middle Ages drew to a close, the undertaking of pilgrimages became a thorny issue as the sometimes less-than-pious motives of pilgrims were questioned by reform movements such as the Wycliffites or Lollards, led by Oxford clergyman John Wyclif. Knowing that the practice was both widespread and controversial, both Langland and Chaucer used the pilgrimage theme to great (if dissimilar) effect to illustrate some of the most compelling social and spiritual issues of their era.