William Langland's Piers Plowman Book

Penguin Classics edition in modern English, translated by Frank Goodridge

This may sound daft to anyone whose first acquaintance with Piers Plowman was as compulsory reading during an Eng Lit degree - so probably most people who've read it - but I had no idea quite how religious it was.

For at least twenty-five years, without reading the whole text, I'd thought of it as an interesting historical source about everyday life in late medieval England, because that's how it's quoted in history books. It absolutely does have passages like that - it was fun finding fully in context that famous earliest known reference to Robin Hood (as the subject of ballads sung in taverns by a lazy priest).

There are details of medieval poverty by someone well-acquainted with them and not that well off himself, horribly vivid in a way they wouldn't have been from someone further up the social scale and removed from this world:

For whatever they save by spinning they spend on rent, or on milk and oatmeal to make gruel and fill the bellies of their children who clamour for food. And they themselves are often famished with hunger, and wretched with the miseries of winter - cold, sleepless nights, when they get up to rock the cradle cramped in a corner, and rise before dawn to card and comb the wool, to wash and scrub and mend, and wind yarn and peel rushes for their rushlights.

This sounds like the voice of experience, or at least a first-hand witness:
Though he longs for good ale, he must go to his chill bedding, and lie uncomfortably huddled with his bare head askew; and when he tries to stretch his legs, he finds only straw for sheets. So he suffers a heavy penance for gluttony and sloth - the wretchedness of waking up crying with the cold, or weeping perhaps for his sins.

Just when you think those are over and it's all catechism now, there appears another occasional great detail.

It is, though, a great guide to the medieval Christian mindset and some common religious views of how one best ought to live - which many, of course, did not practice - via an eccentric, poorly-paid, implicitly Lollard-sympathising cleric. But this still makes it of much more interest for students of late medieval and Reformation history in England and Western Europe, than for people who have minimal background on the topic who are intent on studying literature. Is this still shoved at English students who haven't done A-level medieval or Reformation/Tudor history, or without a similar level of knowledge? Because it shouldn't be. No wonder they are bored. A lot of what's interesting in the religious content of the book (which will also make more sense if you were brought up in some form of Christianity, making it a far from universal text now), is in seeing what you've been told about popular opinion on the late medieval church reflected in a long primary source, written in a far more interesting fashion than a chronicle.

If it's a while since you formally studied the Reformation, this will bring all those specialist terms, like anticlericalism, indulgences and simony, flooding back. For all that I've seen examples from Piers Plowman used for social history, I don't think I've ever seen it mentioned that Langland advocated taking land and riches away from the clergy (who should then live on tithes) and giving it to the nobility - that this was an idea that had been floating around for over 150 years by the time Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries. It was always made to sound like it was Henry's own shocking and venal strategy he and his ministers dreamed up, and I was using older university-level textbooks by historians such as Geoffrey Elton and John Guy, not vague popular history or schoolbooks. In Piers Plowman, this proposal for a forcible transfer of ownership is rooted in the three estates concept, which many contemporary historians consider has fairly limited application, but Langland is one of those cases where it's obviously relevant. He says that nobles have jobs to do as part of the social contract: they must defend from marauders, hunt animals who'd consume the peasants' crops, and are more appropriate custodians of land so that the clergy don't become corrupted by material concerns. There has generally been too much of a medieval/early modern tide wall, when the early modernists could have learned more about their era from going back in detail another couple of hundred years or more; this must have been one of the things that was stopped by it.

It has been interesting to contemplate the morality and politics in Piers Plowman and its marked similarities to and differences from today, when it really, really doesn't fit into one neat box on the political spectrum. Its concern with the poor, and reiteration that the rich (in both the church and lay worlds) are appalling and excessive, might find sympathy with contemporary socialists - yet its hardline conservatism about social structures and roles, both class and gender-based - part of the Great Chain of Being would be abhorrent to the same. Sometimes simple commoners are praised as naturally wise and admirable; at others society has much to learn from scholars - not very different from the aggressive jostling of viewpoints about the value of similar groups in recent years. But what stands out most in comparison to modern Anglo (predominantly secular) culture is the degree of concern with the afterlife - that's what really matters and actions in this world matter because of their consequences for the soul after death. If you don't read a lot of material like this and it doesn't grate on you, the change of orientation is rather fascinating to see. The focus on material poverty, or at best modesty, is particularly stringent and bracing when, online, it is common to run into content by or for Christians who are materially very comfortable and plan to stay that way. Langland essentially sees the rich as trading temporary wealth in this life for a far longer worse fate in the next, and even a morally good rich person essentially has points taken off.

I'd always found allegory-that-is-hardly-an-allegory (where the names are unchanged) deadly boring, in any form longer than the kids' picture book of Pilgrim's Progress I read a couple of times. So I was disappointed when I saw Piers Plowman was actually one of those; I always thought Piers literally was a ploughman, and that his life was among the text's main subjects; I imagined a sort of verbal, demotic, Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry - but he, with his shifting identity (one of the more curious literary elements of the text) variously represents St Peter, Christ and/or Christian teaching. I don't know how much is because I've changed and how much is down to Langland and Goodridge as writers but, I found the Dreamer's journey and encounters with allegorical personages such as Lady Fee, Conscience and Charity as interesting as an old story with what to us are now 'normal' characters, and more interesting than I'd have expected to find a medieval chivalric romance about knights higher up the social scale. I found myself thinking about and visualising the characters as if they were people and wondering what might happen. I assumed it must end similarly to Pilgrim's Progress (which I'd never heard described as a descendant of Piers, perhaps because I'd not read much detailed commentary on medieval & early modern religious literature) - but there isn't an ending! How had I never heard that the text was unfinished or the ending lost? I'd owned a copy of the Everyman edition for over ten years and browsed through it, and seen all those references, yet not this info.

At first the text struck me as peevish and negative (though marginally less harsh in tone the beginning of Oxford World's Classics modern English version) and this was more disappointing than any of the above. It didn't really feel wise or generous, but closer in register to hearing some populist conservative bloke on a pub rant about the youth of today, women, rich arseholes etc etc. I regretted not being up to reading the original at a decent speed, because it felt like this wasn't the spirit of the text I'd heard about. But I got used to it, or it became a little less mean in tone, or there was more explanation for it - and soon it all made complete sense as part of the lead-up to the Reformation and the fermenting discontent with the Church. Langland may be strongly in favour of the old social hierarchy, but in his focus on poverty, and the poor as inherently morally better than the rich, I think you can arguably see glimmerings of the radical groups of the English Civil Wars like Diggers and Levellers, and, even while he lambasts greedy post Black Death labourers who demand higher wages, his underlying ethos is close to slogans of the Peasants' Revolt such as "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then a gentleman?" and "With King Richard and the true commons of England".

Every time I finish an old text like this - something I'd been meaning to read for 20+ years about which I used to put myself in the bind of "someone like me should read the original" coupled with "but I'm not really up to reading the original now, at least not at a speed I'd enjoy" - I'm grateful to MJ's 2013 post about The Canterbury Tales for saying "I wouldn't learn German to read Goethe". The phrase broke the deadlock, coming as it did from someone who enjoyed Finnegan's Wake and stacks of other difficult modern novels. And thanks once again to that, I have finally read Piers Plowman.



At time of writing I haven't quite finished the volume (notes) and am only posting this because of the newsfeed glitch that means reviews are taking seven or eight hours to appear in the feed after posting, and because it's the end of the year. (I wanted to have the review up by the end of the year.) I expect to have finished the book by the end of the day.

(December 2020)