Piers Plowman (written c. 1370–90) or Visio Willelmi de Petro Ploughman (William's Vision of Piers Plowman) is a Middle Englishallegorical narrative poem by William Langland. It is written in unrhymed alliterative verse divided into sections called passus (Latin for "step"). It is considered by many critics to be one of the greatest works of English literature of the Middle Ages, along with Chaucer'sCanterbury Tales and the Pearl Poet's Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Piers Plowman contains the first known allusion to a literary tradition of Robin Hood tales.
Summary
The poem—part theological allegory, part social satire—concerns the narrator's intense quest for the true Christian life, from the perspective of medieval Catholicism. This quest entails a series of dream-visions and an examination into the lives of three allegorical characters, Dowel ("Do-Well"), Dobet ("Do-Better"), and Dobest ("Do-Best"). The following summary is based on the B-version of the poem--the most widely edited and translated.
The poem is divided into passus ('steps').
Vision 1
Prologue: The poem begins in the Malvern Hills between Worcestershire and Herefordshire. A man named Will (which can be understood either simply as a personal name or as an allegory for a person's will, in the sense of 'desire, intention') falls asleep and has a vision of a tower set upon a hill and a fortress (donjon) in a deep valley; between these symbols of heaven and hell is a 'fair field full of folk', representing the world of mankind. A satirical account of different sections of society follows, along with a dream-like fable representing the King as a cat and his people as rodents.
Passus 1: Holy Church visits Will and explains the tower of Truth, and discusses Truth more generally.
Passus 2: Will sees Lady Mede ('payment') and finds out about her planned marriage to False.
Passus 3: Lady Mede travels to the royal court; the King proposes she marry Conscience; but Conscience denounces her.
Passus 4: Conscience and Reason convince the King not to marry Mede to False. Will wakes up.
Vision 2
Passus 5: Will falls back to sleep. Reason gives a sermon to the Field of Folk and the people decide to repent. The Seven Deadly Sins make confession and in penance attempt to go on pilgrimage to St Truth. They get lost, and Piers Plowman makes his first appearance: he will help the penitents if they help him plough his half-acre.
Passus 6: Piers and the penitents plough the half-acre. Some people refuse to work, and Hunger punishes them until they work. But once Hunger has been sated, the people return to idleness.
Passus 7: Eventually, Truth sends Piers a pardon for the penitents' sins; its main content is 'Do well and have well and God shall have your soul' and 'Do evil and have evil, and expect nothing other than that after your death, the Devil shall have your soul'. When challenged on the pardon's validity by a priest, Piers angrily tears it in two. Will is awakened by their arguing and, musing on his dreams, decides to seek ‘Do-wel’.
The A-version of Piers Plowman stops at this point.
Vision 3
Passus 8: Will's search for Dowel begins. He enters into a disputation with Friars. He then falls asleep once more and meets Thought. Thought instructs Will in 'Do well, do better, do best'. Practical interpretation of what these concepts mean is to be provided by Wit.
Passus 9: There is an extended allegory featuring Dowel and the Castle of Flesh, exposing the need for people to be governed by their ‘Inwit’. The text discusses poverty and marriage. Wit makes further inroads to understanding Dowel, as active virtue.
Passus 10: We meet Wit’s wife, Dame Study. She complains to Will about his ignorance. Will then proceeds to Clergy and Scripture to learn more about Dowel. He considers what use scholarship might have in helping him achieve salvation.
Passus 11: Scripture complains about Will's lack of self-knowledge. Angered, Will (who is already dreaming) goes to sleep and has a dream-within-a-dream in which he meets Fortune. He serves her into old age, but she abandons him. Will learns about the salvation of the Emperor Trajan and power of love. Kynde ('character, natural disposition, nature', here understood as an aspect of God) shows Will the world. Will has an argument with Reason: Reason, Will concludes, does not do enough to keep people from sin; but Reason disagrees. Will awakes from the dream-within-a-dream. He now meets Imaginatif, who advises Will to be patient.
Passus 12: Imaginatif teaches Will, bringing together and improving his understanding of earlier discussions in the poem. Imaginatif emphasises the need for humility and the importance of Grace.
Vision 4
Passus 13: Will awakens and then falls back to sleep; he dreams of sharing a feast with Conscience, Scripture, Clergy and Patience; he encounters a greedy Doctor of Divinity (who later shows disdain for love) and as well as eating actual food also dines on spiritual food. Piers the Plowman offers a definition of Do Well, Do Better and Do Best. Then Conscience and Patience meet Haukyn the Active Man, who wears a coat of Christian faith which is, however, soiled with the Seven Deadly Sins.
Passus 14: Conscience teaches Haukyn to seek forgiveness and do penance; Patience teaches Haukyn about the merits of embracing poverty. Haukyn cries out for God's mercy, which awakens Will.
Vision 5
Passus 15: Will finds himself alienated from the waking world, but Reason helps him to go back to sleep, whereupon Will meets Anima ('spirit'). Anima tells Will off for his pride in wanting to know too much, but goes on to talk about charity, in particular how the Church should care for its flock, but how its priests and monks (among whom Langland counts the Prophet Mohammed) do not always fulfil this duty. Talking to Anima, Will starts to conclude that Piers the Plowman is Christ. Will realises that he needs to switch from searching for Dowel to searching for Charity.
Passus 16: Will falls into another dream-within-a-dream, this time about the Tree of Charity, whose gardener is Piers the Plowman. Will participates in a re-enactment of the Fall of Man and then has a vision of the life of Christ; when this reaches the point where the Devil is defeated, Will wakes up from the dream-within-a-dream. Will goes looking for Piers and meeting Faith/Abraham, who is himself searching for Christ.
Passus 17: Next, Will meets Hope/Moses, characterised by the tablets of law, who is also in search of Christ. Will learns about the Good Samaritan, the prospect of salvation, and the importance of Love. He wakes up.
Vision 6
Passus 18: Will sleeps again, and experiences the climactic section of Piers Plowman. He experiences Love and the intersection of human and divine time. Will witnesses Christ/the Good Samaritan/Piers Plowman riding into Jerusalem and Christ's crucifixion. He then witnesses the Four Daughters of God (Truth, Justice, Mercy, Peace) in debate; the Harrowing of Hell; and Redemption.
Will wakes again, and now exhorts his family to attend mass.
Vision 7
Passus 19: During the mass, Will falls back to sleep and meets Conscience once more. Conscience recounts the life and Passion of Christ and how Piers/Peter was given his power by Grace/Christ. Will finds out about Pentecost; once more sees Piers as a ploughman; and witnesses Pride attacking Unity/Holy Church. He wakes up and records his dream.
Vision 8
Passus 20: While awake, Will meets Need. He falls asleep again and now dreams of the Antichrist. Kynde sends Old Age, Death, and Pestilence, to chastise people: Will is attacked by Old Age. He witnesses Holy Church undermined by a hypocritical Friar. Conscience goes on pilgrimage to seek Piers the Plowman, and calls on Grace for help--whereupon Will wakes up.
Version C has a further two passus.
Title and authorship
It is now commonly accepted that Piers Plowman was written by William Langland, about whom little is known. This attribution rests principally on the evidence of an early-fifteenth-century manuscript of the C-text (see below) of Piers held at Trinity College, Dublin (MS 212), which ascribes the work to one man, called 'Willielmus de Langlond':
- Translation
Other manuscripts also name the author as "Robert or William Langland", or "Wilhelmus W." (which could be shorthand for "William of Wychwood").
The attribution to William Langland is also based on internal evidence, primarily a seemingly autobiographical section in Passus 5 of the C-text of the poem. The main narrator of the poem in all the versions is named Will, with allegorical resonances clearly intended, and Langland (or Longland) is thought to be indicated as a surname through apparentpuns; e.g., at one point the narrator remarks: "I have lyved in londe... my name is longe wille" (B.XV.152). This could be a coded reference to the poet's name, in the style of much late-medieval literature. Langland's authorship, however, is not entirely beyond dispute, as recent work by Stella Pates and C. David Benson has demonstrated.
In the sixteenth century, when Piers was first printed, authorship was attributed by various antiquarians (such as John Bale) and poets to John Wycliffe and Geoffrey Chaucer, amongst others. Some sixteenth- and seventeenth-century persons regarded the poem as anonymous, and/or associated it with texts in the plowman tradition of social complaint, particularly the Chaucerian pseudepigrapha The Ploughman's Tale and Pierce the Ploughman's Crede. (The latter was appended to Owen Rogers' 1560 edition ofPiers Plowman, a degraded version of Robert Crowley's 1550 editions.) The character of Piers himself had come to be considered by many readers to be in some sense the author.
The first printed editions by Crowley named the author as "Robert Langland" in a prefatory note. Langland is described as a probable protégé of Wycliffe. With Crowley's editions, the poem followed an existing and subsequently repeated convention of titling the poem The Vision of Piers [or Pierce] Plowman, which is in fact the conventional name of just one section of the poem.
Some medievalists and text critics, beginning with John Matthews Manly, have posited multiple authorship theories for Piers, an idea which continues to have a periodic resurgence in the scholarly literature. One scholar[who?] now disputes the single-author hypothesis, supposing that the poem may be the work of between two and five authors, depending upon how authorship is defined. In keeping with contemporary scholarly trends in textual criticism, critical theory, and the history of the book, Charlotte Brewer, among others, suggests that scribes and their supervisors be regarded as editors with semi-authorial roles in the production of Piers Plowman and other early modern texts, but this has nothing to do with Manly's argument.
The text
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Piers Plowman is considered to be one of the most analytically challenging texts in Middle English textual criticism. There are 50–56 surviving manuscripts, some of which are fragmentary. None of the texts are known to be in the author's own hand, and none of them derive directly from any of the others.
All modern discussion of the text revolves around the classifications of W. W. Skeat. Skeat argued that there are as many as ten forms of the poem, but only three are to be considered authoritative—the A, B,[1] and C-texts—although the definition of "authoritative" in this context is problematic. According to the three-versions hypothesis, each version represents different manuscript traditions deriving from three distinct and successive stages of authorial revision. Although precise dating is debated, the A, B, and C texts are now commonly thought of as the progressive (20–25 years) work of a single author.
According to the three-versions hypothesis, the A-text was written c. 1367–70 and is the earliest. It breaks off, apparently unfinished, at Book 11, and Book 12 is written by another author or interpolator. The poem runs to about 2,500 lines. The B-text (Warner's ur-B text) was written c. 1377–79; it revises A, adds new material, and is three times the length of A. It runs to about 7,300 lines. The C-text was written in the 1380s as a major revision of B except for the final sections. There is some debate over whether the poem can be regarded as finished or not. It entails additions, omissions, and transpositions; it is not significantly different in size from B. Some scholars see it as a conservative revision of B that aims at disassociating the poem from Lollardy and the religious and political radicalism of John Ball during the Great Rising of 1381. (Ball appropriated Piers and other characters in the poem for his own verses, speeches, and letters during the Rising.) There is little actual evidence for this proposal, and much against it.[citation needed]
Skeat believed that the A-text was incomplete and based his editions on a B-text manuscript (Oxford, MS. Laud Misc. 581) that he wrongly thought was probably a holograph. Modern editors following Skeat, such as George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson, have maintained the basic tenets of Skeat's work: there were three final authorial texts, now lost, that can be reconstructed, albeit imperfectly and without certainty, by rooting out the "corruption" and "damage" done by scribes.
The Kane, Kane-Donaldson, and Russell-Kane editions of the three versions, published by the Athlone Press, have been controversial, but are considered among the most important accomplishments in modern editorial work and theory in Middle English. A. V. C. Schmidt has also published a parallel edition of A, B, C and Z; the second volume containing a full critical apparatus indicating his editorial decisions was finally published in 2008, long after the first volume fell out of print.
A. G. Rigg and Charlotte Brewer hypothesized the existence of a Z-text predecessor to A which contains elements of both A and C. The Z-text is based on Oxford MS. Bodley 851, which Rigg and Brewer edited and published. It is the shortest version, and its authenticity is disputed. Ralph Hanna III has disputed the Rigg/Brewer approach based on codicological evidence and internal literary evidence; consequently the Z-text is now more commonly viewed as a scribal corruption of A with C elements. More recently, Lawrence Warner has shown that what was thought of as B in fact incorporates matter produced as part of the C-revision: if B circulated before C, it looked nothing like what previous editors had assumed.
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