PIERS PLOWMAN

The full title of Piers Plowman, the master literary work of 14th-century England's alliterative revival in the West Midlands, is The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman. Common in the MSS and in early references are the Latin titles: Visio Willelmi de Petro Plowman and Liber de Petro Plowman. The poem survives in 49 MSS in three successive versions of unequal length, known as the A, B, and C texts; ten of the MSS are composed of parts from two of the texts. The A text (2,558 lines), written c. 1362 to 1373, is divided into a prologue, 11 passus (cantos) and a "Passus XII" of dubious character, written by a John But and printed as an appendix in recent editions. The B text (7,242 lines), written c. 1377, has a prologue and nine additional passus following the 11 of A, these earlier passus being altered in many respects. The C text (7,357 lines), written c. 1387 to 1398, is a revision of B, having no prologue and 23 passus. The first printed edition (B text) was by Robert Crowley in 1550.

Authorship and Organization. Although the famous controversy over the authorship is not completely resolved, Piers Plowman is now generally attributed to William Langland on the basis of two 15th-century notes in MSS and of internal evidence. He was possibly the illegitimate son of Eustace de Rokayle, was born at Cleobury Mortimer or Ledbury in Shropshire, and educated at the priory of Great Malvern in Worcestershire. All else about him seems speculation.

Each version of the poem follows the same basic organization of two large divisions, each containing several visions composed of one or more passus. The B text, the one most often read and translated today, includes the Vision concerning Piers the Plowman (Prologue-Passus VII), two dreams, and the Lives of Dowel (VIII–XIV), Dobet (XV–XVIII), and Dobest (XIX–XX), eight dreams, two of which are dreams within dreams.

The Visio and the Vita. In the Visio, Will, a persona for William the author and the will of every medieval man, recounts his dream of the various contemporary professions, of the "fair field full of folk," working out their fates between the Tower of Truth (eternal life) and the Castle of Care (eternal fire). A Lady (the Church), the first of many tutors to appear, explains the divine origin and destiny of men and their duties to God. There follows a series of dramatic scenes dealing with the proposed marriage of Lady Meed (reward) first to False, and then to Conscience. In the second dream, the folk repent their past sins and begin a pilgrimage in search of Truth. Piers now makes his first appearance, directing them first to plow their own half-acres, after which Truth sends a pardon to him and his true followers: "Et qui bona egerunt, ibunt in vitam eternam;/ Qui vero mala, in ignem eternum."

In the Vita, Will's quest for the three degrees of doing well (bona egerunt ) moves mainly in his own mind; his search is a pilgrimage through the three grades of Christian perfection toward the ideal society. The pattern at the center of the poem, the lives of Dowel and Dobet, is progress through struggle. In the third vision, Will confronts his own faculties, such as Thought and Imagination, gradually learns the responsible use of man's distinguishing gifts, wit and will, and recognizes his sinfulness. In the fourth, under the tutelage of Conscience and Patience, he beholds Hawkin the Active Man's discovery of his stained coat (soul) and adopts an attitude of penance and poverty in preparation for the focusing of divine powers within his own soul, Anima. In the fifth vision, he then moves to the contemplation of the three theological virtues and the Trinity, and in the sixth, to a meditation on the Passion and its relation to his own salvation. It is in this last vision that Charity, who is also the Good Samaritan, takes on the flesh of Piers Plowman, who appears as Christ the Knight, come to joust at Jerusalem. In Dobest, Piers makes his third appearance as Christ's reeve, the Pope. The final two dreams present the testing of Will's love and poverty and of the 14th-century Church, which is attacked by Antichrist. Will recounts his own tribulations and the coming of old age; the poem concludes with his Conscience vowing that he will "walk as wide as the world lasts" in search of Piers the Plowman. Each passus, or "step," has made it clear that the pilgrimage is the poem's dominant motif, a fact that relates it to chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

Relationship with Other Works. In form and technique Piers Plowman is related also to the works of other contemporaries. No other medieval poem presents such a mixture of genres. In keeping with the basic form of allegorical dream narrative, mental faculties (Reason), sins (Pride), virtues (Patience), institutions (Holy-church), and a great many other personifications, as well as divine persons (Holy Ghost), Biblical figures (Moses), and contemporary people (Friars) appear as characters, undergo a variety of transformations, and vanish unexpectedly. Parts of the personified action relate the poem to the morality plays, while mystery plays have clearly influenced other scenes (see drama, medieval).

The unifying action, a quest, connects it with the romance, and, inasmuch as the quest involves Will with a series of guides, it resembles the consolatio in which Boethius is tutored by Dame Philosophy. The character Will, uneducated but argumentative, is similar to the autobiographical ingénu of encyclopedic satire, and in the continual criticism of the actual in the light of the ideal, there are elements of complaint in the de contemptu mundi tradition. Other materials are derived from the sermon, the devotional, penitential, and ascetic handbooks, and the commentaries and glosses of the Bible. Langland "spoke Bible" and used at times both typology (see typos) and the four allegorical levels of Scripture (singly or in combination) to shape a poem that, in its eschatological orientation and its scattered prophetic warnings, is apocalyptic. Some of the alliterative lines are macaronic and acrostic, and others contain repetition, riddles, puns, and word play of all kinds. All critics agree that Piers Plowman is one of the most puzzling poems in English literature.

Main Theme. If the author's aims and accomplishments are to be understood, the three versions should probably not be regarded as variants of the same poem, but as a cumulative work in which successive attempts are made to develop and clarify his main theme, the search for salvation. This is treated thematically as a pilgrimage, in keeping with the Augustinian definition of charity as the motion of the soul toward God, and is associated with plowing, the tending to the duties of one's own estate. The value of both depends on cooperation with the way of the cross, the pardon. These motifs of pilgrimage, plowing, and pardon are unified in penance, which is not only the ritual followed in the confession scenes for which the poem is well known, but a virtue related to poverty and patience. For the author, these three seem to define the life of perfection.

In depicting Will's search, Langland incorporates all the elements associated with the medieval spiritual life: the creed; the Ten Commandments; the seven deadly sins; the three theological virtues; the four cardinal virtues; the four daughters of God; the world, the flesh, and the devil; and the three types of chastity—in marriage, in widowhood, and in virginity. Key terms of medieval philosophical thought, such as Need, Fortune, and Kind (Nature), all receive systematic treatment as personifications, and the century's problems, such as the questioning of the value of learning and the rising emphasis on voluntarism, are given penetrating and balanced analysis. The poem, finally, is the most significant vernacular expression of English social thought in the Middle Ages; it makes explicit and detailed reference to the plagues, the Hundred Years' War, the Great Schism, and the wide variety of clerical and economic abuses; yet, grounded as it is in the actual religious practice, philosophical thought, and historical events of its time, it conveys, like no other English poem, the timelessness of Christian truth.

Scholarship Devoted to Piers. Piers Plowman has been fortunate in its editors and interpreters. The basic edition of all three texts is that of Skeat, but this is gradually being replaced by the new London edition, of which Kane's A text has already appeared. This edition, which was begun as a result of the famous authorship dispute between J. M. Manly, who argued that the composition of the three versions was the work of five men, and J. J. Jusserand and others, who argued for a single author, will probably not fully resolve the dispute for all, but Kane's book (1965) clearly indicates that the evidence points toward unity of authorship. Despite the speculations of A. Bright, little more is known about the author; the chief source for his biography is internal evidence, and most critics today agree that the events in the poem do not mirror his life in such close detail as has previously been argued. Chambers, Coghill, and Wells were among the poem's first great interpreters. Owst and Spearing have shown how much the poem has in common with the medieval sermon. Dunning's early study of the A text has left subsequent writers on all three versions in his debt, as has Donaldson's pioneering work on the C text. In more recent years, critical studies have focused on the B text and its Biblical, theological, devotional, and apocalyptic backgrounds; the best are those of Robertson and Huppé, Frank, Fowler, and Bloomfield. Interest in this important work is still very strong and further scholarship appears every year.

Bibliography: Editions. w. w. skeat, ed., The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman in Three Parallel Texts, Together with Richard the Redeless, 2 v. (London 1886). t. a. knott and d. c. fowler, eds., Piers the Plowman: A Critical Edition of the A-Version (Baltimore 1952). g. kane, ed., Piers Plowman: The A Version (London 1960). Translations. n. coghill, tr., Visions from Piers Plowman (New York 1949). j. f. goodridge, tr., Langland: Piers the Ploughman (Baltimore 1959). h. h. wells, tr., The Vision of Piers Plowman (New York 1935). Studies. a. h. bright, New Light on 'Piers Plowman' (London 1928). m. w. bloomfield, Piers Plowman as a 14th-Century Apocalypse (New Brunswick, N.J. 1962). r. w. chambers, Man's Unconquerable Mind (London 1939). c. h. dawson, Medieval Religion and Other Essays (New York 1934). e. t. donaldson, Piers Plowman: The C-Text and Its Poet (New Haven 1949). t. p. dunning, Piers Plowman: An Interpretation of the A-Text (New York 1937). w. erzgrÄber, William Langlands 'Piers Plowman': Eine Interpretation des C-Textes (Heidelberg 1957). r. w. frank, Piers Plowman and the Scheme of Salvation (New Haven 1957). d. c. fowler, Piers, the Plowman: Literary Relations of the A and B Texts (Seattle 1961). d. l. owen, Piers Plowman: A Comparison with Some Earlier and Contemporary French Allegories (London 1912). g. r. owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (2d ed. New York 1961). d. w. robertson and b. f. huppÉ, Piers Plowman and Scriptural Tradition (Princeton 1951). a. c. spearing, Criticism and Medieval Poetry (New York 1964). e. m. tillyard, The English Epic and Its Background (New York 1954). h. c. white, Social Criticism in Popular Religious Literature of the 16th Century (New York 1944). g. kane, Piers Plowman: The Evidence for Authorship (London 1965).

[g. l. o'grady]