William Langland wrote the poem Piers Plowman over the course of about twenty years in the Late Middle Ages, completing the earliest version in the mid-1360s, and longer revised versions in the late 1370s and mid-1380s. Fifty-two early manuscripts of Piers Plowman have survived; this large number attests to the poem’s popularity. Four editions were also printed in the 15th century. All of these versions of Piers Plowman vary in length, content, and structure. Scholars have divided the versions into A, B, C, and Z texts. Of these, the B text is regarded as the most poetic, with the sharpest satire.
The poem was produced during a period of major political, economic, and religious upheaval in England. Half of the population had perished in the Black Death of 1347-1351, just ten years before. England was also fighting the Hundred Year’s War with France. Depopulation brought about social unrest and popular uprisings. Piers Plowman is written in sympathy with the common peasant, against unfair dealings by the King, courts, clergy, and tradesmen, in a scathing indictment of corruption and greed. The first two versions of the poem were written just prior to the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Leaders of the revolt quoted from passages in Piers Plowman to motivate the peasants. (In the third version of the poem, the C-text, written after this revolt, Langland removed a particularly intense passage in which Piers tears up a priest’s pardon). The poem was used for political purposes again in the sixteenth century, when its criticisms of the clergy were cited by early Protestants.
This was also an era of flourishing literary activity. Contemporary literature included the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer and the Pearl Poet's Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It was written in language that all literate English speakers of the time could understand, in what is now called Middle English—a combination of the French of the Norman elite and the Anglo-Saxon of the lower classes. Contemporary readers require assistance to understand Middle English, so the poem is most often read in translation to Modern English. This guide uses the modern translation by Peter Sutton.
Piers Plowman is written in alliterative verse, meaning that a number of stressed syllables of words in each line begin with the same sound. It was part of a revival of alliterative poetry in the 14th century that returned to the Old English Anglo-Saxon tradition of Beowulf, before metrical court poetry became popular. Its lines are unrhymed and consist of two halves on either side of a caesura, or break, between grammatical structures. The poem also contains over 300 Latin quotations, mostly from the Vulgate—the Latin Bible of the Catholic Church.
The poem is a theological allegory in which the speaker, Will, experiences ten dream-visions, including two dreams within dreams, on his quest for a good Christian life. The dream-vision was a common literary form at the time, employed by Chaucer and others. Langland combined it with other genres: the quest, social satire, beast fable, debate, and sermon. It is structured as a journey. Each chapter after the prologue is called a passus, which is Latin for step. In his first dream-vision, Will describes a ‘fair field full of folk,’ a wide variety of characters living in the everyday realm, which lies between heaven and hell, represented by a tower and a dungeon respectively. When the poem was first printed, it was divided into two sections: "The Vision of Piers the Plowman," and "The Life of Do-well, Do-better, and Do-best."
On his quest, Will is diverted wildly, as he encounters hundreds of characters from every walk of life: prostitutes, clergy, lawyers, pilgrims, drunkards, judges, thieves, vagabonds, bankers, sheriffs, wastrels, scholars, con-men, and judges, among many others. The text also reflects Christian prejudice against Jews and Muslims in the Medieval period. The scope of the poem is ambitious, rich, and often humorous. It explores the proper roles of various parts of secular and religious society, such as the government, the nobility, the peasantry, the papacy, and the clergy. In this, it addresses issues that are perennially urgent: relations amongst classes, nations, family members, the secular and religious worlds, and humans and nature. It touches on the topics of taxation, trade, war, criminal justice, finance, food supply, medicine, heredity, marriage, child-rearing, and education.
Piers Plowman is committed to Truth and divine justice. The poem rails against corruption passionately and angrily, and has contempt for hypocrisy. It grapples with the different levels of economic and political power among social actors including the traditional three estates of feudal society: the Church, the nobility, and the peasantry, and the new classes that arose in the late Middle Ages: traveling laborers, the urban mercantile class, and intellectuals such as the poet himself.
Many abstract qualities, such as Truth, Charity, and Conscience, morph into and out of personified form in the poem. As each quality carries many connotations, they intertwine to create rich, complex imagery. Piers Plowman is himself a complex allegorical character. He appears sporadically throughout the poem as an ideal peasant laborer, friend of Truth, founder of the Church, and embodiment of Christ.
The dreamer’s name, Will, is also allegorical, representing human will. Will desires to make things right with God through penance. He finds that the system doesn’t work the way that it’s supposed to—even though he seeks true penitence earnestly, he encounters false friars who grant easy absolution to get rich quickly. Corruption is endemic in the world of Piers Plowman; the effort of the poem represents hope for a cure. Will progresses from confusion to redemption and hopes for society to return to the Cardinal Virtues and to follow Christ’s commandments to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself. The poem ends in crisis, with the Church lost to the forces of the Antichrist. But there is a glimmer of hope, as Conscience sets out on a new pilgrimage to once again find Piers Plowman.
