Langland, Langelande, or Longland, William: author; born probably at Cleobury Mortimer, Shropshire, England, about 1332; was educated at Oxford; became a fellow of Oriel College, and a tonsured clerk at Malvern. His “Vision of Piers Plowman,” in alliterative verse, written about 1362, was a religious and moral allegory, containing much satire upon ecclesiastical corruption and the social abuses of the time. It was originally in eight divisions, or “passus,” to which was added a continuation in three parts, Vita Do Wel, Do Bet and Do Best. About 1377 the whole was greatly enlarged by the author. The best edition is that of W. W. Skeat (four parts with glossary 1867–84; another edition in 2 vols., 1886). Langland died about 1400.

Vision of Piers Plowman

  We may iustly coiect therfore y^t it was firste written about two hundred yeres paste, in the tyme of Kynge Edwarde the thyrde. In whose tyme it pleased God to open the eyes of many to se hys truth, geuing them boldenes of herte, to open their mouthes and crye oute agaynste the worckes of darckenes, as did Iohn wicklefe, who also in those dayes translated the holye Bible into the Englishe tonge, and this writer who in reportynge certaine visions and dreames, that he fayned him selfe to haue dreamed: doeth moste christianlye enstruct the weake, and sharply rebuke the obstinate blynde. There is no maner of vice, that reigneth in anye estate of men, whiche this wryter hath not godly, learnedlye, and wittilye, rebuked. He wrote altogyther in miter; but not after y^e maner of our rimers that write nowe adayes (for his verses ende not alike) but the nature of hys miter is, to haue thre wordes at the leaste in euery verse whiche beginne with some one letter…. Loke not vpon this boke therfore, to talke of wonders paste or to come, but to amende thyne owne misse, which thou shalt fynd here moste charitably rebuked. The spirite of god gyue the grace to walke in the waye of truthe, to Gods glory, & thyne owne soules healthe. So be it.

  In hys dooinges is somewhat harshe and obscure, but indeede a very pithy wryter, and (to hys commendation I speake it) was the first that I have seene, that observed ye quantity of our verse without the curiosity of Ryme.

  He that wrote the Satyr of Piers Ploughman, seemed to have bene a malcontent of that time, and therefore bent himselfe wholy to taxe the disorders of that age, and specially the pride of the Romane Clergy, of whose fall he seemeth to be a very true Prophet, his verse is but loose meetre, and his termes hard and obscure, so as in them is litle pleasure to be taken.

  It is written in a kind of English meeter, which for discovery of the infecting corruptions of those times, I preferre before many of the more seemingly serious Invectives, as well for Invention as Judgement.

  Forgive me, Reader, though placing him (who lived one hundred and fifty years before) since the Reformation: for I conceive that the Morning-star belongs rather to the Day, than to the Night. On which account this Robert (regulated in our Book not according to the Age he was in, but Judgement he was of) may by Prolepsis be termed a Protestant…. It’s observable that Pits (generally a perfect Plagiary out of Bale) passeth this Langland over in silence. And why? Because he wrote in oppositum to the Papal interest. Thus the most light-finger’d Thieves will let that alone, which is too hot for them.

  The metre of Pierce Plowman’s Visions has no kind of affinity with what is commonly called Blank Verse; yet has it a sort of harmony of its own, proceeding not so much from its alliteration, as from the artful disposal of its cadence, and the contrivance of its pause; so that when the ear is a little accustomed to it, it is by no means unpleasing; but claims all the merit of the French heroic numbers, only far less polished; being sweetened, instead of their final rhymes, with the internal recurrence of similar sounds.

  This poem abounds with the boldest personifications, the keenest satire, the most expressive descriptions, and the most singular versification.

  Instead of availing himself of the rising and rapid improvements of the English language, Longland prefers and adopts the style of the Anglo-Saxon poets. Nor did he make these writers the models of his language only: he likewise imitates their alliterative versification, which consisted in using an aggregate of words beginning with the same letter. He has therefore rejected rhyme, in the place of which he thinks it sufficient to substitute a perpetual alliteration. But this imposed constraint of seeking identical initials, and the affectation of obsolete English, by demanding a constant and necessary departure from the natural and obvious forms of expression, while it circumscribed the powers of our author’s genius, contributed also to render his manner extremely perplexed, and to disgust the reader with obscurities.

  Langland’s work, whatever may be thought of its poetical merit, cannot fail of being considered as an entertaining and useful commentary on the general histories of the fourteenth century, not only from its almost innumerable pictures of contemporary manners, but also from its connexion with the particular feelings and opinions of the time.

  Wherever born or bred, and by whatever name distinguished, the author of these Visions was an observer and a reflector of no common powers. I can conceive him (like his own visionary William) to have been sometimes occupied in contemplative wanderings on the Malvern Hills, and dozing away a summer’s noon among the bushes, while his waking thoughts were distorted into all the misshapen forms created by a dreaming fancy. Sometimes I can descry him taking his staff, and roaming far and wide in search of manners and characters; mingling with men of every accessible rank, and storing his memory with hints for future use. I next pursue him to his study, sedate and thoughtful, yet wildly inventive, digesting the first rude drafts of his Visions, and in successive transcriptions, as judgment matured, or invention declined, or as his observations were more extended, expanding or contracting, improving and sometimes perhaps debasing his original text. The time of our author’s death, and the place of his interment, are equally unknown, with almost every circumstance relating to him. His contemporaries, Chaucer and Gower, repose beneath magnificent tombs, but Langland (if such were really his name) has no other monument than that which, having framed for himself, he left to posterity to appropriate.

  His style, even making allowance for its antiquity, has a vulgar air, and seems to indicate a mind that would have been coarse, though strong, in any state of society. But, on the other hand, his work, with all its tiresome homilies, illustrations from school divinity, and uncouth phraseology, has some interesting features of originality. He employs no borrowed materials; he is the earliest of our writers in whom there is a tone of moral reflection; and his sentiments are those of bold and solid integrity. The zeal of truth was in him; and his vehement manner sometimes rises to eloquence, when he denounces hypocrisy and imposture. The mind is struck with his rude voice, proclaiming independent and popular sentiments, from an age of slavery and superstition, and thundering a prediction in the ear of papacy, which was doomed to be literally fulfilled at the distance of nearly two hundred years. His allusions to contemporary life afford some amusing glimpses of its manners. There is room to suspect that Spenser was acquainted with his works; and Milton, either from accident or design, has the appearance of having had one of Langlande’s passages in his mind, when he wrote the sublime description of the lazar-house, in “Paradise Lost.”

  The work of Langland is also curious, as being the product of a rich and powerful mind, drawing upon its own stores, unaided (perhaps I might have said unfettered) by rule and precedent. When carefully examined, it will not be found wanting in the important quality of unity, the absence of which so much lessens our enjoyment of many contemporary poems; but the execution of the work is certainly superior to its conception, and shows indeed a wonderful versatility of genius. A high tone of feeling is united to the most searching knowledge of the world; sarcastic declamation is succeeded by outpourings of the most delicate poetry; and broad humour or homespun mother-wit by flights, which neither Spenser nor Milton have disdained to follow.

  The “Visions of Piers Ploughman” will always offer studies for the poetical artist. This volume, and not Gower’s nor Chaucer’s, is a well of English undefiled. Spenser often beheld these Visions; Milton, in his sublime description of the Lazar House, was surely inspired by a reminiscence of Piers Ploughman. Even Dryden, whom we should not suspect to be much addicted to black-letter reading beyond his Chaucer, must have carefully conned our Piers Ploughman; for he has borrowed one very striking line from our poet, and possibly may have taken others. Byron, though he has thrown out a crude opinion of Chaucer, has declared that “the Ploughman” excels our ancient poets. And I am inclined to think that we owe to Piers Ploughman an allegorical work of the same wild invention, from that other creative mind, the author of the “Pilgrim’s Progress.” How can we think of the one, without being reminded of the other? Some distant relationship seems to exist between the Ploughman’s Dowell and Dobet, and Dobest, Friar Flatterer, Grace the portress of the magnificent Tower of Truth viewed at a distance, and by its side the dungeon of Care, Natural Understanding, and his lean and stern wife Study, and all the rest of this numerous company, and the shadowy pilgrimage of the “Immortal Dreamer” to “the Celestial City.” Yet I would mistrust my own feeling, when so many able critics, in their various researches after a prototype of that singular production, have hitherto not suggested what seems to me obvious.

  The Poem of “Piers Ploughman” is peculiarly a national work. It is the most remarkable monument of the public spirit of our forefathers in the middle, or, as they are often termed, dark ages. It is a pure specimen of the English language at a period when it had sustained few of the corruptions which have disfigured it since we have had writers of “Grammars;” and in it we may study with advantage many of the difficulties of the language which these writers have misunderstood. It is, moreover, the finest example left of the kind of versification which was purely English, inasmuch as it had been the only one in use among our Anglo-Saxon progenitors, in common with the other people of the North.

  Genius was thrust onward to a new slope of the world. And soon, when simpler minstrels had sat there long enough to tune the ear of the time,—when Layamon and his successors had hummed long enough, like wild bees, upon the lips of our infant poetry predestined to eloquence,—then Robert Langlande, the monk, walking for cloister “by a wode’s syde,” on the Malvern Hills, took counsel with his holy “Plowman,” and sang of other visions than their highest ridge can show. While we write, the woods upon those beautiful hills are obsolete, even as Langlande’s verses; scarcely a shrub grows upon the hills! but it is well for the thinkers of England to remember reverently, while, taking thought of her poetry, they stand among the gorse,—that if we may boast now of more honoured localities, of Shakespeare’s “rocky Avon,” and Spenser’s “soft-streaming Thames,” and Wordsworth’s “Rydal Mere,” still our first holy poet-ground is there.

  The Visionary is no disciple, no precursor of Wycliffe in his broader religious views; the Loller of Piers Plonghman is no Lollard—he applies the name as a term of reproach for a lazy, indolent vagrant. The Poet is no dreamy speculative theologian; he acquiesces seemingly with unquestioning faith in the creed and in the usages of the Church…. It is in his intense absorbing moral feeling that he is beyond his age: with him outward observances are but hollow shows, mockeries, hypocrisies without the inward power of religion. It is not so much in his keen cutting satire on all matters of the Church as his solemn installation of Reason and Conscience as the guides of the self-directed soul, that he is breaking the yoke of sacerdotal domination: in his constant appeal to the plainest, simplest Scriptural truths, as in themselves the whole of religion, he is a stern reformer.

  It is hardly less important to the philologist that the Mercian dialect, which he seems to have preferred, and which is still heard in the speech of Salopian laborers, appears visibly changed in the successive MS. copies that were made during the lifetime of the author, and thus show how, within the limits of one generation, the language was improved and developed.

  Though highly original, thoroughly genial, and fully imbued with the spirit of the age and of the commonwealth of which he was the first-born intellectual son, yet, in his versification, he was little better than a servile imitator…. The poem, if not altogether original in conception, is abundantly so in treatment. The spirit it breathes, its imagery, the turn of thought, the style of illustration and argument it employs, are as remote as possible from the tone of Anglo-Saxon poetry, but exhibit the characteristic moral and mental traits of the Englishman, as clearly and unequivocally as the most national portions of the works of Chaucer or of any other native writer.

  The poem—in all its shapes—abounds with passages which we could ill afford to lose; the vivid truthfulness of its delineations of the life and manners of our forefathers has been often praised, and it is difficult to praise it too highly…. The extreme earnestness of the author and the obvious truthfulness and blunt honesty of his character are in themselves attractive and lend a value to all he utters, even when he is evolving a theory or wanders into abstract questions of theological speculation. But we are the more pleased when we perceive, as we very soon do, that he is evidently of a practical turn of mind, and loves best to exercise his shrewd English common sense upon topics of every-day interest.

  Langland’s verse runs mostly like a brook, with a beguiling and wellnigh slumberous prattle, but he, more often than any writer of his class, flashes into salient lines, gets inside our guard with the home-thrust of a forthright word, and he gains if taken piecemeal. His imagery is naturally and vividly picturseque…. “Piers Ploughman” is the best example I know of what is called popular poetry,—of compositions, that is, which contain all the simpler elements of poetry, but still in solution, not crystallized around any thread of artistic purpose. In it appears at her best the Anglo-Saxon Muse, a first cousin of Poor Richard, full of proverbial wisdom, who always brings her knitting in her pocket, and seems most at home in the chimney-corner. It is genial; it plants itself firmly on human nature with its rights and wrongs; it has a surly honesty, prefers the downright to the gracious, and conceives of speech as a tool rather than a musical instrument. If we should seek for a single word that would define it most precisely, we should not choose simplicity, but homeliness.

  The strength of Langland’s genius is shown in stern invective:—not vague declamation, but invective, which is prompted and guided by a true insight into the vanities and vices and negligences of mankind in their various stations of life.

  His world is the world of the poor; he dwells on the poor man’s life, on his hunger and toil, his rough revelry and his despair with the narrow intensity of a man who has no outlook beyond it. The narrowness, the misery, the monotony of the life he paints reflect themselves in his verse. It is only here and there that a love of nature or a grim earnestness of wrath quickens his rhyme into poetry; there is not a gleam of the bright human sympathy of Chaucer, of his fresh delight in the gayety, the tenderness, the daring of the world about him, of his picturesque sense of even its coarsest contrasts, of his delicate irony, of his courtly wit. The cumbrous allegory, the tedious platitudes, the rhymed texts from Scripture which form the staple of Longland’s work, are only broken here and there by phrases of a shrewd common sense, by bitter outbursts, by pictures of a broad Hogarthian humor.

  Before middle life, William, like Dante, had recognised that the world was out of joint. He too looked with longing for the deliverer who should set it right; he too, with all the powers of his soul, wrestled for the knowledge of salvation, for himself as for others; he too lifted up his voice in warning and menace, before the great and mighty of the earth, before princes and priests; he too held up a mirror to the world, in which it saw both its own image and the ideal to which it had grown faithless. But unlike the Italian poet, William did not attain a full and clear theory of life, and hence he failed to put together what he had lived and seen, in a symmetrical, distinctly-drawn picture, with the mighty personality of the poet for its centre. The “Vision concerning Piers Plowman” is a series of paintings whose mutual connection lies more in the intention than in actual execution, and each of them has, besides clearly illumined groups, others that seem enveloped in mist, whose outlines we may feel rather than perceive, and still others whose dim figures first receive colour and life from our fancy.

  The writer who, before Chaucer’s prime, and in so close proximity to him and to the influences which moulded him, had already succeeded in distancing all predecessors, and in leaving a lasting bequest to his posterity of English readers, and to ours.

  The whole drift of the poem is to recommend practical Christianity. The kernel of its moral teaching is the pure Christian love of our neighbour—love especially to the poor and lowly; a love of our neighbour reaching its highest point in patient forbearance, and love towards enemies—a love inspired by the voluntary passion of Christ for us.

  Nowhere had the English mind found so real an opportunity of poetic utterance in the days of Chaucer’s own youth as in Langland’s unique work, national in its allegorical form and in its alliterative metre; and nowhere had this utterance been more stern and severe.

  Probably no rhythm was ever so thoroughly misunderstood as the gentle and incessant sing which winds along through these alliterative fixed-points as a running brook among its pebbles.

  “Piers Plowman’s Vision” is one of the first declarations of the intrinsic holiness of honest industry.

  So ends the Vision, with no victory attained. There is a world at war, and a renewed cry for the grace of God, a new yearning to find Christ and bring with Him the day when wrongs and hatreds are no more…. Fourteenth Century yielded no more fervent expression of the purest Christian labour to bring men to God…. Langland lays fast hold of all the words of Christ, and reads them into a Divine Law of Love and Duty. He is a Church Reformer in the truest sense, seeking to strengthen the hands of the clergy by amendment of the lives and characters of those who are untrue to their holy calling. The ideal of a Christian Life shines through his poem, while it paints with homely force the evils against which it is directed. On points of theology he never disputes; but an ill life for him is an ill life, whether in Pope or peasant.

  It makes a little book—earliest, I think, of all books written in English—which you will be apt to find in a well-appointed private library of our day. I won’t say that it is bought to read, so much as to stand upon the shelves (so many books are) as a good and sufficient type of old respectabilities. Yet, for all this, it is reasonably readable; with crabbed alliterative rhythm;—some Latin intermixed, as if the writer had been a priest (as some allege); and such knowledge of life and of current shortcomings among all sorts of people as showed him to be a wide-awake and fearless observer…. Langlande is a little mixed and raw oftentimes; but he is full of shrewdness and of touches of a rough and unwashed humor. There is little tenderness of poetic feeling in his verse; and scarcely ever does it rise to anything approaching stateliness; but it keeps a good dog-trot jog, as of one who knew what he was doing, and meant to do it. What he meant was—to whip the vices of the priests and to scourge the covetousness of the rich and of the men in power. It is English all over; English in the homeliness of its language; he makes even Norman words sound homely; English in spirit too; full of good, hearty, grumbling humor—a sort of predated and poetic kind of Protestantism. Plums might be picked out of it for the decoration of a good radical or agrarian speech of to-day.

  No doubt his peasant was idealised, as no one knew better than himself; but it was honesty of work in the place of dishonest idleness which he venerated. It was the glory of England to have produced such a thought far more than to have produced the men who, heavy with the plunder of unhappy peasants, stood boldly to their arms at Creçy and Poitiers.

  He seems to have had a hard life, for he speaks of himself as earning a scanty living by the performance of minor clerical duties, such as singing the placebo, dirige, and “the seven psalms,” for the good of men’s souls, and he often alludes to his extreme poverty. Being married, he was, of course, only in minor orders, and thus could never rise to any rank in the Church. His poverty made him bitter and proud, and he hated, he tells us, to bow to the gay lords and dames who rode, richly dressed in silver and miniver, adown Cheapside. But perhaps it was well for others that he was poor, for his world is the world of the poor; he tells of their life and labours, their toil and hunger, their rude merriment and their helpless despair, till the misery and even the narrow bitterness of their thought is reflected in his verse.

  Because Langland reveres virtue, many commentators have made a saint of him; because he condemns, as an abuse, the admission of peasants’ sons to holy orders, they have it that he was born of good family; and because he speaks in a bitter and passionate way of the wrongs of his time, they have made him out a radical reformer, aiming at profound changes in the religious and social order of things. He was nothing of all this. The energy of his language, the eloquence and force of his words may have given rise to this delusion. In reality, he is, from the religious and social points of view, one of those rare thinkers who defend moderate ideas with vehemence, and employ all the resources of a fiery spirit in the defence of common sense.

  The earliest poem of high value which we meet with in modern English literature is the thrilling and mysterious “Vision of Piers Plowman.” According to the view which we choose to adopt, this brilliant satire may be taken as closing the mediæval fiction of England or as starting her modern popular poetry…. One of the greatest writers of the Middle Ages…. In the “Vision of Piers Plowman” the great alliterative school of West-Midland verse culminated in a masterpiece, the prestige of which preserves that school from being a mere curiosity for the learned. In spite of its relative difficulty, “Piers Plowman” will now always remain, with the “Canterbury Tales,” one of the two great popular classics of the fourteenth century…. It is an epitome of the social and political life of England, and particularly of London, seen from within and from below, without regard to what might be thought above and outside the class of workers. It is the foundation of the democratic literature of England, and a repository of picturesque observations absolutely unique and invaluable.

  Even Langland, a much more interesting and striking figure than Gower to us, could have been much better spared by his own generation than Gower himself. In literary form Langland had nothing to teach: he was in fact merely rowing offstream, if not against it, up a backwater which led nowhither. In substance he was powerful rather than profitable, offering nothing but allegory, of which there was already only too much, and political-ecclesiastical discussion, a growth always nearer to the tares than to the wheat of literature. In other words, and to vary the metaphor, he gave the workmen in the new workshop of English letters no new or improved tools, he opened up to them no new sources of material. He was a genius, he was a seer, he was an artist; but he was neither master nor stock-provider in literature.

  It is one thing to reach the public, quite another to reach the people; and the more difficult achievement was Langland’s. His grave verse went straight to the heart of the still Teutonic race, indifferent to the facile French lilts of Chaucer. Serfs and laborers, seemingly inaccessible to influences of culture, as they staggered along under their heavy loads, eagerly welcomed the Visions of Piers the Plowman, of Do Well, Do Better, and Do Best. They heard, pondered, and repeated, till they realized that their souls had found utterance at last. The central version of the great poem—for the author rewrote it three times—antedated by only two or three years the Peasants’ Revolt under Wat Tyler and John Ball. This was the first largely significant prophecy in England of a distinct industrial movement. Its inspiration was no gentle Christian idealism, such as stirred the followers of St. Francis, but a spirit of fierce rebellion, flinging itself with awakened intelligence and destructive ardor against established law. The first note of the social revolution is heard in its confused echoes. No one can trace the thrilling story of its hope and passions, and fail to see how potent had been the poem of Langland in arousing and shaping its ideals. Phrases from the poem were used as watchwords in the uprising; more than this, the central personage, the intensely conceived Piers the Plowman, became a spiritual presence to the laboring classes of England. In those days before telegram or press, association was difficult; this poem, quietly passing from lip to lip, helped bind together the scattered and voiceless workingmen of the eastern counties with a new sense of fellowship. Langland was thus a direct power, as few poets have ever been, upon an awakening national life…. Art knows no classes; and the self-expression of a class, though that class be the very heart of the nation, cannot be immortal. This is the book of the people; and the people, even when thinking, feeling, seeing aright, is yet unable, except by occasional chance, to find the inevitable word. The burden of the popular heart remains forever undelivered. This book is like all others that seek to give it. Sharing the people’s sorrows, it shares also their fate: it is forgotten.

Piers Plowman Creed, 1394?

  “The Crede of Piers Ploughman,” if not written by the author of the “Vision,” is at least written by a scholar who fully emulates his master; and Pope was so deeply struck with this little poem, that he has very carefully analyzed the whole.

  The mention of Wycliffe and of Walter Brute and other circumstances, fix the date of “Piers Ploughman’s Creed” with tolerable certainty in the latter years of the reign of Richard II. It was probably written very soon after the year 1393, the date of the persecution of Walter Brute at Hereford; and from the particular allusion to that person we may perhaps suppose that like the Vision it was written on the Borders of Wales.

  This poem, consisting of 850 lines, was written in alliterative verse by a disciple of Wycliffe, whose name has not been ascertained. The title and form of it are both imitated from William Langland’s more famous poem, known as “The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman.” Though these two poems, the “Crede” and the “Vision,” are, in fact, by different authors, and express different sentiments on some points, they are, to the disgrace of students of English literature, continually being confounded with each other. There is every reason to believe that the anonymous author of the “Crede” was also author of “The Plowman’s Tale,” a satirical poem which has often been wrongly ascribed to Chaucer.