WILLIAM LANGLAND
If I postpone Chaucer a little longer, it is because, when he appears, he pushes his contemporaries into the wings. Each deserves attention—a generous man, he might have said as much himself. Each is different from him: he learned from them, reading them in manuscripts, or hearing their verse recited of an evening, at a feast or with a friend. Perhaps he heard these lines:
“Bi Cryste,” quod Conscience tho, “I will bicome a pilgryme,
And walken as wyde as al the worlde lasteth,
To seke Piers the Plowman...”
Piers Plowman was one of the most popular poems of its time. It survives in over forty manuscripts from the fifteenth century.
When popular works with a religious or political edge are no longer topical they fall into neglect. Piers Plowman vanished from sight in the late sixteenth century and reemerged only in the late eighteenth. Thomas Warton helped to restore it to the conscious tradition in the 1770s. It has not lacked readers since. In fact for every reader of Gower, there are a score of Langland readers. Poetic value is not democratically established, but if a work survives with a readership after six centuries, it must have something to recommend it. And in this case it isn’t the poet’s life. William Langland—called Long Will because he was so tall—is almost anonymous. His name may not even have been William. Warton calls him Robert Longlande, following Robert Crowley who first printed the poem in 1550. His name may not have been Langland. He may have been born about 1331, possibly out of wedlock, in Cleobury Mortimer, Shropshire, or in Shipton-under-Wychwood, Oxfordshire, or in Somerset, Dorset or Devon, where Langland connections exist. He seems to be claimed by the whole country. E. K. Chambers constructs a plausible biography, diverging from the Reverend Walter W. Skeat’s equally credible hypotheses. Warton makes him a secular priest, fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. But Long Will may have received a clerical education at Malvern Priory, where he was made a clerk or scholar. This accommodates the Malvern references in the poem. He was certainly a poeta doctus, a learned poet, and his poem is littered with scholastic digressions and embellishments.
The first (A) text of the poem seems to date from 1362. Shortly afterward he settled in London, in Cornhill, with his wife, Kitte, and his daughter, Calote. In 1376 the second (B) text was begun. It’s generally held to be poetically the best. The third (C) text, overlong and overembellished, was composed between 1392 and 1398. If all three texts are by the same man, the poem was the work of a lifetime. Warton speaks of other poems written in Langland’s manner and quotes them; but the similarities are sparse. True, these other poems alliterate and don’t rhyme, but they lack the dense particularity of Piers Plowman and are translations or retellings of legend. Piers Plowman doesn’t do much of that. Its method is not adaptable to continuous historical narrative, partly because the line-by-line dynamic, compressed for social observation, dialogue and allegorical concision, won’t “flow” for straight narrative. In 1399 he probably composed the angry poem “Richard the Redeles.” Then he vanished.
In the poem we meet the poet, Lange Wille (George Gascoigne, also tall, was dubbed “Long George”). If he took minor orders, because he married he failed to ascend the church hierarchy. He was poor, earning his keep by “saying prayers for people richer than himself” and copying legal documents. The poem reveals his knowledge of courts, lawyers and legal procedures. A proud man, he is reluctant to defer to lords, ladies and other social superiors unless he feels they merit deference. His “I” is strong and affirmative—one might say “modern,” in the way of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis—compared with Gower’s and Chaucer’s reticences.
In Piers Plowman—its full title is The Vision of William about Piers the Plowman and the Vision of the Same about Do-Wel, Do-better, and Do-Best—we must picture Long Will striding in threadbare garb through the streets of London (his principal setting), with eyes wide open, conscience stung and amazed by what he sees. Our first reformer poet, he’s visionary but not revolutionary. Calmly, using allegory, he exposes corruptions in church, state and society. He wants people to understand the causes of their suffering and put things right, not to throw the hierarchies down. It was—and is now—fashionable to convert Langland into another sort of radical. But he was as troubled as most of his contemporaries by the Wat Tyler fracas, even if he was more in touch with the grievances, having so many of his own. Still, he was a devout Catholic—the sort Wycliffe would have welcomed heartily though the Archbishop of Canterbury would have refused to shake his hand. He believed in the kingdom—of heaven, of this world—and that virtue and faith could make a road between them. The secular king had duties and was not above judgment. People who shared his view—like the anonymous author of “Piers Plowman’s Crede”—were more decidedly Wycliffite than he was. His poem was used in ways he never intended. Such a fate can distort a poem: English readers remember how the Mothers’ Union and the Proms misuse Blake’s “Jerusalem.”
Piers first appears, well into the poem, as a plowman, representing the common laity, then metamorphoses into a priest, and finally into a bishop with St. Peter and his papal successors. “Petrus, id est Christus.” He is exemplary, his developing example inspires love and respect, or indicts those who fail to follow him.
Ford Madox Ford’s impression of the poem is partial but illuminating. Piers has, he says, “the air of having been written in a place of public assembly. As if, while he wrote, individuals came up and whispered into his hooded ear: ‘Don’t forget the poor cooks,’ or: ‘Remember the hostelers,’ or: ‘Whatever you do, don’t forget to expose the scandalous living of the lousy friars.’ ” No one is forgotten: “Kokes and her knaves crieden, ‘hote pyes, hote! / Good goos and grys go we dyne, go we!’ ”
You can hear such demotic strains in the eighteenth century, in Jonathan Swift and John Gay, each vocation acknowledged in its own voice and idiom. Piers’s public tone belongs in the sermon tradition, explaining the unfamiliar through the familiar. Chaucer has tales, Gower has legends, Langland has homilies.
Verse form sets Langland apart from Chaucer and Gower. So does his direct teaching. He draws on the everyday world but writes of types, not characters. For him more than for Chaucer social conduct is spiritual. He uses the dream convention to cross into a “real” world from the partial, semblant secular world; to go not into fantasy—a world of animals, dreams of an old lover, a “house of fame”—but into truth. This is beautifully symbolized in the “Prologue,” where, by a stream, he first falls asleep:
Langland allegorizes by second nature. Men in the fair field make their way either to the tower of truth or to the dungeon of falsehood. His vision includes social, moral and spiritual worlds. A pull of opposites coordinates his poem: between tower and dungeon, Christ and Antichrist, good shepherd and bad. Langland writes in an expansive, digressive tradition. This is the poem’s virtue and vice. It includes longueurs as well as arresting detail.
True allegory—Langland’s is more true, more antique in feel, than Gower’s or Chaucer’s—requires intuitive and analytical comprehension from a reader. We don’t possess that intuition any longer, and the process of allegorical analysis can be mechanical, its fruits arcane. Unless you’re an unreconstructed Roman Catholic, Dante’s cosmology is a fiction; Shakespeare’s political structures have a varnished, or bloodied, feel, not to mention Blake’s angels with sandals on their heads, Wordsworth’s burly pantheism and Yeats’s silly gyres. Allegory was at least a form universally practiced and figuratively based, an instrument in an age of strict orthodoxies for reading pre-Christian writers like Virgil without getting into trouble. Allegory, the quintessential medieval Christian form, rests on a belief that the Creator can be perceived in his creation, that every created thing signifies in relation to the Creator. The poet witnesses—beyond the particulars of an experience—their significance in a wider scheme, “rendering imaginable what was before only intelligible.” Gower’s allegory works on two main levels, a “parable sense”—transferring meaning to the present world—and a moral sense, which he will not let us forget. Chaucer’s secular allegory works on three levels: a literal, even a social level; a “parable-sense”; and a moral sense, more subtly delivered than in Gower. In Langland there’s a fourth level, the anagogical, which opens on a spiritual world of being. A consistent allegorical interpretation of the whole poem on four levels should be possible. For medieval listeners, allegory was a way of seeing. They didn’t have to unpack a poem like customs officers. They marveled at how it delivered multiple meanings. They felt it.
They may not even have understood half of the time, but how many of us understand poetry even half of the time? For them it wasn’t a separate category called “the poem,” something to stand back from in order to receive an aesthetic frisson. It was part of their Christian world.
Taking the B text as our poem, Piers Plowman has four parts. First we witness the world of human transactions and meet Piers. Debates and trials are enacted, involving among others Holy Church and Lady Meed, supported by lesser allegorical figures, especially the Seven Deadly Sins. Avarice is especially horrible:
When you say the lines aloud you find your mouth forced by the consonants into all sorts of shapes, and spittle gathers on your lips. You see Avarice: you see and feel what the words mean. He is not seductive: he’s an old hoarding hag, cheeks like a purse, beard like a bondman. Visual and moral detail are transmitted simultaneously.
The first part ends with a general decision to make a pilgrimage to St. Truth, and Piers the Plowman offers to serve as guide, provided the pilgrims first help him to finish harrowing his field. After further complications, the poet wakes up. In the second part of the poem he reflects on his vision. Piers returns in the third part, and the poem builds beyond its theological to its spiritual climax, the evocation of God as man in the incarnation, crucifixion and descent into hell. The final part tells of Christ’s triumph over sin and death, and our triumph through Him and his authority vested in Peter (now Piers). The poem resolves not in triumph but in a determination to seek the exalted Piers, after Holy Church has been besieged by Antichrist. The poem is finished. It has set the reader, or audience, on a path of truth. The unresolved dialectic can be resolved only by individual conscience and effort.
Langland doesn’t avail himself of the “improvements” of the English language. Rather than advance the language he deliberately makes it old, using the unrhymed alliterative verse of a dying tradition. Is this caprice in a learned man? Having chosen the constraint of strict alliteration, he keeps departing from natural word order. Yet he’s often closer to the daily speech of his time than Gower. And unlike Chaucer or Gower he isn’t writing in the first person. Langland creates an Everyman for men who warmed to the miracle and mystery plays. He’s after general moral truth, not psychology or bourgeois individuality. He addresses a congregation of like-minded souls, not a single reader, certainly not an assembled court. His constituency is the populace.
That is why his manner strikes us as perplexing and perplexed, even obscure. Yet Langland’s vocabulary is just as riddled with Norman French and “new words” as Chaucer’s. This reveals how wide a currency that vocabulary had, how little Chaucer was the sole inventor of our language. Some suggest that Chaucer knew Piers Plowman and used it in “The Summoner’s Tale.” One thing is certain: if he read Langland he appreciated his comedy. Langland may not display “wit,” but there’s knockabout and lively jest, as in the street plays of the day.
Still, Langland’s form is constricting. Gower wrung a variety of paces and syntactical licenses from his couplets. In the accentual alliterative line of Langland, with its varying number of syllables but constant number of stresses, a strong caesura is required around the middle of each line; there is seldom a run-on rhythm or cadence. It’s bunched poetry, even when used with Langland’s freedom, a line of knots, not a smooth thread. This has some advantages, for instance Langland’s ability to vary the register abruptly to excellent effect. Langland’s verse accommodates numerous voices, from the cries of street vendors and exclamations of the poor to the honeyed words of Lady Meed and the eloquence of moral lawyers. He tightens the texture on repeated words, using internal assonance and rhyme to rhetorical effect. Despite its seeming rusticity, this most English of poems is in no sense crude. Like Gower, Langland is a moralist who asks us to attend to his matter, not his manner. He seeks to portray not only the world, but the truth: a man speaking not to professors but to men.
If we set Gower alongside Langland (Chaucer stands alone as Shakespeare and Milton do), we can contrast two emerging styles which become the poles of English poetry in time to come: one rigorously formal, restrained, metrical and rhymed, the other answering a cadenced norm. Both imitate speech but sing in different ways. One is classical, the other biblical; one is more artificial and constructed, based, initially at least, on alien models, the other more “native.”