sign in sign up
<<
Home , William Langland

The Mysterious William Langland

GUESS #1: He was born probably at Ledbury near the Welsh marshes and may have gone to school at Priory. Although he took minor orders he never became a priest. Later in he apparently eked out his living by singing masses and copying documents. His great work, , or, more precisely, The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman, is an allegorical poem in unrhymed alliterative verse, regarded as the greatest poem prior to Chaucer. It is both a social satire and a vision of the simple Christian life. The poem consists of three dream visions: (1) in which Holy Church and Lady Meed (representing the temptation of riches) woo the dreamer; (2) in which Piers leads a crowd of penitents in search of St. Truth; and (3) the vision of Do-well (the practice of the virtues), Do-bet (in which Piers becomes the Good Samaritan practicing charity), and Do-best (in which the simple plowman is identified with Christ himself). The 47 extant manuscripts of the poem fall into three groups: the A-text (2,567 lines, c. 1362); the B-text, which greatly expands the third vision (7,242 lines, c. 1376–77); the C-text, a revision of B (7,357 lines, between 1393 and 1398). Most scholars now believe that at least the A- and B-texts are the work of William Langland, whose biography has been deduced from passages in the poem. However, some still hold that the poem is the work of two or even five authors. The popularity of the poem is attested to by the large number of surviving manuscripts and by its many imitators. --Columbia Encyclopedia

GUESS #2: William Langland was, in an entirely different way, as great a poet as his contemporary . Langland’s Piers Plowman, his life’s work, most often sounds like an odd mixture of dream-vision, satire, sermon, and allegory, as if its purpose were aggressively didactic. Some critics explicate the poem as a coherent system of doctrine. Others deny system, preferring to think of the poem as recording a number of inconclusive stories into some of the thorniest thickets of medieval philosophy and theology. -- William Elford Rogers, Fuhrman University

GUESS #3: Generally accepted as the author of Piers Plowman, Langland seems to have been an educated servant of the Church. Between about 1360 and 1400, he wrote three substantially different versions of Piers. The poem’s narrator recounts a dream of allegorical characters like Holy Church, Reason, and Anger discussing and displaying moral and spiritual conditions. Langland puts these characters in the midst of everyday life - so Gluttony, for example, sets out for church, strays into an alehouse, carouses and quarrels with other scoundrels, and finally staggers home, sick and drunk, in the dark. The plowman of the title embodies an ideal of simple virtue. Many of Langland’s views resembled those of Wyclif and the Lollards, even though he criticized them for their rebelliousness. -- Janis Svilpis, University of Calgary

GUESS #4: Few poems of the have had a stranger fate than those grouped under the general title of The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman. Obviously very popular in the latter half of the fourteenth century, the time of their composition, they remained popular throughout the fifteenth century, were regarded in the sixteenth by the leaders of the reformation as an inspiration and a prophecy, and, in modern times, have been quoted by every historian of the fourteenth century as the most vivid and trustworthy source for the social and economic history of the time. Yet their early popularity has resulted in the confusion of what is really the work of five different men, and in the creation of a mythical author of all these poems and one other; and the nature of the interest of the sixteenth century reformers has caused a misunderstanding of the objects and aims of the satire contained in the poems separately and collectively. Worst of all, perhaps, the failure of modern scholars to distinguish the presence of several hands in the poems has resulted in a general charge of vagueness and obscurity, which has not even spared a portion of the work remarkable for its clearness and definiteness and structural excellence. -- John Matthews Manly, University of Chicago NOTES FROM BOOK (PAGEs 43-46)

1. The book is a collection of allegorical visions

2. Note the definition of ALLEGORY (see tan box)

3. Key Vocabulary Terms . . . hermit fairyland marvel raiment penance mendicants ribaldry staves shrieve enow pestilence novices waifs tonsure forsooth lunatic

4. Describe in a sentence or two the portrait that Langland paints of the Roman Catholic Church at this time.