LANGLAND AND THE FRANCISCANS ON DOMINIUM Lawrence M. Clopper As early as its fi rst print, by Crowley in 1555, Piers Plowman was tagged, among other things, as an anti-mendicant poem written by the proto-Protestant Langland (Crowley’s formulation) on the grounds that Langland’s attacks on the institution of the church and on the clergy, but especially on the friars, looked much like those of the Protestant reformers in the sixteenth century.1 John Bale, who shared this view of the poem, asserted in the fi rst edition of his bibliography of English writers that the author of Piers Plowman was John Wyclif, the reformer and subsequently condemned heretic and the most virulent attacker of the mendicants in the later English Middle Ages.2 By the second edition Bale had gotten more reliable information, some of which is similar to the few other documents that we have referring to Langland, and changed his ascription to William or Robert Langland.3 But he could not give up Wyclif, so he added that Langland was one of Wyclif ’s fi rst followers. Th is is ludicrous, of course, if for no other reason than that the fi rst version of Piers Plowman was fi nished about 1365 and the second about 1377 whereas Wyclif did not make his break with the mendicants until sometime between 1379 and 1381.4 1 J.N. King, “Robert Crowley’s Editions of Piers Plowman: A Tudor Apocalypse,” Modern Philology 73 (1976): 342–52, and J.R. Th ome and Marie-Claire Uhart, “Robert Crowley’s Piers Plowman,” Medium Aevum 55 (1986): 248–54. 2 Illvstrium maioris Britanniae scriptorvm (Wesel: Th eoderic Plantaenus, 1548), fol. 157r. 3 Scriptorvm Illustrium maioris Brytannie quam nunc Angliam & Scotiam uocant . (Basel: Ioannem Oporiunum, 1557?), 474. For a discussion of the early documents referring to Langland, see George Kane, Piers Plowman: Th e Evidence for Authorship (London: Athlone Press, 1965); and Ralph Hanna III, William Langland, Authors of the Middle Ages 3 (Aldershot, U.K.: Variorum, 1993). 4 For the dates of the versions of Piers, see George Kane, “Th e Text,” in A Companion to “Piers Plowman,” ed. John A. Alford (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 175–200; for Wyclif and the friars, see his De apostasia (com- pleted ca. 1381 according to Williell R. Th omson, Th e Latin Writings of John Wyclyf [Toronto: Pontifi cal Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1983], 64–65); and Penn R. Szittya, Th e Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 152–54. 86 lawrence m. clopper Since it is clear that Crowley did not understand the poem—he thought Piers was the visionary, for example—and that Bale’s comments are without merit, perhaps one should be skeptical of the foundations laid by these two commentators. Th ere is, in addition, one set of details that suggests that Langland’s Piers Plowman is not simply an anti-fra- ternal work: Langland frequently incorporates charges made by Richard FitzRalph, the best-known English critic of the mendicants prior to Wyclif, but omits others and rejects some altogether.5 FitzRalph had sued in the curia for the revocation of papal privileges granted to the mendicant orders: the right to preach, the right to cure of souls, and the right of sepulture. FitzRalph’s concern was jurisdictional and insti- tutional: when the friars exercised these privileges, they were usurping the traditional rights of the secular clergy and in some instances act- ing without the approval of the bishop, who was the person through whose offi ce these rights were granted to the secular clergy. In his De defensio curatorum he also charged that the Franciscans preached the absolute poverty of Christ and the apostles in defi ance of John XXII’s condemnation of the mendicant theses.6 Langland is critical of mendi- cant abuses of care of souls and right of sepulture, but he only attacks mendicant preaching if it is done for profi t. Anima makes the case for mendicant (I think specifi cally Franciscan) preaching if it follows Francis’s admonition that sermons should be brief and intended to call people to repentance by teaching moral precepts and the basic elements of the faith.7 I suggest that Langland’s stance is like that of Bonaventure 5 De defensio curatorum, in Melchior Goldast, Monarchia s. romani imperii, 3 vols. (Graz: Akademische Druck- u. Verlaganstalt, 1960). On FitzRalph, see Katherine Walsh, A Fourteenth-Century Scholar and Primate: Richard FitzRalph in Oxford, Avignon and Armagh (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 349–451; and Szittya, Th e Antifraternal Tradition, 123–51. For Langland’s use of FitzRalph, see Lawrence M. Clopper, “ ‘Songes of Rechelesnesse’: Langland and the Franciscans” (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 58–63, 70–82. 6 Cum inter nonnullos: Quum inter nonnullos viros scholasticos saepe contingat in dubium revocari, utrum pertinaciter affi rmare, Redemptorem nostrum ac Dominum Iesum Christum eiusque Apostolos in speciali non habuisse aliqua, nec in communi etiam, haereticum sit censensum. In Corpus iuris canonici (=CIC), eds. Emil Albert Friedberg and Aemilius Ludwig Richter, 2 vols. (Leipzig: ex officina Bernhardi Tauchnitz, 1879–81), 2: 1225–29. 7 Compare Anima’s statement (PP.15.70–79) with Francis’s in the Rule of 1223, cap. 9. And see Clopper, ‘Songes,’ 74–77. Missing from Piers are charges common in external critiques of the orders; for example, there is no accusation that they steal children or claim judicial immunity from the ecclesiastical hierarchy nor that they handle money against their rule, nor use bursarii as intercessors for collecting money and goods. .