William Langland:


William Langland:

Almost nothing is known about his best contemporaries of Chaucer. His fame mainly rests on his work ‘The vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman’ better known as ‘Piers the Plowman’.

v            Piers the Plowman:

* The poem has come down to us in three different texts known as- A Text, B Text and C Text.

a)                     A Text contains 2500 lines (a prologue and 11 cantos) and appeared in 1362.
b)                     B Text contains 7200 lines (a revision of the first and a continuation with the prologue and 20 cantos) and appeared in 1377.
c)                     C Text contains 7300 lines (about the same length as the B text and is divided into 23 cantos) and appeared in 1400.

* It is thought that Langland only composed the A Text while the both B and C Text have composed by a later inferior poet.

* The poem written in alliterative lines consists of three successive visions. The first two visions are intimately connected whereas the third is incoherent one.

* In the first vision the poet while lying down on the Malvern hills on a May morning dreams a high Tower (Truth) in the East and a dark Dungeon (Wrong) in the west and in between a field full of people coming from all classes and conditions- beggars, friars, priests, lawyers, hermits and nuns. In another vision he sees Lady Med, Reason and others. Confusion arises and then Lady Holy Church exhorts them all to seek the Truth. In the next vision Piers the Plowman appears to guide the way to the thousand men to the path of Truth.

* To J.Long- “Its tremendous appeal to justice and common honesty, its clarion call to every man, whether king, priest, noble, or laborer, to do his Christian duty takes from it any trace of prejudice or bigotry with which such works usually abound. Its loyalty to the Church, while denouncing abuses that had crept into it in that period, was one of the great influences which led to the Reformation in England. Its two great principles, the equality of men before God and the dignity of honest labor, roused a whole nation of freemen. Altogether it is one of the world’s great works, partly because of its national influence, partly because it is the very best picture we possess of the social life of social life of the 14th century.”

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