Piers Plowman

The famous Roman de la Rose is one vast allegory, as is also the still longer Pèlerinage de la Vie Illimane by de Gouville, and so again is the best-known medieval Scots poem, The King's Quare.

That landmark in English literature, The Vision of Piers Plowman, might be called a conglomeration of allegories, and those most exquisite gems of Middle English religious verse, The Pearl, Cleanness, etc., have frequent recourse to the same device.

One may take, almost at random, such a passage as the description of the Lamb, the Master of the Heavenly Jerusalem.

Delight and great marvel stirred my mind, as I strove to picture that Lamb aright.

We read, moreover, of orders of protection given to two ships bound for Bordeaux to fetch one hundred and fifty hogsheads of wine for their use.

If we may judge from a passage in a contemporary poem, The Vision of Piers Plowman, these prolonged visits were not regarded with much favor in England.

The country is the cursitor that cardinals come in, and where they lie and linger, and etc.

They arrived in November, and Edward had given them a promise that he would not invade France before March.

Section 40 of Edward III by William Parsons Warburton.

This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, read by Pamela Nagami.

Concluding chapter, part 3, Language and Literature, Vision of Piers Plowman, The Canterbury Tales.

As has been already said in other terms, Latin was the language of business and French the language of society.

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Preface of The Vision of Piers the Plowman This is a LibriVox recording.

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For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Read by Patrick Randall The Vision of Piers the Plowman by William Langland Translated by Kate M. Warren Preface Langland's Vision of Piers the Plowman An English poem of the fourteenth century Done into modern prose with an introduction by Kate M. Warren Dedicated to the Reverend Stopford A. Brooke, teacher and friend Preface to the first edition It is necessary to open the preface to this book with an apology.

When I began the translation of Piers the Plowman some time ago, Mr. Stopford Brooke kindly promised to write a short introduction for it, and until recently the book has been advertised as having this preface from his pen.

Unfortunately, a sudden and severe illness has prevented Mr. Brooke from fulfilling the promise made when in health, and the accompanying introduction has been therefore supplied by myself.

I have tried to make my rendering as accurate as it can be.

It is impossible, however, but that here and there errors of translation will be found, and I shall be grateful to any scholar who may feel sufficient interest in the book to point these out.

But luckily it is not hard, in spite of all these hindrances, to make a fair reading with the old languages in Anglo-Saxon.

For example, with Sweet's Primer and Reader, in Middle English with Chaucer or Piers Plowman.

The difference in language between Anglo-Saxon and Middle English corresponds to a division in the history of literature.

Anglo-Saxon literature is different from that which follows it, not merely in its grammar and dictionary, but in many of its ideas and fashions, particularly in its fashion of poetry.

Quote, thought shall be the harder, heart the keener, mood the more as our might lessens.

It is one of the strange things in the history of poetry that in another 500 years, an old fashion of poetry, near akin to the Anglo-Saxon, comes to an end in a poem on a contemporary battle.

The last poem in the Middle English alliterative verse, which was used for so many subjects in the 14th century, for the stories of Arthur and Alexander and Troy, and for the vision of Piers Plowman, is the poem of Scottish Field, AD 1513, on the Battle of Flodden.

This alliterative verse, which has a history of more than a thousand years, is one of the things that are carried over in some mysterious way from the Anglo-Saxon to the later medieval period.

It had a kind of hero, so it's got the figure of Wat Tyler, it's got the figure of John Ball as kind of leaders.

But it also, John Ball again in, in his sermon sort of calling everybody to revolt, cites the figure of Piers Plowman, who's a sort of made into a kind of quasi-mythical figure to kind of rally everybody together.

Piers Plowman's actually the subject of a poem by William Langland, who was horrified that his character should be used in this way.

But nevertheless, you've got the idea of a sort of rallying figure there.

You have a kind of iconography of revolt as well, so they have a banner, uh, or many banners.

Pilgrim's Progress."

And that is quite an important note, actually, because there, there's a wonderful scholar whose name I'm forgetting at the moment, who said, um, the same thing of Lewis Carroll, that Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are really more Dante or Piers Plowman than they are Pilgrim's Progress, right? And we tend to like to think, oh, well, we can make an allegory out of Alice in Wonderland, and we might want to do the same thing with Lilith, even though it's nearly impossible.

But both Lewis Carroll-

I love that he's trying to make it impossible.

It did strike me, though, that it's wrong to try to look for a linear narrative, that it's much more like a medieval dream vision book.

It really is.

And I saw it, it's super interesting to me that your guy connected it to Piers Plowman, 'cause that's a medieval dream vision.

Mm-hmm.

Most importantly, it's after the Peasant's Revolt, 1381, that you get the great flowering of medieval outlaw literature.

The first reference to Rob Hood is in Piers Plowman, the poem, which is about 10 years before the Peasant's Revolt.

But the first ballads appear in the aftermath.

And the Robin Hood of those, wildly popular as they were, because people, at a time of deep alienation and rage, people loved to tell stories about outlaws that stand up to the rich and powerful, and that's really where that legend began.

[crowd yelling]

[crowd yelling]Enough! We've given you enough

It's really interesting that you make the Piers Plowman comparison because, of course, the first character we meet, Andrew Garfield, in a desolate field kneeling before the crosses of his wife and his children who've obviously died in the plague.

He- he's only ever identified as Plowman, so a kind of English everyman.

At the same time, Middle English literature gives us glimpses of witches doing something more complicated than simply causing supernatural harm.

In Piers Plowman, a witcher appears in the context of charms and illicit healing, with people resorting to such a practitioner when they seek relief outside approved religious or medical channels.

The writer condemns the behavior, but the social fact beneath that condemnation is revealing.

The practitioner is being consulted because somebody believes they can help.