William Langland

She was an essayist.

One of, one thing that she and I enjoyed figuring out was that I read her, um, nonfiction book about her ancestry, um, her maternal ancestry, uh, in Essex, um, and on page-- At, at the time, I should say, I was reading her books and skimming through sometimes appropriately to find any place where she might mention Piers Plowman or Langland, because Langland's the author of Piers Plowman, because it was a lot and she didn't remember it all.

She couldn't tell me where to look really.

And I spotted Warner, you know, so-and-so Warner on page 93, and looking into it, I realized this was my ancestor as well.

Again, not quite related, but, but Ewan Duff is a great photographer who did the covers of two of her early novels.

He took these photographs.

I was able to publish them with his permission and Maureen's and King's College London's in, um, the Yearbook of Langland Studies.

There were Black folks on the stage.

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.

I love it

... for example, Piers Plowman Piers Plowman is one of the great medieval works of literature, uh, by William Langland, who lived in Worcestershire.

Yeah.

And he...

The origin of this phrase apparently is all the way back in the 14th century.

Poet William Langland in England is credited with that.

But the sentiment is much, much older, over a thousand years before that.

The rabbis of the Mishnah said, he who is slow to anger and quick to forgive is a pious person.

We're in the 14th century now, and we're starting to get some literary allusions here.

Yeah, so the first kind of written reference that we have to anything to do with Robin Hood, definitely as Robin Hood the outlaw, comes in Piers Plowman, so William Langland's famous poem that he writes about this plowman out in the field kind of-

Mm

... daydreaming his life away and all of the visions that he has.

He knows stories of Robin Hood.

So by the time we're in 1377 with Piers Plowman, Robin Hood is established as a folk story, a tale that people are telling to each other.

They're not written down yet, but William Langland here is writing down the fact that people are telling stories-

Mm

He's going to be very important in part three, so remember his name.

And then right around this time, a writer called William Langland was working on a long poem called Pierce Plowman about an honest plowman searching for truth in a corrupt world.

And it was hugely popular.

In 1381, a letter that was attributed to John Ball told the people of Essex to stand together in God's name and bid Pierce Plowman go to his work.

Mm

... by William Langland, which was just literally just a few years before the Peasants' Revolt, and that's basically a poem that features the dreams and reveries and hopes and fears and rages of a simple farmer.

So it felt to me like Plowman was a great name for him, and it was nodding to the famous poem.

Wow, that's amazing that the speaker of that poem sort of brought to life the dreams of these farmers for you, and that that's what you were drawing from.

So I've had a little research sesh because I had an inkling based on all the research that I did for the Robin Hood video last year.

But Piers Plowman is a character in William Langland's 14th century Middle English poem.

It's a famous allegorical narrative written around 1377 that was a protest of the harsh conditions of the poor in medieval society.

It was an egregorical narrative written around 1377 that was a protest of the harsh conditions that the poor were under in medieval society.