THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

eadily recognized by its first readers as variously exploring and demonstrating the active involvement of God in his
physical Creation. Where the Christian Scriptures were interpreted as revealing the incarnation of God in human
form as the fulfilment of ancient prophecy and as the enactment of a new covenant, and where the medieval Church
had come to view the Mass as a symbolic
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acting out of the life and death of Christ in which Christ’s body and blood became physically present on the altar, so
Langland’s poem represents a continuing, covenanted incarnation in which God involves himself with humankind.
Throughout the poem there is a sense of expectation and latter-day fulfilment as if God’s ultimate purposes were
being imminently realized. At certain crucial points readers are bidden to recognize Christ himself in the
representative human figure of Piers (or Peter), the humble ploughman and the bearer of a familiar form of the name
of the greatest of Christ’s Apostles, the rock on which the Church was built. In Passus XIII, for example, Dowel
insists that ‘Petrus, id est, Christus’ (‘Peter, that is, Christ’) and at the opening of the climactic Passus XVIII the
dreaming narrator sees the meek Christ who enters Jerusalem in triumph on Palm Sunday as ’semblable to the
Samaritan, and somdeel to Piers the Plowmanˆ. The Son of God humbles himself by taking the form of a country
workman, but this same workman is in turn elevated through his association with a glorious, ineffable, and eternal
God. In Passus XIX Piers is seen ploughing with ‘foure grete oxen’ given him by Grace, oxen named after the four
evangelists (‘oon was Luk, a large beest and a lowe chered [meek-looking], ( And Mark, and Matthew the thridde -
myghty beestes bothe; | And joyned to hem oon Johan, moost gentil of alle’). Piers’s ploughing is further assisted by
harrows (formed by the Old and New Testaments), by four more sturdy beasts (named for the great Latin Fathers,
Augustine, Ambrose, Gregory, and Jerome), and by seeds which are the cardinal virtues (Prudence, Temperance,
Fortitude, Justice). Piers is thus the supereffective earthly ploughman, one supernaturally endowed by Grace, but he is
also, and at the same time, the enactor of one of Christ’s agricultural parables, and an actual embodiment of Christ
and his Apostles, speeding the advance of the kingdom of heaven.
Langland appears to have developed the shape of his poem gradually. Not only does each section open up new and
enigmatic vistas into what is to follow, in an appropriately dreamlike manner, but the three distinct surviving versions
of the narrative (traditionally known as the A-, B-, and C-texts) also suggest shifting approaches to an expanding and
would-be universal subject. The unfinished A-text, dating from the 1360s, contains only twelve sections, or as
Langland styles them, passus (Latin, ‘steps’). The so-called B-text, probably of the late 1370s, offers a complete
revision of the earlier work, adding to it a further eight passus. The C-text, which may or may not represent
Langland’s final version, suggests a date of composition in the early 1380s, and offers a further scrupulous verbal
revision and a new rearrangement of the narrative (now into a Prologue and twenty-two passus). Langland’s central
figure, the dreamer/narrator of all three versions, is neither a courtly lover contained in the cultivated world of a
walled garden, nor an entranced Dantesque wanderer caught up in the affairs of worlds beyond worlds. His vision
presents readers with the open, working landscape of England ‘in a somer seson’, but a landscape variously shot
through with human confusion and divine wonder. From a
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broad point of vantage on the Malvern Hills in Worcestershire there opens up to him an animated vision of a ‘fair
feeld ful of folk ... alle manere of men, the meene and the riche’.
The early passus of the poem seem to represent an attempt to come to terms with the confusions, corruptions, and
innate contradictions within the religious and social life of contemporary England. Throughout the narrative,
however, Langland deliberately intermixes genres and adds an element of ambiguity to what might otherwise have
emerged as conventionally monitory figures (such as the personified female representations of Holy Church, Truth,
Repentance and, above all, Lady Meed - in part fair reward, in part financial corruption). Unlike the distressed
dreamer of a poem such as Pearl, Langland’s visionary is offered little direct or transcendental consolation for the
evident ills of the world; instead, he passes through a succession of dreams interspersed with periods of waking and
contemplation. He is variously preached at, prophesied to, and illuminated by theological, moral, or ritual
demonstration. In Passus V, for example, the Seven Deadly Sins lumberingly attempt to make their confessions at the
bidding of Lady Repentance in scenes rendered particularly immediate by satirical observation (Sloth, ‘with two slymy
eighen [eyes]’, falls asleep in mid-shrift, while Gluttony is waylaid into an ale-house and stays there until he ‘had yglubbed
[swallowed] a galon and a gille’). Perhaps the most ambiguous figure of all is that of the dreamer himself, at
once detached from the author and intimately associated with him. Like the writer, he is called Will, a name which
can be taken both literally and (as Shakespeare was later to do in his Sonnets) as an abstract quality or allegorical
name. The name of ‘William Langland’ can be played with in Passus XV when Will cryptically announces: ‘I have
lyved in londe ... my name is Longe Wille’ (B-text,1. 152). Alternatively, some sixty lines later we are told by the