This state of things is reflected in the Vision of Piers Plowman, written as early as 1362, by William Langland, a tonsured clerk of the west country.  It is in form an allegory, and bears some resemblance to the later and more famous allegory of the Pilgrim’s Progress.  The poet falls asleep on the Malvern Hills, in Worcestershire, and has a vision of a “fair field full of folk,” representing the world with its various conditions of men.  There were pilgrims and palmers; hermits with hooked staves, who went to Walsingham—­and their wenches after them—­great lubbers and long that were loth to work; friars glossing the Gospel for their own profit; pardoners cheating the people with relics and indulgences; parish priests who forsook their parishes—­that had been poor since the pestilence time—­and went to London to sing there for simony; bishops, archbishops, and deacons, who got themselves fat clerkships in the Exchequer, or King’s Bench; in short, all manner of lazy and corrupt ecclesiastics.  A lady, who represents holy Church, then appears to the dreamer, explains to him the meaning of his vision, and reads him a sermon the text of which is, “When all treasure is tried, truth is the best.”  A number of other allegorical figures are next introduced, Conscience, Reason, Meed, Simony, Falsehood, etc., and after a series of speeches and adventures, a second vision begins in which the seven deadly sins pass before the poet in a succession of graphic impersonations; and finally all the characters set out on a pilgrimage in search of St. Truth, finding no guide to direct them save Piers the Plowman, who stands for the simple, pious laboring man, the sound heart of the English common folk.  The poem was originally in eight divisions or “passus,” to which was added a continuation in three parts, Vita Do Wel, Do Bet, and Do Best.  About 1377 the whole was greatly enlarged by the author.

Piers Plowman was the first extended literary work after the Conquest which was purely English in character.  It owed nothing to France but the allegorical cast which the Roman de la Rose had made fashionable in both countries.  But even here such personified abstractions as Langland’s Fair-speech and Work-when-time-is, remind us less of the Fraunchise, Bel-amour, and Fals-semblaunt of the French courtly allegories than of Bunyan’s Mr. Worldly Wiseman, and even of such Puritan names as Praise-God Barebones, and Zeal-of-the-land Busy.  The poem is full of English moral seriousness, of shrewd humor, the hatred of a lie, the homely English love for reality.  It has little unity of plan, but is rather a series of episodes, discourses, parables, and scenes.  It is all astir with the actual life of the time.  We see the gossips gathered in the ale-house of Betun the brewster, and the pastry cooks in the London streets crying “Hote pies, hote!  Good gees and grys.[7] Go we dine, go we!” Had Langland not linked his literary fortunes with an