Peter, the ploughboy, intended as a representative of the common people, drops asleep on Malvern Hills, between Wales and England, and sees in his dream an array of virtues and vices pass before him—­such as Mercy, Truth, Religion, Covetousness, Avarice, etc.  The allegory is not unlike that of Bunyan.  By using these as the personages, in the manner of the early dramas called the Moralities, he is enabled to attack and severely scourge the evil lives and practices of the clergy, and the abuses which had sprung up in the Church, and to foretell the punishment, which afterward fell upon the monasteries in the time of Henry VIII., one hundred and fifty years later: 

    And then shall the Abbot of Abingdon, and all his issue forever,
    Have a knock of a king, and incurable the wound.

His attack is not against the Church itself, but against the clergy.  It is to be remarked, in studying history through the medium of literature, that the works of a certain period, themselves the result of history, often illustrate the coming age, by being prophetic, or rather, as antecedents by suggesting consequents.  Thus, this Vision of Piers Plowman indicates the existence of a popular spirit which had been slowly but steadily increasing—­which sympathized with Henry II. and the priest-trammelling “Constitutions of Clarendon,” even while it was ready to go on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Thomas a Becket, the illustrious victim of the quarrel between Henry and his clergy.  And it points with no uncertain finger to a future of greater light and popular development, for this bold spirit of reform was strongly allied to political rights.  The clergy claimed both spiritualities and temporalities from the Pope, and, being governed by ecclesiastical laws, were not like other English subjects amenable to the civil code.  The king’s power was thus endangered; a proud and encroaching spirit was fostered, and the clergy became dissolute in their lives.  In the words of Piers Plowman: 

    I found these freres, | For profit of hem selve;
    All the four orders, | Closed the gospel,
    Preaching the people | As hem good liked.

And again: 

    Ac now is Religion | And a loud buyer,
    A rider, a roamer about, | A pricker on a palfrey,
    A leader of love days | From manor to manor.

PIERS PLOWMAN’S CREED.—­The name of Piers Plowman and the conceit of his Vision became at once very popular.  He stood as a representative of the peasant class rising in importance and in assertion of religious rights.

An unknown follower of Wiclif wrote a poem called “Piers Plowman’s Creed,” which conveys religious truth in a formula of belief.  The language and the alliterative feature are similar to those of the Vision; and the invective is against the clergy, and especially against the monks and friars.