The note of increasing strain and stress is fully expressed in the earlier forms of The Vision of Piers Plowman, which were composed before the death of Edward III.  Its author, William Langland, a clerk in minor orders, debarred by marriage from a clerical career, came from the Mortimer estates in the march of Wales:  but his life was mainly spent in London, and he wrote in the tongue of the city of his adoption.  The first form of the poem is dated 1362, the year of the second visitation of the Black Death, while the troubles of the end of the reign perhaps inspired the fuller edition which saw the light in 1377.  It is a commonplace to contrast the gloomy pictures drawn by Langland with the highly coloured pictures of contemporary society for which Chaucer was gathering his materials.  Yet this contrast may be pressed too far.  Though Langland had a keen eye to those miseries of the poor which are always with us, the impression of the time gathered from his writings is not so much one of material suffering, as of social unrest and discontent.  The poor ploughman, who cannot get meat, still has his cheese, curds, and cream, his loaf of beans and bran, his leeks and cabbage, his cow, calf, and cart mare.[1] The very beggar demanded “bread of clean wheat” and “beer of the best and brownest,” while the landless labourer despised “night-old cabbage,” “penny-ale,” and bacon, and asked for fresh meat and fish freshly fried.[2] There is plenty of rough comfort and coarse enjoyment in the England through which “Long Will” stalked moodily, idle, hopeless, and in himself exemplifying many of the evils which he condemned.  The England of Langland is bitter, discontented, and sullen.  It is the popular answer to the class prejudice and reckless greed of the lords and gentry.  Langland’s own attitude towards the more comfortable classes is much that of the self-assertive and mutinous Londoner whom Froissart looked upon with such bitter prejudice.  He boasts that he was loath to do reverence to lords and ladies, or to those clad in furs with pendants of silver, and refuses to greet “sergeants” with a “God save you”.  Every class of society is flagellated in his scathing criticisms.  He is no revolutionist with a new gospel of reform, but, though content to accept the old traditions, he is the ruthless denouncer of abuses, and is thoroughly filled with the spirit which, four years after the second recension of his book, found expression in the Peasants Revolt of 1381.  With all the archaism of his diction and metre, Langland, even more than Chaucer, reflects the modernity of his age.

    [1] Vision of Piers Plowman, i.,220, ed.  Skeat.

    [2] Ibid., i., 222.