can they say or prove that they are better than we, if it be not that they make us gain for them by our toil what they spend in their pride?  They are clothed in velvet and warm in their furs and their ermines, while we are covered with rags.  They have wine and spices and fair bread; and we oat-cake and straw, and water to drink.  They have leisure and fine houses; we have pain and labour, the rain and the wind in the fields.  And yet it is of us and of our toil that these men hold their state.”  It was the tyranny of property that then as ever roused the defiance of socialism.  A spirit fatal to the whole system of the Middle Ages breathed in the popular rime which condensed the levelling doctrine of John Ball: 

“When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?”

[Sidenote:  William Langland]

More impressive, because of the very restraint and moderation of its tone, is the poem in which William Langland began at the same moment to embody with a terrible fidelity all the darker and sterner aspects of the time, its social revolt, its moral and religious awakening, the misery of the poor, the selfishness and corruption of the rich.  Nothing brings more vividly home to us the social chasm which in the fourteenth century severed the rich from the poor than the contrast between his “Complaint of Piers the Ploughman” and the “Canterbury Tales.”  The world of wealth and ease and laughter through which the courtly Chaucer moves with, eyes downcast as in a pleasant dream is a far-off world of wrong and of ungodliness to the gaunt poet of the poor.  Born probably in Shropshire, where he had been put to school and received minor orders as a clerk, “Long Will,” as Langland was nicknamed from his tall stature, found his way at an early age to London, and earned a miserable livelihood there by singing “placebos” and “diriges” in the stately funerals of his day.  Men took the moody clerk for a madman; his bitter poverty quickened the defiant pride that made him loth, as he tells us, to bow to the gay lords and dames who rode decked in silver and minivere along the Cheap or to exchange a “God save you” with the law sergeants as he passed their new house in the Temple.  His world is the world of the poor; he dwells on the poor man’s life, on his hunger and toil, his rough revelry and his despair, with the narrow intensity of a man who has no outlook beyond it.  The narrowness, the misery, the monotony of the life he paints reflect themselves in his verse.  It is only here and there that a love of nature or a grim earnestness of wrath quickens his rime into poetry; there is not a gleam of the bright human sympathy of Chaucer, of his fresh delight in the gaiety, the tenderness, the daring of the world about him, of his picturesque sense of even its coarsest contrasts, of his delicate irony, of his courtly wit.  The cumbrous allegory, the tedious platitudes, the rimed texts from Scripture which form the staple of Langland’s work, are only broken here and there by phrases of a shrewd common sense, by bitter outbursts, by pictures of a broad Hogarthian humour.  What chains one to the poem is its deep undertone of sadness:  the world is out of joint, and the gaunt rimer who stalks silently along the Strand has no faith in his power to put it right.