[Sidenote:  Piers Ploughman]

Londoner as he is, Will’s fancy flies far from the sin and suffering of the great city to a May-morning in the Malvern Hills.  “I was weary forwandered and went me to rest under a broad bank by a burn side, and as I lay and leaned and looked in the water I slumbered in a sleeping, it sweyved (sounded) so merry.”  Just as Chaucer gathers the typical figures of the world he saw into his pilgrim train, so the dreamer gathers into a wide field his army of traders and chafferers, of hermits and solitaries, of minstrels, “japers and jinglers,” bidders and beggars, ploughmen that “in setting and in sowing swonken (toil) full hard,” pilgrims “with their wenches after,” weavers and labourers, burgess and bondman, lawyer and scrivener, court-haunting bishops, friars, and pardoners “parting the silver” with the parish priest.  Their pilgrimage is not to Canterbury but to Truth; their guide to Truth neither clerk nor priest but Peterkin the Ploughman, whom they find ploughing in his field.  He it is who bids the knight no more wrest gifts from his tenant nor misdo with the poor.  “Though he be thine underling here, well may hap in heaven that he be worthier set and with more bliss than thou....  For in charnel at church churles be evil to know, or a knight from a knave there.”  The gospel of equality is backed by the gospel of labour.  The aim of the Ploughman is to work, and to make the world work with him.  He warns the labourer as he warns the knight.  Hunger is God’s instrument in bringing the idlest to toil, and Hunger waits to work her will on the idler and the waster.  On the eve of the great struggle between wealth and labour, Langland stands alone in his fairness to both, in his shrewd political and religious common sense.  In the face of the popular hatred which was to gather round John of Gaunt, he paints the Duke in a famous apologue as the cat who, greedy as she might be, at any rate keeps the noble rats from utterly devouring the mice of the people.  Though the poet is loyal to the Church, he proclaims a righteous life to be better than a host of indulgences, and God sends His pardon to Piers when priests dispute it.  But he sings as a man conscious of his loneliness and without hope.  It is only in a dream that he sees Corruption, “Lady Mede,” brought to trial, and the world repenting at the preaching of Reason.  In the waking life reason finds no listeners.  The poet himself is looked upon—­he tells us bitterly—­as a madman.  There is a terrible despair in the close of his later poem, where the triumph of Christ is only followed by the reign of Antichrist; where Contrition slumbers amidst the revel of Death and Sin; and Conscience, hard beset by Pride and Sloth, rouses himself with a last effort, and seizing his pilgrim staff, wanders over the world to find Piers Ploughman.

[Sidenote:  Praemunire]