William Langland

William Langland wrote Piers Plowman, the great English poem of the fourteenth century and the one that comes closest to the anger behind the Peasants' Revolt. Almost nothing is known about him and what there is comes from the poem itself: a west midlands dialect, an education good enough for minor clerical orders, a life in London on the margins of the church saying prayers for the dead, a wife named Kit. The poem is an alliterative dream vision that he rewrote for most of his life, surviving in three versions of very different lengths. It begins on the Malvern Hills with a field full of folk between a tower and a dungeon, and it proceeds through allegorical figures - Lady Meed, who is bribery; Piers the honest ploughman who turns out to be something more - to a savage account of a church grown rich, friars selling absolution, lawyers who will not speak without payment, and labourers who will not work. It is not a revolutionary document; Langland was hard on the poor as well as on the rich, and later added lines against wasters. That did not stop it being used as one. John Ball's letters to the rebels in 1381 name Piers the Plowman directly, which is the earliest recorded instance of an English literary character being taken up as a political symbol, and the C-text revisions are usually read as Langland putting distance between himself and what his poem had been made to mean. The poem exists in more than fifty manuscripts, which for the period means it was read widely and by people who were not rich. Whether one man wrote all three versions was disputed for a century and is now generally accepted. The name comes from a note in a single manuscript.

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