In Our Time - Piers Plowman

Episode Date: October 29, 2020

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss William Langland's poem, written around 1370, about a man called Will who fell asleep on the Malvern Hills and dreamed of Piers the Plowman. This was a time between the Black Death and The Peasants’ Revolt, when Christians wanted to save their souls but doubted how best to do it - and had to live with that uncertainty. Some call this the greatest medieval poem in English, one offering questions not answers, and it can be as unsettling now as it was then.WithLaura Ashe Professor of English Literature at Worcester College, University of OxfordLawrence Warner Professor of Medieval English at King’s College LondonAnd Alastair Bennett Lecturer in Medieval Literature at Royal Holloway, University of LondonProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programs. Hello, seven centuries ago, William Langland wrote a poem about a man called Will, who fell asleep on the Malvern Hills and dreamed of Pear's the Ploughman. This was a time between the Black Death and the Peasants' Revolt,

when Christians wanted to save their souls but doubted how best to do it and had to live without uncertainty. Some call this the greatest medieval poem in English, warn offering questions, not answers, and it can be as unsettling now as it was then. Joining me to discuss the vision of Pierce Plarman are Lawrence Warner, Professor of Medieval English

at King's College, London, Alistair Bennett, a lecturer in medieval literature at Royal Holloway University of London, and Laura Ash, Professor of English Literature at Worcester College University of Oxford. Laura Ash, this was a tumultuous time in English history towards the end of the 14th century. Can you tell us more about that?

Yes, absolutely. So as you said, in 1348, the black death had swept across the country and killed perhaps as much as a third of the population. And that resulted in huge labour shortages, which then immediately resulted in worry about the breakdown of community and the government's attempt to stop people from doing their own thing by bringing in measures such as the statute of labourers in 1351, which attempted to cap wages to prevent free movement. And over the ensuing years, you have a strong sense that things are changing and changes being resisted and with violence on both sides. But there is a public voice growing stronger, and it's no accident that this is when English is rising in the public sphere. It's in 1362

that it's declared that English will be used in the courts for pleading, and in 1363, English is used in Parliament. And you have this sense. of a shifting landscape in which more people are having their voices heard. And this is also the time of John Wycliffe, who we know as the inspiration for the first English Bible and for what becomes known as the Lollard heresy condemned by the church. So the sands are shifting everywhere. And meanwhile, throughout this period, England is more or less at war with France. There are high points and there are low points, but it's going on forever.

This is the war that becomes known as the Hundred Years' War. and when Edward the Black Prince dies too young in 1376, he leaves an elderly father who then dies and puts a child, King Richard II, on the throne, and the war is continued to be pushed by various aristocratic factions and war costs money, and that means ever heavier taxation. The first great poll tax is passed by the so-called bad parliament in 1377. In the ensuing years, ever-higher taxation is imposed.

and this leads directly to the explosion of what we often call the Peasants Revolt, the Great Rising in England. It wasn't actually run by peasants. And in 69, the Black Death returns and people think it might be just as bad as the first time around. And then as you say, we have a great revolt miscalled the Peasants Revolt, but it's again very threatening and worrying. Can you give us an outline as clear as brilliant as you've just done about the period of what the bones of the poem are.

Well, a central thing to say is that the poem is Will's vision of Piers Plowman, and it's with the Peasants' Revolt that Piers Plowman leaps onto the national stage because the leaders of that revolt actually cite him as this is the time when peers must go to his work, so he's this figure of inspiration to the rebels. And the whole of the poem is Will, our speaking dreamer who falls asleep, He spends only a few hundred lines in the poem awake. Most of it he's asleep having visions. And in these visions, he meets a series of confusing characters.

And some of them are named characters. Some of them are personifications of various qualities or objects or things. And these characters all shout at him and tell him things. And he tries to learn from them and find what he can find. And over time, this character appears, Plowman, appears and disappears. and he grows and changes as he flits in and out of the narrative. And it becomes clear that what Will is trying to do is find a route to salvation, find the way to save his soul.

And he asks many different people for instructionalness. And he gets many, many different answers. And lack of sureness and confusion is the point. And the whole thing is thoroughly allegorical in the sense that every scene we're shown, we're given the sense that it means something. else that we have to strive after a deeper meaning to understand the exchanges going on. There are characters called gluttony and conscience and falsity and on it goes. Lawrence, can you give us an idea of what it sounded like at the time, say from the very

opening? Sure, sure. This is the, from the prologue. In a summer season, Juan Soft was the sonner. He shop me into shrewdus as he a shapeweller. Inhabit as an armit, unholy of werkes. went weed in this world wonders to herre ach on o'er my morning on mowverna hillis may befell a fairly a fairy may faulkte that's in a summer season when the sun was mild i shrouded myself kind of ended into the clothes as if i were a sheep in the habit as a hermit who was unsanctified of his works i went wide in this world in order to hear wonders but on a may morning

on Malvern Hills, a marvel occurred to me of the land of fairy, I thought. I've said that William Langland wrote it, but that's not exactly a concrete fact. What do we know about the author? One answer to that is what we know about him is what we read in his poem. It's a million dollar question.

There are really two sources of information, as it were, about the author. The internal is that in the B version, because there are three author, versions. It seems like the poet wrote all his adult life. That's one basic thing to know. The B version has a line in which Will

says, I have lived in land, quote E, my name is Long Willa. I have lived in land. I said, my name is Long Will. Now, if you read that as an acrostic,

backwards, he is saying, my name is Will Long Land. Land Long Will, Will Long Land. And the main. manuscripts quite often have the Latin phrase, Nomen Autoris next to this, the name of the author. The other source of information about his name, at least,

is that there is a manuscript that's now at Trinity College Dublin, dated to 1437, and on the back page are some memoranda. And one of these memoranda says in Latin, but I'll read the translation, note that Stacey de Rocola was the father of William de Langland. this Stacy was of gentle birth and lived in Shipton under whichwood, a tenant of the Lord Dispenser in the county of Oxfordshire. The only William Rockolas are people who, in my opinion, don't fit at all, but there is a group of scholars who think that we have found him

and that he was actually a quite well-off parish priest who would have had to study quite a bit and knew his Latin. There's a growing sense that he knew French quite well. it's unlikely that he went to university his self-portrait in the poem is of a figure who wanders around but also for a while at least lived in London and said prayers for the dead

and got paid to do this and he said as Padernoster and Credo on behalf of the dead that's pretty much what we can tell about him and beyond that it's speculation he kept writing to the end of his life as I understand it that seems to be the case the first version

Writing and rewriting, that is. Writing and rewriting. The first version seems to be a product of the 1360s and was probably pretty well known throughout the 70s. The second version, he seems to have been done with in the late 1370s, although there's almost no evidence that actually anyone knew it. And then the third version, what we call the C version, has episodes that seem to make most sense in the light of the late 1380s,

but also that poem seems incomplete, and there are bits that Langland didn't seem to have fissue. which suggests that he might well have died before it was over. Aleister Bennett, we have the Malvern Hills, but can you point to other places or people or events in the poem that were, as it were, real and not allegorical? Yeah, sure. So, I mean, it might be easy to think about an allegorical poem

taking place in quite a sort of abstract or purely symbolic surroundings. But in Pierce Plowman, the allegory plays out in some recognisable real-world places. So we start, as you say, on the Malvern Hills and with this view over a kind of a fair field full of folk, lots of different sorts of agricultural labour going on there. But by the time the prologue has finished, the poem has moved its kind of focus to the streets of London. And there's a kind of a scene which describes the coronation of a new king,

which might allude to the coronation of Richard II and to some of the London pageantry. And London's sort of where we stay for large parts of the first vision as well. the later stages of the first vision are taken up with the trial of Lady Mead, who's a figure who represents different kinds of reward and payment that could be used in both good and bad ways. And that trial happens before the king in the court at Westminster. And I suppose the poem is sort of quite London-centric overall.

So there are points in the poem where Langland considers events in France and even thinks about the need to preach the Christian faith in the Holy Land. But for the most part, the poem's kind of imaginative geography is sort of centered on London and a network of places you could go to from London, like the fairs at Winchester to go and trade or pilgrimage sites in Walsingham or Canterbury. Why is it important that the thing is presented as a series of dreams and visions? So Langland's writing, as Laura said already, in the tradition of dream vision poetry, which is a really sort of widespread kind of way of writing.

poems in this period. So Chaucer writes dream poems, the poet of the Saguayne and the Green Knight writes a dream poem. John Gowers, Vox, Clamantis starts as a dream poem. What did they think he's right to think that he gives them? Well, so one of the things that dream poems have got in common is that they draw attention to that sort of inherent ambiguity of dream experience. So dreams might be offering you revelation. They might be offering you kind of spiritual insight, knowledge from God, but they might not. There's no guarantee that a dream offers you that. And whatever knowledge... They might be trivial.

Right, exactly. And they might be mundane. So who tells the difference? Well, this is the point. In a dream poem, it's often the case that it's left to you as the reader to make those determinations. So a common convention of dream poetry is that the narrator will kind of disavow any knowledge about how seriously his dreams should be taken and defer it to you. And often, dream poems, the narrating figure will actually talk about how you can't be certain about the authority or the source of dreams. And Langland's narrator does both of those things. So like already in the prologue, he's kind of saying, you know, interpret this, who dares?

Because I don't dare to interpret it. I think it might be worth adding as well that Langland kind of innovates within the dream vision form. So the idea of having a series of dreams, a succession of dreams, where the narrate, wakes up in between and sort of wanders about a bit sometimes. That's quite new to Langland. That's very unusual. And Langland also includes episodes where you have a dream within a dream. So the narrator actually falls asleep while he's already asleep.

And exactly what that means is hard to say with certainty, but it often seems to imply that he is sort of, he's internalising the knowledge that he has in some newly personal way. It seems to be often about kind of assimilating knowledge in a way that relates it to the self more intimately and more deeply. Laura Ash, it's full of allegories. Can you tell the listener how the allegra plays a part in this and why there's so much of it there, wonderful allegories,

and give us a few examples? Sure. Allegory, of course, is not a genre that we're very used to these days. It's characteristically a medieval and classical genre. And it literally means other speaking. So on the simplest level, it means that what you're faced with on the literal level means something else, and therefore you have to interpret it. And this is the key thing to grasp about allegory, that it requires work from the reader. It requires...

Can you give us a few examples? So, as Alistair mentioned, Lady Mead is a courtly and beautiful lady who has slept with everyone. And she symbolises worldly reward, which can easily slide into bribery and corruption. And during the trial of Lady Mead, there is a difficulty, because the king wants her at court. And you can see that literally. He fancies her. And you can see it allegorically,

the king needs worldly reward at court because otherwise he can't reward his courtiers and he can't run his battles and so on. So what the king tries to do to keep her under control is he says he will marry her to another character called conscience. And so we understand this literally. He thinks, I'll marry her off to one of my best knights and then she'll stop misbehaving.

And we can understand it allegorically. if worldly reward can be married to conscience, then that will mean that only the right people will get worldly reward. But conscience is having none of it. He says, this woman has slept with everyone she's ever met. And so this is not going to happen as far as he's concerned. But then Lady Mead comes back and says, oh, conscience, yes, I know you.

You've had me several times. And now suddenly things start to slide. And this is what's so brilliant about Langland's allegation. agree because it's not static. You know, as I've just been describing it, you think we have these stable principles and that you can see their interaction and take a very staid moral lesson from them. But in fact, we're never allowed to rest at a kind of static moral interaction. What happens instead is that we start to get less short about what is going on.

And Mead says to conscience, who is a knight at the king's court, oh, well, thanks to you, the king was a coward and withdrew from the war in France. And suddenly you see, yes, well, things that people can call conscience, can be cowardice. They can be caution that goes wrong. And so now already our understanding what's going on is slipping. And so having these principles

or these personifications as human beings interacting gives us a much more nuanced sense of how our ideas of vices and virtues can shift and move around. There's many, many of these characters we can call them. Of course it's allegorical characters,

but there's gluttony and there's truth and there's envy and the unsloth and on and all it goes. Yes, they are astonishingly vivid. I mean, the parade of the seven deadly sins that you've mentioned is hugely dramatic and funny. You know, envy comes on and he sticks thin and he says that, you know, my stomach is swollen with bitterness and bile and I don't know how I'll ever be well unless someone scrapes out my stomach,

lest whoso shrap my mouth, he says, someone scrap my mouth. And he's talking ludicrously, he's talking to a character, called repentance. And repentance, he was a really chirpy chap who says, of course you can be saved. He says to him, sure, sorrow of sins is salvation of souls. And envy says, I'm always sorry. Were you not listening? The problem is, I'm always sorry. And that is another perfect use of allegory because, of course, the deadly sin of envy cannot converse with repentance. If it could, it would vanish. But what we have, therefore, to allow this to happen is we have two people who are talking at total cross-purposes who simply don't understand what they're saying.

We have gluttony who wants to try his best, but sets on a way to repent and everything good, and then he's a pub. Yeah, exactly. He's on his way to mass, but always the pub is open. I think Lawrence wanted to come in. One amazing thing about this whole, I should say that readers always love the gluttony and the confessions of the sins. Those are always the well-thum parts. But about getting to how the allegory works, the allegory here is an allegory of the striving of the soul. and if it's successful, that is, if repentance does well and convinces gluttony to repent, then gluttony is no longer gluttony, is he? He doesn't exist. And I think Langland is aware of this, and this is one of the things where he kind of paints himself into a corner and pushes things to the limit before he goes off in other directions.

The gluttony tavern scene is so interesting, isn't it? Because it tells you all of these fascinating details about the real what might actually be going on in the tavern. You learn about what kinds of spices are available and what kinds of food you might eat and what kinds of bartering and gambling are going on in there. And none of that is going to help you not to want to go there. No, no. But it has these weird echoes all the time of the church service

that he would originally have gone to, right? So there's a bit where, I don't know if I'm allowed to say this or not, actually, there's a bit where it says he pissed a pot full in a part of Nostahuehler. So when he's drunk, he fills a pot with piss. in the time it would take to say a Lord's Prayer. So there's this sense that even while he's kind of gone off the rails, the thing that he should have been doing,

the devotional activities he should have been engaged with are still there happening in the background. Oh, Alistair. What is Will's Road? Lawrence, what's Will's role here? The figure who sees everything happening and sometimes participates and sometimes has conversations is called Will.

And as I said earlier, it seems likely that the poet, was named William. So one answer is that he is kind of a figure akin to what Dante the Pilgrim is in the Divine Comedy, that is a representation of the poet himself who needs to go on his own journey towards salvation. It doesn't quite work as simply as that, partly because unlike Dante, unlike that name, his name is Will. So that, for instance, when we see these seven sins and glutton and so forth, confessing their sins. What we're really seeing is Will's own confession. And there is a great line that says, now I see thy will. Now I see your will. And it's

unclear whether it's referring to the Voluntas, that is the will, the desire of the character there, or whether it's referring to Will, the figure. Will as a character is sometimes, um, quite insightful and interested in what's happening and a good guide for us. But other times, the allegorical personifications will just lay into him. I mean, Holy Church early on calls him a daughter duff, a silly fool. And this is when she's... Holy Church is again another character. She's a personification who seems really the poem could end with her lesson and everyone would say, what a lovely short poem that teaches us The good world.

And then Lady Mead comes along and Will turns his head towards this woman in red in the corner and oh my God and she is, and Holy Church is just outraged. Can I get to Pierce Plumann here? Alistair, who is Pierce Plumann then? And how does the poet reveal him to us?

So Pierce Plowman is a charismatic, forthright agricultural laborer who seems to have a kind of... He comes in quite late, doesn't it? He does, but by no means at the beginning, yeah. Not at the start. He comes in in the second vision is when he first appeared.

So this is a part of the poem where the people have assembled, they're keen to go on a pilgrimage to truth, because they've been told by reason in a sermon to do that. But none of them actually knows how to get there. And it's Piers Plowman who arrives without any kind of announced, well, he just arrived dramatically suddenly in the poem and tells them that he knows the way. And he has this kind of intuitive, sort of instinctive knowledge

that let him get to truth in the first place. And then he's spent 40 years in truth's survey. like working the land, sowing seeds, digging ditches, working for truth. So he has this kind of this sort of, this knowledge of truth that's based on lived experience, on direct experience.

And what happens next is that he kind of directs the people on a sort of route through the Ten Commandments to get to truth, an allegorical pilgrimage. But they sort of say, well, we'd like you to go with us, peers. And he says, I'll go. But first, we have to plow this half acre of

land by the highway beside the road. And what happens over the course of the rest of the vision is that that agricultural labour actually turns into the pilgrimage that was meant to follow from it. So Pierce Plowman becomes the sort of leader of this microcosmic community on the field. He's directing them as they plow and as they do useful agricultural work. But behind that, there's this kind of penitential dimension where through that labour they're sort of they're engaged in an activity that's bringing them closer to truth. And this is where we get, Loras,

is where we get to people looking for how to live well, how to do well, to do better and to do best. He's been working for truth for 40 years, and then he's given a pardon. What's the pardon? And why does he rip it up? Yeah, this is an astonishing episode, and it's the most notorious episode in the whole poem, I think.

Critics do not agree on what it means, but everyone agrees that it's very hard to know what it means. Pears has been ploughing his half acre with his people, and truth promises him that he will bring for him and his heirs forever a full pardon, a penur eta corpah, that is, you know, remission of sins and remission of the penance that you normally undertake for your sins. So this is a very exciting thought that you can be remitted of all sins. And then there's a build-up about who else can have a part of this pardon and who can be included in it

and what they will have to do in order to be included in it. And if you're paying attention at this point, you might, as a reader, be thinking, okay because there's a lot about whether merchants can be included or not because their lives are so sinful and then they're very pleased that they can buy their way in and we're told if you live well and we're told for a couple of hundred lines how different people can live well to get this pardon and then when this piece of paper is produced a priest says that he'll read it to peers and it contains just two lines in Latin and they translate as if you do well and you do right then you will be saved, and if you do evil, then you will be condemned to hell.

And the priest says, this is no pardon. And then we're told, and peers, for pure tain, pulled it to twain, for pure rage, anger, resentment, peers tears it apart. And he says then, you know, I've been paying too much attention to worldly things. He says, he will no more busy himself about mere belly joy, the joy of my stomach. but instead he says he's going to go off into a life of weeping instead of sleeping and of prayers and penance and pilgrimage. And it signifies a real break in the poem because early on we've had this attempted community idea set up that all will be well if everyone plays their part.

The labourers will plough the fields and a knight comes along and says, can I help you plough the fields? And Pierre says, no, no, no, you're a knight, you guard us, we'll plough the fields, everyone does their right job, everyone can do well, everyone can have a pardon. And then it turns out, of course, that it's no pardon, except that it is the absolute ultimate pardon because the only reason that we can be saved from our sins

is because of the grace of the incarnation of Christ taking flesh and being crucified for our sins. So in that sense, it's a dramatic statement that this is the only pardon we can have. In contrast, of course, with the indulgences, the market for indulgences, the way that people in this period were beginning to be able to by masses to be said for their souls,

and therefore we're beginning to be convinced that if you could just pay for enough masses, then perhaps it wouldn't matter if you committed sins. And this is the crisis that's signified here. The early stirrings of what we see in all its glory, if you look at that way, as the Reformation now. But some have said, Alistair Bennett, that Pierce Plowman is a great poem,

but is Langlil who wrote it a great poet? Now, that's the sort of stuff that you lot feed on. What's the problem here? people have said some sort of disobliging things about Langland's poetry in the past and thinking of like C.S. Lewis famously said that Langland like scarcely turns his poetry into a poem. But I think one way to really get a sense of Langland's sort of poetic craft might be to think about the way that he uses puns and wordplay to think through some quite sort of big questions in the poem. And a good example of that is the way that he puns on multiple senses of kind and kindness in the text.

So Middle English kind is a word for nature, like when we might ask in modern English what kind of thing is it, what is its nature. And it also means what it means to us to be loving and generous. And Langlam puns on these senses to imagine that the created natural world with all of its resources and provisions is an expression of God's generosity for people. But he uses the same terms to describe the things that we can learn about God from the created world and the things that we know about God intuitively. I've read the prose translation by Schmidt, which is wonderful. It's vivid. It's full of people. It's argumentative.

It's tremendous prose. And he uses some alliterative devices here, Laura Ash. Can you tell me why it's so good? My middle English is forever unexplored. So, alliteration is a device that's rather fallen out of fashion, but in fact it's been a major force in almost all the poetry of the world. And it means just that the same initial consonant or initial consonant cluster appears in stressed words several times in succession in a line. And the effect is quite

astonishing. So the alliterative metre as Langland uses it doesn't rhyme, although sometimes there are chance rhymes and internal rhymes. And it has variable numbers of stresses and syllables. So the flesh is a fell wind and influring a tima, thorolicking and lustus so low he that it nouriseth nis situs and somtima wordes and wickederer werkes thereof, wormers of sinna, and forbitteth the blossoms rich to the barra levers. So you can hear the consonants being repeated. And what happens is that it has the cadence of speech to some degree. You know, it's not like Tennyson that just slides through without any knots.

You know, it doesn't count syllables, it doesn't rhyme. It doesn't ever let you relax. You have to figure out where the stresses are and what's happening. and the alliteration catches you and catches you again and makes you feel the kind of energy and the pulse in the verse that never settles. I mean, there are some tender lines that you have to say so slowly, the moments of the crucifixion,

the Lord of Liff and of Lich laid his iron together. The Lord of Life and Light closed his eyes. Moments like that. So the variation available is wonderful. Lawrence, Lawrence, this was a very, poem was quoted by John Ball, as it were, the thinker inside the Peasness Revolt, and therefore it has been thought of to be a subversive poem. What does it challenge? How do you see it as being subversive? Yeah, that's a really good question. I mean, one question is, if John Ball did

have the poem in mind, what was it about the poem that he did? And it seems to be the honest worker who does an honest day's work and isn't worried about what the landlord might say or, and and would fight back if the landowners tried to undermine and disparage him. It's quite possible that actually Pierce the Plowman was a folk character. I mean, there are other characters that John Ball mentions that no one thinks came from a poem like John the Miller. But its main threat, I think, would have been seen by a lot of church authorities and monks who owned a lot of land.

The most direct critique it has is one. that in the 16th century was picked up on making the poem a proto-reformist poem and that is... It's merciless about the church is a creation of power and misuse of power and every category in the church

lets the bishop off now and then, but basically there's page after page of these terrible people owning too much, bossing too much and not actually letting you get to God. That's right, that's right. The monks own too much land. The friars intervene between the Christian and the parishion.

priest because the friars showing up with their bulls from the pope. I think one thing going on, Langland is opposed to any, it seems to me, listening to Laura talk earlier, he seems about the pardon. He seems opposed to any commodification of faith and of God. And I think the pardon is a representation of that. And even at perfect moments where an eternal truth seems to be expressed that no one could gainsay, Langeland just pushes away from it. And I think that would seem quite threatening as well. There's a basically revolutionary quality in Potentia to the fact that he's writing this in English. It's dotted with Latin, but it's Latin opened up to ordinary people.

It's mostly translated for them. And what it does is say to an ordinary person, you can judge a king. You can decide whether this king is acting morally or not. And it says all of us are on the same journey. all of us are striving to reach salvation. Nobody really knows how to get there. There are many very supposedly authoritative characters that are shown up for being foolish or ignorant

or disagreeing with one another. And so in all that sense, it's potentially revolutionary. But he is also profoundly conservative. He believes in a hierarchy of society. And again and again, we're told it's the poor who can go most easily to heaven. And that is also then undermined by other people saying yes but the poor should be allowed to steal

because if you're in need then there is no law and then another character querying this and you think, do I believe that? And on it goes. But the revolutionary aspect is about the invitation morally to explore what it means to be human but it is within a framework

that's fundamentally conservative that doesn't want in any sense to upend society. One group we've left out and it is a crammed period of time with the plague returning and other things we've talked about. There were the Lollards. These were the followers of Wickliff who'd done a fairly rudimentary, but very important translation of the Bible, who was given a show trial and after that faded away.

But the Lollards for the next century were persecuted for taking his word in English around the country. And that was seen to be, and it was considered to be, as religion and politics were two sides of the same coin most of the time, a revolutionary thing. How did this poem play with the Lollards? The Lollards are, so John Wickcliffe is developing his thought and disseminating it at around the same time that Piers Plowman is being written. So I guess Langlands and Wycliffe's careers are roughly contemporary.

And that means that the poem kind of emerges in the same moment and some of the kind of anti-clerical critique that it contains, the criticisms of the friars that Lawrence is talking about, for example, are also found in the writings of Wycliffe and his followers. So a Wiclifite reader, a Lollard reader, be very at home in those kind of polemical parts of Piers Plowman. And there are, in fact, there are places where the poem ends up advocating, like the disendowment of the church by secular lords,

which becomes a Wiclifite position too. Although, of course, it's important to say that Langman never adopts Wickliff's most extreme position. and the things that make Lollardee heretical, like Wycliffe's views about the Eucharist and transubstantiation. Langland is very sort of orthodox in the way that he thinks about, the sacraments and the church. But we know that there are writers with Lollard's sympathies

who are among the readers of Piers Plowman. There's a poem called Pierce the Plowman's Creed, which was written early in the next century, where Piers shows up to criticise the friars. And in that poem, Piers Plowman himself expresses his admiration for Wycliff, and for Walter Brute, who was a Lollard who was tried in 1391. And as Lawrence has already kind of alluded to this too, actually, but some of their early modern readers of the poem

certainly kind of co-opted Pierce Plowman as a proto-protestant figure. Robert Crowley in his printed edition, which comes out in 1550, says that before the Reformation, there are some people who were still able to see, like, the, I don't know the exact quote, it was like, the light of the true faith in the darkness. And one of them is Wycliffe,

and one of them is Langland. The tone of the poem, Laura, can be preachy and instructional. What I find the tone of the poem mainly is robust and rolls along and is all human life is there. But it does talk about the limits of knowledge of truth. Is that troubling? Yeah, I think that the poem is hard work because that is the point of the poem. It wants us to work. The act of reading the poem and trying to understand what is going on is already

the first step towards doing well because trying to understand what's happening involves developing a moral understanding. It involves judging morally how you should think about the events that are played out in front of us and the rouse that are played out in front of us. And there is a sense where Will often is close to despair.

Often he doesn't know what he should think. There are moments when he's just woken up out of his dream and he wanders in a sort of despairing haze before he's then allowed to fall asleep again and get more visions as he's constantly trying to work out the truth. But that is exactly the point trying to get to the truth. And it is fundamentally also a hugely optimistic poem about humanity and about the possibility of humanity,

which is really fired by the growing collocation as the poem progresses between peers and Christ. And ultimately we get a vast vision of Christ coming to the crucifixion, which is described as his coming to joust in peers' armour, Humana Natura, which is to say that Christ dons peers' flesh, human flesh. He becomes peers in order to fight against the devil. And this is so vital because throughout the poem we are described as Christ's bloody brethren that we are flesh of his flesh.

And so what that implies in terms of the perfectibility of humanity has to be set against the chaos and the dismay and the confusion that besets us. and then the work is the point, our progress, our vision, our striving. Because having said that, you have this astonishing vision of the crucifixion and Christ harrowing hell and bringing all the lost souls out of hell and up into the world with grace and salvation. And then the poem doesn't end. The poem says, yeah, that's really where we begin.

And now we have a new vision of trying to set up a universal church, the barn of unity. And it starts falling apart and the wrong people come in, and it's full of hypocrites and flatterers alive. They let the friars in. Right, exactly. a terrible idea. The thing is don't let the friars. We're near the end now. You say Chaucer has been shadowing this

discussion. It's almost precisely contemporaneous. And you say this film's greater than anything by Chaucer. Can you tell us why? On any given day I might give Chaucer a look in there. But in general, Pierce Plowman really speaks

truth to power with such beautiful language that Chaucer never combined that quite quite right and chaucer seems to know a little bit better than his audience you get that sense sometimes i'm not trying to say anything bad about chaucer but langland really is so earnest and even in his humor i mean we we've touched some on the humor with gluttony pierce plowman jousting in the arms of human nature that's actually also a joke because what's happened is that the devil has claimed the soul of all humans and then tried to claim the soul of jesus when he

died, but not knowing that the human nature was a disguise for his divine nature. So he's been tricked. And we have this whole wonderful episode in hell of the devils all talking to each other, Satan and Lucifer and so forth, about what's happened up there. Oh, no, the world has changed. Moments like that are just so compelling and part of this worldview that is, I won't say it's unified, but it's comprehensive in a way that Chaucer, I think, would struggle to match. And there are There are modern major authors who have been inspired by Pierce Ploughman in a way that Chaucer is just almost the antithesis. Maureen Duffy thinks Pierce Plowman is William Langland's her hero. Is there a class element in this judgment?

Well, I was going to say she sets up Langland as her hero in large part as a working class writer, as someone who stands up for Plowman. And Chaucer was a figure of the court who had rich patrons. John of Gaunt was probably a patron of his. So a lot of it is tied into that. But I don't think we should ever play those things too much because if Chaucer knew the poem, then I think that he would have appreciated it. A lot of people assume he did know the poem.

I actually don't think there's any evidence that he did. But if he did, I think he would have found a lot that was inspirational for his own work and that he would have agreed with on an intellectual and religious level. And I think he would have loved the poetry, as Alistair and Laura's descriptions and performances of it indicate. It's just beautiful poetry. We're coming to the end now, can I ask three of you briefly to tell me, Alistair Bennett, what to start with you? What impact has the vision of Pierce Plowman had?

What's its legacy? I think it's quite a mixed picture. So in its kind of immediate moment, it generates kind of other poems that imitate it and echo it. I think it's the character of Peers Plowman himself who actually enjoys an afterlife that's independent of the poem for a while in the early modern period. He turns up in some sort of in some pamphlet literature,

And he turns up also in the Shepherds calendar by Spencer. But more recently, there is a long history of readers expressing confusion about Pierce Plowman. George Putnam in the Art of Posey said that Langland's terms were hard and obscure. So that's 1589. So that's quite early, I guess, in the kind of in the long history of its reception. Lawrence has mentioned the reception of the poem in contemporary novels. There's a novel, a recent novel called Open City by Teju Cole, which includes a character who's at.

actually like a fictionalised translator of Pierce Plowman. And you can see the influence of peers on the structure of that novel because the narrator spends lots of time wandering around New York, searching for insights about himself and about the world that he's part of. But it's a poem, I think, that's still inspiring new responses and kind of creative reimagining even now. Lawrence, what would you say? There's a claim to be made that's a case to be made

that Pierce Plowman in its early version as being the first, first significant and perhaps the first major poem in the alliterative long line, that it generated a whole, as it were, a school of poetry in that mode, all of which is concerned with penance, with the need to come right with God, which is almost a formulaic phenomenon. Even something like Sergo Wayne in the Green Knight might well exist purely because of Pierce Plowman. That's the historical answer I would give. Someone like Marilyn Robinson, whose brand new novel Jack has just come out,

she sees a direct line between Pierce Plowman and abolition in the U.S. and sees Langland's legacy as really being at one with the Puritans who were all about democratizing religion and social equality. And there's another major way that Pierce Blowman might well have had an effect.

It certainly has had an effect on her own work, which is a major body of literature. Thank you very much. Finally, Laura. I think what's most important about this poem is it's a very long poem about how one should live, which says no one can tell you how you should live, that the business of being a human moral agent is that you have to decide moment by moment what you should do. And that is a powerful message that can speak to anyone, that has to speak to everyone.

Thank you very much. That's been terrific. Thank you, Laura. I'm sorry, Lawrence Warner and Alistaird. Next week, Mary Astell, 17th century philosopher and feminist pioneer, who asked, if all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves? Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What would you like to have said that you didn't say?

Can we start with you? Alistair. There are so many episodes in the poem we might have come to you to talk about. I think the one that I missed most was the episode where the dreamer Will is invited to a feast at the house of conscience. And he encounters there a whole series of other guests. It's like your worst ever dinner party. And he meets this gluttonous friar. So it's more kind of critique of the friars again.

A gluttonous friar who's hoarding all of the good food at the high table in the kind of place of honour while the dreamer sits with patience at a side table and is served. penitential texts to eat as food. And he sits there sort of furiously watching the doctor as he stuffs himself and says, you know, I heard this guy preaching about penance and abstinence and here he is kind of clearly showing that he doesn't live in that way. And patient says if you wait, then eventually all this overeating is going to produce its own kind of penance in the friar's body because he'll get indigestion. So there's this kind of this fascinating scene which is about the distribution of material food, but also like different kinds of knowledge.

Like who has the greater knowledge? Is it the intellectual friar who pontificates St. Paul's Cross? Or is it patience and will who get to see through to some other truth about what's going to happen to the friar if they're just kind of patient and quiet enough to let it happen? A similar moment when Will is talking to scripture and Dame study and these very learned characters were basically lecturing. him and he's getting quite bored.

And then the Emperor Trajan suddenly appears and says, bore for books. You know, I didn't need books to be saved. I just needed to live a good life. And you're like, okay. And this constant flicking between is quite striking. Yeah, I would say there are all sorts of episodes. It's very much an episode-generated poem in a sense.

It doesn't really have a plot from start to beginning, I'm sorry, from beginning to end. And what I would add, apart from the episodes, is Pierce Plowman, the textual history of it is so complicated and fascinating that really it's at the center of lots of the most important episodes of humanistic scholarship of the 20th and 21st centuries in ways that can be arcane to outsiders, but really play a role. No matter what you read of Pierce Plowman, you are reading the results of, of, fierce debates that have not been settled at all about, one of them that mainly is settled is whether one poet actually wrote all the versions that exist, and I think most of us agree that one did, but beyond that, how many versions, when were they circulated, what did early readers think of these? They combined them quite often, and it's just fascinating, so that

you can, there are worlds to be found in what readers have made of the, of the, of the, of of the combination of texts and both, and by readers, I mean both 14th and 15th century readers and readers of the 19th, 19th century through now from Walter Skeet, from Robert Crowley in the 16th century, what he did with it is just fascinating. But what about today's readers of three? Do you think people pick up this translation

and see it as part of their life? I think it's really important as well to, I know, to take an opportunity just to kind of encourage people to like open their covers, of the Middle English version as well. So we've been praising Schmidt's translation quite rightly. But Schmidt's edition, too, has got, you know, the apparatus, the glosses that will help you kind of figure out things in the Middle English text.

And it's a text that rewards, I mean, Laura talked in the main part of the programme about how the difficulties of the text, the challenges it presents to you, a sort of part of the point of it. Like it rewards that kind of interpretive labour if you can puzzle out the middle English. And for all of its kind of difficulties and those hard terms, as Patnum called it, it's very beautiful and

compelling and gripping language as well in the original. Laura, do you think that the drive of it, what it's going for, resonates with your students today? I think Pazvidu. I think students find it very hard to grapple with as a

whole, and part of the point is that it almost doesn't work as a whole. I mean, one of the things that it dramatises very often in the episodes is that the episodes will kind of fall apart or fall into disruption. The point being that you cannot make a coherent hole out of this. You cannot say, like the pardon that he tears apart, it's come from truth and what it says is true. So what on earth is he doing, tearing it up? But you can read a narrative up to the point of the tearing and say this makes sense. And you can read a narrative from the tearing and say that makes sense. And for me,

it's about the way in which the poem is just holding in balance these these mutually exclusive truths all the time like the truth that god says you should give away all your possessions and simply go on pilgrimage follow me and the truth that god says you must cultivate the earth and and how do you how do you reconcile those well that's the question and and it's the question for everyone at every point the one funny thing that occurred to me when alicea was talking about the dream within a dream made me think of the christopher nolan film it perception. And that made me think in turn about the way that in that film

Nolan plays with time, you know, that the deeper the dream you go, the more time is passing out in, or rather more time passes for you and the less in the outside world. Or so, or maybe it's the other way around. But in any case, toying with time is important because of the way in which so in this poem he spends a couple of hundred

lines awake and in those few hundred lines pass decades of his life in which nothing of any value happens and then he falls asleep and has this revelatory dream. And the implication of that is that, you know, a life could be 80 years long, but the only bits that are going to matter are the moments when you were searching for truth, the moments when you were thinking most clearly about what the moral

quality of your life is. Which right is are searching for truth today? Searching for truth today, aren't we all? Well, maybe... Well, if we're all doing, that's the answer the question. Yeah, yeah, or enough people have given up, hence we need Pierce Plowman back in the world. Well, people search today and, well, now that the theaters are closed, not so much there, but in cinema, our students certainly love their movies, and I think it's a very cinematic poem in a lot of ways, and we just had Inception as a great example. There are lots of things like that, but Derek Jarman actually described his 1987 film, The Last of England, as a dream allegory, and he was explicit that Pierce Plumman was one of the sources.

of this and he he was obsessed by pierce plowman and um so even where you don't expect it you know an avant-garde uh queer uh filmmaker um from the from from a generation ago is is obsessed by pierce plowman in ways that i think students really can um uh latch on to if they give it a chance they would see that it's a poem about our psychological um trauma is that the word our psychological dramas This is maybe better. I didn't mean trauma. I meant dramas. And that truss sound came out by accident.

But maybe trauma in some ways for other people as well. I was rather proud of the fact that, are intrigued by the fact that none of you drew a sort of banal conclusion. Look, there's a plague there and there's a plague now. There's problems and there's problems. We got on with talking about then, which was great. So thank you all very much indeed. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Thank you. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon T. Before you go, I'm Miles, the producer of a brand new podcast for Radio 4 called Tricky. This is how it works. Four people from across the UK meet up and without a presenter breathing down their necks talk about issues they really care about. Sex work is quite complicated for a lot of people and it's okay to be against it but not to, you know, shame someone because of their professional.

Across the series will hear anger, shock and even the odd laugh. Another thing that really gets to me is when people say, I know what we need to do. I know what black people... Shut up. You don't, like, that's the thing, that's not how it works. Nobody knows if you knew you would have done it. Discover more conversations like this

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