William Langlande.
This was William Langlande[35] (or Langley, as others call him), reputed author of the poem I have named. It makes a little book—earliest, I think, of all books written in English—which you will be apt to find in a well-appointed private library of our day. I won’t say that it is bought to read, so much as to stand upon the shelves (so many books are) as a good and sufficient type of old respectabilities. Yet, for all this, it is reasonably readable; with crabbed alliterative rhythm;—some Latin intermixed, as if the writer had been a priest (as some allege); and such knowledge of life and of current shortcomings among all sorts of people as showed him to be a wide-awake and fearless observer. It is in the form of an Allegory, Christian in its motive; so that you might almost say that the author was an immature and crude and yet sharper kind of John Bunyan who would turn Great-Heart into a Plowman. The nomenclature also brings to mind the tinker of the Pilgrim’s Progress; there is a Sir Do-Well and his daughter Do-Better: then there is Sir In-wit with his sons See-well and Say-well and Hear-well, and the doughtiest of them all—Sir Work-well. We may, I think, as reasonably believe that Bunyan hovered over this book, as that Milton took hints from the picture of Pandemonium attributed to Cædmon.
Langlande is a little mixed and raw oftentimes; but he is full of shrewdness and of touches of a rough and unwashed humor. There is little tenderness of poetic feeling in his verse; and scarcely ever does it rise to anything approaching stateliness; but it keeps a good dog-trot jog, as of one who knew what he was doing, and meant to do it. What he meant was—to whip the vices of the priests and to scourge the covetousness of the rich and of the men in power. It is English all over; English[36] in the homeliness of its language; he makes even Norman words sound homely; English in spirit too; full of good, hearty, grumbling humor—a sort of predated and poetic kind of Protestantism. Plums might be picked out of it for the decoration of a good radical or agrarian speech of to-day.
Of his larger religious and political drift no extracts will give one a proper idea; only a reading from beginning to end will do this. One or two snatches of his verse I give, to show his manner:
And thanne cam coveitise,
Kan I hym naght discryve,
So hungrily and holwe
Sire Hervy hym loked.
He was bitel-browed,
And baber-lipped also
With two blered eighen
As a blynd hagge;
And as a letheren purs
Lolled his chekes,
Well sidder [wider] than his chyn
Thei chyveled [shrivelled] for elde;
And as a bonde-man of his bacon
His berd was bi-draveled,
With an hood on his heed.
A lousy hat above
And in a tawny tabard
Of twelf wynter age.
—2847 Pass. V.
And again, from the same Passus (he dividing thus his poem into steps or paces) I cite this self-drawn picture of Envy:
Betwene manye and manye
I make debate ofte,
That bothe lif and lyme
Is lost thorugh my speche.
And when I mete hym in market
That I moost hate,
I hailse hym hendely [politely]
As I his frend were;
For he is doughtier than I,
I dar do noon oother:
Ac, hadde I maistrie and myght.
God woot my wille!
And whanne I come to the kirk
And sholde kneel to the roode,
And preye for the peple …
Awey fro the auter thanne
Turne I myne eighen
And bi-holde Eleyne
Hath a newe cote;
I wisshe thanne it were myn,
And al the web after.
For who so hath moore than I
That angreth me soore,
And thus I lyve love-lees,
Like a luther [mad] dogge;
That al my body bolneth [swelleth]
For bitter of my galle.
—vers. 2667.
It is a savage picture; and as savagely true as was ever drawn of Envy. Those who cultivated the elegancies of letters, and delighted in the pretty rhyming-balance of Romance verse, would hardly have relished him; but the average thinker and worker would and did. It is specially noteworthy that the existing MSS. of this poem, of which there are very many, are without expensive ornamentation by illuminated initial letters, or otherwise, indicating that its circulation was among those who did not buy a book for its luxuries of “make-up,” but for its pith. A new popularity came to the book after printing was begun, and made it known to those who sympathized with its protesting spirit;—most of all when the monasteries went down and readers saw how this old grumbler had prophesied truly—in saying “the Abbot of Abingdon and all his people should get a knock from a king”—as they did; and a hard one it was.
Langlande was born in the West, and had wandered over the beautiful Malvern hills of Worcestershire in his day but he went afterward to live in London, which he knew from top to bottom; had a wife there, “Kytte,” and a daughter, “Calote;”[37] shaved his head like a priest; was tall—so tall he came to be called “Long Will.” He showed little respect for fine dresses, though he saw them all; he was in London when Chaucer was there and when the greater poet was writing, and had higher-placed friends than himself; but he never met him,—from anything that appears; never met Wyclif either, with whom he must have had very much thinking in common, and who also must have been in London many a time when tall Will Langlande sidled along Fenchurch Street, or Cornhill. Yet he is worthy to be named with him as representing a popular seam in that great drift of independent and critical thought, which was to ripen into the Reformation.