"Ich live in Londone, and on Londone both," he writes. The instruments of his craft are not sickle and scythe, but the paternoster, the psalter, "and my seven psalms," that "I sing for men's souls". In return for such services he picks up a bare livelihood. Clerks like himself should "come of franklins and freemen," not of bondmen. The sons of serfs, he thinks, should do manual labour, and should not be admitted to Holy Orders. This was the view of the English House of Commons, under Richard II, and it may be that the poet is rather satirizing their exclusiveness, and the hand-to-mouth lazy life of poor clerks, than describing himself. The narrator, after the sermon preached at him by Reason, goes to Church in a penitent mood, and beats his breast, but does not change his course of life.
The poem (or, as some think, the series of poems by various hands) represents in the most vivid way, the unrest, discontent, and doubt which came over Western Europe towards the end of the fourteenth century. The cruel and endless wars, the brigands, the ravages of the Black Death (which caused demand for higher wages because so few were left to work) drove the poor into revolts like that of Wat Tyler. There were frightful cruelties and terrible reprisals. The wealth and licentiousness of the regular Orders of clergy caused them to be hated and despised. The people called Lollards advocated a kind of evangelical Protestantism, and something very like modern Socialism. All these things Chaucer passed by or treated lightly, but whoever wrote "Piers Plowman" threw into his picture of the age his vivid and fiery but lurid and confused genius. He paints himself as poor, discontented, powerless, and always angry.
The dreamer states that he went about London,—a tall lonely discontented man,—"loath to reverence lords and ladies," and never saluting the great, and the well clad, nor doing any courtesy, so that "folk deemed me a fool". He describes taverns full of bad company, as if he were familiar with them. He states the doubts that arise in clerkly minds. Why should the penitent thief have been allowed to go straight to Paradise? "Who was worse than David, or the Apostle Paul," when he breathed out threatenings against the earliest Christians? Beset by such questionings, and by the scepticism which haunted the Ages of Faith, clerks may curse the hour when they learned more than their creed.
The narrator seems to know a good deal about law, and despises men who draw up charters ill, and in bad Latin; he speaks as if he may have eked out his livelihood as a scrivener. He says that he dresses like a "Loller" (however they may have dressed), but he is not a Loller, which may mean either an idle loiterer or a heretical Lollard, who was apt to be a kind of evangelical socialist, entertaining advanced ideas about property.
The poet himself, in the spirit of the contemporary House of Commons, denounces the foreigners who obtain benefices in England, and the Englishmen who buy them from Rome. He would not throw off all allegiance to the Pope, but the Pope ought to follow the example, not of St. Peter, a very human character, but of the divine Master of St. Peter. He hates the Friars as much as John Knox did, who called them "fiends, not freres". He denounces the lawless rapacity of "maintained," the liveried followers of great lords; in fact his poem is often an alliterative rendering of the complaints of the House of Commons preserved in the Rolls of Parliament: For Parliamentary institutions he has the highest respect and admiration, he is the warm advocate of peace with France, and opposes the idea of settling the Eastern Question by a Crusade. If he is the author of "Richard the Redeless," he gave good advice, in a severe tone, and too late, to Richard II, when that Prince set himself, like Charles II and James II, to govern England without a Parliament, and was near his fall. The dreamer, or the poet, was no friend of Revolution, but his works were quoted by John Ball, priest and agitator, who was hanged some time after Wat Tyler was done to death.
Chaucer was a poet who did not write on political, social, and ecclesiastical reform. Langley or Langland, wrote about little else: he is for reforming a world full of inequality and injustice. In his time the Revolution stirred in its sleep, as it were, like the great subterranean reptile of Australian mythology, and caused the crust of society to tremble, and the spires of the Church to rock. He professed that a reforming King is to come
And thanne shal the Abbot of Abyndoun
And all his issue for evere
Have a knokke of a Kynge, and
Incurable the wounde.
The prediction was fulfilled by Henry VIII, but the poor, in whose interests Langland wrote, were none the better but much the worse for "The Great Pillage" of the Tudor King.
We cannot, let it be repeated, feel certain that the dreamer's description of himself, as a moody, idle, discontented clerk, spoiled for work by much study, and unable to find a market for his science; striding angrily and enviously through the London streets where he has not a friend, is the poet's description of himself, a satire on himself; or whether it is a dramatic study of an imaginary character. We cannot be certain that he has lived much at or near Malvern; where the hills, overlooking the vast plain, form the natural scene for his Vision of the "sad pageant of men's miseries"; of poverty and toil, of wealth and injustice and oppression. Of the poet we really learn nothing, even his name,—whether Langley or Langland, or neither,—is matter of conjecture. We only know that his heart burned within him at the many evils which he was impotent to cure, and that he had a kind of apocalyptic faculty for visions of good and evil. As readers usually take the narrator and preacher in the poem to be a portrait of the poet himself, he appears as a character neither happy nor the cause of happiness in others. He is not so much a poet as a prophet in the Hebrew sense of the word; the world owes to him no such gratitude and love as it owes and pays to the kind, happy Geoffrey Chaucer.
The Visions of Langland are visionary; now the dream is luminous and distinct; now it merges, as dreams do, into shadowy shapes of things half-realized. In sleep the poet first sees a vast plain; on the eastern side is a tower, westward is the den of Death. In a field full of folk some laboured; others, gaily clad, took their ease; some were hermits in cells, others were merchants, and there were minstrels who hate work, "swink not, nor sweat," but make mirth. The poet, like the author of the "Cursor Mundi," detests minstrels. There were sham hermits with their women; pilgrims with leave to lie, from Rome; pardoners who took money from men for remission of their sins; parish priests who seek gold in London as the Black Death has impoverished their people. To them all Conscience preaches at great length, denouncing idolatrous priests in the manner of John Knox. Then follows a version of the fable of "belling the cat," told with some vigour and political point.