Piers Plowman Read online

  Piers Plowman

  A Modern Verse Translation

  William Langland

  Translated by Peter Sutton

  McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers

  Jefferson, North Carolina

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

  BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

  e-ISBN: 978-1-4766-1817-3

  © 2014 Peter Sutton. All rights reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers

    Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640

      www.mcfarlandpub.com

  Acknowledgments

  I am indebted first of all to Gwen Appleby, who revived my interest in Langland by taking a group of local writers some ten years ago to the precise point on the Malvern Hills where she believed he had his vision. I am equally indebted to Peter Smith, founder and artistic director of the Autumn in Malvern Festival, who subsequently invited me to write about Langland. For their help in that process and in the making of this translation I am grateful to Bromyard and District Local History Society and Local History Centre, Cleobury Mortimer History Society, Colwall Village Society, the Wychwoods Local History Society (Oxfordshire), Herefordshire Archive Service and the Victoria County History Trust for Herefordshire, Shropshire County Archives and Worcestershire Record Office, as well as to the librarians of Great Malvern Library, Westminster Abbey and Worcester Cathedral Libraries. I thank the poet Jim Dening for his kind words about the translation, and my son and my wife, a former proofreader for the European Commission, for their painstaking reading of the text. I owe a debt to all the authors cited in the bibliography, and most especially to Carl Schmidt for his very generous encouragement and permission to consult his work.

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  The Identity of the Author

  Prologue

  Step I

  Step II

  Step III

  Step IV

  Step V

  Step VI

  Step VII

  Step VIII

  Step IX

  Step X

  Step XI

  Step XII

  Step XIII

  Step XIV

  Step XV

  Step XVI

  Step XVII

  Step XVIII

  Step XIX

  Step XX

  Selected Bibliography

  List of Names and Terms

  Introduction

  The Poem and the Translation

  The medieval English poem known as Piers Plowman is a moving, disturbing and often amusing commentary on corruption and greed that is still apposite today. Conscience, Fidelity, Gluttony, Pride and the other human strengths and weaknesses named as characters in the poem are timeless, and are recognizable as our present-day politicians and celebrities, friends and neighbors. Merchants, bankers, brewers and judges, scholars, sheriffs, bishops and priests come tumbling out of the text alongside wastrels and vagabonds, thieves and fraudsters, drunkards and whores. The poem gives a vivid insight into the social attitudes and everyday concerns of England in the fourteenth century as well as into contemporary religious beliefs, and it is this mixture of the sublime and the familiar, the coarse and the spiritual, that gives the poem its unique strength.

  From the historical references in the poem it is thought that the author, William Langland, wrote the earliest version in the mid–1360s, and longer, revised versions in the late 1370s and the mid–1380s. This was a period of political and religious upheaval and of burgeoning literary activity, when the French of the Norman elite and the Old English of the Anglo-Saxon lower classes had only recently been melded into one language, now termed Middle English. The best-known English writer of the time is Geoffrey Chaucer, author of works including the Canterbury Tales, although numerous love poems, histories, scientific treatises, plays, songs, romances, moral philosophies, travelogues and religious commentaries were composed and written by other writers too, in both English and Latin.

  Piers Plowman revolves around the narrator’s quest for how to live a good Christian life that combines practical activity with spiritual reflection. Every reading of the poem reveals new layers of meaning, but the English of the text is so far removed from today’s language that it cannot be read without assistance. The aim of this translation is to provide a version that retains the energy, alliteration, imagery and intentions of the original and can be read with pleasure for its own sake by anyone interested in poetry, history or literature. It is not intended primarily as a crib, although it can also be used as an introduction to the original, which well rewards deeper study.

  The translation grows out of a dramatic presentation about Langland given during the 2012 Autumn in Malvern Festival. I have therefore come at the task not as a literary historian but as a playwright, making use of my earlier experience as a translator working in the fields of education, law and the arts. The work would have been impossible without the background material listed in the Selected Bibliography, although I am aware that I have only skimmed the surface of the vast and richly productive sea of medieval scholarship.

  Structure and Synopsis

  When the poem was first printed, it was given the overall Latin title Liber de Petro Plowman or “Book of Peter the Plowman,” and it was divided into two sections, the Vision of Piers the Plowman, and the Life of Do-well, Do-better and Do-best. There is no evidence that Langland intended such a division, but it reflects the difference in mood which occurs at the beginning of Step VIII, when the narrator sets out to discover what doing well means, having seen plenty of ill-doing in his initial dreams. The whole poem can indeed be seen as a journey, each of the 20 chapters that follow the Prologue being called a passus, the Latin for “step,” which is the term adopted here.

  The use of dreams was a conventional literary device,1 but Piers Plowman is unusual in containing not one dream sequence but eight, and two more “dreams within dreams.” This is not surprising, given the huge scope of the poem, which not only explores Christian mysticism and morality, but also examines the role and duties of government, the papacy, the clergy and the different social classes, and considers economic relations, criminal justice, welfare, diet, food shortages, finance, taxation, trade, war and peace, heredity, medicine, the natural world, marital relations, child-rearing and the limits of academic learning. To borrow an appropriate image, it is “like many a church in the Middle Ages, so crowded with tombs and rood-screens, chantries and side-altars, that the total effect is a most curious blending of order and confusion.”2

  Despite the many diversions, the narrator does nevertheless progress from puzzlement to resolution, finally moving from “contrition and confession and satisfaction through patience and poverty to faith, hope and charity [and] the Cardinal Virtues.”3 The poem closes with a plea for society as a whole to adopt these virtues of prudence, tolerance, justice and fortitude and to follow Christ’s two great commandments, to love God and to love one’s neighbor as oneself.

  The poem opens with the narrator falling asleep on the Malvern Hills, a prominent ridge to the west of the River Severn in the English West Midlands, and seeing his first dream of a “fair field full of folk” caught between heaven and hell. A rowdy wedding is about to take place between Money and Falsehood, but Theology steps in to refer the matter to the King, and the crowd of revelers sets off for Westminster. The King threatens to arrest Falsehood and his friends, who flee, and he asks Conscienc
e to marry Miss Money instead. Conscience refuses, and Reason supports him. The King undertakes to be guided by them in future.

  In his next dream, the narrator sees the Seven Deadly Sins make their confession, which incites the people to set out in search of Truth. Piers the honest Plowman offers to lead them once he has finished the harvest, but he has to call up Hunger to punish the carousing idlers who decline to work. The quest for Truth nevertheless leads to a dead end when Piers is offered a written pardon for those who help him. He tears it up, arguing that what matters is not a scrap of parchment but to “do well,” and preferably to “do better” or “do best.”

  In the second part of the poem the narrator seeks to discover what this means. In his dreams he consults Thought and Intelligence, Study, Learning and Scripture, but finds their obscurantism frustrating. He idly follows Fortune for a time, but eventually meets Fidelity, Nature, Imagination and Patience, who teach him the merits of poverty and the wonders of creation. He sees further visions of greed and the self-serving nature of social engagement, in the figure of a master tradesman. At length he is relieved to meet his guide Piers again, and encounters Faith, Hope and Charity.

  The high point of the poem is reached in Step XVIII, when the narrator dreams of the terrifying Harrowing of Hell, which releases the souls of the penitent, including the heathen, from the clutches of the devil. But then the forces of Antichrist gather, against whom the only defense is true Christian values. Conscience and Grace seek to withstand the onslaught of Sloth, Covetousness and Falsehood, but Courtesy finally causes them to admit a fraudulent friar, who brings corruption to the very heart of the Church. Conscience sets off in despair to seek the help of Piers once more, and the narrator awakes for the last time. The ending is sudden, but the journey has come to the end of the road.

  The poem is thus full of religious symbolism and allegory, but it is also infused with humanity. The narrator repeatedly reveals his confusion, his anger against corruption, and details of his personal life, while constantly carrying before him the image of the honest plowman, the Piers of the title, whom he eventually identifies with Christ in all his glory.

  The Sources of the Text

  Some fifty-two early manuscript copies of the poem are still extant, an exceptionally large number which attests to the poem’s popularity. There are also copies of the four printed editions which appeared about a hundred and fifty years after the author died. These versions differ markedly in length, content and structure, and were divided in the nineteenth century into three main groups, representing successive revisions of the work, termed A, B and C, by the first modern scholar to study the poem in depth, the Rev. Walter W. Skeat. He was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge University and a founder member of the Early English Text Society, which continues to publish works. Through the Society Skeat issued a comprehensively annotated edition of all three consolidated texts of Piers Plowman in the original Middle English in the 1860s, and an edition based on this was published by Oxford University Press in 1886 and remained in print for over a century.4

  This translation was made initially from that Skeat edition, and lines from it were used in the presentation given at Little Malvern Priory as part of the 2012 Autumn in Malvern Festival. With the kind permission of Dr. A.V.C. Schmidt, emeritus fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, the translation was then compared with his 1995 Everyman edition of the B text, which can be recommended to general readers wishing to consult the original.5 In consequence, some alternative readings have been adopted, and in a dozen instances, lines have been deleted, changed or added. Where the sense or the modern sentence structure requires, I have also transposed or rearranged a few lines on my own initiative. Attention is called in the footnotes to significant variations, “Schmidt” referring to the Everyman edition unless otherwise stated. Dr. Schmidt has also issued a revised and newly annotated parallel-text edition of the A, B and C texts, with the addition of a fourth, earlier version termed Z, and this has replaced Skeat as the standard scholarly edition.6 Other revised editions of the B text are by Kane and Donaldson, and by Robertson and Shepherd,7 and texts are becoming available online.8

  The B text of the late 1370s, which was chosen for this translation, contains the liveliest narration and the sharpest social criticism. The A version of the 1360s is shorter, ending around Step XI of the B text, perhaps because Langland could not yet see the way ahead. The later C text of the 1380s recasts the poem in a less abrasive form, probably in response to the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, when prominent Londoners including the Archbishop of Canterbury were murdered along with merchants and passers-by, and much property was stolen or destroyed. The leaders were appeased and then arrested, and most of the propositions put forward by the dissident cleric John Wyclif, many of which echo Langland’s criticism of the clergy, were subsequently condemned as heretical.

  Despite its political caution, the C version does contain some striking new images, such as a brewer negligently setting fire to his house (Skeat C IV, Schmidt III 104) and the King threatening to lock up Miss Money in solitary confinement in Corfe Castle (Skeat C IV, Schmidt III 140–141).9 It was tempting to incorporate these in the translation, but that would have been to take editorial license too far. However, three sections of the C version that are of particular interest are included, separated from the remainder of the text by indentation and the suspension of line numbering. Two are placed at the point where they appear in the C text, the first demonstrating Langland’s sympathy for the hard-working poor (Step VII), and the second adding detail to the scene in hell (Step XVIII). The third section comprises so-called “autobiographical” lines and is placed at the end of Step XIV, where it fits conveniently.

  The bulk of the footnotes are taken from Skeat, with the addition of some valuable insights from the notes to the Schmidt editions, and some explanatory remarks of my own. Lastly, again with his generous permission, a few points in the text that remained unclear were checked against Dr. Schmidt’s very lucid recent prose translation.10 Any errors and mistranslations are none the less entirely my own.

  Verse Form

  Chaucer uses the kind of end-rhyme (e.g., “A knight there was, and that a worthy man / That from the time that he firste began”) which is familiar to the modern reader. It was well established in England by the beginning of the fourteenth century and had long been practiced in France and Italy. Langland, on the other hand, is at the forefront of a “fourteenth-century revival of alliterative verse in the West Midlands and North-West England.”11

  The best-known poem of the revival is now Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight, and three shorter poems on morality are thought to be by the same unknown author: Pearl, Purity and Patience. There is no evidence that Langland knew these, but he would probably have been familiar with some of the so-called Harley Lyrics (British Library ms. Harley 2253). This collection contains a mixture of English, French and Latin texts that includes alliterative verse and was probably compiled in Herefordshire, Langland’s home territory. It is thought that he also knew the alliterative poem Wynnere and Wastoure, written by an unknown author some time between 1350 and 1370, which shares some of the content of Piers Plowman.12 He may also have encountered The Parlement of the Thre Ages, which likewise has features in common. In turn, although some of the dates of composition are unclear, Piers Plowman almost certainly influenced alliterative poems such as Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede, The Plowman’s Tale and Jack Upland, which appear to build on its popularity. There is a huge body of literature on the Alliterative Revival and the extensive poetry of the period, which should be consulted for a full discussion of the literary context.13

  In alliterative verse, instead of a rhyme at the end of a word, a number of stressed syllables or words in each line begin with the same sound, an enduring feature of English which finds echoes in poetry today and is preserved in everyday speech, in couplings such as “heart and hand” and “mind over matter.”

  The other main feature of alliterative vers
e is the caesura or break that occurs at the mid-point of each line. It should be placed between grammatical structures, or in other words, it should be natural to pause at that point when reading the line.

  Normally, there are four stresses per line, the first three of which should alliterate, but Langland “pushes the flexibility of the verse to its limits.”14 There is little consistency in where his alliteration falls. Sometimes it is on a stressed syllable, but sometimes it is on the unstressed first syllable of a word or on a completely unstressed word: perhaps Langland might have argued that it is acceptable to rhyme the first word in a foot, rather than the stressed syllable. Moreover, some lines contain only two alliterating syllables, not three. There is therefore much discussion of the degree to which these variations are intentional, and of the part played by scribal error.15

  The number of unstressed syllables in a line also varies considerably, although some rules can be inferred16:

  1. A line may begin with between zero and three unstressed syllables.

  2. The “dip” between the stressed syllables consists of two or three unstressed syllables, although four are permissible in the first half of a line.

  3. Four unstressed syllables are not permissible where one of these is a significant noun, verb, adverb or adjective that would normally be stressed.

  4. The line should end either in the fourth stressed syllable (a “masculine ending”) or in no more than one unstressed syllable (a “feminine ending”), which is the norm.

  To these can be added four more principles based on Langland’s practice: