Piers Plowman Tradition - Trends and Influences

Trends and Influences

The early modern dissemination and reception of Visio Willelmi de Petro Ploughman ("William's Vision of Piers Plowman") from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century is quite complex and reveals a great deal about changes in English society and politics. Clearly orthodox Roman Catholic in doctrine but reformist in that it posed social criticism and advocated moral, economic, and political change in the English church and nation, the original poem(s)--and the figure of Piers in the popular imagination--could be and indeed were viewed in many different ways over time, depending upon the historical and ideological vantage point of its various readers and the forms in which its texts paratexts were disseminated.

Like Desiderius Erasmus and his work, Piers was open to being appropriated by Lollards and later Protestant reformers. William Tyndale's memorable statement to a "popish priest," recorded in John Foxe' Acts and Monuments, is an echo of Erasmus' Paraclesis, which also resonated with popular images of the pious plowman: "If God spare my life ere many years, I will cause a boy that driveth the plow shall know more of the scripture than thou dost." Earlier, Erasmus had written, in his introduction to his Greek New Testament, "Would that, as a result, the farmer sing some portion of them at the plow." (Elsewhere Tyndale is closer to Erasmus: "I wold to god the plowman wold singe a text of the scripture at his plowbeme...") Similarly, the text of Piers and the figure of the English plowman developed from a reformist Catholic identity toward a much more revolutionary, first Wycliffite (i.e., Lollard), then more anti-Roman Catholic, Protestant identity which could be and indeed was turned against perceived abuses in the Church of England and English society in general.

However, just as C. S. Lewis cautions against viewing Tyndale and Thomas More as "the representatives respectively of an old and new order," there is more continuity than discontinuity between the Catholic and Protestant, medieval and Renaissance/Reformation versions of Piers. Like Tyndale and More, as Lewis writes, "both inveighed against enclosure and sheep-farming and demanded that the desires of the 'economic man' should be completely subordinated to traditional Christian ethics." To Tyndale and More, Lewis remarks, "what they had in common doubtless seemed a mere 'highest common factor...'" As the chief emblem of what Tyndale, More, and others like them had in common, the figure of Piers and the plowman--with their shifting guises in the sixteenth century--is an index to changes in English society that were ultimately unfavorable to the social vision that Piers originally stood for.

After nearly two centuries, the plowman tradition of social complaint and satire became more Chaucerian and less Langlandian to the extent that it turned more worldly-wise, if not cynical, and less ardently idealistic or concerned with the pursuit of the pure principle and reality of social justice. It became, increasingly, a secular vehicle for lampooning and complaining about class rivalries and political dissent--and also for containing or restraining such things. What is notable about the Piers/plowman literature of the Elizabethan era (barring a few exceptions) is the absence of the old religious radical who speaks the plain truth for the poor, godly commons against corrupt elites and dissembling, hypocritical English clergy. In many cases the name of Piers remained current, but his vocation generally was altered; with few exceptions, he was no longer a religious reformer. In fact he tended to become a more secular figure. There were still some rare appearances of the old Piers, but in general it seems that as a traditional "voice of the people," he had to change. This is not to say that Piers became apolitical or even less political, although that may be the case among writers like Gascoigne who point to universal corruption and mock the idea behind much plowman literature that the lowly are intrinsically virtuous. For those who did not reject the tradition, it seems that Piers became less an idealist and more of a pragmatist with a more nuanced view of English society. Criticism of the wealthy and powerful continued, but rather than directly addressing complaints to them and to the mnonarch and parliament as Edwardians like Crowley, Latimer and Thomas Lever had done, they became the subject of comic, often satiric, popular entertainment. Plays and pamphlets became the vehicle of social analysis, concerned with class identities and rivalries that were rendered with greater complexity and detail than in found in the earlier literature.

Before this shift, Langland's old political-religious-moral animus and the desire for social justice was close to that of social-minded evangelicals of the early and mid-Tudor era who advocated for the re/formation of a godly commonwealth. But unlike the medieval and early to mid sixteenth-century Piers, his Elizabethan successors discarded the comprehensive, reformist vision underwritten by belief in a theocentric social norm. To an extent this was because the Reformation officially had ended in the eyes of the queen and others who accepted the Elizabethan Religious Settlement. Censorship laws had been put into effect in 1551, 1553, and 1559, officially banning discussion of religious matters or matters of state. Nevertheless, the Crown was probably unable and unwilling to enforce these laws completely, especially in the case of texts that favored (or sufficiently appeared to favor) its interests--e.g., The Cobler's Prophecy. Radical Puritans who might sympathize with the older Piers as a critic of the established church-state were quite politically incorrect under the Elizabethan establishment and open to--at the least--accusations of naiveté. Other causes were also at work. With the division and collapse of Christendom in the Reformation, the medieval conception of the social hierarchy, as well as Purgatory and Hell, so central to Langland's poem, were vestigial remnants of a passing order. They no longer had a coherence that could support and explain material, political realities as, say, Machiavelli could to the official and often real shock and dismay of the pious. Nor did they retain much spiritual purchase on men's lives once Protestant solafidian theology altered the fear of Hell and largely eliminated the penitential mentality of Langland's more medieval Catholic world. Even in Piers Plowman one may see, in retrospect, all these outcomes as emerging possibilities.

In the Elizabethan era, Piers' Christological aspect became fully detached from and eclipsed by his role as the universal commoner, a secular economic man among economic men with clashing interests. At the same time, there was a bifurcation of the original, more unitary, carnivalesque world of Langland's Piers that is interpenetrated by common, aristocratic, and divine characters. Just as in rival high vs. lower class representations of Chaucer at the same time, the emerging divisions of private and public, sacred and secular, this bifurcation was articulated in terms of social class categories that were then emerging in force, much as Mikhail Bakhtin observes in Rabelais and His World. The idea of the nation as a "commonwealth" became strained even in the Edwardian era when its (and Piers') ultimately recalcitrant enemies were construed less as abstract vices to be opposed by virtue but more specifically as the policies and practices of landlords, nobles, kings and "private men." The moral and apocalyptic aspects of Piers flourished briefly at mid-century but then dissipated along with the idealism of the Edwardian reformers and their vision of a united commonwealth of interdependent estates. Popular literature evoking Piers by name or in spirit began to construe elites as people with whom one may compete--and win. Langland's "fair field of folk" became a socioeconomic playing field on which elites are perhaps no less important (or even, in fact, less important) to the nation than the common people. In this way Langland's Piers and Piers-like figures helped establish an English national identity based on and for the popular rather than the elite culture. This popular self-understanding seems to have flourished especially in the nonconformist Puritan mind where it could be radicalized. In other cases, it could be a basis for statist nationalism

According to the Privy Council, military conscription, which was at a high in the late sixteenth century, gave "great ease and good to the country to be ridd of those kinde of people whoe otherwyse wil be a burthen to the country." Such attempts to channel and appropriate the power of the commoners did not escape their notice. In Pierce Pennilesse, Thomas Nashe wrote, "If they have no service abroad, they will make mutinies at home..." Shakespeare's Henry IV similarly advises "busy giddy minds / With foreign quarrels." Popular awareness of such strategies to channel the (publicly denied) power of the commons toward royal interests did not generate resistance so much as an opportunity for the commons to insert their own interests into the transaction. Perhaps this is why in the Elizabethan era, Piers and Piers-like figures began to appear as itinerant laborers and tradesmen: tinkers, coblers and shoemakers who claimed to represent true Englishness over against effete, pretentious elites. While affirming their loyalty, these humble figures labored to define an English identity from below that was drawn from native, popular traditions going back to Langland and Chaucer. To the extent that the popular opposition between plain and ornate, honest and dissembling was associated with courtiers, (South European) foreignness and Catholicism, the plowman tradition continued to be anti-Catholic and staunchly Protestant. (As a political sensibility and a means of relating to a larger society, much of this mindset has endured, particularly in the United States where it still has a clear link to Protestantism.)

This popular image of the English commonwealth is frequently defined in the Elizabethan era in opposition to Catholic nations (i.e., France and Spain, notably) and "Rome," which are represented as less free and unvirtuous. Hutchins notes that "Even in the most unremittingly absolutist interpretations of Tudor theories of rule, the qualities that Elizabethans claim make a good ruler include dignified concern for the common people" (229). Popular plowman literature constantly reasserts this view: English society is based on its regard for its foundation in the commons. This idea can both empower and co-opt the power of the common people, however. Shakespeare's Henry V exhibits plain, soldierly behavior that allows him to level social distinctions between him and his men in his St. Crispin's day pep-talk before the battle of Agincourt: "He to-day that sheds his blood with me / Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile, / This day shall gentle his condition" (4.3.60-67). In the same year of Shakespeare's play (1599), Thomas Dekker's Shoemaker's Holiday depicted cobblers at home in England while the king is fighting in France. The cobblers declare their lowly nobility, and the hero, Simon Eyre, becomes Mayor of London--another image of tenuously levelled class distinctions at odds with social realities. (See Hobsbawm, Hutchins, Ayers, Dollimore and Sinfield, McEachern, Neill, Kastan, Maynard, Straznicky, and Stevenson.)

As a sturdy working-class fellow in the popular culture, it is not surprising that Piers never made it into the works of the elite writers who predominate in the English literary canon. Aristocrats, like Sir Philip Sidney, disdained the imitation of Chaucer for his old, uncouth language, which is a judgment based in class prejudice as much as aesthetics. Moreover, Piers was even more archaic and parochial, with the added notoriety of political subversiveness and (now illegal) prophecy. University educated, aspiring courtier-writers with poorer, often rural, backgrounds (e.g., Spenser and Harvey) may have been uneasy with a tradition that sometimes cast a cold eye on the lives and ambitions of upwardly mobile urbanites like themselves. Others, like Greene and Nashe, would exploit this anxiety and use the plowman tradition in order to lampoon would-be courtiers like Harvey, who took the attack very personally. In Nashe we find a new Piers, Pierce Pennilesse, who represents the young London malcontent writer who desires but lacks patronage and recognition of his talent. While this literature is far removed from the straightforward religious and political criticisms of Crowley and others, writers like Nashe and Greene were still finding ways to use the old moral-satirical tradition to expose and attack--or just laugh at--vices directly related to contemporary social and political conditions.