Piers Plowman is one of the most important and poetically innovative works of medieval literature. Embracing every aspect of fourteenth-century- life from the most mundane (life in the local pub) to the most abstract (the meaning of imagination), this poem is at once a compendium of fourteenth-century, culture and a powerful evocation of a passionate quest for truth within the context of the most pressing social, economic, and religious realities.

Preface

Acknowledgments

Reading Middle English

Reading Langland's Alliterative Verse

Notes on the Middle English Texts

Note on the Translation

Using This Edition

Abbreviations

The Text of Piers Plowman

Prologue

Passus I

Passus II

Passus III

Passus IV

Passus V

Passus VI

Passus VII

Passus VIII

Passus IX

Passus X

Passus XI

Passus XII

Passus XIII

Passus XIV

Passus XV

Passus XVI

Passus XVII

Passus XVIII

Passus XIX

Passus XX

 APPENOIX: The "Autobiographical" Passage from the C-Version

Sources and Backgrounds

SCRIPTURAL AND RELIGIOUS

From the Douai Bible

    Moses and the Ten Commandments

    Psalm 22

    The Good Samaritan

    Paul's Allegory of Abraham

    The Whore of Babylon

  The Athanasian Creed

  From the Gospel of Nicodemus

   [The Harrowing of Hell]

  From Fasciculus Morum

  Envy and Bread

  From Pearl

 Julian of Norwich · From A Book of Showings to the Anchoress

Julian of Norwich

  Margery Kempe · From The Book of Margery Kempe

  Walter Hilton· Epistle on the Mixed Life

  From The Abbey of the Holy Ghost

  From The Castle of Love

Legends of the Virtuous Heathen

  From John Trevisa's Translation of Polychronicon

  [Aigolandus Rejects Christendom]

  From The Golden Legend translated by William Caxton

  The Story of Trajan

  From The Examination of William Thorpe

  Guild Ordinances of St. Peter's Church, Cornhill

  Kepe well x, and flee fro vii

  Mesure

POLITICAL AND HISTORICAL

The Plague, 1348-1349

 Thomas of Walsingham · On the Great Mortality in England,

Now Called the "First Pestilence"

  Robert of Avesbury· On the General Pestilence in England

Statutes of the Realm

 The Statute of Laborers, 1349

 The Statute of Pleading, 1362

Shorter Poems

  Pees maketh plente

  Bissop lorles

 Vertues and good lyvinge is cleped ypocrisie

  God Kepe the Kyng, and Save the Croune

Plowman Poems

  I-blessyd be Cristes sonde

 God Spede the Plough

 London Lyckpeny

 From Symonye and Covetise

Longer Poems

 From Wynnere and Wastoure

 Geoffrey Chaucer · From The General Prologue to The

Canterbury Tales

 From Richard the Redeless

 From Pierce the Ploughman's Crede

 From Mankind

The Letter of John Ball, Sent to the Commons of Essex

From the Chronicon Angliae

   [Alice Perrers and Edward III]

 The Crowning of a King

Thomas of Walsingham · From the Historia Anglicana

    [The Coronation of Richard If, July 16, 1377]

From The Maner and the Forme of the Coronacioun of Kyngis

  and Quenes of Engelonde

    [The King's Coronation Oaths]

 Thomas Brinton, Bishop of Rochester· Sermon 69

    [The Parliament of the Mice and Rats]

 The Case of the Earl of Devonshire

    Esturmy versus Courtenay, 1392

Criticism

E. Talbot Donaldson · [Summary of the Poem] (1986)

Robert Crowley· [A Renaissance Reader's Response] (1550)

C. S. Lewis · [On Langland's "Intellectual Imagination"] (1936)

Robert Worth Frank · From Piers Plowman and the Scheme of

  Salvation (1957)

Morton Bloomfield · From Piers Plowman as a Fourteenth-

  Century Apocalypse ( 1961 )

Charles Muscatine · From The Locus of Action in Medieval

  Narrative (1963)

George Kane· [Who Is William Langland?] (1965)

Elizabeth Salter and Derek Pearsall · Allegory and Realism and

  the Eigural Approach to Reality (1969)

Mary C. Schroeder (Carruthers) · The Character of Conscience

  in Piers Plowman (1970)

Jill Mann · Eating and Drinking in Piers Plowman (1979)

Anna Baldwin · From The Theme of Government in Piers

  Plowman ( 1981 )

John Burrow · The Action of Langland's Second Vision (1984)

David Aers · From Community, Gender, and Individual Identity

  (1988)

Derek Pearsall · Poverty and Poor People in Piers Plowman

  (1988)

Anne Middleton· [Kynde Name] (1989)

James Simpson · From Piers Plowman: An Introduction to the

  B-Text (1990)

 Ralph Hanna III · [Dating the A, B, and C Versions] (1993)

 C. David Benson · Piers Plowman and Parish Wall Paintings

   (1997)

 Mary Clemente Davlin, O.P. · The Place of God in Piers

  Plowman (2001 )

 Elizabeth D. Kirk· "What is this womman?" Langland on

  Women and Gender (2003)

Gloss

Selected Bibliography