LIFE.  Very little is known of Langland.  He was born probably near Malvern, in Worcestershire, the son of a poor freeman, and in his early life lived in the fields as a shepherd.  Later he went to London with his wife and children, getting a hungry living as clerk in the church.  His real life meanwhile was that of a seer, a prophet after Isaiah’s own heart, if we may judge by the prophecy which soon found a voice in Piers Plowman.  In 1399, after the success of his great work, he was possibly writing another poem called Richard the Redeless, a protest against Richard II; but we are not certain of the authorship of this poem, which was left unfinished by the assassination of the king.  After 1399 Langland disappears utterly, and the date of his death is unknown.

PIERS PLOWMAN.  “The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord,” might well be written at the beginning of this remarkable poem.  Truth, sincerity, a direct and practical appeal to conscience, and a vision of right triumphant over wrong,—­these are the elements of all prophecy; and it was undoubtedly these elements in Piers Plowman that produced such an impression on the people of England.  For centuries literature had been busy in pleasing the upper classes chiefly; but here at last was a great poem which appealed directly to the common people, and its success was enormous.  The whole poem is traditionally attributed to Langland; but it is now known to be the work of several different writers.  It first appeared in 1362 as a poem of eighteen hundred lines, and this may have been Langland’s work.  In the next thirty years, during the desperate social conditions which led to Tyler’s Rebellion, it was repeatedly revised and enlarged by different hands till it reached its final form of about fifteen thousand lines.

The poem as we read it now is in two distinct parts, the first containing the vision of Piers, the second a series of visions called “The Search for Dowel, Dobet, Dobest” (do well, better, best).  The entire poem is in strongly accented, alliterative lines, something like Beowulf, and its immense popularity shows that the common people still cherished this easily memorized form of Saxon poetry.  Its tremendous appeal to justice and common honesty, its clarion call to every man, whether king, priest, noble, or laborer, to do his Christian duty, takes from it any trace of prejudice or bigotry with which such works usually abound.  Its loyalty to the Church, while denouncing abuses that had crept into it in that period, was one of the great influences which led to the Reformation in England.  Its two great principles, the equality of men before God and the dignity of honest labor, roused a whole nation of freemen.  Altogether it is one of the world’s great works, partly because of its national influence, partly because it is the very best picture we possess of the social life of the fourteenth century: