that Carmelites were founded by Elijah himself. For a
contribution to the order, the Carmelite promises to
help the narrator. When the narrator suggests that the
Carmelite teach him the creed simply for the sake of
God’s love, the Carmelite calls him a fool and rushes
off to visit a woman preparing to leave money to his
order.
Finally the narrator comes across Piers, a poor plow-
man with three hungry children and a shoeless wife.
Piers, who accepts God’s will without question despite
his hard life, teaches the narrator the creed in straight-
forward, simple language. In passing, he praises the
virtues of Saint Dominic and Saint Francis, at the same
time berating the contemporary adherents of their
orders. In the end, the poet says that his only purpose
in writing is to reform those he satirizes. He prays God
to forgive him if he has said anything wrong, and he
asks God to save all friars who are truly faithful, while
causing other friars to repent.
Antifraternal satire was abundant in the late Middle
Ages—one need only look as far as GEOFFREY CHAU-
CER’s GENERAL PROLOGUE TO THE CANTERBURY TALES,
where the conventional complaints about the friars’
easy penance, lechery, greed, and vanity are personi-
fi ed in the fi gure of Huberd the Monk. The theologian
John Wycliffe had gone farther, calling for the pope to
revoke the friars’ privileges. In Pierce the Ploughman’s
Crede, the poet has Piers cite Wycliffe’s views sympa-
thetically. He also has Piers express support for Walter
Brut, a Welsh Lollard (follower of Wycliffe) whom fri-
ars had condemned as a heretic in 1393. The poet
seems to be on dangerous footing in his sympathy for
the heretical Lollard sect, though he does uphold the
doctrine of transubstantiation in Piers’ description of
the Apostles’ Creed, a doctrine Wycliffe had rejected in
his late writings. In general, however, he is far more
sympathetic to the Lollard cause than Langland had
been, or than the authors of poems like MUM AND THE
SOTHSEGGER in the satirical PIERS PLOWMAN TRADITION.
The poet’s antifraternal satire and Lollard sympathies
have been the focus of most critical studies of the
poem, although some have focused on the poem as a
part of the ALLITERATIVE REVIVAL of the 14th century,
noting that, like its inspiration, Piers Plowman, this
poem makes no use of the specialized diction that
characterized the heroic kinds of texts that typifi ed
poems in that alliterative tradition.
FURTHER READING
Barr, Helen, ed. The Piers Plowman Tradition: A Critical Edi-
tion of Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede, Richard the Redeless,
Mum and the Sothsegger, and The Crowned King. London:
Dent, 1993.
Lampe, David. “The Satiric Strategy of Peres the Ploughmans
Crede.” In The Alliterative Tradition in the Fourteenth Cen-
tury, edited by Bernard S. Levy and Paul E. Szarmach,
69–80. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1981.
Lawton, David. “Lollardy and the Piers Plowman Tradition.”
Modern Language Review 76 (1981): 780–793.
Szittya, Penn. The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Litera-
ture. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987.
von Nolcken, Christina. “Piers Plowman, the Wycliffi tes,
and Pierce the Plowman’s Creed.” The Yearbook of Langland
Studies 2 (1988): 71–102.
Jay RuudPIERS PLOWMAN (OVERVIEW) (WIL-
LIAM’S VISION OF PIERS PLOWMAN)
WILLIAM LANGLAND (ca. 1362–1386) Piers Plow-
man is an extensive and complex DREAM VISION that
relies heavily on ALLEGORY in order to instruct its read-
ers. It is a combination of political/social commentary,
religious history, and salvation manual—the main
question of the text is “How can I save my soul?” Other
literary forms incorporated throughout include debate
and dialogue, as well as the use of parable and exempla
(see EXEMPLUM). Very little is known about the work’s
purported author, WILLIAM LANGLAND, though Piers
was popular during its day. It is likely that Langland
was a clerk in minor orders, which explains his famil-
iarity with religious tenets and works. The main char-
acter is the naive and humble Will, a plowman who
has fallen asleep in a fi eld.
There are at least 53 extant manuscripts of Piers
Plowman, and three (complete) versions, referred to as
the A-, B- and C-texts. The A-text is the shortest and
earliest, as well as being unfi nished. It was probably
written during the 1360s, though continually revised.
The B-text is dated between 1377 and 1381, and it is
the version cited by John Ball and other leaders of the
PEASANTS’ REVOLT. The C-text is believed to have been320 PIERS PLOWMAN