rings with the hope of the Second Coming and the
dawn of the millennial era of the heavenly kingdom.
See also ALLEGORY, PIERS PLOWMAN (OVERVIEW).
FURTHER READING
Bloomfi eld, Morton. Piers Plowman as a Fourteenth-Century
Apocalypse. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University
Press, 1962.
Joshua R. Eyler
PIERS PLOWMAN TRADITION The PIERS
PLOWMAN tradition comprises a large body of mostly
anonymous, pseudepigraphic, and often hybrid texts
produced over more than 200 years in which fi ction
and history, text and context cannot be easily differen-
tiated. Its defi ning feature is the political appropriation
of the fi gure and ethos of Piers Plowman—the charac-
ter and the poem—as a voice for political and religious
dissent during and after the PEASANTS’ REVOLT and
throughout the English Reformation in the 16th and
17th centuries.
One of the leaders of the Peasants’ Revolt, a priest
named John Ball, put Piers and other characters from
Piers Plowman into cryptic verses and speeches that were
circulated in letters among the rebels. Consequently, the
Dieulacres Abbey Chronicle named Piers as one of the
leaders of the rising, as if he were a real person. This
view of Piers was encouraged early in the history of the
poem’s scribal transmission, as the character Piers was
often taken as an authorial persona, if not the name of
the actual author whose name and identity was obscured,
remaining a subject of some debate to this day.
In some contemporary CHRONICLEs of the Peasants’
Revolt, Ball and the Lollards (see LOLLARDISM) were
blamed for the revolt, and Piers began to be associated
with heresy and rebellion. The earliest literary works
comprising the Piers Plowman tradition follow in the
wake of these events, although they and their 16th-
century successors are not antimonarchical or support-
ive of rebellion. Like WILLIAM LANGLAND, who may
have written the C-text version of Piers Plowman to dis-
associate himself from the revolt, they look for the
reform of the English church and society by the
removal of abuses in what the authors deem a restor-
ative, rather than an innovative, project.
The Piers Plowman tradition proper begins with a
body of anonymous poetic and prose compositions cir-
culated by manuscript that have an explicit or attrib-
uted kinship with Piers Plowman. They are politically
charged, sometimes allegorical social complaints with
elements of SATIRE and polemic. These chiefl y include
PIERCE THE PLOUGHMAN’S CREDE (1395), The Complaynte
of the Ploughman/The Plowman’s Tale (1400), The Praier
and Complaynte of the Ploweman unto Christe (1400),
Richard the Redeless (1405), MUM AND THE SOTHSEGGER
(1405), and “The CROWNED KING” (1415). Many of
these texts have a more or less evident Lollard message
and provenance. Richard the Redeless and Mum and the
Sothsegger are probably by the same author and may be
two parts of a single work.
The Piers Plowman tradition was revived and trans-
formed in the 16th century by the appearance of
printed, and somewhat altered, pro-Protestant versions
of The Praier and Complaynte of the Ploweman unto
Christe (1531/32), The Plowman’s Tale (1533–36, 1548),
Piers Plowman (1550, 1561), and Pierce the Ploughman’s
Crede (1553, 1561). The purpose of these books was to
support Protestantism, in part by establishing its antiq-
uity and thus its authority. Notably, The Praier and
Complaynte was printed with a preface possibly by the
reformer William Tyndale. It was attacked by SIR
THOMAS MORE, and it appeared in four editions of John
Foxe’s Actes and Monuments from 1570 to 1610. The
Plowman’s Tale appeared in four editions of GEOFFREY
CHAUCER’s Works from 1542 to 1602. At that time
Chaucer was widely considered to have been a Lollard,
largely because of his association with poems he did not
write, especially The Plowman’s Tale, which was thought
to correspond to Chaucer’s Lollard Plowman in the
GENERAL PROLOGUE TO THE CANTERBURY TALES.
There is a considerable body of original 16th-cen-
tury texts that might be included in the Piers Plowman
tradition by dint of their use of plowmen fi gures or
truth-telling characters named Piers in a satirical or
critical fashion. For example, EDMUND SPENSER’s The
SHEPHEARDES CALENDER has a character named Piers and
borrows directly from The Plowman’s Tale. Considering
only the texts that contain or refer to a “Piers Plow-
man,” the following stand out: A Godly Dyalogue and
Dysputacyion Betwene Pyers Plowman and a Popysh Pre-330 PIERS PLOWMAN TRADITION