Langland, William

(ca. 1330–ca. 1388)

   Almost nothing can be said with certainty about the author of the popular and influential 14thcentury DREAM VISION poem PIERS PLOWMAN. In the past, there was controversy as to whether a single author wrote all three versions of the poem, known by scholars as the A-, B-, and C-texts. As many as five different authors were projected at one time, but the current critical consensus is that a single author, named William Langland, is responsible for all three texts.

   Two 15th-century manuscript notes attribute the poem to Langland, and a line in the B-text (Schmidt 1995, passus 15, l. 152) is apparently intended as a play on the author’s name: It can be translated as “I have lived in the land, my name is Long Will.” In one manuscript a Latin note identifies Langland as the son of Eustace de Rokayle, who was a supporter of Lord Despenser and held land from him in Oxfordshire at a place called Shipton-under-Wychwood. It seems likely Langland’s father was a franklin rather than a member of the noble class. Some have conjectured that Langland may have been illegitimate, but it is not necessary to make that assumption: It was not uncommon in the 14th century for father and son to be known by different surnames.

   Any other information about Langland’s life can only be conjectured from the three texts of the poem.While it is certainly dubious to identify the narrator of a medieval text, particularly an ALLEGORY like Piers Plowman, with the author himself, it was customary for the narrator of a dream vision to be at least a parody of the author himself (as in CHAUCER’s dream visions). Furthermore the specific detail of some of the “autobiographical” aspects of the Dreamer (named, allegorically and autobiographically, “Will”) are specific enough to suggest they are personal details—like Chaucer’s reference in The HOUSE OF FAME to his accounting practices as controller of customs.

   Thus when, in the B-text, Langland refers to his age as 45 years, scholars have assumed that he must have been born in about 1330, since the B-text seems to have been completed about 1377 (judging from a reference in the prologue to the coronation of RICHARD II, which would have taken place in that year). Langland was certainly from the West Midlands, since he writes in that dialect, and it is assumed that he lived much of his early life in or near Malvern Hills, which forms the setting for the first two visions of the poem. It is believed he was born at Cleobury Mortimer in Shropshire, about eight miles from Malvern Hills.

   Langland speaks in the C-text of attending school. Many believe he was educated at the priory of Great Malvern in Worcestershire, and perhaps later at Oxford. He certainly trained for the priesthood, but took only minor orders. Passages in his poem suggest that the reason for this was that he was forced to leave school by the death of his father and other financial supporters (perhaps during the BLACK DEATH, when Hugh Despenser III is known to have died). He also indicates that he—or at least Will the Dreamer—had a wife named Kitte and a daughter, Callotte. A married cleric could not advance in the church beyond the rank of subdeacon. These things led E. Talbot Donaldson (1965) to conjecture that Langland was an acolyte, a poor clerk without a benefice and no way to make a living within the church hierarchy. He certainly seems to have been poor.

   In the C-text Will is shown excusing his shiftless lifestyle before the allegorical characters Reason and Conscience by arguing that his position as a tonsured clerk should exempt him from manual labor: His only tools to support himself are his prayer book and Psalms with which he prays and sings the office of the dead for anyone that would pay him. He may also have picked up occasional odd clerical jobs in the city of London, where, according to the C-text, he was living in the city at Cornhill with his wife and daughter.

   The only other thing we know about Langland is that, in the midst of the poverty that seems to have followed him his entire adult life, he worked for some 25 to 30 years honing and revising his masterpiece. The A-text, whose character Lady Meed is believed to be modeled on the figure of Alice Perrers, mistress of King EDWARD III, for that reason must have been written in 1365 or soon after. The B-text, as already noted,must have been completed around 1377. Scholars generally agree that Langland was probably still at work on the text when he died. Though some independent evidence suggests that Langland may have been dead by 1387, his apparent allusions to a Statute of Laborers of 1388 make that date more likely the date of his death.

   If Langland was anything like the character of Will in the poem—and it is possible that he creates a kind of exaggerated parody of himself there—he may have been a gaunt, tall fellow (nicknamed “Long Will”), who had wandered about a great deal and done some begging, had little use for the rich or powerful, and was impulsive and sometimes contentious.What we can be sure of is that he was an original and gifted poet whose single masterpiece continues to amuse, puzzle, and move readers even today.

   Bibliography

   ■ Alford, John A. A Companion to Piers Plowman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

   ■ Donaldson, E. Talbot. Piers Plowman: The C-Text and Its Poet. Yale Studies in English, 114. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1966.

   ■ Du Boulay, F. R. H. The England of Piers Plowman: William Langland and His Vision of the Fourteenth Century. Cambridge, U.K.: Brewer, 1991.

   ■ Langland,William. Piers Plowman: A New Translation of the B-text. Translated by A. V. C. Schmidt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

   ■ ———. The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Critical Edition of the B-text based on Trinity College Cambridge MS B.15.17. Edited by A.V. C. Schmidt. 2nd ed. London: Everyman, 1995.

   ■ Wittig, Joseph S. William Langland Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1997.