Piers The Ploughman: Historical Source Analysis

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Source Analysis: Prologue of Piers the Ploughman

Candidate:

100004129

Module: ME3420, The Rich and the Poor in the Middle Ages Date:

23/04/2016

Word Count: 1648

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Source Analysis: Prologue of Piers the Ploughman William Langland is a frustratingly obscure figure lacking in significant biographical detail and even uncontested authorial attribution,1 and thus analysis of the source is better served by contextualisation within the events of the fourteenth century. This turbulent period witnessed the Great Famine, recurrent bouts of the Plague, and the Hundred Years War, all of which helped crystallise medieval ideas regarding poverty and the nature of the deserving poor. Piers Plowman is highly critical of false beggars as well as the pursuit of material luxury, particularly by clerical figures who profess poverty but overlook their responsibility to the truly destitute. Moreover, the central theme of worldly avarice imperilling salvation is clearly dictated by the vision as perched tenuously between imaginings of heaven (‘a tower high up against the sun’) and hell (‘deep, dark pits’). However, Langland also offers a solution within his allegorical vision, and the purpose of the source as morally guiding is expressed early as the narrator dons ‘shaggy woollen clothes, as if I were a shepherd’. This recalls the biblical presentation of Jesus: ‘Like a shepherd He will tend his flock’ (Isaiah 40:11)2, and thus the narrator assumes a pseudo-clerical authority to preach to the otherwise abandoned flock, enforced by the framework of the ‘marvellous dream’ within the biblical tradition of prophetic visions. The introduction first of those who ‘laboured at ploughing and sowing’ is highly significant, as it suggests that this is the natural and proper state, as expressed in the Old Testament: ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread’ (Genesis 3:19). Otherwise uncriticised, these people are described as having ‘no time for pleasure’, thus suggesting that we might use for them a contemporary classification such as the ‘miserable poor’, being those who are working but in a precarious situation and potentially in need and deserving of charity. The source alludes to morally corrupted persons sustaining their hardship as they ‘produce food for the gluttons to waste’, which is contrary to the Aristotelian notion popular in the Middle Ages that fundamental justice required balance, as echoed by Aquinas: ‘One man cannot overabound in external riches without another

1 David Benson, ‘The Langland Myth’, in Kathleen Hewett-Smith (ed.), William Langland's Piers Plowman (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp.83-99. 2 Biblical quotations accessed online through [22 April, 2016]

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man lacking them’.3 Thus, the immorality of society and obsession with material gain is seen to harm the honest poor. These labourers are directly juxtaposed with false beggars who refuse to work despite being able. Hermits are described as ‘great long lubbers who hated work’, and others ‘pose as half-wits…and could easily work for a living if they had to’, suggesting paranoia about those who might fake disability to avoid work. Indeed, the beggars are described as having ‘bellies and packs full of bread’, making it clear that these are neither, to use Mollat’s phrasing, the desperate poor who need to beg to survive, nor fiscal paupers in need of assistance, and thus they are nondeserving.4 The fear of shirkers became particularly pressing in the fourteenth century as the Plague led to a labour shortage and increased itinerancy which enabled vagabondage, leading to measures such as the 1349 Ordinance of Labourers which targeted ‘some rather willing to beg in idleness, than by labour to get their living’.5 As Sharon Farmer has highlighted, toiling for sustenance was the punishment given to man after the Fall, meaning that false beggars lived in sin as they shirked their God-given penance.6 However, the source also expresses how those working might fall into moral poverty despite their seeming success, highlighting the difference between worldly and heavenly riches. Piers describes the apparent success of those who live by trade, saying ‘in our worldly eyes such men seem to thrive’, but this necessarily alludes to the heavenly judgment. The temporary and damaging nature of earthly wealth is well-attested to in scripture, as exemplified in the oft-quoted phrase ‘it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of the needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God’ (Mark 10:25). Lester Little has demonstrated how increasing commercialisation caused concern about implications for the soul, stating that ‘philanthropy was the key to justifying profit-making’. 7 Piers Plowman also advocates charity as remedial through criticising a series of other activities undertaken desirous of the same effect but without success, relying heavily upon the semantic field of deception. He speaks of pilgrims ‘spinning such yarns of 3 Aquinas, ST. II-II, q.118 a. 1, quoted in Anne Scott, Piers Plowman and the Poor (Dublin, 2004), p.34. 4 Michel Mollat, The Poor in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Yale, 1978), p. 86. 5 Albert Beebe White and Wallace Notestein (ed.), Source Problems in English History (1915), p.141. 6 Sharon Farmer, Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris: Gender, Ideology, and the Daily Lives of the Poor (Cornell, 2002), p.128. 7 Lester Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (London, 1978), p.44.

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the shrines they had visited’ and a Pardoner who ‘claimed to have the power to absolve…broken fasts and vows of every kind’. Thus, the people exchange their material wealth, ‘rings and jewellery’, for ‘letters of indulgences’, but the fact he operates using a misappropriated Bishops’ seal shows the inefficacy of this supposed solution. It is here that charity is strategically juxtaposed as a more pious option to dispose of wealth and assure salvation, with the assertion that the money ‘but for [the Pardoner and priest], would go to the poor of the parish’. Thus, the avarice of these figures, like the false beggars, guided help away from real need and obscured the pathway to salvation. It is not without consequence that the source locates charity within the communal framework of the parish, as local cases of need were believed to be more greatly deserving. St Ambrose espoused that ‘We should help our own before strangers’,8 and particularly within the post-Plague environment which greatly feared vagrancy, local charity was seen as a way to ensure that only the deserving poor benefited, leading to the persecution of people giving alms to vagabonds which also served to ensure resources remained within the community.9 The description of the vision as not a hierarchy but a ‘smooth plain, thronged with all kinds of people, high and low together’ is also suggestive of the interdependence of the community on a larger scale, a system which can only function adequately with a balancing of resources, as exemplified through the negative metaphor of the labourer feeding the glutton. The ability of charity to reinforce positive social bonds is often emphasised as historians increasingly view medieval charity within Mauss’ anthropological framework of giving. However, the source presents the key detractors from the Christian community to be the churchmen themselves, and the frustration with the contradiction between those who profess poverty but do not suffer like the involuntarily indigent is evident. The widespread corruption of Friars is emphasised as Langland states that ‘all four Orders of them’ operated by twisting the Scriptures ‘in their greed for fine clothes’. This is clearly against the rule of Usus Pauper which dictated against ownership and advocated the use only of the fewest resources possible, as found in The Rule of the Friars Minor: ‘the brothers shall take nothing for themselves’.10 By saying that ‘Charity has gone into business, and become confessor-in-chief to wealthy lords’, the source suggests that the Friars serve only the needs of the wealthy in order to profit themselves, thereby abandoning the poor that need them. The priests are also seen to 8 Mollat, The Poor, p.32. 9 Marjorie McIntosh, Controlling Misbehaviour in England, 1370-1600 (Cambridge, 2002), p.92. 10 Rosalind R. Brooke, The Coming of the Friars (London, 1975), p.122.

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prioritise wealth over care for their flock, with the narrator relating that he ‘heard parish priests complaining that since the Plague their parishes were too poor to live in’, leading to them moving to London. In fact, the only group leading truly religious lives are the hermits and anchorites ‘who stay in their cells, and are not forever roaming about’, which once again reinforces the danger of the outside world as corrupting with ‘sensual pleasures’, a trap into which the friars and priests have fallen. Additionally, we are reminded of the key duties of the Church, including to ‘feed the poor’, yet clearly they are actively shirking their spiritual work, akin to the false beggars. The Plague also raised questions about ecclesiastical work by exposing the inadequacy of existing systems of poor relief which in the earlier Middle Ages were the purview of the Church. This led to an increase in direct lay charity without ecclesiastical mediation, one of the hallmarks of Vauchez’s debated ‘charitable revolution’.11 Langland’s critique of ecclesiastical individuals as corrupt seems to advocate this personal approach to salvation, as does his mention of the Cardinal virtues which he emphasises ‘are the gates on which swing Christ’s kingdom of heaven’. Thus, it is not through the intervention of bad-intentioned priests and pardoners that salvation is achievable, but by personal engagement with the virtues of Prudence, Justice, Temperance, and Courage. In particular Temperance and Justice can be seen within the Aristotelian framework of balance, as a fair society would be one which did not consume unethically the ploughman’s labour, and the practice of moderation would diminish the harmful material appetites of society, and in particular the clergy. As a final reminder not to represent oneself to God through the purchase of hollow indulgences and interventions, the last group mentioned are inefficacious lawyers, ‘who never once did they open their mouths out of love for our Lord’. Thus, as the opening recalled the biblical origins of mankind, here we are reminded of what shall be the end, and the necessity to prepare effectively for the eschatological Last Judgment where Jesus, aided by the poor, will be the judge.

11 James Brodman, Charity and Religion in Medieval Europe (Catholic University Press, 2009), p.55.

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Bibliography

Primary Sources King James Bible, accessed at <www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/> [22 April 2016]. Source Problems in English History, ed. Albert Beebe White and Wallace Notestein,(London, 1915). William Langland, Piers the Ploughman, trans. J. F. Goodridge (London, 1959), pp.63-69.

Secondary Sources Benson, David, ‘The Langland Myth’, in Kathleen Hewett-Smith (ed.), William Langland's Piers Plowman (New York: Routledge, 2001). Brodman, James, Charity and Religion in Medieval Europe (Catholic University Press, 2009). Brooke, Rosalind, The Coming of the Friars (London, 1975) Farmer, Sharon, Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris: Gender, Ideology, and the Daily Lives of the Poor (Cornell, 2002). Little, Lester, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (London, 1978). McIntosh, Marjorie, Controlling Misbehaviour in England, 1370-1600 (Cambridge, 2002). Mollat, Michel, The Poor in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Yale, 1978). Scott Anne, Piers Plowman and the Poor (Dublin, 2004).