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Updated: June 27, 2025
Of course I have Minnie Wager. She'll soon be eleven, you know. I do my best with her. 'Mrs. Langland says you have done wonders. 'Minnie will never learn much from books; I feel pretty sure of that. But' she laughed 'everyone has a strong point, if it can be discovered, and I really think I have found Minnie's at last. It was quite by chance.
But his sympathy reached no less the life of the lowly; the poor widow in her narrow cottage, and that "trewe swynkere and a good," the plowman whom Langland had made the hero of his vision.
That is, both inhabiting North Jutland and the islands of Funen, Zeeland, Langland, Laland, and Falster. Forst. Formerly called Apdrede, and explained to be the Obotrites. Alluding, doubtless, to the country from whence the Saxons who inhabited England had come of old.
Langland, in the Vision of Piers Plowman, makes the first mention of his popularity: "I kan not parfitly my paternoster, as the priest sayeth, But I kan rymes of Robyn Hode and Randolf, Earl of Chester". Again, in John Fordun's Scottish Chronicle, written about 1360, we find him described not only as a notorious robber, but as a man of great charity.
Thus men will call a universal satirist like Langland a "morning star of the Reformation," or some such rubbish; whereas the Reformation was not larger, but much smaller than Langland. It was simply the victory of one class of his foes, the greedy merchants, over another class of his foes, the lazy abbots.
Langland also, in his "Vision of Piers Plowman," goes out of his way to denounce them for their levelling doctrines: "Envy heard this and bade friars go to school, And learn logic and law and eke contemplation, And preach men of Plato and prove it by Seneca That all things under Heaven ought to be in common, And yet he lieth, as I live, and to the lewd so preacheth For God made to men a law and Moses it taught
His assertion of the absolute impracticable nature of socialistic organisation, as he knew it in his own age, was too good a weapon to be neglected by those who sought about for means of defence for their own individualistic theories; whereas others, like the friars of whom Wycliff and Langland spoke, and who headed bands of luckless peasants in the revolt of 1381 against the oppression of an over-legalised feudalism, were blind to this remarkable expression of Aquinas' opinion, and quoted him only when he declared that "by nature all things were in common," and when he protested that the socialist theory of itself contained nothing contrary to the teaching of the gospel or the doctrines of the Church.
Revived, after long disuse, by Langland and other poets of the West Midlands in the fourteenth century, it had soon again been swept out of fashion by the irresistible charm of the genius of Chaucer. The Tale of Gamelyn, dating apparently from the first quarter of the fifteenth century, is probably the last poem of note in which the once universal metre is even partially employed.
Although he speaks bitter words against the evil deeds of priest and monk, he does not attack the Church. To him she is still Holy Church, a radiant and lovely lady. The Vision of Piers Ploughman, by W. Langland IN all the land there is perhaps no book so common as the Bible.
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.
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