The Vision of Piers the Plowman -

William Langland

The Folio Society

2014

512 páginas

17h 4m

ISBN-13: 1111111111111

The Vision of Piers the Plowman is at once a bitter satire on a corrupt church, an uncaring nobility and a sinful humanity, and a passionate search for truth, beauty and redemption. Written in the 14th century, this poem offers us the whole medieval world – its people and its preoccupations – and presents them in full and glorious colour, realised in fresh language that is sometimes earthy, sometimes lyrical.

We meet a magnificent range of characters – ‘hermits’ wandering to town with their mistresses following behind, friars wearing costly gowns and a man who, instead of going to church, gets so drunk that he ‘pissed four pints in a Paternoster’s length’. Searching for repentance and redemption, the dreamer is led to a vision of sublime beauty – first Christ’s death and then a final battle between the newly Christ-like Piers and the Devil.

Folio Society editors spent a long time researching the best available text before deciding to follow the Norton Critical Edition, which features the accessible yet deliberately unobtrusive translation by E. Talbot Donaldson. Our edition is also illuminated by an introduction from the Irish poet and academic Bernard O’Donoghue. The book is beautifully bound in leather and cloth blocked with a design by Harry Brockway. The paper itself is exceptionally fine, and its shade was carefully selected to work with the engravings.
The narrator describes lying down by a stream in May in the Malvern Hills, and it is hard for a reader not to picture the author also sitting by those streams, carefully composing his poem as he listens to the musical sound of the water. We know little about the lives of many of the great medieval authors. Chaucer is a rare exception. Indeed, for a time, Piers the Plowman was attributed to Chaucer – who else, thought antiquarians, could have written such an intricate and beautiful allegory?

On a manuscript from Trinity College, Dublin, a 15th-century hand had noted, ‘Stacy de Rokayle was the father of William de Langlond; this Stacy was of noble birth and dwelt in Shipton-under-Wychwood … The aforesaid William made the book which is called Piers Plowman.’ Further evidence is contained within the poem itself. In Passus XV, the narrator tells us, ‘I have lyved in londe … my name is Longe Wille’ – turned backwards his name is spelled out as Will Longe Londe.

William must have been something of a rebel – his criticisms of the church are even more biting than Chaucer’s, and an early critic called him ‘a malcontent’. He was deeply affected by the economic hardship of ordinary people, something other poets rarely addressed, and spoke feelingly of ‘prisoners in pits and poor folk in cottages’.

Yet the author was much more than a critic or satirist, for his poem reaches for the sublime, echoing Revelations and forming an English prophetic voice that would inspire other poets, such as William Blake. He has a passion for nature and beauty, and a keen eye for detail that speaks to us across the centuries. The dreamer beholds a bird’s nest and acknowledges, ‘No carpenter could, I think, copy her nest correctly/ If any mason made a mould for it, it would be most wonderful.’