Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Somewhere in London in the 1360s, an emaciated clerk falls asleep and dreams of home. Home is Cleobury or Shipton-under-Wychwood or Burford or Tewkesbury (Hanna 1993), but in our dream the clerk wanders the hills and crosses the brooks of his childhood and sees, as he could see only in a dream, polluted, riotous London arrayed before him. The innocence of his wanderings across childhood hills is darkened by his waking experience of London's corruption and injustice and its ignorance of God. When he wakes, the poem he will work on for the rest of his life, writing and rewriting, constantly revising, has been seeded. It provides a conflicted political conscience and extraordinary moral sense with devastating focus. And so the most shattering vernacular critique of medieval English society and its spiritual life is begun.Or so the story goes in a convenient, if crude, précis of the dominant critical narrative of twentieth-century Piers Plowman studies. It has come to define what C. David Benson has recently termed the ‘Langland myth’: the critically convenient fiction of a righteous poet and his insistent, visionary and revisionary poetics (Benson 2004). But as in all myths there is some value in the story it purports to tell. It describes William Langland, the poet of three, or perhaps four, versions of Piers Plowman and his quest, in Anne Middleton's provocative terms, ‘to revise ... log in or subscribe to read full text