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The use of French in Piers Plowman shows a predictable orientation toward social relations, ethics, religion, law, and rhetoric; it can signal politeness, pretension, and hypocrisy. But it is not all easily explicable - what do we make of the fact that ‘Piers’ seems in late medieval England to be rather a rare name? In general, however, Langland’s decision to write in English and his irreverential manipulation of anything approaching ‘sources’ means the constant occlusion of the poem’s many French referents. Nevertheless, insofar as the poem does invoke other texts and traditions (French or otherwise), this invariably raises questions with larger social, institutional, structural, and discursive implications.