The Yearbook of Langland Studies

This essay offers a reading of Piers that centres on the poem’s famous and muchstudied repetition of reddere. Rather than construing that repetition as simply repetition, the essay suggests that we think of that repetition as a poetic refrain in the poem. In making this suggestion, the essay also synthesizes and contributes to the extant body of theories of refrain - both in contemporary and medieval contexts. Encountering reddere as a refrain fosters a non-linear and non-argumentative orientation toward the poem’s deeply-graven commitment to economic justice.

This essay examines the possibility that John Ball acquired Piers Plowman from a personal connection with the poet and revisits the evidence that a William Rokele, priest in Easthorpe (Essex) was the author of Piers Plowman. Johnston then turns to John Ball, showing that he lived in Colchester, quite close to Rokele. In closing, he reads several moments from the A text as offering a radical social critique, arguing that such moments could well have found a sympathetic reader in Ball.

This article investigates the nature of hiatus and elision in fourteenth-century alliterative verse by using a series of case studies from within and beyond the alliterative tradition. In particular the article considers whether elision between the -ly suffix and a following word beginning with a vowel (or h + vowel) was a possibility in alliterative poetry. The author concludes that the degree to which poets and their scribes exploited the -ly and -liche suffixes as doublets for metrical purposes to avoid hiatus was variable from poem to poem and proposes several possible explanations for the observable differences in usage.

Reading Piers Plowman depends in part on being able to distinguish well-formed ‘unmarked’ Middle English usages from well-formed but ‘marked’ ones, and both kinds of utterances from ones that are simply scribal or even authorial errors. Not being native speakers of Middle English and lacking any fourteenth-century English grammar books or dictionaries, modern readers can make these judgements on behalf of Langland and his contemporaries only by examining late medieval usages, modern dictionaries, textual notes, and the like. Even with rigorous practices of historical reconstruction, then, we have little access to the daily language practices of medieval England or, more generally, to Middle English as a natural language. Focusing on two peculiar but well-established forms, this paper suggests that for as much as Piers Plowman reveals about medieval theology and social practice, the poem also tells us that there are things about medieval English that we do not, and perhaps cannot, know.

This essay draws on new research in alliterative metrics in order to locate Langland’s verse techniques in metrical history and cultural history. The first section summarizes progress in the study of Middle English alliterative metre, with emphasis on the observable metrical development that justifies reference to a durable alliterative tradition spanning the seventh through the sixteenth centuries. The second section compares the metre of Piers Plowman with the emergent metrical model, identifying major similarities and minor differences between Piers Plowman and other fourteenth-century alliterative poems. The third section explores the cultural implications of the similarities and differences, thereby situating Langland’s formal choices in the metrical landscape of late fourteenth-century London. Ultimately, I argue that the metre of Piers Plowman reflects the interaction of a major diachronic and a major synchronic force, the durable alliterative tradition and Langland’s metrical landscape.

The Roman de la Rose and Deguileville’s Pèlerinages-trilogy have often been invoked as possible sources for Piers Plowman, yet their deep and pervasive impact on Langland largely remains to be explored. Rather than being mere sources or quarries for episodes, characters, and topoi, these slippery and capacious allegorical poems define the very space within which Piers Plowman can materialize, shaping the major themes, scope, and method of Langland’s own allegorical poetics. Their influence on Langland’s choice of a first-person narrative voice to recount his dream vision is particularly profound: rather than simply providing Langland with an influential authorial model to be emulated, they introduce a first-person subject produced-yet-bounded by fluctuating and unstable textuality. This tradition sustains Langland’s constant questioning of his poetic craft, and his protracted process of revision.

This article contributes to the developing field of Piers Plowman and the French tradition by arguing that Langland engages with French texts such as the Roman de la Rose and Machaut’s Remède de Fortune in a deep and critical way, weaving French literary influence into the language and theology of his poem. In particular, this essay considers Langland’s use of the rhyme pair wiket-cliket in passus 5, tracing the rhyme to a French source text, and examining how the sexual valence of these terms may have shaped the salvific theology of Langland’s dream vision.

This essay returns to the uses of the Roman de Fauvel in Piers Plowman, in order to show the unusual depth of Langland’s engagement with that poem and Fauvel’s close association with Isabella of France, Edward II’s much-maligned widow - and in turn to claim that the figure of Meed begins in part as a topical satire on Isabella herself. In this and other ways, Meed epitomizes ‘topicality’. Yet the process of revising Piers Plowman (the essay argues) included increasing distance from any one topical meaning. The essay traces the literary and historical reputation of Isabella, and measures that against more immediate evidence of her resolutely pro-French patronage and cultural agenda in the realm of Essex and London to which the poet was probably connected. This context helps explain Langland’s response to the topical Fauvel, a surprising spur for his own assessments of literary value and his production of a unique selfreflective and philosophical satire.

This essay investigates the mutual use of the ‘belling the cat’ fable in Langland’s Prologue to Piers Plowman, in Thomas Brinton’s sermon from 1376, and in a cluster of poems about the Hundred Years War by Langland’s French contemporary, Eustache Deschamps. Although the fable was popular in their day, only these three authors offer it a specifically topical application, and each, the essay argues, uses it to critique administrative dysfunction and excessive taxation during the Hundred Years War. By teasing out this Anglo-French political context, the essay offers a new reading of Langland’s mouse’s exhortation of inaction before the Rodent Parliament as pointedly reflective of debates surrounding the war in the Good Parliament of 1376. It thus argues for Langland’s engagement with international, rather than only domestic, politics and for his participation in broader, cross-Channel literary currents, rather than purely insular ones.

This article looks at what scholars have long called the popular French song at the end of Langland’s prologue. In light of the forms of variation that occur through the versions and in different manuscripts, it argues that the song is not a record of an actual popular song, but a synthetic everysong, a song designed to merely sound like any popular song. The essay ends by considering what Langland’s creation of a fake French song can tell us about the limits of source study, Langland’s view on popular French literature, and Langland’s understanding of the relationship between literature and labour.

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.