Introduction

In the last chapter, we saw that the poet’s call for missionaries is the outcome of the poem’s turn to history. Throughout the poem, the poet accuses clerics of failing their constituencies; they are grasping and sycophantic, illiterate or abstruse. In B.15, Langland recommends lay reading of history as the path to clerical reform. Secular lords should encourage clergy to act “historically”: to remodel their lives on those of the saints, and to imitate their ecclesiastical forebears, who ventured their lives converting non-believers. In passūs 16–18, the poet continues to take an historical approach to faith, but his focus shifts from universal history to biblical narrative. Together these passūs make a thrilling “prequel” to passus 15: at the beginning of passus 16, the dreamer enters an inner dream in which he beholds the Garden of Eden, the Fall, and the birth of Christ. Flanked by Old Testament figures Abraham and Moses, the dreamer races down the road of gospel time until he reaches Jerusalem in passus 18, where he beholds the Crucifixion and the harrowing of hell.

Piers Plowman is not charged with converting the heathen: the poem is too diffuse to win new souls, however much it forecasts the Christian conquest of the world as its own narrative end. But neither does the poet’s call to convert the heathen merely recycle a Western Christian fantasy that the walls of Islam will one day be breached and the Jews converted or cast out. Instead, it reveals a poem deeply engaged with the long history of belief. Like Mandeville’s Travels and like many other texts from this period, Piers Plowman locates the proper discussion of belief on the road through the sacred past – a road littered with believers and non-believers, witnesses to and deniers of Christian faith.