This topic is at the same time both slender and broad. Slender because what literary material was written about medieval labour is usually short if complete, or fragmentary if embedded in a larger text. Broad because the material comes from a lengthy and varied period, appears in a wide range of genres, and has many different types of approach, audience and thematic implication. Even if a modern definition of literature is used, focusing only on ‘creative’ writing, that includes mostly poetry in various genres. As a result of this simultaneous slenderness and breadth, the comforting systems of conventional literary treatments are not available; we cannot deal simply in terms of an author, a period, a genre. Therefore this chapter is theme-based and will try to sort the discussion of labour in medieval literature into different categories based on content and approach. It will also, because of both space and range, restrict itself to material written in English. And because of the focus of this collection I will concentrate on the fourteenth century, though I will make some references to texts surviving from a little later which either seem likely to have been current in the fourteenth century or enlighten its texts in some way.

Throughout, the purpose will be to see to what extent the surviving material about labour gives access to what Raymond Williams called ‘a structure of feeling’, a sense of what it felt like to be involved in the debates about the role, duties and even rights of labour in the fourteenth century. Some of the material has been usefully discussed: John Scattergood’s Poetry and Politics in the Fifteenth Century and Janet Coleman’s English Literature in History, 1350–1400: Medieval Readers and Writers offer analytic surveys, while Ordelle G. Hill in The Manor, the Plowman, and the Shepherd deals interestingly with the theme of labour. Recent studies with a historical focus are an essay by J. R. Maddicott on ‘Poems of Social Protest in Early Fourteenth-Century England’ and Peter Coss’s ‘Introduction’ to the reprint of Thomas Wright’s Political Songs of England. The major editors of these materials, notably Carleton Brown, R. H. Robbins, Celia and Kenneth Sisam and James M. Dean often locate interesting comments in their notes.