THE WRITER AND HIS WORK

The writer of Piers Plowman teeters on the brink of complete anonymity. The scanty biographical details proffered by the poem's modern editors and critics are mainly gleaned from the internal, and often contradictory, evidence of his writing, possibly demonstrating more about a modern need for authorial biography than anything else. Only one or two assumptions about the man behind the poem are held to be noncontroversial. The poet's connection with the West Midlands is suggested by the famous opening description of May morning sunshine on the Malvern Hills and confirmed by the dialect of Middle English in which the poem is written. Similarly, the poet's description of himself as someone who was sent to school to be educated for a career in the Church is born out by the text 's extensive use of Latin quotations and its detailed discussion of theological and religious issues. Beyond this, the particulars of the poet's life are speculative to say the least and his various depictions of himself as a false hermit, idler, witless wanderer, minstrel, displaced cleric and London psalter-clerk make up a fictionalized and fragmented persona which cannot necessarily be seen as dealing in literal truths. Even the name ‘William Langland’ is taken from the internal, and possibly fictionalized evidence of the poem, rather than from an independent source or autographed manuscript copy. As a signature, ‘William Langland’ is fragmented and hidden within the poem, requiring the reader to piece its meaning together. The most complete instance of this occurs at Passus XV, line 152, where the Dreamer declares ‘I have lyved in londe’ … ‘my name is Longe Wille’.

Only one manuscript copy of the text offers any information about William Langland. An early fifteenth-century annotation connects Langland with the Malvern area of the West Midlands, stating that he was the son of a Stacy de Rokayle, a member of the gentry class who held lands at Shipton-under-Wychwood. The accuracy of this claim is difficult to assess, not least because it involves confirmation or refutation which requires recourse to the circular evidence of the text.