Will Langland, wandering and discontented, is the self-styled subject and creator of Piers Plowman. We know this because his name is repeatedly and indelibly written into the text. The most famous occurrence is at line 152 in Passus XV of the B-text where the narrator's name is revealed in a cryptogram when he says: ‘“I have lyved in londe,’’ quod I, ‘‘my name is Longe Wille”’. By weaving his name into the text, Will Langland ensures that the poem's textual transmission will always be accompanied by the name of its professed author. Yet manuscript copies of the variant forms of the poem are almost universally silent on the question of its authorship, in some cases ascribing it to its fictional hero Piers. As Anne Middleton has pointed out, ‘Piers Plowman, who is rarely present in the narrative and seldom speaks, was widely taken to be the centre and source of authority for the poet's powerful innovation, and in contemporary imagination Piers effectively supplanted the author as a putatively actual historical being’.

Piers the Plowman's role in contemporary discourses of religious and political dissent was the subject of the last chapter. However, even if Piers is the largely absent centre of the narrative, the shadowy figure of Will still remains the enigmatic means of that narrative's formulation. The diverse and often contradictory accounts Will gives of his social identity during the course of the poem have traditionally posed difficulties for its readers. It has proved hard to read Piers Plowman as an account of the development of a unified subject in the humanist tradition. In the past, this has sometimes contributed to the critical opinion of Piers Plowman as an unreadable text. More recently the text has been opened up in such a way that the issue of what constitutes subjectivity itself has been brought to the fore. Thus, as David Lawton argued persuasively in the very first Yearbook of Langland Studies, rather than searching for a unified humanist ‘I’ in the text, it will perhaps be more valuable to look towards different models of ‘consciousness’ and ‘personality’ if we are to understand the complex process of subject-formation in Langland's text.