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is pompous and ineffective; and when he begins to talk about abiding by the law, they are not impressed, but 'let light of the law, and less of the knight.' It is only by calling in Hunger that Piers can put them down. When it comes to choosing between working and not eating, the blind and bedridden are suddenly healed by thousands.

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The more well-to-do of the working classes evidently spent a vast deal of time at the public-house, eating and drinking, telling idle tales, playing at skittles when the weather was fine, singing rhymes of Robin Hood, or listening to fiddlers and pipers, or to gleemen and janglers of gests-that is to say, ballad-singers and professional story-tellers. At high prime-the hour in the middle of the forenoon when agricultural work broke off, as it still does, for a brief rest and slight meal-Langland speaks of the ploughs standing idle in the field while the ploughmen sit at the ale and sing 'How trolly lolly.' The cook comes out to the tavern door and cries 'Hot pies, hot!' and the alewife fills pots of half-and-half by pouring penny ale and pudding ale together. Indoors there is plenty of food, in great variety, for such as can afford it bread and broth, potfuls of boiled peas and beans, pieces of salt bacon, stewed fowls, fried fish, baked meat, green cheeses, curds and cream, and baked apples. Poorer people had to be content with halfpenny ale, and bread not made of clean wheat, but of oatmeal or beans and bran. Idlers are threatened that they shall eat of barley bread and of the brook drink;' but it would seem that water-drinking, except under some religious rule, was not common even among the poor, who drank milk and mean ale—I suppose the same as what Langland elsewhere calls farthing ale, and not much more than water with a taste in it.

In the profuse use of vegetables the English of the fourteenth century were like the modern French peasantry. All through summer, till Lammas-tide brought harvest to the croft and new corn came to cheaping, occasional fowls and bacon were the mere embroidery upon the peas, leeks, cabbages, onions, parsley, and beans which, together with the coarse bread and the abundant milk and cheese, were the staple of poor people's diet.

Their dress, almost entirely of woollen stuff, was also coarse but not uncomfortable. We read of gowns of grey russet, of labourers digging in the fields in courtepies, or tippets, that kept the neck and shoulders warm, of a bondman dressed in a tawny tabard, threadbare with twelve winters' wear, and a hood not worth a groat. There are the usual complaints of the extravagance of women, who will spend half a mark (the equivalent of three or four pounds now) upon a bonnet, who buy a piece of embroidered stuff with the savings that should have been hoarded to purchase a cow, who go to church only to look at their neighbours' new clothes:

Away fro the alter then
Turn I mine eyen,

And behold Ellen

Hath a new coat:

I wish then it were mine
And all the web after.

The age was one of expanding commerce, and the commercial middle class were increasing steadily in wealth and consequence.

Some chosen chaffer

And acheiveden the better;
As it seemeth to our sight
That such men thriveth.

One of them gives an account of his life, which is a sort of mediæval edition of the 'Successful Merchant.' In his youth, he says, he had learned thrift among Lombards and Jews (a practical modern education); then he started in business as a merchant at fairs, selling on commission for his employers, and becoming an expert in trade-customs, such as straining out cloth so that twelve yards of it would make thirteen. As he got on in the world, he took to lending on landed security, and became a large landed proprietor by foreclosing on mortgages. He also made his advances to borrowers, not in hard cash, but partly in chaffer (i.e. merchandise), which they had to take at his price, and which he afterwards bought back from them, also at his own price, less a

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deduction for brokerage. Transmitting money to Rome by bills of exchange was another profitable part of his business; and, while his sphere of operations extended to the Low Countries and the Baltic, he looked sharply after the most trifling sources of income, such as encroaching a foot's breadth on his neighbour's boundary when ploughing, or keeping two sets of weights, one heavy for weighing the wool that he gave out to cottagers for spinning, and the other light for use in ordinary sales.

Profits made in these, or in more honest ways, enabled the trading class to buy freeholds and settle down as substantial burghers. They live in high timber-framed houses, full of cupboards and iron-bound chests of household stuff, while 'poverty hath but pokes' (like Mrs. Gamp and her bandboxes) to putten in his goods.' Of town life, however, Langland only gives occasional glimpses. He mentions the spicers' shops as a great feature of it (so true it seems to have been even then that the English were by natural bent a nation épicière), and next to these in importance seem to come the mercers and drapers, and the cooks and taverners. He mentions the mayor in his robes, with a man carrying the mace before him, and the market-place with its pillory for male, and its pining-stool for female offenders. In his version of the Parable of the Good Samaritan, the Samaritan is represented as riding to town from his country village to see a tournament; these were held in the market-place or main street, strewn with sand, and fenced in with barricades for the purpose. When he comes on the poor wounded man lying naked as a needle' by the roadside, he gets him up on to his grey horse, and leads him so, 'well six mile or seven,' to a grange beside the new market; and leaving him there in the innkeeper's hands, gets across the grey horse again and rapes him to Jerusalem-ward.'

In this parable, under the figures of the Priest and Levite, as often elsewhere in the poem, there is an implied censure of the clergy, and especially of the monastic orders, for their failure in the primary duty of charity. This is part of Langland's everpresent sympathy with the poor:

Should no Christian creature

Cryen at the gate,

Nor fail pain nor pottage,

An prelates did as they should.

Of the ascetic religious life he always speaks with respect: nor has

he less respect for the priests and monks who work honestly, even at the routine of their calling:

And dingen upon David
Each day till eve,

as the threshers in the barn 'dingen upon sheaves.' But for the idle hunting and hawking clergy he has nothing but denunciation :

Now is Religion a rider,

A roamer about,

A leader of love-days

And a land-buyer,

A pricker on a palfrey

From manor to manor,

An heap of hounds at his tail
As he a lord were.

It was this indignation mainly which drove men of Langland's generation into Lollardy or into open irreligion. A few years after the appearance of 'Piers Ploughman,' the revolt had spread so alarmingly that the Church, in self-defence, instituted the burning of heretics alive, and began the war which only ended in the overturn under Henry VIII. (already prophesied in this poem), and the complete severance of England from mediæval Christendom.

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As yet, however, the old religion reigned in almost unimpaired power and charm. It was the age of the Canterbury Pilgrims; and in Langland, no less than in Chaucer, the whole face of the country appears covered with folk of all sort on their way to and from the great shrines, 'wending to Walsingham with their hooked staves,' or to pray at the Rood of Bromholme or of Chester, or further afield to foreign holy places, apparelled as a pilgrim in paynim's wise.' In many respects the Church was still far in advance of the secular world. Langland is deeply moved, as he could not fail to be, by the civilised life and splendid art of the great religious communities: the spacious and lordly architecture, the huge glazed windows of the churches, the covered cloisters, the white walls all painted and portrayed, the bells of brass or of bright silver, the gospels and psalters with their leaves of brent gold, the volumes of Plato the poet,' of 'Ypocras and Virgil,' of Aristotle and other mo' that filled their libraries; the skill in outdoor work that made the gardens and orchards of convents a fit surrounding for their beautiful buildings. More deeply still is he moved by what underlay this life and art, the beauty of holiness, the mysterious angelical grace of the Catholic religion,

No one else has expressed more simply or more vividly the consolation that lay in the offices of the Church and its appointed minister:

For he shall answer for thee
At the high Doom;

nor the uplifting brought to people for whom this world was wretched enough, by the great medieval art, where music, architecture, and painting converged through all the avenues of beauty upon an almost visible heavenly world.

Woolward and wet-shod

Went I forth after,

Till I waxed weary of the world

And willed eft to sleep:

Of girls and of Gloria laus

Greatly me dreamed,

And how Osanna on organy

Oldè folk sungen.

He dreams on Easter-Eve of heaven come upon earth, of Mercy and Truth meeting out of east and west, of Righteousness and Peace kissing each other, each in the likeness of a fair maiden: Till the day dawed

These damsels dancèd

That men rungen to the Resurrection,

And right with that I waked:

And called Kate, my wife,

And Colette, my daughter,

Arise and go reverence

God's Resurrection,

And creep to the cross on knees

And kiss it for a jewel;

For God's blessed body

It bare for our boot;

And it a-feareth the fiend:

For such is the might,

May no grisly ghost

Glide where it shadoweth.

With such qualities as these-imaginative insight, large human sympathy, descriptive and dramatic power, humour, pathos, acuteness of vision and adroitness of expression-how is it, it may well be asked, that Langland does not effectively rank beside Chaucer, that he is little more than a name to us, and this poem is only read by scholars and students of history? It is not that it is written in an obsolete or unintelligible dialect; the language is in all essential features that which we use at the present day.

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