“Biddeth Peres Ploughman go to his Werk”: Appropriation of Piers Plowman in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Summary

In his 1821 novel, The Pirate, Sir Walter Scott gives us a scholarly in-joke at the expense of what we may think of as an “unusual” reader of Piers Plowman. Triptolemus Yellowley, Scott's obsessively theoretical, yet hopelessly impractical, agriculturalist has little time for vernacular poetry, preferring instead classical authors with some connection, however tenuous, with farming. One of the few vernacular titles to slip through is “Piers Ploughman's Vision,”

which, charmed with the title, he bought from a packman, but after reading the first two pages, flung it into the fire as an impudent and misnamed political libel.

I refer to Yellowley as an “unusual” reader of Piers Plowman because he is one of the seeming few who have failed, by some means, to find what they want within the work. Helen Barr puts it quite succinctly when she observes that “there must be few works which have been used to authorise both civil and religious dissent and which have also spawned a literary tradition”:3 the complexity and open-endedness of Piers Plowman rendered it infinitely adaptable and malleable in the service of quite differing agendas. In the present paper, I would like to address the issue of how Piers Plowman continued to be read and appropriated after Yellowley's dismissal, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

History and Literary History

In 1778, Thomas Warton published his History of English Poetry from the Eleventh to the Seventeenth Century, the stated aim of which was “to pursue the progress of our national poetry, from a rude origin and obscure beginnings to its perfection in a polished age.” His introduction to Piers Plowman hardly fills the reader with expectation of literary joys to follow:

… instead of availing himself of the rising and rapid improvements of the English language, Longland prefers and adopts the style of the Anglo-Saxon poets. Nor did he make these writers the models of his language only: he likewise imitates their alliterative versification, which consisted in using an aggregate of words beginning with the same letter. He has therefore rejected rhyme, in the place of which he thinks it sufficient to substitute a perpetual alliteration.