Chapter 4 - The Great Tradition: Langland, Gower, Chaucer

Summary

William Langland’s Piers Plowman, one of the greatest English poems of the late fourteenth century, was first printed in 1550. This edition was produced by Robert Crowley (c. 1517–88), who combined his short-lived commercial activities – supported, albeit without acknowledgement, by the king’s printer, Richard Grafton – with a longer career as a polemical author and reformed clergyman, active in the evangelical interest and inter alia a major source for the protestant martyrologist John Foxe. He has, perhaps a little over-enthusiastically, been described as ‘the most significant poet between Surrey and Gascoigne’ (King 1982: 320). Piers Plowman was Crowley’s most ambitious verse publication in terms of size, and was clearly a success for him. No fewer than three impressions (1550a–1550c) appeared in the same year, in a substantial quarto format; with the exception of an edition of the Psalter, all Crowley’s other publications were more modest octavos.