People who lived six or seven hundred years ago weren’t so very different from us. We have only to look at Chaucer’s pilgrims. They were all Christians, in the 14th century understanding of that term, and they were on a religious pilgrimage. They might just as well have been passengers on a flight to the sunshine beaches of Spain or Greece. They had their little weaknesses. Some were full of themselves. Others had cute little habits or a familiarity with sharp practice. The pardoner didn’t know when to stop; he was an official agent of the Church and had lost any sense of what was due from him.
Living at the same time was a more obscure poet. Unlike Chaucer he was not a man accustomed to the court and its pattern of high living. He came from the Malvern Hills. He was as English as they come. His poetry was of an old-fashioned kind, alliterative verse that his Anglo-Saxon forbears would have appreciated. If Chaucer was looking to the future, William Langland, to judge by his language, was a man of the past. But he too looked beneath the surface of things. And what did he see? A Lady Meed venal and hoity-toity, friars lining their pockets, bakers, brewers and butchers getting through their days as best they could.
In a fair field full of folk Langland was looking for true Christianity. It was in short supply, if by that we mean men and women with a personal experience of Christ and a readiness to explain themselves. Their understanding of the Christian faith was tribal, unstated and decided for them by the official agents of the Church. Langland’s poem ‘Piers the Plowman’ expects more than that. Unlike Chaucer, he does not go on to give his characters an opportunity to tell their tales and wander down primrose paths. He follows through with his ensemble, looking for something genuine. Some, he found, chose trade; that was not a bad choice; they prospered ‘as it semeth to our sight’ They gained gold with their glee, comedians and chatter-boxes, the lot of them.
He found in his dream a Church and a society in which some were seeking the common good, informed by the Scriptures and renouncing the seven deadly sins. He may not speak in an English we immediately understand but he has things to say that we in our generation do well to heed.
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