k Death, pressed upon the
poor and wasted the land. The Church was corrupt; the mendicant orders
had grown enormously wealthy, and the country was eaten up by a swarm
of begging friars, pardoners, and apparitors. That social discontent was
fermenting among the lower classes which finally issued in the
communistic uprising of the peasantry under Wat Tyler and Jack Straw.

This state of things is reflected in the _Vision of Piers Plowman_,
written as early as 1362, by William Langland, a tonsured clerk of the
west country. It is in form an allegory, and bears some resemblance to
the later and more famous allegory of the _Pilgrim's Progress_. The poet
falls asleep on the Malvern Hills, in Worcestershire, and has a vision
of a "fair field full of folk," representing the world with its various
conditions of men. There were pilgrims and palmers; hermits with hooked
staves, who went to Walsingham--and their wenches after them--great
lubbers and long that were loth to work; friars glossing the Gospel for
their own profit; pardoners cheating the people with relics and
indulgences; parish priests who forsook their parishes--that had been
poor since the pestilence time--and went to London to sing there for
simony; bishops, archbishops, and deacons, who got themselves fat
clerkships in the Exchequer, or King's Bench; in short, all manner of
lazy and corrupt ecclesiastics. A lady, who represents holy Church, then
appears to the dreamer, explains to him the meaning of his vision, and
reads him a sermon the text of which is, "When all treasure is tried,
truth is the best." A number of other allegorical figures are next
introduced, Conscience, Reason, Meed, Simony, Falsehood, etc., and after
a series of speeches and adventures, a second vision begins in which the
seven deadly sins pass before the poet in a succession of graphic
impersonations; and finally all the characters set out on a pilgrimage
in search of St. Truth, finding no guide to direct them save Piers the
Plowman, who stands for the simple, pious laboring man, the sound heart
of the English common folk. The poem was originally in eight divisions
or "passus," to which was added a continuation in three parts, _Vita Do
Wel, Do Bet, and Do Best_. About 1377 the whole was greatly enlarged by
the author.

_Piers Plowman_ was the first extended literary work after the Conquest
which was purely English in character. It owed nothing to France but the
allegorical cast which the _Rom