and
Cressida, the Parliament of Birds, and the Court of Love. Wycliffe, the
great English reformer of the Church, was quietly living at his rectory
of Fylingham, and preparing his first essays against the mendicant
orders. John Ball, the "crazy priest of Kent," as Froissart calls him,
was brooding over the miseries of his poor parishioners, and nursing in
his mind that enmity to all social distinctions with which he afterwards
inflamed the minds of the peasantry, and incited them to open rebellion.

But in the quarter least expected the oppressed people found an
advocate. An unobtrusive monk, whose name is almost a doubtful
tradition, stole out from his quiet cell in Malvern Abbey, and, whilst
his brethren feasted, climbed the gentle slope of the Worcestershire
hills, and drank in the beauties of the varied landscape at his feet.
There, on a May morning, as he rested under a bank by the side of a
brooklet, and was lulled to sleep by the murmuring of the water, he
dreamed those dreams that set waking people to thinking, and gave a
powerful impetus to the moral and social revolution that was just
commencing.

The "Vision of Piers Plowman" is every way a singular production.
Clothed in the then almost obsolete verse of a past age, it breathes
wholly the spirit of the time in which it was written. The work of a
monk, it is unsparing in its attacks on the monastic orders. Intended
for the reading or hearing of the middle and lower classes, it gives
more frequent glimpses of the social condition of all ranks of people
than any other work of that age. As a philological monument, it is of
great value; as a poem, it contains many passages of merit; and as a
storehouse of allusions to the social life of the people in the
fourteenth century, it is invaluable.

The poem consists of a series of visions or dreams, of an allegorical
character, in which the dreamer seeks to find Truth and Righteousness on
earth, meeting with but little success. The allegorical idea cannot be
followed without weariness, and, in fact, the intentions of the writer
are by no means clear, the allegory being frequently involved and
contradictory. The beauty of the poem lies in its detached passages, its
occasional poetic touches, its graphic pictures, biting satire, and
withering denunciation of fraud, corruption, and tyranny. The measure
adopted is the unrhymed alliterative, characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon
literature, and which had long been disused,