The Piers Plowman tradition is made up of about 14 different poetic and prose works from about the time of John Ball (died 1381) and the Peasants Revolt of 1381 through the reign of Elizabeth I and beyond. All the works feature one or more characters, typically Piers, from William Langland's poem Piers Plowman. (A much larger number of texts, with less obvious connection to Piers Plowman, may also be considered part of the tradition.) Because the Plowman appears in the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer but does not have his own tale (one of seven such characters), plowman tales are sometimes used as additions to The Canterbury Tales, or otherwise conflated or associated with Chaucer.
As a rule, they satirically reflect economic, social, political, and religious grievances, and are concerned with political decisions and the relation between commoners and king. In these respects they resemble works such as Poem on the Evil Times of Edward II (1321–27), The Song of the Husbandman (c. 1340), Wynnere and Wastoure (c. 1353), and The Parlement of the Three Ages (c. 1375–1400). The Piers Plowman tradition therefore contributed to an emerging early modern "public sphere". Most of the works of the tradition are anonymous; many are pseudepigraphic by authorial design or later misattribution. The distinction between fiction and history in them is often blurred.
(Unless otherwise noted, dates given here refer to the year when the work was first written.)
Along with the writings of John Ball, the earliest contributions to the Piers Plowman tradition are extensively associated with the Lollards:
Less directly and self-consciously evocative of Piers Plowman are:
Many of the previously mentioned plowman texts, which first circulated in manuscript, reappeared later in print, often with some degree of intentional alteration and editorializing that aimed at construing them as proto-Protestant . This is true also of the first printed editions of Piers Plowman in 1550 and 1561 by Robert Crowley and Owen Rogers. William Tyndale may have (and was thought by some contemporaries) to have supplied the preface to the printed edition of the Praier and Complaynte, which aroused the critical pen of Thomas More. John Foxe did his part to canonize the same text in four editions of his famous Actes and Monuments from 1570 to 1610. Like Jack Upland, The Plowman's Tale became associated with Geoffrey Chaucer and was added by various editors to four editions of Chaucer's collected works between 1542 and 1602. I Playne Piers which Cannot Flatter, a mixture of parts of The Plowman's Tale and new material added some time after 1540, was printed in 1550 and ascribed to the author of Piers Plowman who was then unknown or identified as either Chaucer, John Wycliffe, or Robert Langland. I Playne Piers was reprinted by the Puritan Martinist writers in the Martin Marprelate Controversy in 1589. It was then retitled, O read me, for I am of great antiquitie . . . I am the Gransier of Martin Mare-prelitte.
There were also many new texts produced in the sixteenth century that may be considered parts of the Piers Plowman tradition, such as Edmund Spenser's The Shepheardes Calendar which makes use of a character named "Piers" and consciously borrows lines from The Plowman's Tale. Spenser's character, Colin Clout, who appears in two of his poems, is also a Piers-like figure derived from John Skelton. John Bale regarded Skelton as a vates pierius - poetic prophet, with pierius perhaps alluding to Piers, the pre-eminent English prophet-poet. Bale was pleased with Skelton's attacks on the clergy and his open breach of clerical celibacy. Colin Clout (1521) is one of Skelton's anti-Wolsey satires where the title character, a vagabond, complains about corrupt churchmen.
Sixteenth-century texts that refer to the poem Piers Plowman or the character "Piers Plowman" include:
Less directly associated with Piers are:
Thence she thee brought into this faerie Lond,
And in an heaped furrow did thee hyde, Where thee a Ploughman all unweeting fond, As he his toylsome teme that way did guyde, And brought thee up in ploughmans state to byde, Whereof Georgos he thee gave to name; Till prickt with courage, and thy forces pryde, To Faery court thou cam'st to seeke for fame,
And prove thy puissant armes, as seemes thee best became.
Like Thomas More and Robert Crowley, Bishop Hugh Latimer valued "commune wealth" more than "private commodity." He was an outspoken critic of enclosure, the abuses of landlords, and the aristocrats who lined their pockets through the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Like Crowley, Latimer was able to be especially outspoken when Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset had controlling influence in the court as Lord Protector of England during part of the minority of Edward VI. A famous sermon of Latimer's that represented preachers as God's plowmen, "The Sermon of the Plowers," was delivered at St. Paul's Cross, 18 January 1548 and was printed that year by John Day. This was the last of four "Sermons on the Plough;" unfortunately the first three are lost. While Latimer's message is spiritual, it has a sharp political edge that also acknowledges the material concerns of people affected by enclosure. Latimer attacks idle clergy as "plowmen" who cause a spiritual famine, and enclosure is used as a metaphor for hindrances to proper preaching. The devil is called the busiest bishop and greatest plowman in England; he is seeding the land with the ritual and ornamental trappings of popery. Latimer himself, through the style of his sermons, typifies the plain, homely and direct speech of Piers and popular Protestantism. Anthony Anderson's The Shield of our Safetie (1581) uses Latimer's figure of the pastor as a plowman but is unwilling to ascribe special virtue to the commons and rural laborers. Godliness is lacking "from top to toe" in England, "from the Nobilitie, to the Plowman and his mate." George Gifford's A Briefe Discourse of Certaine Points of the Religion which is among the Common Sort of Christians (1583) asserts that "it is not for plowmen to meddle with scriptures."
The early modern dissemination and reception of Visio Willelmi de Petro Ploughman ("William's Vision of Piers Plowman") from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century reveals a great deal about changes in English society and politics. Clearly orthodox Roman Catholic in doctrine but reformist in that it posed social criticism and advocated moral, economic, and political change, the original poem(s)--and the figure of Piers in the popular imagination—were often viewed quite differently.
Piers was open to being appropriated by Lollards and later Protestant reformers. William Tyndale's memorable statement to a "popish priest," recorded in John Foxe' Acts and Monuments, is an echo of Erasmus' Paraclesis, which also resonated with popular images of the pious plowman: "If God spare my life ere many years, I will cause a boy that driveth the plow shall know more of the scripture than thou dost." After nearly two centuries, the plowman tradition of social complaint and satire became more worldly-wise and less ardently idealistic. It became, increasingly, a secular vehicle for complaining about class rivalries and political dissent—and also for containing or restraining such things. What is notable about the Piers/plowman literature of the Elizabethan era is the general absence of the old religious radical who speaks the plain truth for the poor, godly commons against corrupt elites and hypocritical English clergy. In many cases the name of Piers remained, but his vocation was altered; with few exceptions, he was no longer specifically a religious reformer. Criticism of the wealthy and powerful continued, but rather than directly addressing complaints to them and to the monarch and parliament as Edwardians like Crowley, Latimer and Thomas Lever had done, they became the subject of comic, often satiric, popular entertainment. Plays and pamphlets became the vehicle of social analysis, concerned with class identities and rivalries that were rendered with greater complexity and detail than in found in the earlier literature.
After the Elizabethan Religious Settlement, the Piers tradition changed, particularly after censorship laws put into effect in 1551, 1553, and 1559, officially banned discussion of religious matters or matters of state. Other causes were also at work. With the division and collapse of Christendom in the Reformation, the medieval conception of the social hierarchy, as well as Purgatory and Hell, so central to Langland's poem, were vestigial remnants of a passing order. In the Elizabethan era, Piers' Christological aspect became fully detached from his role as the universal commoner, a secular economic man among economic men with clashing interests. At the same time, there was a bifurcation of the original carnivalesque world of Langland's Piers that had common, aristocratic, and divine characters. The moral and apocalyptic aspects of Piers flourished briefly at mid-century but then dissipated along with the idealism of the Edwardian reformers and their vision of a united commonwealth of interdependent estates. Popular literature evoking Piers by name or in spirit began to construe elites as people with whom one may compete and win. Langland's "fair field of folk" became a socioeconomic playing field on which elites are perhaps no less important to the nation than the common people. In this way Langland's Piers and Piers-like figures helped establish an English national identity based on and for the popular rather than the elite culture. This popular self-understanding seems to have flourished especially in the nonconformist Puritan mind where it could be radicalized. In other cases, it could be a basis for statist nationalism
According to the Privy Council, military conscription, which was at a high in the late sixteenth century, gave "great ease and good to the country to be ridd of those kinde of people whoe otherwyse wil be a burthen to the country." Such attempts to channel and appropriate the power of the commoners did not escape their notice. In Pierce Pennilesse, Thomas Nashe wrote, "If they have no service abroad, they will make mutinies at home..." Popular awareness of such strategies to channel the power of the commons toward royal interests did not generate resistance, but offered a chance for the commons to insert their own interests into the transaction. Perhaps this is why in the Elizabethan era, Piers and Piers-like figures began to appear as itinerant laborers and tradesmen: tinkers, cobblers and shoemakers who claimed to represent true Englishness over against effete, pretentious elites. While affirming their loyalty, these humble figures labored to define an English identity from below that was drawn from native, popular traditions going back to Langland and Chaucer. To the extent that the popular opposition between plain and ornate, honest and dissembling was associated with courtiers, (South European) foreignness and Catholicism, the plowman tradition continued to be anti-Catholic and staunchly Protestant.
This popular image of the English commonwealth is often defined in the Elizabethan era in opposition to Catholic nations and "Rome," which are represented as less free and unvirtuous. Hutchins notes that "Even in the most unremittingly absolutist interpretations of Tudor theories of rule, the qualities that Elizabethans claim make a good ruler include dignified concern for the common people" (229). Popular plowman literature constantly reasserts this view: English society is based on its regard for its foundation in the commons. As a sturdy working-class fellow in the popular culture, it is not surprising that Piers never made it into the works of the elite writers who predominate in the English literary canon. Moreover, Piers was even more archaic and parochial than Chaucer, with the added notoriety of political subversiveness and (now illegal) prophecy. University educated, aspiring courtier-writers with poorer, often rural, backgrounds (e.g., Spenser and Harvey) may have been uneasy with a tradition that sometimes cast a cold eye on the lives and ambitions of upwardly mobile urbanites like themselves. In Nashe we find a new Piers, Pierce Pennilesse, who represents the young London malcontent writer who desires but lacks patronage and recognition of his talent. While this literature is far removed from the straightforward religious and political criticisms of Crowley and others, writers like Nashe and Greene were still finding ways to use the old moral-satirical tradition to expose and attack—or just laugh at—vices directly related to contemporary social and political conditions.