The Politics of Consuming Worldly Goods: Negotiating Christian Discipline and Feudal Power in Piers Plowman

THE POLITICS OF CONSUMING WORLDLY GOODS: NEGOTIATING CHRISTIAN DISCIPLINE AND FEUDAL POWER IN PIERS PLOWMAN By MARGARET KIM In passus 15 of the C-text of Piers Plowman, Will meets a doctor of divinity at a feast and is outraged by his simultaneous learning and consumption. The doctor mouths a doctrinally "unobjectionable" definition of Dowel,1 but Will accuses him of being uncharitable to the poor anyway (15.113-16, 76a).2 What conspicuously gives away the emptiness of his religious discourse , to Will and to us modern readers as well, is the enormous appetite of this man for the "manye sondry metes, mortrewes and poddynges, / Brawen and bloed of gees, bacon and colhoppes" (15.66-67).3 Piers Plowman is peopled with characters like the gluttonous doctor who consume excessively or irresponsibly one thing or another — food, sex, drink, material goods. And Langland's political criticism focuses on such characters and the social consequences of their immoral behavior. Waster or "Wastor," who appears on Piers's half-acre farm in the party of the rebellious wage laborers, is one such character and conspicuously at the center of the poet's discriminatory discourse between the voluntary and involuntary poor. Although Langland's discussion of sinful consumers covers all degrees of the social hierarchy, including friars who preach for the profit of their bellies (Prologue.57) and lawyers who wear "houes of selke" (Prologue.161), there is no doubt that the author applies class distinction in his depiction and evaluation of consumption. Wastor does not deserve the food he consumes because he has not worked for it. Great lords and ladies, on the other hand, become sinful consumers, not because they are expected to labor on the half-acre, but because they engage in excessive and conspicuous con1 This is Derek Pearsall's characterization of the doctor's discourse. See n. 15.113 in Pearsall's edition: Piers Plowman by William Langland (Berkeley, 1978), 251. 1 want to thank the editors of, and outsider readers for, Traditio for helping me revise this essay. Also, I want to thank Mary-Jo Arn and my teachers, Derek Pearsall, Larry Benson, and Daniel Donoghue, for their comments and suggestions at the earlier stage of this project. 2 AU references to the C-text, Piers Plowman: The C Version, ed. George Russell and George Kane (Berkeley, 1997), are to passus and line numbers and will appear in the text proper. For a thorough examination of Langland's critical attitude toward the doctor's excessive consumption, see Anne Savage, "Piers Plowman: The Translation of Scripture and Food for the Soul," English Studies 74 (1993): e.g., 214, 215, 216, 217. 340TRADITIO sumption — indulging in a life of luxury and revelry and cultivating a horde of obsequious jesters, clerics, and retainers rather than giving to the poor in their community. Scholarly discussions of wasters in Piers Plowman have centered largely on Langland's treatment of poverty, particularly his anxiety about poor people as low-class laborers who reverse their role from producers to consumers in the society.4 The focus of such critical understanding of consumption is on the lower end of the social hierarchy, and such an approach identifies irresponsible consumption with class protest and social subversion. In this paper, I want to tackle the issue of consumption from the other end of the social hierarchy, and I identify wasteful behavior with the political establishment and its sins instead. From minstrels, feudal retainers, and clerics , to great lords and ladies who support and maintain them, Langland's depiction of corruption at the top makes a connection between excessive consumption and political power. This paper focuses on the connection and the particular problem it poses, for a poet such as Langland, in Christian terms. Secular political authority feeds on the intimate relation between power and extravagant spending and lavish display, and it identifies lordship with the maintenance of great consumers, feudal magnates and members of their households, who spend and use excessively and conspicuously. In this way, political authority in medieval society operates on a worldly logic contrary to the Christian logic of discipline and restraint, particularly manifest in ascetic leanings. Reading Piers Plowman in the theoretical...