Fashioning a cultural icon: the ploughman in Renaissance texts

Fashioning a cultural icon: the ploughman in Renaissance texts The first printed edition of William Langland's Piers Plowman in 1550 was at once an impressive work of literary scholarship and an artful act of cultural appropriation. The poem had enjoyed widespread manuscript circulation, stimulated by interpretations linking it with Lollardy, throughout the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. While publication was delayed on account of the suspicious company the text was keeping, its reputation was further enhanced by a burgeoning tradition of Piers Plowman apocrypha. Anonymous works such as The Praier and Complaynte of the Ploweman unto Christe (1531?), A Lytell Geste howe the Plowman lerned his Pater Noster (1510), and the pseudo-Chaucerian Plowmans Tale (ca 1535) crucially extended Langland's vision of orthodox reform.1 In the hands of its editor, the Protestant poet and pamphleteer, Robert Crowley, Piers Plowman belatedly provided the keystone to this tradition. As John N. King has demonstrated, Crowley used marginal notes and introductory summaries of thetextin an attempt to reshape Piers Plowman as proto-Protestant prophecy.2 His preface placed the poem in the age of Wycliffe, when 'it pleased God to open the eyes of many to see his truth [andto]crye oute agaynste the workes of darcknes' ? Moreover, Crowley's edition imprinted in reformist discourse the figure of the ploughman. Piers is a curiously evanescent character in Langland's poem, most accurately tided The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman; however, Crowley consolidated an important line of interpretation which centred on the ploughman, identified for his reader as * I wish to thank Stephen Bending and Kristin Hammett for their comments on th essay. Earlier versions of the paper were presented at the Huntington Library and the 1994 A N Z A M R S Conference. 1 On the 'Piers Plowman tradition', see Helen C. White, Social Criticism in Popular Religious Literature of the Sixteenth Century, N e w York, 1944, chap. 1; Anne Hudson, 'The Legacy of Piers Plowman', in John A. Alford (ed.), A Companion to Piers Plowman, Berkeley, 1988, pp. 251-66; and Helen Barr (ed.), The 'Piers Plowman' Tradition, London, 1993. 2 John N. King, English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the ' Protestant Tradition, Princeton, 1982, pp. 322-39. 3 The Vision ofPierce Plowman, 1550; facsimile edn, London, 1976, sig. %lx . P A R E R G O N ns 14.1 (July 1996) 188 A. McRae 'Trueths servant'.4 This construction of the ploughman as a touchstone of moral and religious virtue, which was endorsed in a wave of contemporary preaching and publishing, poses some important questions. W h y did the early Protestants accord such value to this particular rural labourer? H o w did their appropriations negotiate a position between textual tradition and their own moment of reform? And most importantly, what did the ploughman signify for early modern writers and readers? Recourse to agrarian history provides little more than an outline for these inquiries. The ploughman was a recognisable member of the feudal estate, where his skilled labour underpinned the production of a localised economy, and commanded both, respect and substantial financial reward.5 Yet even in Langland's lifetime this status was eroded by forces of change. Pastoral farming increased in relation to arable, a rising population pushed wages down, and ploughmen 'decreased in numbers ... and moved progressively from the disintegrating manor'.^ Ploughmen appear only sporadically in early modern documents: a royal proclamation lists them among 'laborers in husbandry' threatened by enclosure; Henry Best suggests moderate wages for a servant 'if the reporte goe on him for a good ploweman'.7 Anatomists of the rural social order, in the tradition of William Harrison and Sir Thomas Smith, typically note only the generic categories of gentlemen, yeomen, husbandmen and labourers.8 Therefore, the continuing textual presence of the figure invites analytical strategies of cultural history, alert to the influence of literary mode and tradition, and to developing discourses of economics, social order and religious reform. 4 From Crowley's summary of passus 5, sig. 7t4v . 5 Elizabeth Kirk places Piers in this context, as a contracted labourer: see 'Langland's Plowman and the Recreation of Fourteenth-Century Religious Metaphor', Yearbook ofLangland...