Pierce the Ploughman's Crede
Pierce the Ploughman's Crede is a medieval
Textual history
Surviving in two complete 16th-century manuscripts and two early printed editions,
The Crede was first printed in London by
The poem exists in several modern editions: Thomas Wright and Walter Skeat produced independent versions in the 19th century; more recently, James Dean has edited the text for TEAMs, and Helen Barr has produced an annotated edition in The Piers Plowman Tradition (London: J.M. Dent, 1993) (
Authorship
Some scholars believe it is very likely that the author of the Crede may also be responsible for the anti-fraternal
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Crede was usually attributed to Chaucer. The editor of the 1606 edition of The Plowman's Tale, possibly
The Crede might also have been attributed to "Robert Langland" (i.e., William Langland) because of its inclusion in the 1561 edition of Piers Plowman, although this edition dropped the preface by Robert Crowley that names Langland. One reader of the 1561 Piers Plowman (which appends the Crede) made notes (dated 1577) in his copy that quote John Bale's attribution of Piers Plowman to Langland ("ex primis J. Wiclevi discipulis Unum") in Bale's Index...Scriptorum. Because of differences in language and his belief that Chaucer lived later than Langland, the reader concludes that the Crede alone (and not Piers Plowman) is Chaucer's.
Significant contents
Like much political or religious poetry of the
But all is not entirely lost. As he returns home, the narrator encounters a poor Plowman, dressed in rags and so emaciated that men myyte reken ich a ryb (432). Although starving, the Plowman freely offers the narrator what food he does have. When the narrator tells him of his experiences with the friars, the Plowman launches into a blistering diatribe on the four orders. Recognizing the wisdom of the Plowman's words, the narrator asks him whether he can teach him the Creed. He is glad to do so: the poem ends with the Plowman's recital of the elusive text.
Two features make the Crede particularly worthy of note. Firstly, it is the earliest text to imitate William Langland's Piers Plowman, to which it refers explicitly. The selfless Plowman is of course directly drawn from the earlier work. Perhaps written within eight years of the C-text of Piers Plowman, the Crede thus testifies to the appeal of Langland's more subversive, anticlerical sentiments among some of his early readers. Of course, the Crede-poet only uses Piers Plowman as a launch-pad for his own views. The Crede is markedly more confident than Langland in its opposition to the clergy. The fact that it abandons Langland's dream-vision framework is suggestive of this as if the lay perfection that the Plowman represents has become more achievable in reality. The Crede conflates Piers (here, "Peres") with the author/dreamer of Piers Plowman, thus collapsing that poem's many voices into a single, collective voice of the ideal community. This misprision was a common aspect of Piers Plowman's dissemination. The character of Piers thus escapes from the confines of William Langland's vision and takes on a life, an authority, and an authorial career of his own. As in The Plowman's Tale and The Prayer and Complaint of the Plowman, true religion is the virtue of the poor. The Piers of the Crede is simply a plowman without the Christological aspect of Piers in Langland's poem.
A second, related point of interest is that the Crede is a
The Crede's content wholly conforms to Lollard views of the friars. Most of the charges against the friars are familiar from other works such as Jack Upland, the Vae Octuplex or Wyclif's Trialogus, and most are ultimately derived from William of Saint-Amour's De Periculis Novissimorum Temporum (1256). As in all Wycliffite satire, the friars are lecherous, covetous, greedy, vengeful, demanding extravagant donations for even the most elementary services. They seek out only the fattest corpses to bury and live in ostentatious houses that are more like palaces than places of worship. They are the children of Lucifer rather than Saint Dominic or St Francis, and follow in the footsteps of Cain, the first treacherous frater. But the fact that the poem's main approach is dramatic rather than didactic or polemic, and its frequent passages of striking physical description, elevate it beyond the vast bulk of antifraternal writing. Elizabeth Salter's charge of empty 'sensationalism' seems highly unjust. [according to whom?] The poem's vicious and unremitting attacks are impressively constructed, and even entertaining in their lacerating cynicism. Plus, as von Nolcken and Barr have shown, there is a remarkable subtlety to the poem, as it draws on even the most purely philosophical aspects of Wyclif's system. The opposition between the friars and Piers is finely crafted. While the friars squabble and bicker with one another, the true (i.e., Lollard) Christians form a single unity; at the end of the poem, in the words of Barr, 'the voices of Peres, narrator and poet all merge' into a single 'I':
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See also
Notes
- ^ British Library MS Royal 18.B.17 and Trinity College Cambridge MS R.3.15
- ^ MS Harley is a collection made by John Stow in the 16th century; it contains poems by Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Wyatt, and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey.
- ^ 1553 (STC 19904)
- ^ STC 19908
- ^ 1832, reprinted 1856
References and further reading
- Helen Barr, Signes and Sothe: Language in the Piers Plowman Tradition (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1994) ISBN 0-85991-419-4.
- Doyne Dawson, James (1978). "William of Saint-Amour and the Apostolic Tradition". Mediaeval Studies. 40: 223–238. .
- Doyle, A. I. (1959). "An Unrecognized Piece of Piers the Ploughman's Creed and Other Work by Its Scribe". Speculum. 34 (3): 428–36. S2CID 163035289.
- George Kane, "Some Fourteenth-Century 'Political' Poems", in Medieval English Religious and Ethical Literature: Essays in Honour of G. H. Russell, ed. by Gregory Kratzmann and James Simpson (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1986), pp. 82–91. ISBN 0-85991-220-5.
- Ritchie D. Kendall, The Drama of Dissent: The Radical Poetry of Nonconformity, 1380–1590 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986) ISBN 0-8078-1700-7
- David Lampe, "The Satiric Strategy of Peres the Ploughman's Crede" in The Alliterative Tradition in the Fourteenth Century, ed. Bernard S. Levy and Paul E. Szarmach (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1981), pp. 69–80. ISBN 0-87338-255-2
- Von Nolcken, Christina (1988). "Piers Plowman, the Wycliffites, and Pierce the Plowman's Creed". Yearbook of Langland Studies. 2: 71–102. .
- Elizabeth Salter, Fourteenth-Century English Poetry: contexts and readings (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984) ISBN 0-19-871102-6.
- Szittya, Penn R. (1977). "The Antifraternal Tradition in Middle English". Speculum. 52 (2): 287–313. S2CID 162539724.
- Penn R. Szittya, The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986) ISBN 0-691-06680-9.
- Lawrence Warner, ‘Owen Rogers and Piers Plowman’s Crede, 1561: A Census of STC 19908’, in Later Middle English Literature, Materiality, and Culture: Essays in Honor of James M. Dean, ed. Brian Gastle and Erick Kelemen (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2018), pp. 189-218.
External links
- Six Ecclesiastical Satires, ed. James M. Dean, TEAMS Middle English Texts (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1991): the full edition of Crede online
- Pierce the plowman's crede (about 1394 AD) to which is appended God speed the plow (about 1500 AD), ed. Walter W. Skeat, Early English Text Societyo.s. 30 (London: Trübner, 1867): another edition of the Crede, largely rendered obsolete by Dean's edition, although the spelling is less modernized.
- John Matthews Manly, XXX: Peres the Ploughman's Crede, in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, ed. A. W. Ward and others, 18 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1907–21), II: The End of the Middle Ages (1908)
- James M. Dean, Plowman Writings, in Medieval English Political Writings, ed. James M. Dean (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1996): essay on the Ploughman tradition in medieval literature, with links to texts.