Who wrote the medieval poem 'Piers Plowman'?
Piers Plowman Piers Plowman Piers Plowman (written 1370–90) or "Visio Willelmi de Petro Ploughman" ("William's Vision of Piers Plowman") is a Middle English allegorical narrative poem by William Langland. It is written in unrhymed, alliterative verse divided into sections called "passus" (Latin for "step"). Like the Pearl Poet's "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight", "Piers Plowman" is considered by many critics to be one of the greatest works of English literature of the Middle Ages, even preceding and influencing Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales". "Piers Plowman" contains the first known allusion to a literary tradition of Robin Hood tales. The poem, a mix of
Piers Plowman referred to as the author of the poem, and when writers refer to a list of medieval authors, they will often mention "Piers Plowman" as an author's name or a substitute for one. One gets the overall impression that Langland and "Piers Plowman" had less existence as author and text than did the fictional figure of Piers, whose relationship to a definite authorial and textual origin had been obscured much earlier. Samuel Pepys owned a copy of "Piers Plowman". Milton cites "Chaucer's Ploughman" in "Of Reformation" (1641) when he is discussing poems that have described Constantine as a major contributor