The authorship of Piers the Plowman Author:Henry Bradley Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Modern Philology Vol. VI January, igoq No. 3 PIERS PLOWMAN THE WOKK OF ONE OR OF FIVE I Next to the Canterbury Tales, the poem usually called Piers ... more »Plowman is the greatest literary work produced by England during the Middle Ages; and it was considered so from the first, these two poems being almost equally popular. Fifty-seven manuscripts have preserved for us Chaucer's tales ; forty-five Piers Plowman. This latter work is a unique monument, much more singular and apart from anything else than Chaucer's masterpiece. It is more thoroughly English; of foreign influences on it there are but the faintest traces. Allegorical as it is, it gives us an image of English life in the fourteenth century of unsurpassed vividness. If we had only Chaucer we should know much less ; Chaucer is at his best when describing individuals; his portraits are priceless. The author of Piers Plowman concerns himself especially with classes of men, great political movements, the general aspirations of the people, the improvements necessary in each class for the welfare of the nation. Contemporary events and the lessons to be deducted from them, the hopes, anxieties, problems', and sufferings occupying his compatriots' minds, are never far from his thoughts: plague, storms, French wars, question of labor and wages, bishops becoming royal functionaries, power of the Commons and the king, duties of the nobles, the priests, the workmen. He does not describe --]) 1 [modern Philoloot, January, 1909 J.—P.P. A them simply to add picturesque touches, but to express what he feels, and show how the nation should be governed and be morally improved. He is not above his time, but of it; he is not a citizen of the world, but a thoroughgoing Englishman, and nothing else. Alone in Europe, and, what is ...« less