Piers Plowman

What it is

Piers Plowman is a long allegorical poem written by William Langland, around the late fourteenth century. It survives in several versions and follows a dreamer named Will through visions searching for the true Christian life. The manuscript page shown is written in Middle English verse with red rubrics.

Why it matters

Langland wrote in the decades after the Black Death had swept through England, and his poem shows labourers refusing low wages and treats repeated outbreaks of pestilence as divine punishment for sin. This gives historians a literary window into how people made sense of plague, social unrest and the changing value of labour in its aftermath.

Look closer

• Why might workers refusing low wages appear in a poem about sin and salvation?
• What does it suggest that writers linked disease to punishment from God?
• What is missing from this account of plague's effects on society?