ABSTRACT
We have seen how political controls and the figuring of pilgrimage as, potentially, false and, thereby, threatening, were forms of power exerted in late medieval England. But power exercised in the realm of representation can be as important as actual material or legal power. David Harvey suggests that ‘[a]ny system of representation, in fact, is a spatialization of sorts which automatically freezes the flow of experience and in so doing distorts what it strives to represent’.1 Rodney Hilton looking at the preoccupation with the figure of the ploughman in late medieval England, points out that
[S]ymbols are chosen because of their contemporary resonance. It is no accident that the ploughman appears so powerfully, whether as himself or as a symbol in the last century and a half of the middle ages. He had become a disturbing figure.2
