ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the relationships between the ideas about the church which Langland wished to affirm and their place and meaning in the achieved poetic work which is Piers Plowman. The role of the church is central in the poem's anxious searching and had become an area of massive theoretical and practical controversy in the late Middle Ages. Accepting traditional ideas about the church, Langland envisaged it as a centralized, hierarchical community, led by its clergy, united by doctrine, sacraments which only the clergy dispensed, rituals and institutionalized structures of authority. The self-sacrificing fraternity of the Christ in Piers Plowman, proclaimed by himself and others, could only form a terrible indictment of the contemporary church, in vision and reality. The present Catholic church did not seem to provide a hold for Langland's traditional and orthodox ecclesiastic ideology, and it is in this perception that the poem comes to identify þe pope and prelates', priests and religious with Antichrist.
