ABSTRACT
This chapter examines that the Plowman, the pawn in a social-text game played out in textual transmission, functions as one of the most dynamic ideological and narratological game pieces in the Canterbury Tales'. In the introduction to the facsimile of the Hengwrt manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, Donald Baker states that "each century has had its own Chaucer". Beyond the borders of the Canterbury Tales' canon, the plowman was a common figure in the late medieval literary and popular religious imagination. Regardless of Piers's theological complexity, the plowman eventually became associated with the Uprising of 1381 and with the Wycliffites of the fourteenth century. Perhaps Chaucer's Plowman is so conventional because Chaucer, in fact, feared to take a clear position in the potentially explosive religious and social debate. The Plowman is a game piece charged with serious social symbolism and political meaning whose ambiguity needed a clear solution for several productive and actively involved readers of the Tales.
