ABSTRACT
William Langland's poem incorporates five main stories: the Marriage of Lady Mede, the Pilgrimage to Truth, Will’s Quest for Dowel, Jesus’s Joust with Death and the Devil, and the Siege of Holy Church. What these fictions have in common is that none of them arrives at any full or final closure. Two just break off in the middle, and the others have endings which leave their business variously unfinished. The Marriage of Lady Mede has the most conventional narrative shape. Its outcome is clearly signalled at the beginning, when the dreamer sees Lady Mede as a woman ‘wonderliche yclothed’ in a dress of ‘reed scarlet engreyned’, adorned with gold and precious stones. Piers Plowman angrily tears up the pardon document and goes on to declare a change in his way of life. Piers first describe the pilgrimage to Truth as a journey mapped onto a landscape of virtues and vices and he promises to lead the people on this allegorical route.
