ABSTRACT
Piers Plowman plays the part of one of those experienced knights who in romances take young enthusiasts under their wing and teach them the knightly arts that they will need to practise. He stands for that human condition whose constraints the God-man must learn to suffer as he awaits ‘full time’. At the Incarnation, God ‘cam and took mankynde and bicam nedy’; and the need for Jesus to await the fullness of time was among those manifestations of common human neediness that the God-man had to suffer, along with hunger, thirst, and the other ills that flesh is heir to. The flowering of the Tree of Charity and the ripening of its fruit here represent those natural processes which take up so much time in our world, and to which Jesus himself, as ‘God-man’.
