ABSTRACT
It is a noteworthy feature of the alliterative revival in the second half of the fourteenth century that a number of poems in the older measure, and among them some of the most important, are poems of social and moral protest.1 This should not cause surprise when we remember that the period was ushered in by the Black Death with its grave economic and political consequences, that it saw the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, and that Wyclif and the Lollard movement are only another manifestation of the general up-heaval which unsettled so many established conditions and beliefs. Nor should it seem altogether strange that much of this social criticism should appear in alliterative verse rather than in the more conventional measure of the court. The criticism is directed at the government which tolerated so many abuses, and like most forms of political opposition came from those outside the group in power. The poems which we shall consider in the present chapter all express the point of view of the common man. They are like voices crying in the wilderness, denouncing evils without seeming so much as to hope for their redress.
