ABSTRACT
The ‘Langland country’ is a constantly, often rapidly changing terrain, and it both reflects and contributes to the at times direct, often tantalizingly circuitous argument of the poem. Langland’s gift ‘to see the highest spiritual conceptions in terms of a rooted concreteness, a firm grasp of the particular’, enables him also to describe the terrain of his spiritual pilgrimage in words firmly rooted in English topography. The method served Langland well, for it allowed him to be both vague and specific, to combine the abstract with the concrete, to counterpoise the actual and the spiritual. The opening vision of the field full of folk immediately establishes the duality of the ‘Langland country’: its mingled, sometimes confused, spiritual and, in contemporary terms, realistic features. The high road to Truth, to salvation, to perfection, to social reform was not, for Langland, as it turned out, the seemingly simple route mapped out by Piers.
