ABSTRACT
Langland is justifying a non-labouring aristocracy by positing a kind of implicit social contract, according to which they are sustained by the working classes in return for the military and policing services they provide, defending community from “wastours and fro wikked men that this world destruyeth.” Other moralists who had interested themselves in the question of whether and how a livelihood is honestly earned had adopted the same criterion of labour as Langland employs in Passus VI: earnings must be commensurate with labour. Langland gives his own forceful logic to the respect for equity underlying such attitudes by representing society, labour, and livelihood in their most basic and primitive forms: a small peasant community, dependent for food on grain the land will not yield unless physically laboured upon by them. The poem appears at the beginning of the Passus to be confident that it has identified just such a legitimate pardon, a mercy in accord with justice and Truth.
