ABSTRACT
In an important introductory volume to Renaissance culture published at the turn of the millennium, William Langland's extravagantly complex and arresting medieval poem is accorded a short, but extremely significant, appearance. Patrick Collinson, the great scholar of the Elizabethan Puritan movement, writes that 'lurking in the arras, as it were, was the living ghost of Piers Plowman'. More recently, James Simpson's barn-storming reassessment of literary history in his Reform and Cultural Revolution again questioned quite what the ghost or legacy of Piers Plowman might have been for the sixteenth century. This chapter argues that amongst the most important things that Piers Plowman endowed to the sixteenth century was a particular imaginative preoccupation with the city-London in particular-and consequently a certain mode of satire or polemic which was vital to mid-Tudor writing. The chapter details some key passages in Langland's poem itself, and show how vital, deep and artful was Langland's satirical preoccupation with the urban marketplace.
