ABSTRACT
Towards the end of Passus 19 in the B Text of Piers Plowman, a simple parish priest, the ‘leveed vicory’, bursts out with a speech in which, having first complained about the behaviour of visiting cardinals, he goes on to express his wishes for a better future. Discussing the figure of Piers in one of her essays on the poem, Rosemary Woolf observed that, ‘after his first appearance, it would be ludicrously irrelevant to imagine him as a ploughman’. Piers, she writes, ‘as he grows in allegorical significance, ceases to be a ploughman: all that remains of the literal level is the name’. In modern discussions of the poem, he is commonly referred to as ‘Piers Plowman’ — as if perhaps, ‘Plowman’ were little more than an opaque surname like ‘Smith’. But Langland himself hardly ever refers to his hero as ‘Piers Plowman’: his regular designation is ‘Piers the Plowman’, including the definite article.
