Page:The English Peasant.djvu/24

 Ne no kokeney, bi cryst: coloppes forto maken. Ac I have percil and porettes, and many kole-plantes, And eke a cow and a kalf, and a cart-mare, To draw a-felde my donge, the while the drought lasteth, And bi this lyflode we mot lyve, til lammasse tyme.'"

All this indicates hard and careful living, and the ploughman's clothes "y clouted and hole," tell the same tale.

But what is most striking is that a ploughman should have so great a concern for the common weal, and should not only have been desirous to find the Truth for himself, but anxious to guide others to it. This independence of character combined with strong conservative instincts does not suggest a serf or one who had lately emerged from that condition. But in the fact that the Ploughman had not only his "half acre by the highway," but possessed a little homestead of his own, it seems far more probable that he was a member of one of those rural townships where there were "common fields" and "lot meadows."

Of course I recognise that Piers the Plowman is continually passing from a real into an allegorical character; but just as Bunyan's "Christian" was a fair type of the best Christians found among the poor in the seventeenth century, so Piers is a fair type of the English husbandman who has never been submitted to the degradation of personal slavery.

The popularity of the book, proved by the many copies extant in a rough penmanship, and still more by the fact that the leaders of the insurrection of 1381 couched their appeal to the country in its phraseology, renders it evident that Langland sketched from life.

The stars fought in their courses during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to set the labourer free. Whether Wiclif was the product or the producer of the awakening that during these centuries went on all over the Continent, it would be hard to say,