at he be worthier set
and with more bliss than thou.... For in charnel at church churles be evil
to know, or a knight from a knave there." The gospel of equality is backed
by the gospel of labour. The aim of the Ploughman is to work, and to make
the world work with him. He warns the labourer as he warns the knight.
Hunger is God's instrument in bringing the idlest to toil, and Hunger waits
to work her will on the idler and the waster. On the eve of the great
struggle between wealth and labour, Langland stands alone in his fairness
to both, in his shrewd political and religious common sense. In the face of
the popular hatred which was to gather round John of Gaunt, he paints the
Duke in a famous apologue as the cat who, greedy as she might be, at any
rate keeps the noble rats from utterly devouring the mice of the people.
Though the poet is loyal to the Church, he proclaims a righteous life to be
better than a host of indulgences, and God sends His pardon to Piers when
priests dispute it. But he sings as a man conscious of his loneliness and
without hope. It is only in a dream that he sees Corruption, "Lady Mede,"
brought to trial, and the world repenting at the preaching of Reason. In
the waking life reason finds no listeners. The poet himself is looked
upon--he tells us bitterly--as a madman. There is a terrible despair in the
close of his later poem, where the triumph of Christ is only followed by
the reign of Antichrist; where Contrition slumbers amidst the revel of
Death and Sin; and Conscience, hard beset by Pride and Sloth, rouses
himself with a last effort, and seizing his pilgrim staff, wanders over the
world to find Piers Ploughman.

[Sidenote: Praemunire]

The strife indeed which Langland would have averted raged only the fiercer
as the dark years went by. If the Statutes of Labourers were powerless for
their immediate ends, either in reducing the actual rate of wages or in
restricting the mass of floating labour to definite areas of employment,
they proved effective in sowing hatred between employer and employed,
between rich and poor. But this social rift was not the only rift which was
opening amidst the distress and misery of the time. The close of William
Langland's poem is the prophecy of a religious revolution; and the way for
such a revolution was being paved by the growing bitterness of strife
between England and the Papacy. In spite of the sharp protests from king
and parliament the need for money