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Prose

Notes Langland was fond of making up long fantastic compound names, such as Dame Work-when-
time-is, the name of the wife of Piers, or Do-right-so-or-thy-dame-shall-thee-beat, the name of his
daughter. Some of these names, as for example the name of Piers’ son, are several lines in length
and so unwieldy as to become grotesque. Picturesque words of popular color occur, and the main
difference between the vocabulary of Langland and that of Chaucer consists in the presence of a
certain number of outlandish words, as they seem to the modern reader, in the writings of Langland,
which have been lost altogether to the language or have fallen from the literary speech to the
dialects. Undoubtedly the alliteration, demanding as it does a wide range of vocabulary, is partly
responsible for Langland’s popular words, alliteration and the popular style naturally going
together. Broad picturesque phrases abound, as in the description of Sir Harvey, the covetous
man, “bitelbrowed and baberlipped,” his beard beslobbered, like a bondman’s, with his bacon; or
when Langland calls Christ’s disciples God’s boys, merry-mouthed men, the minstrels of heaven.
When occasion calls for them, Langland even uses freely words not to be repeated for modern
readers. Plainness of speech is inherent in his mode of thought, and if plainness becomes vulgarity,
Langland feels no necessity for apologizing, as Chaucer does when he defends his broad style on
the artistic grounds that the manner must be appropriate to the matter. On the other hand, Langland
is equally free in introducing learned Latin and French into the body of his narrative, not
systematically in the manner of the later Macaronic writing, as in Skelton, but apparently as the
fancy struck him.
The spirit of Langland’s verse was not that of the school. Although the style was not without its
technic, it was a free and easy technic. It called for the readiness and copiousness of the improviser,
rather than the care and forethought of the literary artist. If impassioned prose had been possible
in his day, Langland might well have chosen to write in that form, but lacking such a medium, he
developed in his free metrical rhythms a form that approaches prose. By means of this form he
expressed himself with an astonishing ease and abundance. There is a power in the mere sweep of
his thought which would have been impossible in the regular rimed meters of Chaucer. And yet
Langland’s eloquence seldom reaches the lofty heights of great poetry. His art is crude, grotesque,
and unformed, as compared with the art of later masters of the serious style, like Hooker in prose
or Milton in verse. Lacking Langland’s earnestness of thought, his style in the hands of his successors
often degenerated into the blustering, robustious, but formless writing of a host of popular rimesters,
pamphleteers, and preachers of the Tudor and Elizabethan periods. Even with Langland, the form
of Piers Plowman occupied a position of unstable equilibrium between verse and prose, and not
infrequently the free alliterative verse of this tradition passed over into popular alliterative prose.
In its looseness of form and its picturesqueness and homely vigor this prose resembles the degraded
survival of the older alliterative long line known as ‘tumbling verse,’ and perhaps no better name
can be found for it than ‘tumbling prose.’ With all its crudities, this prose played a not inconspicuous
part in the development of literary style in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and more must be
said of it later.
The latter half of the fourteenth century presents no writers of equal eminence to Chaucer and
Langland. Verse, as has already been pointed out, occupied almost the whole field of literary
activity, and such prose as was written had usually an immediate practical or documentary purpose.
Simple narration, however, was not beyond the powers of fourteenth-century prose, and the
famous Voiage and Travaile of Sir John Moundevile and Trevisa’s numerous translations, especially
his version of Higden’s Poly-chronicon, are the best representatives of this naive and rudimentary
prose which had as yet hardly lifted itself to the literary level. The Voiage and Travaile is also a
translation, preserved in three versions by unknown translators, which are all more or less freely
adapted from the French original. Under the guise of a manual of directions for pilgrims making
the journey to the Holy Land, the original author or compiler of the work, who also is unknown,
really wrote a traveler’s book, filled with all manner of picturesque misinformation about man
and nature. How much faith the compiler of the book and its translators may have had in the

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