Talk:Piers Plowman tradition

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A number of these texts (and others not named) deal specifically with enclosure. This is possibly a topic for a different, related article.

future addenda?

Seventeenth-Century Continuities and Discontinuities

In 1601, the House of Commons was debating over laws that would restrict enclosure and fix the current rates of tillage. Supporting the legislation, Robert Cecil took the old agrarian view of the moral economy where agricultural life was seen as integral to the nation. Waxing a bit hyperbolic, he is recorded as saying: "whosoever doth not maintain the Plough, destroys the Kingdom." (D'Ewes, 674). (McRae notes that Cecil's plowmen "were valued in part as potential conscripts for the nation's defence.) Sir Walter Raleigh argued against the proposed regulation and claimed that open competition on the international grain market whould be disastrous with such an arrangement: "the ploughman would be beggered" (D'Ewes, 674). McRae rightly observes that "Raleigh's comments demonstrate the extent to which the ploughman was by the seventeenth century set adrift from his traditional sources of cultural legitimation. Complaint, with its moral fundamentalism and binaries of economic and political power, lacked authority in the new age" (The Ploughman, 199). Thus when Thomas Moore, in The Crying Sin of England, Of not Caring for the Poor (1653) (Wing M2558), defended the old order from the pulpit. He was rebutted by Joseph Lee, who, in Considerations Concerning Common Fields (1654) (Wing L843), writes: "Doth Master Moore conceive that a plowman, as a plowman is . . . more spirituall then shepheard, or a heardman? . . . much good, if it can, may his conceit do him" (31). Rowland Watkyns' Flamma sine Fumo (1662) went further to attack "new illiterate Lay-Teachers . . . the laborious ploughman . . . Who now doth thresh the Pulpit" (44).

Perhaps accommodating himself to hostility and incredulity toward political plowmen, Richard Pecke's [date? see Blench and DNB.] sermon, "The Great Day Dawning" (STC 19522a/19522.5), concentrates on personal piety. Using the tools of the plowman to illustrate the spiritual life all Christians must live, Pecke's extended metaphor is a demilitarized version of the Pauline "armor of God," where the plowman's work is personal, private and inward: "the field you must work in must bee your heart; the furrowes to be beaten up, your sinnes, corruptions, lusts; the sword of the spirit (God's word) your mattock..." A common symbol since the middle ages, Pecke depicts the plow as the cross (and thus the gospel) as well as the Law, which introduces one of Luther's central dialectics. [Tvvo sermons delivered at St. Peters in Exeter. By Rychard Peck, Master of Arts, and minister of Gods word, at Columpton in Devon. London: printed by Thomas Harper for Ambrose Ritherdon, and are to bee sold at his shop in Pauls Church-yard at the signe of the Bull-head, 1632. Part 1 has a separate title page, with the same imprint, reading: The great day dawning. Or, Christs neerenes to iudgement. Part 2 has a separate title page, with same imprint, reading: The spirituall plowman. Or, the art of spirituall fallowing.]

George Wither's Collection of Emblemes, ancient and moderne (1635) depicts the plowman's industrious work as being directed toward spiritual and material profit. John Denham's Coopers Hill (1642) and Thomas Bancroft's "To Swarston" in Two Bookes of Epigrammes and Epitaphs (1639) (STC 1354) similarly relate the plowman's toils and pains to an idyllic bounty. Typical of the period, these examples of Royalist pastoral idealize the old hierarchical, manorial order, depicting happy relationships between lords and plowmen. (E.g., Robert Herrick"The Country Life"). However, as McRae observes, this is a new pastoral of property, where "the ploughman retains his identity with the manorial estate" while "the figure's associations with social reform" are erased by the "interests of proprietorial power and managed economic improvement" (The Ploughman 203). Francis Quarles' "On the Plough-man" (1632) brings some of the tensions of social class back into focus by contrasting the life of "the Landed Lord" with that of his plowman:

       I heare the whistling Plough-man, all day long,
       Sweetning his labour with a cheerfull song:
       His Bed's a pad of Straw; his dyet coarse;
       In both, he fares not better then his Horse:
       He seldome slakes his thirst, but from  the Pumpe,
       And yet his heart is blithe; his visage, plumpe;
       His thoughts are nere acquainted with such things,
       As Griefs or Feares; He onely sweats, and sings.

The plowman's toil is handled with difficulty by Quarles, whose final line explains the difference between plowmen and lords:

   'Tis strange! And yet the cause is easly showne;
   T'one's at God's finding; th'other, at his owne.

In other words, the landlord's freedom comes from his property ownership; the freedom of the plowman has no material base and, like the animals, he is reliant on "God" and "nature" for his sustenance. (Not the benevolence or employment of the landlord though.) Quarles does not confront the possibility of scarcity or the plowman's ability to provide for himself; in this image too, the plowman has no family to care for.

The need to avoid the realistic aspects of the rural laborer's life continued to make him less popular than the shepherd as a poetic figure. McRae reports that Thomas Randolph "asserted a conventional distinction between 'reapers, loppers and Plowmen' who are paid for their work, and the suitably leisured and poetic shepherds" (The Ploughman, 200).

Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers - true levellers

Walter Blith - The English Improver Improved (1652) (Wing B3195) exhorted the "good Plough-man" to "abandon those poor silly shifts men make to preserve themselves ignorant and unserviceable, as they have been Plough-men all their dayes, and are not now to learn" (195-96).

Thomas Middleton (c. 1580-1627), in A Mad World, My Masters (c. 1605-06), has an old gentlewoman say:

       The Shallow ploughman can distinguish now
       'Twixt simple truth and a dissembling brow. (1.1.143-44)

Inconsistency between Introduction and Body of Article

The Introduction limits the Plowman Tradition to fourteen works composed in or before the sixteenth century. This is not consistent with the article. Should we rewrite the Intro? Palaeovia 14:18, 5 April 2007 (UTC)