Stories about feathered men and wool-bearing trees and the child Jesus hanging water pails on a sunbeam have not previously featured in accounts of Piers Plowman’s literary contexts. These tales and much of the other material that appears with the poem in manuscripts like Herun’s collection H have more typically been brushed aside as embarrassments by scholars pursuing medieval responses to Piers Plowman more congenial to modern critical interests. With more justice, students have also been cautious about reading too much into Langland’s manuscript companions. Yet as I have demonstrated, evidence from the marginalia and continuations to the text would suggest that some of these pairings, at least, reflect a wider tendency of medieval readers to approach Piers Plowman as a romance or life history, a compilation of unlikely narrative episodes.

Modern scholarship on the poem and its manuscripts has typically treated Langland’s work very differently. Reading Piers Plowman ‘for the story’ finds little favour today. John Burrow strikes a relatively unusual note in describing the ‘five main stories’ of Piers Plowman. In a review of Michael Calabrese’s ‘narrative reading guide’ for students, Eric Weiskott sounds slightly incredulous to find Piers Plowman approached as a narrative at all:

Weiskott here reproduces, more or less accurately, the dominant mode of contemporary criticism on the poem as a collection of institutional discourses, an approach most comprehensively articulated in David Lawton’s essay on ‘The Subject of Piers Plowman’ and in James Simpson’s Introduction. Scholarship on the manuscripts often follows this tendency of literary criticism to approach Piers as something other than a narrative. Recent work has accordingly highlighted those copies that treat Piers as an encyclopaedic source of excerptible wisdom on various topics, and scholars have identified, catalogued and promoted to prominence previously overlooked excerpts, mostly of ‘prophetic’ passages in sixteenth-century manuscripts.