If William Langland had known there was going to be a conference on the subject of ‘The Problem of Labour’, he would have been sure to have been in attendance, in order to give his opinion on the matter. For, though it may sound a strange thing to say about an essentially religious poem, the problem of labour is central to his poem of Piers Plowman. It is central to his ideas about the reform of society and it is central to his programme of spiritual renewal. The secular and the religious are never far separated in Langland. The religious is the political, the political is the personal, and the personal, the idea of personal identity, is always perceived as rooted in the work that a person does. Langland draws on the tradition of estates-satire, as does Chaucer in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, but there is the difference that in Chaucer the work that a person does is part of his ‘character’, where in Langland it is the means through which his contribution to the Christian community is assessed.

Even before his poem has got fully under way, Langland is already making a key distinction, in the vision of the Field Full of Folk, between those who are true workers in their vocation, whether secular or spiritual, and those who are idle, or who do no useful work, and who batten upon those who do. Ploughmen and true hermits are the representatives of the former; minstrels, false beggars, false pilgrims, false hermits and friars are amongst the many representatives of the latter group. The ploughman was obviously a powerful image of the good honest Christian worker for Langland and his audience, as it was for Chaucer, and Langland eventually makes a Ploughman the hero and agent of grace in his poem – his Beatrice. He also returns again and again, with self-revealing insistence, to the groups who fail to demonstrate the salvific function of labour – minstrels, beggars, false hermits and friars. I say ‘revealing’, because, as Talbot Donaldson long ago made clear, they are the groups with whom Langland most closely identified himself. His own vocation is uncomfortably tangled up with theirs.