The English Poets (Volume 1); Chaucer to Donne

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: WILLIAM LANGLEY, LANGLAND. Contemporaneously with Chaucer there lived arid worked one of the most remarkable of our poets, of whom we know little or nothing except from his works. And even these have been so little studied by the generality of readers, that the singular mistake has arisen of confusing the name of the work with the name of the author. It is common to see-references made to 'Piers Plowman' as if he were a writer living in the fourteenth century, which is no less confusing than if we should speak of Hamlet as flourishing in the reign of Elizabeth. Our author's name is not certainly known. That his Christian name was William there can be no doubt, though by some mistake he has sometimes been called Robert. In a note written on the fly-leaf of one of the Dublin MSS., in a hand of the fifteenth century, we are told that a certain Stacy de Rokayle, living at Shipton-under-Wychwood (about four miles from Burford in Oxfordshire), and holding land of Lord le Spenser, was the father of William de Langlond who wrote the book called Piers Plowman. The only difficulty about this testimony is the name Langland, which should rather, perhaps, be read as Langley; since the Langland family was at that date connected with Somersetshire, whilst there is actually a hamlet named Langley at no great distance from Shipton. By a careful study of the internal evidence afforded us by the poet's works, we can make out quite sufficient to give us a cleaf idea of the man. We gather, chiefly from his own words, that he was born about A.D. 1332, probably at Cleobury Mortimer in Shropshire. His father and his friends put him to school (possibly in the monastery at Great Malvern), made a clerk or scholar of him, and taught him what holy writ meant. In 1362, at the age of about thirty, h...