Langland’s Musical Reader: Liturgy, Law, and the Constraints of Performance

Abstract

Langland's Musical Reader: Liturgy, Law, and the Constraints of Performance Bruce W. Holsinger University ofColorado "Our songs have become laws." -Plato, The Laws Rarely h,s a litera,y wock esrnped ch, idcologirnl grnsp of ics author as quickly as did William Langland's Piers Plowman. Within a few decades of their composition, the three versions of the poem at­ tracted an astonishingly wide range of responses from a number of En­ glish writers who took the work as a justification for their own articu­ lation of religious and political protest. The B-text initially circulated within what some have recently described as a "London coterie," the members of which included the bureaucratic functionary Thomas Usk and, perhaps, the increasingly prominent London poet Geoffrey Chau­ cer, who may have composed The House ofFame after encountering the work shortly before 1380. 1 Soon thereafter, however, allusions to Piers Plowman appear in two letters associated with the Peasants' Revolt of I am grateful to the staff of the Students Room at the British Library for their assis­ tance and toJohn Bowers, Anna Brickhouse, A. S. G. Edwards, Andrew Galloway, Rich­ ard Firth Green, Ralph Hanna, William Kuskin, Jana Mathews, Derek Pearsall, Wendy Sease, and Emily Steiner for their helpful suggestions. 1 Ralph Hanna III, "On the Versions of Piers Plozl'/Jzan." in Plirstting History: Middle English Manuscripts and Their Texts, Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 236-37; see also Hanna, William Langland (Al­ dctshot, Hams.: Variorum; Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 1993), pp. 23-24; and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and StevenJustice, "Langlandian Reading Circles and the Civil Service in London and Dublin, 1380-1427," New Medieval Literatures 1 (1997): 59-83. A much more skeptical appraisal of the evidence for Usk's knowledge of Langland is forthcoming from John Bowers in Yearbook ofLangland Studies. On Langland and the House ofFame, see most recently Frank Grady, "Chaucer Reading Langland: The House ofFame," SAC 18 (1996): 3-23. 99 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER 1381.2 By the early fifteenth century, several heterodox writers had re­ cruited Piers Plowman into what John Bowers terms a "renegade" textual community, attesting to a general tendency among later authors to view the work as primarily a political document that would lend prestige to their own critiques of church, law, and government.' While Langland's own positions on the controversies of his day have never been particu­ larly easy to pin down, many of his poem's earliest readers sought to enlist its befuddled dreamer and laboring protagonist as vocal propo­ nents for the necessity of dissent. This essay proposes a new addition to the immediate vernacular leg­ acy of Piers Plowman. I shall argue that the so-called "Choristers' La­ ment," a little-studied alliterative satire on the woes ofmusical learning within an English monastic institution, represents a sophisticated but hitherto unrecognized response to Langland's poem. (The "Lament" is newly edited and annotated in the Appendix.') Provocative evidence for the argument that follows can be found in the notes to Skeat's 1886 parallel-text edition of Piers, and in fact the topic was first suggested to me by an entry in the Middle English Dictionary. Among the most prominent obstacles that arguments for direct liter­ ary influence must inevitably confront are those of dating: while the earliest likely date of the B-text is 1377, the "Choristers' Lament" has been dated anywhere from circa 1300 to the middle ofthe fifteenth cen­ tury.5 A new estimate by Ralph Hanna, based in part on an assessment 1 Steven Justice, \Ylriting and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley: University of Cali­ fornia Press, 1994), p. 129.Recent work on Piers Plouman and the Rising includes John Bowers, "Piers Plowman and the Police: Notes Towards a History of the Wycliffite Langland," Yearbook ofLangland Studies 6 (1992), esp.pp.2-10; Susan Crane, "The Writ­ ing Lesson of 1381," in Barbara Hanawalt and David Wallace, eds., Chaucer's England: Literature in Historical Context (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), esp. pp.211-16; Richard Firth Green, "John Ball's Letters: Literary History and Historical Literature," in Chaucer's England. pp. 176-200; and Anne...