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| CATEGORIES ABOUT WILLIAM LANGLAND | |
| old elizabethans | |
| langland, william | |
| people from malvern | |
| english poets | |
| middle english poets | |
| medieval writers | |
| 1332 births | |
| 1386 deaths | |
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William Langland is the conjectured 's acrostics in Le Testament ). Although the evidence may appear slender, Langland's authorship has been widely accepted by commentators since the 1920s. It is not, however, entirely beyond dispute, as recent work by Stella Pates and C. David Benson has demonstrated. Almost nothing is known of Langland himself. His entire identity rests on a string of conjectures and vague hints. It would seem that he was born in the West Midlands. Langland's narrator receives his first vision while sleeping in the Malvern Hills (between Herefordshire and Worcestershire ), which suggests some level of attachment to the area. The dialect of the poem is also consistent with this part of the country. Although his date of birth is unknown, there is a strong indication that he died in c.1385–6. A note written by one 'Iohan but' ('John But') in a fourteenth-century manuscript of the poem (Rawlinson 137) makes direct reference to the death of its author: ''whan this werke was wrouyt, ere Wille myte aspie/ Deth delt him a dent and drof him to the erthe/ And is closed vnder clom'' ('once this work was made, before Will was aware/ Death struck him a blow and knocked him to the ground/ And now he is buried under the soil'). Since But himself, according to Edith Rickert , seems to have died in 1387, Langland must have died shortly before this date. The rest of our knowledge of the poet can only be reconstructed from ''Piers'' itself. There is in fact a wealth of ostensibly biographical data in the poem, but it is difficult to know how this should be treated. The C-text of ''Piers'' contains a passage in which Will describes himself as a 'loller' living in the 's 'In Praise of Aige' and The Parlement Of The Thre Ages ), and the fact that it occurs towards the end of the poem, when Will's personal development is reaching its logical conclusion. Further details can be inferred from the poem, but these are also far from unproblematic. For instance, the detailed and highly sophisticated level of religious knowledge in the poem indicates that Langland had some connection to the clergy, but the nature of this relationship is uncertain. The poem shows no obvious bias towards any particular group or order of churchmen, but is rather even-handed in its Anticlericalism , attacking the regular and secular clergy indiscriminately. This makes it difficult to align Langland with any specific order. He is probably best regarded, as John Bowers writes, as a member of 'that sizable group of unbeneficed clerks who formed the radical fringe of contemporary society...the poorly shod Will is portrayed "y-robed in russet" traveling about the countryside, a crazed dissident showing no respect to his superiors'. Malcom Godden has proposed that he lived as an itinerant hermit, attaching himself to a patron temporarily, exchanging writing services for shelter and food. The tradition that Langland was a Wycliffite, an idea promoted by . But these topics were widely discussed throughout the late fourteenth century, only becoming typically 'Wycliffite' after Langland's death. Furthermore, as Pamela Gradon observes, at no point does Langland echo Wyclif's characteristic teachings on the Sacraments . For further information, see the article Piers Plowman . REFERENCES
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