Langland's glowing recommendation of the life of the cloister – ‘For yf hevene be on this erthe, or eny ese to the soule, / Hit is in cloystre or in scole, by many skilles I fynde’ (Piers Plowman, c.v.i152–3) – has often been taken to be in need of explanation. After all, monks, as we know from Chaucer, are fat and worldly and much more devoted to venery than the opus Dei. It has often been thought to be an indication that Langland himself had a monastic education. But it seems more likely that the views of both Langland and Chaucer are examples of cultural image–making. Monks are not portrayed as they ‘really’ are but in ways that serve particular cultural purposes. These images are powerful and vivid fictions, and they soon displace the shifting realities that must be laboriously, and inevitably imperfectly, reconstructed from other sources. In this paper I shall try to trace some of these various strains of thinking, including Langland's Utopian vision of the monastic life, in the secular English literature of the later medieval period. Something will be said about the benefits that accrued to the monks from not being friars, but the main argument will concern the superseding of the stereotypes ad bonum and ad malum of Langland by a more pragmatic acknowledgement of the monk as a bureaucratic functionary, mischievously anticipated in Chaucer and embodied in person in the poet John Lydgate.