In 1550 The Vision of Piers Plowman was published (without author’s name) by the Protestant printer and controversialist Robert Crowley, and reprinted twice in the same year. Langland’s great poem had previously been known only in manuscript copies, and as a product of a non-courtly tradition never interested William Caxton, who printed the works of Chaucer, Gower and Malory (1478; 1483; 1485). The first literary critics to notice it were William Webbe (1586), who thought the poet’s ‘dooinges … somewhat harshe and obscure’ but judged him ‘a very pithy writer’ and George Puttenham (1589), who found his ‘termes … hard and obscure’, offering ‘litle pleasure’. Though read by Spenser, Marlowe and possibly Shakespeare, Piers Plowman sank from sight until Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry (1774–81). Warton found the poet’s ‘extremely perplexed’ manner such as to ‘disgust the reader with obscurities’ but ascribed to the ‘imposed constraint’ of the alliterative metre his ‘constant and necessary departure from the natural and obvious forms of expression’. The poem’s arresting first lines, which Warton quotes, hardly bear this out, however; and though Langland is not as linguistically accessible as Chaucer or Gower, his ‘terms’ will hardly seem ‘hard’ by comparison with the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

If Langland’s poetry is ‘difficult’, this is due not to his language but his thought, his disconcertingly labile use of allegory and his unexpected and (at times) startling imagery, which contrasts strongly with the ‘illustrative’ mode typical of medieval writing. In his famous description of divine love (B-version, Passus i.148–58), heterogeneous conceits tumble forth, catching the light of semi-understanding before rolling into the shadow of semi-mystery. Love is a medicine, a spice, the plant of peace, the most precious virtue; heavy, it falls out of heaven, but after ‘eating’ earth grows light as a lime-tree leaf; it is easy to carry but sharp enough to penetrate chinks in armour or the walls of a fortified city.