‘Elementary’ Images in the Samaritan Episode of Piers Plowman

Abstract

IN AN ESSAY published in this journal over twenty-five years ago, I claimed that the imagery of food and drink so prominent in Piers Plowman was ‘genuinely structural’ and ‘central to Langland's main thematic concern’.1 I now wish to argue that this strain of imagery pertains to a wider and more basic category that I shall call ‘elementary’. I adopt this term, which may seem surprising in connection with a poet like Langland, as signifying both ‘elemental’ and ‘rudimentary’, and so usefully keeping present the notion that such imagery is meant to be comprehensible to the simple as well as the subtle.2 With a few well-known exceptions, like the notorious distinction between mede and mercede based on the categories of formal grammatical theory (C III. 332-406), the figurae in Piers Plowman are drawn from everyday human living but, like the imagery of the Bible that inspires them, come to be endowed with rich spiritual meanings. In contrast to the seventeenth century metaphysical poets, Langland's figures mostly avoid abstruse or novel fields of erudition and draw on such fundamental features of bodily experience as heat and cold, wetness and dryness, or light and dark. These categories depend on the contact our five senses make with a world composed of the ‘Four Elements’ of the old physics (earth, water, air, and fire); but the ‘elementary’ in the meaning I give it here imports, as much as this, the common (‘shared’ and ‘ordinary’) needs and actions that arise from the conditions of material existence. Thus it includes not only the hunger and thirst discussed in my earlier piece but a whole range of sensory experiences, which provide Langland the chief, at times the sole, means through which transcendental religious truths may be communicated. Such a notion of the ‘elementary’ can take us into the centre of Piers Plowman, but I begin here with the neglected ‘Samaritan’ episode, which deploys this type of imagery in a concentrated way.3 I shall refer mainly to the B-text (the version in Passus XIX of the C-text, shorter by some twenty lines, shows no significant differences).4

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