The Church was corrupt; the mendicant orders
had grown enormously wealthy, and the country was eaten up by a swarm
of begging friars, pardoners, and apparitors. That social discontent was
fermenting among the lower classes which finally issued in the
communistic uprising of the peasantry under Wat Tyler and Jack Straw.
This state of things is reflected in the _Vision of Piers Plowman_,
written as early as 1362, by William Langland, a tonsured clerk of the
west country. It is in form an allegory, and bears some resemblance to
the later and more famous allegory of the _Pilgrim's Progress_. The poet
falls asleep on the Malvern Hills, in Worcestershire, and has a vision
of a "fair field full of folk," representing the world with its various
conditions of men. There were pilgrims and palmers; hermits with hooked
staves, who went to Walsingham--and their wenches after them--great
lubbers and long that were loth to work; friars glossing the Gospel for
their own profit; pardoners cheating the people with relics and
indulgences; parish priests who forsook their parishes--that had been
poor since the pestilence time--and went to London to sing there for
simony; bishops, archbishops, and deacons, who got themselves fat
clerkships in the Exchequer, or King's Bench; in short, all manner of
lazy and corrupt ecclesiastics.
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