The Manor, the Plowman, and the Shepherd: Agrarian Themes and Imagery in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance English Literature

The Manor, the Plowman, and the Shepherd is a study of agrarian history and economics that illuminates the literature of England for the late medieval and early Renaissance period (ca. 1300-1600). During the fourteenth century, basic changes in the country resulted from natural and man-made crises: famine, plague, war, and rebellion. As population declined, the manorial institution changed, and the arable farming considered essential for the manor gradually yielded to a more profit-oriented pastoral way of life, a subtle change identified in late thirteenth-century poems such as "The Man in the Moon," "Song of the Husbandman," A Satire of Edward II's England, and Wynnere and Wastoure. One of the most recognizable images of the old way of life, but also representing a troubled force in the new way of life, is the plowman, whose strong spiritual and social associations are central to Piers Plowman and present in the works of writers such as Chaucer, Gower, and the anonymous authors of the Piers Plowman tradition. The agrarian economic conditions of the fifteenth century, which permitted extensive leasing of demesne land to enterprising peasant farmers, give rise to the literary creation of the "new" farmer, a beggar on horseback, a less severe and more humorous type in such works as "John the Reeve," "How the Plowman Learned his Paternoster," "The Turnament of Tottenham," and various short poems. Closely related to the comic farmer is the shepherd, who began to appear particularly in the mystery plays. This is the beginning of a native pastoral tradition that will contribute to the prevailing pastoral literature of the sixteenth century. By the early sixteenth century, the agrarian landscape changed to more pastoral land, more enclosures, and a decrease in (or a rearrangement of) manorial lands. Increased population and an abundance of labor created economic tensions that caused moralizers to cry out for reform, but there is no evidence pastoral lands decreased even by the end of the century. In literature, the plowman tradition continued to exist in such forms as the remarkable sermon by Bishop Latimer, but more often than not it was viewed nostalgically as part of the past, and used to address the problems brought about by the pastoral economy of the sixteenth century. The plowman can be identified even as late as Spenser's Faerie Queene where he assumes the moral associations of the fourteenth-century type, and in Sidney where the plowman becomes the unsympathetic buffoon. But it is the shepherd who becomes the familiar voice of morality (Skelton and Spenser), of love (Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare), and of basic human values (Spenser and Shakespeare).