Page:Readings in European History Vol 1.djvu/512

476 Readings in European History What Piers had withal to stave off hunger until the harvest. How Covet- ousness appeared. Langland, who appears to have been born about 1332, and to have given the last revision to his poem shortly before the year 1400. Much is said by Langland of the hard lot of the peasant, the abuses in the Church, the seven cardinal sins, and the various Christian virtues. The following passages in modern English prose illus- trate the spirit, charm, and interest of the little book. 1 "I have no penny," said Piers, "to buy pullets, nor geese, nor pigs, but I have two green cheeses, a few curds and cream, and an oat-cake, and two loaves of beans and bran baked for my children. And yet I say, by my soul, I have no salt bacon nor eggs forsooth to make collops, but I have parsley and leeks and many cabbages, and eke a cow and a calf and a cart mare to draw my dung a-field while the drought lasteth, and by this provision we must live till Lammastide; and by that I hope to have harvest in my croft, and then may I get thy dinner [O Hunger] as it pleaseth me well." Then [among the cardinal sins] came Covetousness. I cannot describe him, so hungry and hollow Sir Harvey looked. He was beetle-browed and also thick-lipped, with two bleared eyes like a blind hag; and like a leathern purse his cheeks lolled about even lower than his chin and they trembled with old age. And his beard was beslobbered with bacon like a bondsman's. A hood was on his head above a lousy hat, and he was in a tawny coat twelve win- ters old, and full of vermin, and all dirty and torn to rags, and full of creeping lice ; except a louse were a good leaper he could not have walked on that scurvy coat, it was so threadbare. The poet gives at the close of his poem his notion of the relative worth of good conduct (" Do-well ") as against confidence in papal pardons and in masses said after one's death. 1 I borrow, with slight changes, from Miss Kate Warren's spirited and scholarly prose version (London, 1899).