William Langland

William Langland is the name given to the author of Piers Plowman, the great alliterative dream-vision of fourteenth-century England. Almost nothing is known of him beyond what the poem and a single manuscript note suggest: that he was born around 1330, perhaps near the Malvern Hills in the west of England, that he was a cleric in minor orders who lived poorly in London with a wife and daughter, and that he worked on the poem for some thirty years, leaving it in three versions now called the A, B and C texts. He probably died around 1386.