His poem, following the convention of dreams and allegories, is the record of dreams into which he fell, first on the Malvern hills; later, wherever he chanced to be. The poem exists in three forms (A, B, C), and, from the allusions to contemporary events (such as the peace of Bretigny, with France (1360), and a great tempest of January, 1362), the A version may have been composed in 1362. The B version, much altered and enlarged, is dated, from its allusions to events, in 1377; and the C version, also enlarged, from its references to the unpopularity of Richard II, must be later than 1392. If the poet drew his dreamer and narrator from study of his own character, he must have been, in some ways, not unlike Mr. Thomas Carlyle. Though he had a noble appreciation of the dignity and duty of manual labour,--the honest and pious ploughman was his favourite character,--he never did toil with his hands. In reply to the remonstrances of Reason, he says:-- I am too weak to work with sickle or with scythe. Over-education in youth has sapped his manhood: and, since his friends who paid for his schooling died, he has never joyed. He praised the country, but, as Dr. Johnson said, "hung loose upon the town," a man of a modern type. "Ich live _in_ Londone, and _on_ Londone both," he writes. The instruments of his craft are not sickle and scythe, but the _paternoster_, the psalter, "and my seven psalms," that "I sing for men's souls". In return for such services he picks up a bare livelihood. Clerks like himself should "come of franklins and freemen," not of bondmen. The sons of serfs, he thinks, should do manual labour, and should not be admitted to Holy Orders. This was the view of the English House of Commons, under Richard II, and it may be that the poet is rather satirizing their exclusiveness, and the hand-to-mouth lazy life of poor clerks, than describing himself. The narrator, after the sermon preached at him by Reason, goes to Church in a penitent mood, and beats his breast, but does not change his course of life. The poem (or, as some think, the series of poems by various hands) represents in the most vivid way, the unrest, discontent, and doubt which came over Western Europe towards the end of the fourteenth century. The cruel and endless wars, the brigands, the ravages of the Black Death (which caused demand for higher wages because so few were left to work) drove the poor into revolts like that of Wat Tyler. There were frightful cruelties and terrible reprisals. The wealth and licentiousness of the regular Orders of clergy caused them to be hated and despised. The people called Lollards advocated a kind of evangelical Protestantism, and something very like modern Socialism. All these things Chaucer passed by or treated lightly, but whoever wrote "Piers Plowman" threw into his picture of the age his vivid and fiery but lurid and confused genius. He paints himself as poor, discontented, powerless, and always angry.