The dreamer states that he went about London,--a tall lonely discontented man,--"loath to reverence lords and ladies," and never saluting the great, and the well clad, nor doing any courtesy, so that "folk deemed me a fool". He describes taverns full of bad company, as if he were familiar with them. He states the doubts that arise in clerkly minds. Why should the penitent thief have been allowed to go straight to Paradise? "Who was worse than David, or the Apostle Paul," when he breathed out threatenings against the earliest Christians? Beset by such questionings, and by the scepticism which haunted the Ages of Faith, clerks may curse the hour when they learned more than their creed. The narrator seems to know a good deal about law, and despises men who draw up charters ill, and in bad Latin; he speaks as if he may have eked out his livelihood as a scrivener. He says that he dresses like a "Loller" (however they may have dressed), but he is _not_ a Loller, which may mean either an idle loiterer or a heretical Lollard, who was apt to be a kind of evangelical socialist, entertaining advanced ideas about property. The poet himself, in the spirit of the contemporary House of Commons, denounces the foreigners who obtain benefices in England, and the Englishmen who buy them from Rome. He would not throw off all allegiance to the Pope, but the Pope ought to follow the example, not of St. Peter, a very human character, but of the divine Master of St. Peter. He hates the Friars as much as John Knox did, who called them "fiends, not freres". He denounces the lawless rapacity of "maintained," the liveried followers of great lords; in fact his poem is often an alliterative rendering of the complaints of the House of Commons preserved in the Rolls of Parliament: For Parliamentary institutions he has the highest respect and admiration, he is the warm advocate of peace with France, and opposes the idea of settling the Eastern Question by a Crusade. If he is the author of "Richard the Redeless," he gave good advice, in a severe tone, and too late, to Richard II, when that Prince set himself, like Charles II and James II, to govern England without a Parliament, and was near his fall. The dreamer, or the poet, was no friend of Revolution, but his works were quoted by John Ball, priest and agitator, who was hanged some time after Wat Tyler was done to death. Chaucer was a poet who did not write on political, social, and ecclesiastical reform. Langley or Langland, wrote about little else: he is for reforming a world full of inequality and injustice. In his time the Revolution stirred in its sleep, as it were, like the great subterranean reptile of Australian mythology, and caused the crust of society to tremble, and the spires of the Church to rock. He professed that a reforming King is to come And thanne shal the Abbot of Abyndoun And all his issue for evere Have a knokke of a Kynge, and Incurable the wounde.