prediction therein contained, which carries with it somewhat of the air of a prophecy; but also as it seems to have been a striking picture of monastic insolence and dissipation; and a specimen of one of the keenest pieces of satire now perhaps subsisting in any language, ancient or modern.
“Now is religion a rider, a romer by streate;
A leader of love-days, and a loud begger;
A pricker on a palfrey from maner to maner,
A heape of hounds at his arse, as he a lord were.
And but if his knave kneel, that shall his cope bring,
He loureth at him, and asketh him who taught him curtesie,
Little had lords to done, to give lands from her heirs,
To religious that have no ruth if it rain on her altars.
In many places ther they persons be, by himself at ease:
Of the poor have they no pity, and that is her charitie;
And they letten hem as lords, her lands lie so broad.
And there shal come a king,* and confess you religious;
And beate you, as the bible telleth, for breaking your rule,
And amend monials, and monks, and chanons,
And put hem to her penaunce ad pristinum statum ire."
*F. 1. a. “This prediction, although a probable conclusion concerning a king who after a time would suppress the religious houses, is remarkable. I imagined it might have been foisted into the copies in the reign of king Henry VIII., but it is to be found in MSS. of this poem, older than the year 1400.”—fol. 1. a. b.
“Again, where he, Piers Plowman, alludes to the Knights Templars, lately suppressed, he says,—
"———Men of holie kirk
Shall turn as Templars did; the tyme approacheth here."
“This I suppose, was a favourite doctrine in Wickliffe’s discourses.”—Warton’s Hist. of English Poetry, vol. i. p. 282.
