Dating the poet
When the poet was born and died, and the circumstances of his life, have been the
subject of much inference from his poem. This survives in three forms, each
preserved in a substantial number of copies. The first, evidently unfinished, but
already bespeaking an accomplished poet, has for coda in three copies a skilful
pastiche in Langland's style by a man who names himself John But. The second,
developing and extending the first and almost three times as long, has an
unmistakable closure. The third is an uncompleted revision of the second. Walter
Skeat, who identified these forms, called them the A, B, and C texts. Each contains
unmistakable contemporary references. The mature excellence of the writing in the A
text, and allusions in it to Edward III's French campaigns, and to a great storm in
1362, between them have suggested that the poet was born about 1330. Recent