[Page numbers of the printed text appear at the right in bold.]

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Notes 1. "I wish ere I go that my bequest be written. In the name of God, Amen: I make it myself." Langland will be cited throughout from Piers Plowman: The C-Text, ed. Derek Pearsall (Exeter, 1994). Unless otherwise indicated, Roman numerals in brackets refer to passus, Arabic numerals to line numbers. Translations from Middle English are my own.
2. "Counsel not the commons the king to displease,
Nor they that have laws fail to keep them, I command thee.
Leave it all to God, as Holy Writ teaches:
The [pharisees] sit on the seat of Moses.'
Masters, as they mayors be, and great men, senators,
what they command, as by the king contradict it never.
All that they command, I command, devoutly thou suffer them
and after their warning and command work thou thereafter.
Practice and observe whatever they tell you."
3. "work when there is time for it."
4. "daughters and my dear children."
5. "at the plow for profit to poor and rich."
6. On a Christian's duty to make a will before setting off on a pilgrimage, see Pearsall, ed., Piers Plowman: The C-Text, p. 150, note 94; and J. A. W. Bennett, ed., Langland, Piers Plowman: The Prologue and Passus I-VII of the B Text (Oxford, 1972), pp. 201-4.
7. "in the manner of a pilgrim."
8. The Chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond Concerning the Acts of Samson Abbot of the Monastery of St. Edmund (London, 1949), pp. 91-92.
9. Edith Rickert, Clair C. Olson, and Martin M. Crow, eds., Chaucer's World (New York, 1948), pp. 401-19.
10. John Ruffing, "The Labor Structure of ’lfric's Colloquy," in The Work of Work: Servitude, Slavery and Labor in Medieval England, ed. Allen J. Frantzen and Douglas Moffat (Glasgow, 1994), pp. 55-70, at 66.
11. E. Talbot Donaldson, Piers Plowman: The C-Text and Its Poet (New Haven, 1949), p. 103.
12. "All that they command, I command."
13. I am here assuming that because Piers leaves his possessions to his wife, Piers's son has not yet attained his majority. Fathers had less than absolute power

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over grown sons, even in the laboring classes: R. H. Helmholtz, Marriage Litigation in Medieval England (Cambridge, 1974), p. 467.
14. "for now I am old and hoar."
15. Louise M. Bishop, "Hearing God's Voice: Kind Wit's Call to Labor in Piers Plowman," in The Work of Work , ed. Frantzen and Moffat, pp. 191-205, at 192.
16. David Aers, Community, Gender, and Individual Identity: English Writing 1360-1430 (London, 1988), pp. 40-41.
17. "devout."
18. "Let God command all, as Holy Writ teaches."
19. "but after their doing do thou not, my dear son."
20. "maintain God's law." See Aers, Community, Gender, and Individual Identity, pp. 7-8.
21. David Aers, "Justice and Wage-Labor After the Black Death: Some Perplexities for William Langland," in The Work of Work , ed. Frantzen and Moffat, pp. 169-90, at 171.
22. Britton J. Harwood, "The Plot of Piers Plowman and the Contradictions of Feudalism," in Speaking Two Languages: Traditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory in Medieval Studies, ed. Allen J. Frantzen (Albany, 1991), pp. 91-114, at 91.
23. Eber Carle Perrow, "The Last Will and Testament as a Form of Literature," Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters 17.1 (1914), 682-753. See also Edward Wilson, "The Testament of the Buck and the Sociology of the Text," Review of English Studies n.s. 45 (1994), 157-84.
24. Pearsall, ed., Piers Plowman: The C-Text, p. 130, note 99.
25. "the church shall have my carrion and keep my bones."
26. David Aers, Chaucer, Langland and the Creative Imagination (London, 1980), p. 22.
27. See for example Michael M. Sheehan, The Will in Medieval England (Toronto, 1963), pp. 188-203; and Rickert, Olson and Crow, Chaucer's World, pp. 287, 401.
28. Aers, Chaucer, Langland and the Creative Imagination, pp. 10-11; Harwood, "The Plot of Piers Plowman," pp. 103, 108.
29. "they sit in the seat of Moses . . . perform and serve all they tell you."
30. Bishop, "Hearing God's Voice," p. 198.
31. "Though we had killed the cat yet there should come another / to claw us and all our kind though we crept under benches."
32. Donaldson, Piers Plowman: The C-Text and Its Poet, pp. 91-98.
33. Aers, Chaucer, Langland and the Creative Imagination, pp. 19-22.
34. Aers, Chaucer, Langland and the Creative Imagination, p. 64.
35. W. A. Pantin, The English Church in the Fourteenth Century (London, 1955), quoted by J. F. Goodridge, ed., William Langland: Piers the Ploughman (New York, 1966), p. 9.