`After Craftes Conseil clotheth yow and fede’: Langland and London City Politics.

As opposed to the societies imagined as working together as a whole in B.Prol. and B 6, societies that are essentially agricultural, hierarchically organized according to the three orders, and unsuccessful, the society of B 19 is egalitarian and includes urban, ecclesiastical and agricultural occupations. It is perhaps modelled on the egalitarian parish fraternities of various occupational membership, which featured religious engagement and were internally regulated to ensure fraternal harmony. C.3.90-97 recalls the reforms of John of Northampton directed against the victuallers’ regrating practices. Yet the image of different crafts co-existing harmoniously in B 19 suggests that WL sees such trade rivalry resolved on the model of the fraternity, in a context “in which the rules for creating peace within the fraternity are applied to the relations between fraternities and particularly between crafts.”