the Carmelites; the Carmelites denounce the Dominicans; the Dominicans denounce the Augustines; the Augustines complete this carousel of invective by denouncing the Franciscans. The entire poem seems like an uproarious inversion of cantos xi and xii of Dante's Paradiso: just as Dante has the Dominican Aquinas and the Franciscan Bonaventure lauding one another's orders, so the Crede-poet makes the mendicants exchange abuse. But all is not entirely lost. As he returns home, the narrator encounters a poor Plowman, dressed in rags and so emaciated that men myyte reken ich a ryb (432). Although starving, the Plowman freely offers the narrator what food he does have. When the narrator tells him of his experiences with the friars, the Plowman launches into a blistering diatribe on the four orders. Recognizing the wisdom of the Plowman's words, the narrator asks him whether he can teach him the Creed. He is glad to do so: the poem ends with the Plowman's recital of the elusive text. Two features make the Crede particularly worthy of note. Firstly, it is the earliest text to imitate William Langland's Piers Plowman, to which it refers explicitly. The selfless Plowman is of course directly drawn from the earlier work. Perhaps written within eight years of the C-text of Piers Plowman, the Crede thus testifies to the appeal of Langland's more subversive, anticlerical sentiments among some of his early readers. Of course, the Crede-poet only uses Piers Plowman as a launch-pad for his own views. The Crede is markedly more confident than Langland in its opposition to the clergy. The fact that it abandons Langland's dream-vision framework is suggestive of this as if the lay perfection that the Plowman represents has become more achievable in reality. The Crede conflates Piers (here, "Peres") with the author/dreamer of Piers Plowman, thus collapsing that poem's many voices into a single, collective voice of the ideal community. This misprision was a common aspect of Piers Plowman's dissemination. The character of Piers thus escapes from the confines of William Langland's vision and takes on a life, an authority, and an authorial career of his own. As in The Plowman's Tale and The Prayer and Complaint of the Plowman, true religion is the virtue of the poor. The Piers of the Crede is simply a plowman without the Christological aspect of Piers in Langland's poem. A second, related point of interest is that the Crede is