The Vision of Piers Plowman

Piers Plowman is trippy and freaking long, so I'll let Wikipedia handle the heavy lifting. Some generalities:

Piers Plowman (written ca. 1360–1387) or Visio Willelmi de Petro Ploughman (William's Vision of Piers Plowman) is the title of a Middle English allegorical narrative poem by William Langland. It is written in unrhymed alliterative verse divided into sections called "passus" (Latin for "step"). Piers is considered by many critics to be one of the early great works of English literature along with Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

The text:

Piers Plowman is considered to be one of the most analytically challenging texts in Middle English textual criticism. There are 50-56 surviving manuscripts, some of which are fragmentary. None of the texts are known to be in the author's own hand, and none of them derive directly from any of the others.

All modern discussion of the text revolves around the classifications of W. W. Skeat. Skeat argued that there are as many as ten forms of the poem, but only three are to be considered authoritative—the A, B, and C-texts—although the definition of "authoritative" in this context is problematic. According to the three-version hypothesis, each version represents different manuscript traditions deriving from three distinct and successive stages of authorial revision. Although precise dating is debated, the A, B, and C texts are now commonly thought of as the progressive (20-25 yrs.) work of a single author.

Given the epic size of Piers Plowman, and its tangled intricacies, no mere synopsis will do. Ergo, an outline.