The years surrounding the Rising of 1381 witnessed socio-cultural struggles suggesting to authors of the day the fallen-ness of England. That impression had significant effects on the community imagined by writers. As authors such as John Gower and William Langland represented the perceived moral and social decay, they communicated multiple images of the nation simultaneously. One facet is the “monstrous nation,” in which a people is unified by its immoral predilection for self-destruction; the other facet is the “reformist nation,” in which texts communicate an ideal image, rooted in the theory of the Three Estates. Religion, therefore, becomes a structuring principle in medieval “imagined communities.” Chapter One analyzes Gower’s use of Nebuchadnezzar’s statue in the Vox Clamantis, which Gower reuses in the Confessio Amantis, reading it as an image of a monstrous body politic that shadows the ideal image of community. Gower’s adopted role as prophet for the English locates this community within a specifically religious discourse that elevates the ideal image of the nation to one of chosenness by God. Chapter Two argues that in Thomas Walsingham’s Historia Anglicana, Henry Knighton’s Chronicon and other accounts of the Peasants’ Revolt, medieval chroniclers encode the insurgent imagining of community, even as they proclaim the orthodox image set out by Gower, revealing the nation to be a contentious debate rather than a harmonious agreement. Chapter Three uses Post-Colonial theory to address the letters attributed to John Ball, arguing that Ball articulates a distinct image of community for the revolt that is founded upon labor as a conceptual framework. Ball, the chapter claims, expresses an adherence to hierarchical social structures in which estates share an interest in burgeoning market economies. Moreover, he locates that vision within a solidly religious mode that renders him an anti-Gower. The final chapter takes up Piers Plowman to suggest that Langland diagnoses the cause for the inherent fissuring of national identities. Langland’s allegory reveals that social discourses hinder the unity of national communities despite the power of individual religious experiences to realign the individual’s relations to the community at large.