This dissertation examines the use of proverbs in late-medieval English literature (c. 1300-1600), and the ways in which these pithy sayings contributed to conceptions of social class in this period. Drawing on Nancy Mason Bradbury’s conceptualization of the proverb as a “microgenre,” I trace the ways in which proverbs proliferate in texts about particular social classes and rivalries between them. I focus on several Canterbury Tales, the Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf, Lydgate’s Order of Fools, and the Towneley Shepherds’ Plays, each of which features proverbs in situations of class consciousness and class conflict. I argue that the dual universality and particularity of proverbs enables their speakers to convey perspectives that both subvert and and reinforce values associated with their social class, and ultimately both to subvert and to reinforce class boundaries, depending on the contexts in which they are uttered.