The Lost History of "Piers Plowman". Lawrence Warner

       Preface

      Any history of Langland studies must for the most part tell the history of its textual controversies. Is Piers Plowman the work of one, or of five? How much emendation of the B archetype is justifiable? Is the Z text authorial, or scribal? Has the power of the alphabet blinded us to the true order in which the versions of the poem were composed? What is the value of John But’s testimony, in A 12, to William Langland’s poetic career? Middle English scholars are intimately familiar with such questions, because they are so important in defining, not to mention interpreting, Piers Plowman. But a problem I take to be more important than any of these has barely registered in critical consciousness. It is deceptively simple: what is the date of the archetypal B manuscript? On its face the question might seem unduly technical and particular. Surely the real issue is when Langland had completed the B version—that, at least, is what critics have focused on in attempting to determine the relation between Piers Plowman and, say, the Rising of 1381, or the ideas of John Wyclif. Most if not all offer 1377–78 as the date of that event.¹ Yet the entire surviving record of the B version descends from Bx (as I call this document, following A. V. C. Schmidt), so its dating is the crucial one. If the two individuals we will call the RF and W~M scribes, so called for the manuscripts they in turn generated (R and F in the former case; WHmCrGYOC²CBLM in the latter),² did not use Bx as an exemplar till, say, 1393, then the history of Piers Plowman needs to be rewritten, beginning to end. It would be difficult to maintain, for instance, that the C version was prompted by the public’s reception of B, or that John Ball or Geoffrey Chaucer knew the B version by 1381, to take two major cases.

      There are good reasons to pursue this possibility. One of those reasons inheres in the elegant program of textual affiliations, over the course of entire passages of up to forty lines long, between a C-character manuscript and the W~M group where the RF group has nothing or is spurious. Much of this book will present and analyze that and related programs, arguing that they are the result of contamination of Bx by the C text as now attested only in Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales MS 733B, a witness to the earliest stage of Piers Plowman C (sigil N²). No one has noticed this because the evidence, which can be presented in relatively simple charts, is dispersed over hundreds of lemmata spread over the three Athlone editions and thus published over a span of some thirty-eight years. Previous assumptions that nothing like this could have occurred had the effect of burying the evidence that undermines those very assumptions. But we do not need to go through all that material to assess the plausibility of the idea that Bx was contaminated by C—indeed, to see that it is likely, perhaps even as certain as the evidence will permit. This instance, while not nearly as complicated as the indications upon which this book focuses, has likewise flown entirely below critics’ radar, the reasons for which are as important as the indications themselves. The next few paragraphs will thus not only establish some important groundwork for my argument as a whole, but also serve as a miniature copy of that argument and of the phenomena that have rendered it so contrarian.

      Both the local and large-scale cases reveal themselves upon examination of small items that just do not fit the usual narratives of Piers Plowman’s production. We need to put on our Sherlock Holmes hats to figure them out. The clues to the local mystery did not become apparent until J. A. Burrow’s 2007 essay

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