the B edition, collaborating with Janet Cowen, he wanted to edit Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women in part because doing so “would illustrate the problem of copy text in the instance of fourteenth-century poetry preserved only in fifteenth-century or late fifteenth-century manuscripts.”27 The problem was that, whereas “there are manuscripts of both Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales admirably suited to serve as copy text in Greg’s sense”—that is, as provider of language, not as “base text” that supplies the most correct readings—the same does not apply for Chaucer’s other works.28 His conclusion is bold: he chooses the text in Oxford, Bodleian MS Tanner 346 because “it represents authentically what run-of-the-mill fifteenth-century scribes made of, did to, Chaucer’s language. For editors of Chaucer’s minor works use of such a manuscript is one alternative. The other is to rewrite the poem in the language presumed to be Chaucer’s. This would bring to the fore new issues of rationale.”29
In suggesting that copy-text is only one of two viable approaches to this problem, Kane here added his voice to a growing consensus. Fredson Bowers himself had suggested something like my policy.30 Now Joseph Dane has endorsed this approach with regard to the closest post-medieval equivalent to the phenomenon of Piers Plowman: “That a copy-text must be a version of the text to be edited seems obvious enough, but there could be situations where this might not be the case, e.g., where a ‘version’ of a text is regarded not as a ‘variant’ but as a different text. The Folio King Lear could easily be edited with the Quarto functioning as copy-text, even by an editor who regards them as representing different plays.”31 And finally G. Thomas Tanselle has urged that in situations of “radiating authority”—again, such as Piers Plowman, though he does not here say as much—editors should edit without a copy-text.32
So, too, I would suggest, might critics of Piers Plowman benefit from citing without an edition. The collapse of text into document has been occurring for too long on the level of editions, as well as copy-texts. To grant Kane and Donaldson’s or Schmidt’s editions status as “Piers Plowman B,” the work itself, rather than as one of many ways of representing that entity, is not fair either to that entity or to what they were attempting to achieve. The Athlone editors were working in the absence of knowledge we now have, and upon which we can now act. The decision to print A and B in a language different from that of their respective editions is in keeping with this book’s argument that Piers Plowman is a much more fluid concept than is represented by separate (or parallel) editions each of which assumes that the archetypal origins of the versions are integral.
As such, I hope that this book will go some way towards recuperating “the work” as a helpful, a necessary, category in those constructions of literary history that attend closely to manuscript cultures. The collapse of work into document might have more dramatic consequences in Piers Plowman than it would on, say, Chaucer studies, which probably explains the alacrity with which critics have embraced it in their attempts to downplay or even dismiss the editorial achievements of previous generations. If what survives is a fair representation of what preceded it, why bother to discover any lost past? Indeed. But if, as this book argues, what survives is something else entirely, then we owe it to those extant documents, not to mention to the author or authors, executors, scribes, censors, readers, collectors, editors, and critics to begin again the hard work of reconstituting the work in a form capacious enough to make room for the lost history of Piers Plowman.
Chapter 1
Piers Plowman Before 1400: Evidence for the Earliest Circulation of A, B, and C
William Langland was finished with Piers Plowman A by around 1370, but its earliest extant manuscripts are no earlier than about 1390.1 Such gaps are not unusual for Middle English poetry,2 but the existence of Piers Plowman in so many versions, and the indications that major figures like John Ball and Geoffrey Chaucer knew one of those versions as early as 1380, render our response to this gap in particular especially urgent. The predominant narrative of the poem’s early existence—that the B version was the only one available by that date—is in effect a gloss on that gap, one that assumes that A manuscripts from the 1370s do not survive now because they did not exist in the first place. But that narrative passes in silence over the fact that no B manuscripts survive from that era either. At least for the sake of consistency, one might hope for the acknowledgment that the dates of extant manuscripts indicate nothing about the form in which Piers Plowman existed by 1380.
For a much fuller mapping of the earliest circulation of Piers Plowman we need to turn to another major and widely available, if also widely neglected, area of knowledge: the status of the texts within these manuscripts. This material, I will argue, directs us to the conclusion that, contrary to widespread belief, Piers Plowman A achieved a substantial circulation from very early stages, the B version in contrast remaining dormant until readers and scribes had embraced the final, C version. I then turn to the external indications that have a bearing on the question of the B version’s early availability, found in works written by a pamphleteer, a poet, and a preacher c. 1381–82; again, I will show that A is the most likely source of their knowledge. This chapter sets in train the central theme of this book: the earliest production and transmission of Piers Plowman were nothing like what we have assumed.
Evidence for the Early Circulation of Piers Plowman A
The gap between the composition of Piers Plowman A and its surviving manuscripts invites two competing interpretations. One is best articulated by Ian Doyle, who finds it “not surprising that the earliest copies of Langland’s A text, composed in the 1360s and perhaps slow to be multiplied, but increasingly sought after, should have been lost, as the other longer texts became available for preference, combination or conflation.”3 This approach has the advantages of speaking to the character of A in particular, as such forces of destruction would not apply to B or C, and of being immune to disproval. Only the sudden revelation of dozens of ancient A-version manuscripts would alter the point, and even then it would still seem likely that innumerable others were victims to the desire for longer versions. Still, Ralph Hanna, in voicing the alternative approach, goes so far as to censure Doyle’s as one that “simply ignores the visible historical evidence,” which instead, he writes, “suggests that this version had absolutely minimal circulation before about 1425.”4
Hanna immediately qualifies this remark, though, acknowledging that three A-version manuscripts are “certainly fourteenth-century”: Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.14 (T; 1 in our running count of pre-1400 manuscripts); the “Vernon” text, in Oxford, Bodleian MS Eng. Poet. a.1 (V; 2); and the infamous MS Z (Oxford, Bodleian MS Bodley 851; 3).5 The “evidence for other pre-1400 copies” prompts a further retreat:6 the exemplar or ancestor shared by Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson poet. 137 (R) and Oxford, University College MS 45 (U), whose reference to Richard II as monarch in its passus 12 indicates its pre-1399 date (4; Schmidt’s u);7 the copy available to Scribe D as he wrote the Ilchester manuscript (J of C), whose Prologue incorporates material from A and a variant C tradition (5);8 and that used by the scribe of the common archetype behind the BmBoCot group (6).
Hanna’s list of now-lost A manuscripts is very selective. Many more than these three are necessary to explain the surviving affiliations, as the accounts of George Kane and A. V. C. Schmidt in their respective editions make clear. It is true enough that manuscripts cannot be dated very precisely, “erroneous readings” are the products of subjective reasoning, the results are inevitably incomplete, and stemmata are of limited use, at best, to editors. But as Hanna elsewhere says, “However editors may use stemmata in textual reconstruction, the diagrams themselves do represent historical processes, and processes capable of some degree of specification.”9 A little common sense, such as not assuming a direct correlation between the number of lost and extant manuscripts in any given version, will more than balance
