to prevent further copying?34 A more efficient explanation, if one less conducive to most narratives of the history of Piers Plowman, is that Langland’s own B version achieved absolutely minimal circulation, if any at all, before c. 1395, and not very much between then and 1550 either.
The Early Proliferation of the C Version
The most likely scenario is that readers’ quick embrace of Piers Plowman C led to the release of the dormant B version.35 This claim follows from the fact that C’s transmission history differs so starkly from those of A and B. Far more of its manuscripts predate 1400, and four manuscripts from Schmidt’s collective sigil y (XYHJ) have excited particularly strong interest. These texts exhibit both dialectal features very close to those presumed to be Langland’s, which many critics have taken as evidence of his whereabouts when he composed C, and codicological and paleographical characteristics very similar to those of the London-based productions associated with Gower and Chaucer.36 In two of these, San Marino, Huntington Library MS Hm 143 (X) and the Ilchester manuscript (J), critics have found evidence of “some direct connection to the author.”37 Such judgments, however, have not taken account of these surviving manuscripts’ positions within the C stemma. Ten surviving witnesses—three of these four (XHJ), plus MSS UTPEVMK—predate 1400, as do some fourteen more now-lost copies in Schmidt’s chart.38 MS X alone, like MS T in the A tradition, is some five to eight generations of copying removed from Langland’s holograph.39 Even if Langland was alive when C entered circulation, the chances of his survival diminish with each successive generation. We should be wary of any placement of MS X or J in close physical or even textual proximity to the author.
This body of data should also prompt a fresh analysis of our methodologies of dating the versions. In recent years, a terminus a quo of 1388 for the completion of C has gained widespread support on the basis of Anne Middleton’s argument that the apologia pro vita sua (C 5.1–104) stages an interrogation under the 1388 Statute of Laborers.40 The most surprising of this proposal’s many adherents is George Kane, who adds that “the latest topicality in C appears to be reference to the king’s implacable hatred of Gloucester and the Arundels after the dissolution of the Merciless Parliament (C 5.194–96),” that is, the months following June 1388.41 If so, we must marvel at the extraordinary rapidity with which early scribes set to work on C. Although this scenario is not impossible, it is much more difficult than has been acknowledged by most accounts of C’s early production, which seem to assume that Cx or other early manuscripts were available for copying at will by any given fourteenth-century scribe.
The Evidence of Allusion?
Kathryn Kerby-Fulton’s 2006 study Books Under Suspicion represents a major recent trend in claiming to identify allusions to the B version in works composed by 1382 at the latest. In the lines “With an O and an I, Si tunc tacuisses / Tu nunc stulto similis philosophus fuisses” from the 1382 broadside “Heu quanta desolacio” (which includes the phrase “rogo dicat Pers”), she finds a probable reference to B 11.416α, “Philosophus esses si tacuisses,” “you might have been a philosopher, if you had been able to hold your tongue”;42 later, she describes Chaucer’s “Thoo gan y wexen in a were” (House of Fame, 979) as a “deliberate echo” of Will’s “And in a wer gan y wex” (B 11.116).43 Kerby-Fulton finds “the hints of ‘Heu’s’ Langlandianism … significant since its date is so early in the period of B transmission.”44
Such proposals are “soft,” as it were, in occupying no more difficult a place than would the idea that, say, a given Shakespearean phrase comes from Chaucer. They can be adjudicated on the terms in which they are presented—linguistic, thematic—without regard to questions of transmission. The fact that no evidence supports the notion of B’s transmission by this stage, though, makes for a dilemma. Can we elevate their status to “hard,” constituting positive evidence, rather than derivative support, for B’s early circulation? Some have had no trouble doing so: one critic announces that a study finding B’s influence in John Ball’s letters “establishes that June 1381 is a terminus well post quem for the B version”;45 another says that a similar and separate claim regarding the House of Fame “demonstrates that the B text was probably circulating and known about in London at the time when Chaucer was living in Aldgate.”46 The assumption, in other words, generates the proposal, which in turn becomes the evidence upon which the assumption was presumably based in the first place. While those readers predisposed for whatever reason to believe in B’s transmission c. 1380 might well cite such claims as supporting indicators, I think it is fair to say that, when analyzed apart from that assumption, they remain securely in the “soft” category. Each such claim is either more easily explicable by recourse to other modes of influence (if any at all) or contradicts other, equally persuasive proposals, tossing us back to the very category of evidence we were seeking to bypass.
The appearance of the Latin item shared by “Heu” and the B version in both Odo of Cheriton’s thirteenth-century Fables (as I have recently discovered) and John Bromyard’s mid-fourteenth century, and hugely influential, Summa Praedicantium (as Alford pointed out and Kerby-Fulton acknowledges), for instance, indicates a mutual indebtedness to the homiletic tradition c. 1380 rather than one’s reliance upon the other.47 Much more promising is the parallel between the protagonists of Piers Plowman B and the House of Fame who “waxed in a were,” that is, “grew into a condition of doubt or anxiety.”48 Yet Paul and Dante, not Langland, are the most obvious models for Geoffrey’s situation here,49 and only slightly less immediate is Boethius, on the dreamer’s mind at this point (HF 972), who also “leaves us in fact with much the same kind of doubt that Chaucer now confesses to,” says J. A. W. Bennett, citing our line.50 When Chaucer wrote were, he was probably aiming for elegance, given that the alternative, from Philosophy’s diagnosis of Boethius’s affliction, was this: “thilke passiouns that ben waxen hard in swellynge by perturbacions flowyinge into thy thought.”51 Whichever option he chose, he would have almost certainly needed to use the term wax, which appears juxtaposed with these phrases not just in the House of Fame, the B version, and Boece, but also in Chaucer’s account of poor Hypermnestra, who “waxes” cold when she “falls” into a were:
As colde as eny froste now wexeth she
For pite bi the herte streyneth her so
And drede of deth doth her so moche wo
That thryes down she fill in suche a were.52
Both Langland and Chaucer are making best use of a psychological vocabulary that is already inherently alliterative. There is no need to attribute the parallels of these lines to anything other than this common body of sounds and ideas.
This is somewhat unfair to Kerby-Fulton’s proposal, which appeared in a critical milieu that not only took B’s earliness and A’s belatedness for granted, but also had been deeply influenced by Frank Grady’s argument that the House of Fame relied on B. Both poems, he says, interrogate authorities and authoritative discourses, use signatures at moments of poetic transition, and are potentially endless.53 Whatever the strengths of these suggestive parallels—many of which would fit A, too—they run up against Helen Cooper’s equally compelling claim that the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (1387 at the earliest) adopts the A version’s Prologue as a model.54 Grady’s Chaucer was particularly taken by the unresolved conclusion of B (i.e., passus 20) in the late 1370s, but Cooper’s remained ignorant of B passus 19–20 in the 1380s.55 Any adjudication would need to take recourse to other evidence—showing that Grady does not “demonstrate” B’s availability in the 1370s. The force of George Economou’s comments is clear: “wherever critical interpretation leads on the fellowship of Chaucer and Langland, it cannot avoid the mediation of ongoing bibliographical bulletins.
