well.” Thus while Richard Firth Green cites do wel and bettre as “confirmation, if any were needed, that this is a conscious Langlandian allusion,”74 those not as invested in identifying Ball’s reading of the poem could just as easily see it as a conscious allusion to St. Paul’s “both he that giveth his virgin in marriage, doth well; and he that giveth her not, doth better” (1 Cor. 7:38), the verse in which Isabel Davis finds Langland’s inspiration for Wit’s definition of Dowel. We ourselves might do well to heed Margaret Aston’s revival of an earlier approach to the topic:
“Lokke that Hobbe robbyoure be wele chastysed….” Of course it was possible to apply the words to Robert Hales, but the alliterative Rob or Hob Robber was an ancient and familiar figure. Should we not be wary (pace today’s literary scholars) of assuming that Piers Ploughman, who appears alongside Hob Robber, is a reference to Langland’s poem? The words “do well and better” scarcely prove the point, since “Do well” had its proverbial context long before the poem appropriated it. The figure of Piers the honest ploughman may already have been an alliterative type (as much as Tom Tinker, Miles Miller and Piers Potter) called on by John Ball as by Langland for their different purposes. This is an unfashionable view, but it had the support of C. S. Lewis.75
In light of the strength of her objection, and of the fact that the only items with strong Langlandian resonances appear in A and are traceable back to Bromyard, St. Paul, and the like, attempts to depict Ball as a sophisticated reader of the B version go far beyond what the evidence will support. The most these letters tell us is that some catch-phrases from A might have made their way somehow to Ball; and they might not even tell us that.
Conclusion: The Earliest Circulation of Piers Plowman
It is not impossible that Ball or Chaucer could have read the B version by c. 1380, just much more likely that they knew A, if any version at all. The quick promulgation of C (if indeed it is to be dated to c. 1390)—an average of almost one copy a year in each line of transmission, culminating in the surviving fourteenth-century manuscripts—underscores, as does the A line before it, just how shadowy the pre-1390 B tradition is by comparison. Over the course of this book the belief in an integral pre-1390 Piers Plowman that looked something like our modern “B version” will only recede farther from the realm of reasonability. This statement perhaps appears more provocative than it ought, for my argument will be simply that “Piers Plowman B” as studied today is the product of conflation of the “ur-B” version that Langland wrote c. 1378 (whatever the extent of its circulation) and the earliest stages of C, and as such was representative of a major mode of the poem’s production in the era of C’s initial dissemination, which, crucially, was also the era of Bx. Because critics have always assumed a correlation between the “shapes” of certain of the surviving texts and the “versions” (i.e., what Langland wrote), the textual criticism of Piers Plowman, while among the richest and most advanced in English studies and perhaps beyond, remains in some ways in its early stages. Until it confronts the possibility that Bx, like so many of its chronological peers, was conflated by C materials, even if only to reject it, Langland criticism, not just its textual subfield, will be based more on faith than on evidence.
Chapter 2
Scribal Conflation, Convergent Variation, and the Invention of Piers Plowman B
The archetype of all surviving B copies, as we saw in the Preface, concludes with a rubric expecting a further, twenty-first passus: an odd error resulting from contamination by a C manuscript, in which the rubric worked perfectly well as an explicit. These few pen-strokes in manuscripts L and R thus have enormous consequences in that they identify the moment of Bx’s production as the era of conflation and conjoinment. The critical propensity for focusing only on authorial texts has led to an almost exclusive focus on the three versions, dated to the 1360s, 1370s, and 1380s respectively, but the landscape of Piers Plowman manuscripts in the final decade of the century was no respecter of that approach. This was when the desire for “completion” took hold: the energies that went into the compilations now found in the Ilchester Prologue, the BmBoCot group, and the TH2Ch group suggest that conflation and conjoinment might have been the normative modes of producing and reading the poem by this point in its history. Those who got their hands on a C version copy were set; the rest, though, sought out matter from here and there with the aim of compiling a complete Piers Plowman.
Might Bx itself have been the result of this desire for completion? If its very final inscription came from C, could the previous 850 lines, which are nearly identical in the surviving B and C traditions, have as well? And if that possibility is viable, as Chapter 4 will argue in detail, should we perhaps consider the idea that such conflation occurred in other locations? Say, those passages extant in only one of the B families? Over the 150-year editorial history of the poem, such ideas have never been mooted. As a result, many today might dismiss such speculations out of hand. Conflated texts always reveal their nature via signs of scribal officiousness, such skeptics might aver, citing George Kane’s thorough analysis of manuscripts W, N, and K. And more to the point, no potential sources of conflation, other than those final two passus, present themselves. Yet such rejoinders are either just wrong, or the product rather than the foundation of critical approaches to the textual state of Piers Plowman. A three-pronged attack, comprising lemmatization, versioning, and the invocation of convergent variation at any signs of rupture to the existing paradigm, has buried the evidence that shows, contrary to that paradigm, that Bx was indeed affected by the C tradition to a far greater degree than the LR rubric indicates. In conclusion this chapter presents the bulk of my positive evidence that Bx, at one stage in its career as exemplar, was supplemented by lines and paragraphs of new C material, the existence of which has been obscured by its atomization into versions and then lemmas. In sum, an early scribe, like so many others between the Era of Ilchester in the 1390s and Sir Adrian Fortescue in 1532,1 was jealous for the completeness of his copy, and thus turned to C materials to fill out the seemingly deficient manuscript in front of him.
Officious Scribes, Inconsequential Transitions?
George Kane’s chapter defining the character of Piers Plowman A, titled “Manuscripts and Versions,” has never featured very prominently in Langland scholarship. C. L. Wrenn’s early review, in effect saying that we knew all this before but there was no harm in Kane’s rehashing of the material, is representative: “Though little that is positively new here emerges, there is real value in this thorough re-examination of the reasons which lead to the generally accepted conclusions.” The “most important part of a very important Introduction,” he continued, lay farther afield, in the following chapter on the classification of the manuscripts.2 Yet insofar as it determined which manuscripts and which lections of those manuscripts would and would not be classified in any given volume of the Athlone edition, “Manuscripts and Versions” established the framework within which the Athlone enterprise, and all Piers Plowman criticism in its wake, would operate. In sum, it puts forth the idea that, once the obvious instances of scribal conflation among the versions are identified, the editor is left with the authorial versions: here, “Piers Plowman A,” but by implication the other two versions, B and C, as well.
The local problem is the inclusion in A-version witnesses of additional lines or passages corresponding to matter from the B and C versions. Kane argues “that these seven manuscripts received this B or C material, and their present shapes, through scribal compilation, and that they are actually contaminated and augmented copies of the A version.”3 The main offenders are the Duke of Westminster’s manuscript (W; 95 lines at twenty-eight points), National Library of Wales MS 733B (N; about 150 lines at twenty-one points, many shared with W), and Adrian Fortescue’s manuscript, Bodleian, MS Digby 145 (K; over 400 lines at thirteen points). Kane knows they are contaminated because they all bear the marks of “the officious copyist,” who “tended to leave signs of his activity in the character
