The Lost History of "Piers Plowman". Lawrence Warner

A 2.22 and C 2.42 begin with the phrase “Tomorewe worþ.” Equally straightforward is the first conflation common to W and N:

      “þu doted daff!” quod sche, “dul are þi wittis.

       For litel lerestow I leve of latyn in þi ȝowþe:

      Heu mihi quia sterilem duxi vitam Juvenilem.

      It is a kynde knowyng þat kenneþ in þin herte …”¹⁰

      Kane identifies this as A 1.129 and 130 into which are inserted (in bold) B 1.139–39α or C 1.140–40α. If these four lines were excerpted, though, they would simply be called either B 1.138–40 or C 1.139–41. Next, since lines 75 and 76 of A passus 3, “Ne bouhte none burgages, be ȝe ful certayn. / Ac Mede þe mayde þe mayre a bisowte,” are equivalent to C 3.85 and 115 respectively, it was very simple for N, or the text in its line of transmission that initiated the conflation, to add that version’s new intervening lines, 86–114. By the same token WN’s addition of C 2.246–51 at the juncture of A 2.194–95 (= C 2.245, 252), too, is seamless. Only a very willful scribe could have left signs of officiousness at any of these sites, given that Langland himself simply added new material at these junctures, which themselves survived the process of revision intact.

      The most interesting such addition to MS N, where the friar-confessor asks Meed to engrave her name upon a window in the friary, shows that even where conflation is not a matter of simple addition, it could still be accomplished with no signs of officiousness. Here is the received A version of the episode, with the lines in question—to be replaced rather than added to in N—in bold:

      “We han a wyndowe awurchynge wol stande us wel heye;

      Wolde thow glase þe gable and grave ther thy name,

      Sykir sholde thy soule be hevene to have.”

       “Wiste I that,” quod þe womman, “þere nis wyndowe ne auter

       That y ne sholde make or mende, & my name writen

       That uch segg shal se y am suster of ȝoure hous.”

      Ac god alle good folk suche gravynge defendeth

      And saith Nesciat sinistra quid faciat dextera. (A 3.47–54)

      The passage appears in National Library of Wales 733B thus:

      “We have a wyndowe iwrouȝt stant us wel hiegh;

      Woldestow glase þe gable & grave þere þi name,

      Siker scholde þi soule be hevene to have.”

       “Wist I þat,” quod þat womman, “I wolde nouȝt spare

       For to be ȝour frende, frere, & faile ȝow nevre

       Wil ȝe love lordis þat lecherie haunteþ

       And lakkeþ nouȝt ladies þat loveþ wel þe same.

       It is a freelte of flesche—ȝe fynde it in bokys—

       And a course of kynde whereof we comyn alle;

       Who may scape þe sklaunder, þe skaþe is sone amendid;

       Hit is synne of þe sevene sonnest relest.

       Have mercy,” quod Mede, “of men þat it haunte

       And I schal kevre ȝour kirke, ȝour closter do make,

       Wowes do whiten & wyndowes glasen,

       Do pointin & purtraye & pay for þe makyng

       þat evry segge schal seen þat I am sistre of ȝour hous.”

      But god to alle good folke suche gravyng defendeþ:

      Nesciat sinister quid faciat dexter.¹¹

      This instance appears to be N’s sole conflation from the B tradition, as this is equivalent to Kane and Donaldson’s B 3.51–63 (though only one of the two B families attests it, the other instead having a spurious version of lines that look like the ones N replaces, A 3.50–52). As such this will become very prominent later in the chapter, but for now the point is that N, whatever the source of his conflation, does not fall prey to the temptation of including both primitive and revised forms of the same passage. Since both the a-verse at the site of substitution and the entire line with which the passage ends are identical in both texts, the sin was not too difficult to avoid, but many readers would come away from Kane’s chapter assuming that scribes left signs of their incompetence whenever the opportunity presented itself.

      This is not a criticism of Kane’s methodology or conclusion, simply a reminder that his point was local: where manuscripts that otherwise attest the A version have passages in common with C, and where the inclusion of many of those passages results in inconsequence, repetition, broken sense and the like, it is fair to conclude that these manuscripts’ shapes are the results of scribal rather than authorial behavior. He was not arguing that all conflations bear signs of officiousness. No student of the poem’s production can dismiss conflation from consideration just because a passage is smooth. After c. 1390, conflation is always a possibility. It comes to its fullest fruition in the appearance, a few decades later, of Huntington MS Hm 114 (Ht), which combines matter from all three major textual traditions,¹² but there is no reason to exclude Bx from consideration of its workings.

      Shapes and Versions

      Ever since Walter Skeat divided Piers Plowman’s manuscripts into three authorial “versions,” editors and critics have followed suit, assuming that each version comprised an integral body of manuscripts. It was clear that later texts combined matter from two or even three of these textual traditions, but no one seems to have considered the possibility that this could have occurred at the earlier stages as well. The versioning of the poem reached its apogee in the Athlone edition, which defined the A, B, and C texts by process of elimination followed by a leap of faith: once the editor identified the officious intrusions of the W, N, and K traditions, he would be left with “uniformity,” assumed to equate to authorial integrity: “Among the more than fifty manuscripts preserving the work called Piers Plowman two distinct versions are handsomely attested by substantial numbers of copies of uniform shape. The remaining manuscripts have various shapes, but seventeen of them are distinguished by the common possession of some 400 lines not found in the other two versions.”¹³ The “two distinct versions of uniform shape” are of course B and C, while the 400 lines shared by the remaining manuscripts identify them as witnesses to A, which take “various shapes” via acts of conflation and the additions of C conclusions in W, N, K, and the TH²Ch group.

      Although the classification of any given witness to the poem by its “shape” appears to be merely preliminary to the more rigorous work of critical editing, it is in fact a compromised pre-determiner of that editing’s outcomes. The “uniform shape” attested by B and C manuscripts is very broadly defined: B manuscripts feature a Prologue and 20 passus; C manuscripts, a Prologue and 22 passus; and each, a series of passages not in the other. But given that the surviving B tradition did not assume its current “shape” until conflation had already begun, and that conflation did not always leave signs of its presence, it remains unclear on what grounds Kane assumes that the shape of B is solely the product of authorial activity. On the one hand, “shapes” are determined by the character of a manuscript’s passages; on the other, “shapes” predetermine the character of a manuscript’s passages. Here is a major dilemma that has not figured in Langland criticism precisely because that criticism’s methodologies bury the evidence that shows it to be so deeply misleading.

      The prior classification of the evidence into three independent groups produced some decidedly odd results, which perhaps