Notes

Introduction

1 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 101.

2 Ibid., 2.

3 David Greetham, “‘Who's In, Who's Out’: The Cultural Poetics of Archival Exclusion,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 32 (1999): 3.

4 Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 118��19.

5 As observed by Greetham, “Archival Exclusion,” 23 n.10; see also Ralph Hanna, Pursuing History: Middle English Manuscripts and Their Texts (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 73, noting the “superfluity of authority” in the modern archives around which so many debates about editorial theory revolve.

6 Chaucer Life-Records, ed. Martin M. Crow and Clair C. Olson from materials compiled by John M. Manly and Edith Rickert, with the assistance of Lilian J. Redstone and others (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966).

7 Derrida, Archive Fever, 90.

8 Ibid., 98–9. The translator indicates that pas is Derrida's term for “step.”

9 Emily Steiner, Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 93 (emphasis in original).

10 Lawrence Warner, The Lost History of Piers Plowman: The Earliest Transmission of Langland's Work (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

11 As inscribed in British Library (hereafter BL) C.60.g.12, Malone's copy of Ritson's Bibliographia Poetica (hereafter BP) (London, 1802), 299, 366. The copy is full of such remarks – see Bertrand H. Bronson, Joseph Ritson, Scholar at Arms (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1938), 268 n.96 for a catalogue – which is no surprise given Ritson's publication in 1792 of the Cursory Criticisms on the Edition of Shakespeare Published by Edmond Malone, on which see Bronson, 394–403.

12 George Kane, “The Text,” in A Companion to Piers Plowman, ed. John A. Alford (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 176; Ritson, BP, 30 n. The importance of this comment was first noted by Henry Alfred Burd, Joseph Ritson, A Critical Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1916), 134.

13 Ritson, BP, 29 n. The text reads “Caligula A. II. 18 B. XVI,” but the “II” (i.e.,capital Roman numeral two) is a compositor's error for Arabic numeral eleven and “18 B XVI” is clearly supposed to be Royal 18 B XVII, the error caused by attraction to the “B.XVI” earlier in the line.

14 Bodleian Douce RR 36, inside front cover. Also in Bronson, Joseph Ritson, 246, who notes the possibility that his annotations to Add. 10285 “were not entered until after Ritson's death” (n.46).

15 Bronson, Joseph Ritson, 267, quoting from a note signed by Frederick Madden, who attributes the story to Douce himself, in his interleaved copy of the BP, now Widener Harvard Depository 10454.17. On January 31, 1801, Ritson had asked Thomas Park to run his eye over the prefaces; Joseph Haslewood says that the mistreatment of Douce occurred “very soon afterward” (Some Account of the Life and Publications of the Late Joseph Ritson, Esq. [London, 1824], 26–7; Haslewood's transcription of Park's letter is opposite p. 26 in BL G.13123, his copy of that book).

16 BP, ii; Douce RR 36. See also Haslewood, Some Account, 27. Douce would later write to Haslewood, “in spite of himself & what I might very justifiably term his ingratitude, I really loved the man to an extent that he little dreamt of.” Letter of November 5, 1823, in the endpapers of BL G.13123; quoted also by Bronson, Joseph Ritson, 311.

17 For an account of Ritson that analyzes how his madness became part of his story, see David Matthews, The Making of Middle English, 1765–1910 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 25–53.

18 E. Talbot Donaldson, Piers Plowman: The C-Text and Its Poet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949; rpt. New York: Frank Cass, 1966), 4–5 n.3 (italics mine), having been alerted by Bronson, Joseph Ritson, 325–6. Donaldson's interpretation would be endorsed by, e.g., Vincent DiMarco, Piers Plowman: A Reference Guide (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), item 1802.1; Eric Dahl, “Diuerse Copies Haue it Diuerselye: An Unorthodox Survey of Piers Plowman Textual Scholarship from Crowley to Skeat,” in Suche Werkis to Werche: Essays on Piers Plowman in Honor of David C. Fowler, ed. Míċeál F. Vaughan (East Lansing, Mich.: Colleagues Press, 1993), 66; and Charlotte Brewer, Editing Piers Plowman: The Evolution of the Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 36 n.58.

19 Dahl, “Diuerse Copies,” 66.

20 Both Donaldson, The C-Text and Its Poet, 4–5 n.3, and DiMarco, at least, recognize the necessity of separating this supposed insight from his later retreat: “Ritson's comments on the poem in 1802, though his final words on the subject, do not represent the entire range of his speculations.” DiMarco, “Eighteenth-Century Suspicions Regarding the Authorship of Piers Plowman,” Anglia 100 (1982): 128.

21 DiMarco, “Eighteenth-Century Suspicions,” 128. DiMarco speculates at 129 that Ritson recognized all this variation by 1780 or so. On internal evidence Bronson dates the contents of these notebooks to c.1780–c.1800 (Joseph Ritson, 320 n.4).

22 Bronson's “A Ritson Bibliography” (Joseph Ritson, 751–802) was so extensive, commented one reviewer, that “new discoveries about Ritson will be few and relatively unimportant.” James M. Osborn, “Joseph Ritson, Scholar at Odds,” MP 37 (1940): 429. Yet as Simon Meecham-Jones observes, “Few examples of Ritson's hand survive, particularly from the last few years of his life,” and this item is to be dated, as we will see below, to 1801 or 1802 (he died September 23, 1803). “For Mr. Ritson's Collection: George Ellis, Joseph Ritson and National Library of Wales MSS 5599, 5600c.,” English Studies 82 (2001): 129.

23 Facsimile at http://digital.lib.lehigh.edu/cdm4/eb_viewer.php?ptr=1027, “The Vision of Pierce Plowman, 1505 [1550]”; this quotation on (Endmatter [12]). “P.CC.” = “printed copies.” The attribution of these annotations to Ritson relies both on the correlation between their contents and the BP, which also confirms its late date, and on the telltale use of lower-case “i” for the first-person pronoun, for which he was notorious: “d--n his i's” said a contemporary lampoon of Ritson (Bronson, Joseph Ritson, 284, citing Monthly Mirror, August 1803, 90–2). R. Carter Hailey first recognized the historical value of the Lehigh Cr¹, though he did not identify the annotator as Ritson; see “Robert Crowley and the Editing of Piers Plowman (1550),” YLS 21 (2007): 145 and n.7. I thank Dr. Hailey for his encouragement of my work on this copy.

24 James Nasmith, Catalogus Librorum Manuscriptorum quos Collegio Corporis Christi . . . (Cambridge, 1777), 327, entry for MS 293. Between the second and third transcriptions from MSS, discussed below, Ritson adds a note indicating that he consulted Nasmith's entry for MS 293.

25 The absence of any transcription from Douce's copy is one indicator, as is the reliance by both documents on George Ellis's 1801 Specimens of the Early English Poets (DiMarco, Reference Guide, item 1801.1) in citing Reynold Wolfe's 1553 edition of Pierce the Plowman's Crede as if it were an edition of the poem: BP, 26 n.; Endmatter [12] of the Lehigh online copy. That the latter is cancelled suggests that some of the notes in that copy postdate the production of BP.

26 Bronson, Joseph Ritson, 791; see also 797, the entry for the sale catalogue of his books, where Bronson identifies lot 417 in the catalogue, “Pierce Plowman, 1550,” as among its rarer items.

27 In his annotated edition of Rogers's 1561 edition, Dr. John Taylor mentions it in shorthand, citing Leland's caleret, i.e., “Hot was the sunne” (Bodleian, 4⁰ Rawlinson 274, xxxviii^v; see Chapter 5). It was likewise discussed by Thomas Warton, Observations on the Faerie Queene of Spenser (London, 1754), 88–9 (see DiMarco, Reference Guide, item 1754.1, and Brewer, Editing Piers Plowman, 28); on the flyleaves of Dr. Richard Farmer's copy of Rogers (Haverford College, Magill Library 96; Chapter 5); on the flyleaves of Francis Douce's A-text MS (“‘Soft was the sonne’ A better reading than ‘sette’ which is nonsense as appears in P.4 where the morning is mentioned” [Bodleian MS Douce 323, fol. v^r; Chapter 6]); the margins of Thomas Percy's Crowley (see John J. Thompson, “Bishop Thomas Percy's Contributions to Langland Scholarship: Two Annotated Piers Plowman Prints in Belfast,” in The Medieval Book and a Modern Collector: Essays in Honour of Toshiyuki Takamiya, ed. Takami Matsuda, Richard A. Linenthal, and John Scahill [Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004], 457); and in the commentary of Philip Bliss's collations of seven MSS in 1810 (Chapter 5).

28 There is no transcription from Douce's manuscript, Ritson's access to which was surely a casualty of their falling-out; but he does include, indeed begins with, BL MS Royal 18 B XVII, which confirms my emendation of BP (note 13). Ritson also lists the other known witnesses to the poem, but he was relying on catalogues rather than examination. The penultimate page of annotations (Endmatter [11]) announces that “The MSS of this ancient poem are in [blank] Library at Oxford,” citing Thomas Tanner, Bibliotheca Britannico-Hibernica (London, 1748), regarding a dozen items.

29 See George Kane, ed., Piers Plowman: The A Version, rev. edn. (London: Athlone Press, 1988), 48 on the extra lines, 8 on the explicit. Ritson also transcribes C.Prol.1–10, 13 of Cotton Vespasian B XVI (as the first eleven lines appear there) rather than received 1–11, and includes “Explicit hic opus hoc” at the end of Caligula A XI.

30 My spot check of his version of the Vernon lines reveals a few minor errors – he has wente I wyden for MS wende I wydene; weory for weori; and lenede for leonede – of the sort that he censures severely when they appear in other scholars' published works; but of course there is no indication that this material was for anything other than the preparation of what would become one footnote in the BP. See A Facsimile Edition of the Vernon Manuscript: Oxford, MS. Eng. poet. a.1, Bodleian Digital Texts, ed. Wendy Scase (Oxford: Bodleian, 2012).

31 BL Additional MS 10285, fol. 247^v. Lewis infamously writes that Langland “is confused and monotonous, and hardly makes his poetry into a poem”: but also, unlike Ritson, grants that he “is a very great poet” for the heights his poetry attains, and “can do some things which Chaucer cannot, and he can rival Chaucer in Chaucer's special excellence of pathos”: The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), 161.

32 The Gentleman's Magazine n.s. 19 (1843): 339: review of The Vision and Creed of Piers Ploughman, ed. Thomas Wright, 2 vols. (London, 1842).

33 [Thomas Wright,] “The Visions of Piers Plowman,” The Gentleman's Magazine n.s. 1 (1834): 386. On Whitaker's edition, see Brewer, Editing Piers Plowman, 37–45, and Sarah A. Kelen, Langland's Early Modern Identities (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 107–26.

34 The attribution is in James M. Kuist, The Nichols File of The Gentleman's Magazine: Attributions of Authorship and Other Documentation in Editorial Papers at the Folger Library (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 110. The places it would have been discussed had its existence been known are Brewer, Editing Piers Plowman, and Kelen, Langland's Early Modern Identities. Arthur Sherbo cites another item from the magazine missing from DiMarco's book, “probably because it is not listed in the index volumes of the GM ”: “Samuel Pegge, Thomas Holt White, and Piers Plowman,” YLS 1 (1987): 123.

35 W. P. Courtney, “Mitford, John (1781–1859),” rev. James Edgar Barcus, Jr., ODNB, www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/18856, the source for further information cited below.

36 A reproduction of the page, the recto of the second flyleaf, is available in the online version of my essay on Mitford's copy: “The Gentleman's Piers Plowman: John Mitford and his Annotated Copy of the 1550 Edition of William Langland's Great Poem,” The La Trobe Journal 84 (2009): 104–12, www.slv.vic.gov.au/latrobejournal/issue/latrobe-84/t1-g-t10.html, figure 1. The clipping is from Catalogue of the Very Select and Valuable Library of William Roscoe Esq. (London, 1816), lot 1321. The description of a Rogers, whereabouts now unknown, Lot 47 of The Trivulzio Collection. Part the Second (catalogue of sale, 6–11 February, 1888), pp. 18–19, refers to a memorandum to which is “affixed a catalogue cutting of Alexander Pope's copy, priced £28.” Similarly, in another Rogers, Bodleian Douce L 195, someone has written, “Popes copy of this edition was in Mr Roscoe's library” (recto of second flyleaf ). The Pope/Warton copy is item 251 in a catalogue of Pope materials issued c.2012 by Ximenes Rare Books, Kempsford, Gloucestershire (price £20,000): www.ilab.org/catalog_view/739/739_Pope%20catalogue.pdf; it is now in the hands of a private owner whom I thank for answering my queries about it.

37 Thomas Tyrwhitt, ed., The Canterbury Tales of Chaucer, 5 vols. (London, 1775–8), 4:74; Ritson, BP, 30 n. In the Crowley note regarding the two sets of witnesses, discussed above, Ritson continues: “I have never met with a MS. more correct or better deserving of publication than Crowleys editions; & suppose that Mr. Tyrwhitt had not examined as many as I have done, nor marked the above difference” (Endmatter [12]). The catalogue of eighteenth-century recognition of MS variation I give here is widely rehearsed, with the exception of Nasmith, whose role has to my knowledge gone unnoticed. See, e.g., Donaldson, C-Text and Its Poet, 3–7; Kane, “The Text,” 176–7; and the opening chapters of Brewer, Editing Piers Plowman, 7–49.

38 Thomas Warton, The History of English Poetry . . . : A New Edition Carefully Revised [by Richard Price], 4 vols. (London, 1824), 2:482. Critics commonly credit Price with “discovering” the A version, but this is very misleading. The copy in which he identified this third version has what we now call a “C continuation” and thus is some 4,500 lines longer than the “A version” we now know, whose most distinctive characteristic is precisely its relative shortness. Brewer, too, points this out, also noting a few other problems with his textual analysis, with the caveat that “it is distinctly ungenerous to cavil at these shortcomings given Price's notable gains on the work of his predecessors” (Editing Piers Plowman, 47).

39 Mitford, review, p. 344, n.

40 Wright, Vision, 1:xli.

41 For a summary of the situation see Brewer, Editing Piers Plowman, 181–208; the phrase first appeared prominently in J. J. Jusserand, “Piers Plowman: The Work of One or of Five,” MP 6 (1909): 271–329, arguing for single authorship.

42 George P. Marsh, The Origin and History of the English Language, and of the Early Literature It Embodies (London, 1862), 297. For a biography see David Lowenthal, George Perkins Marsh: Versatile Vermonter (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958).

43 John M. Manly, “The Authorship of Piers the Plowman,” MP 14 (1916): 316.

44 Morton W. Bloomfield, “Present State of Piers Plowman Studies,” Speculum 14 (1939): 215; Brewer, Editing Piers Plowman, 184 and n.3.

45 Wright, Vision, 1:xli.

46 Ibid.

47 Brewer, Editing Piers Plowman, 426–7.

48 See www.mla.org/resources/awards/awards_submissions/awards_competitions/prizes_biennial2014/prizeinfo_bib.

49 A. S. G. Edwards, “Shapes Arbitrarily Determined,” Times Literary Supplement 5662 (October 7, 2011): 27. See also, e.g., Brewer, Editing Piers Plowman, 426: the PPEA “has a claim to being the perfect solution to the dilemma confronting would-be editors and readers of the poem in the post-Kane–Donaldson era” followed by the comments above; and C. David Benson, Public Piers Plowman: Modern Scholarship and Late Medieval English Culture (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 57–8, on how it frees readers from the confines inherent in the Athlone edition.

50 Hoyt N. Duggan, “1994 Prospectus: Creating an Electronic Archive of Piers Plowman,” section II, www3.iath.virginia.edu/seenet/piers/archivegoals1994body.html.

51 PPEA, “Creating the Archive”: http://piers.iath.virginia.edu/about/creating.html. This website was launched in 2012; the project originally began in 1990. All quotations from the archive are from this page.

52 A. V. C. Schmidt, Piers Plowman: A Parallel-Text Edition of the A, B, C and Z Versions, Vol. 2, Introduction, Textual Notes, Commentary, Bibliography and Indexical Glossary (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Press, 2011), 2. The PPEA's list of MSS is available in any published edition and most easily accessible in Hoyt N. Duggan, with a contribution from Eugene Lyman, “A Progress Report on The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive,” The Digital Medievalist 1 (2004), www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/1.1/duggan/#d33284e755. That essay's Appendix 1, “New Sigils for the PPEA” (§17), lists the same fifty-eight MSS as does Ralph Hanna, William Langland (Aldershot: Variorum, 1993), 38–42, acknowledging it as source of these excerpts.

53 The omission of the Caius MS is surely owing to the editors' reliance on Ralph Hanna's 1993 list of manuscripts, which mentions it not in the list of MSS (where the other three do appear), but in its entry for “Cr⁴,” Rogers's edition, in his discussion of the printed copies (William Langland, 42). Hanna is inconsistent on this front: he describes Oxford, Bodleian Library MSS Wood donat. 7 (Wb in the PPEA), his number 38, as “probably from Crowley,” and James 2, part 1, as “from a MS. like BmBoCot, to the last of which the copyist Richard James certainly had access” (40). But such inconsistencies are inevitable; Hanna deserves full credit for bringing these items into public view.

54 This and the following are the copies that Walter Skeat and Mr. D. Hall produced, using the Ilchester MS (University of London Library MS S.L. V.88) and C.U.L. MS Ff.5.35 as exemplars, respectively, in preparation for Skeat's edition of C.

55 Carl Grindley, “A New Fragment of the Piers Plowman C Text?” YLS 11 (1997): 135–40.

56 This appears on p. 550 of that MS. It is a version of A 4.15–17 in a hand unattested elsewhere in the volume, which to my knowledge no one has ever mentioned. Though its text is unique as well, it is not of any textual authority: its appearance at the top of the first page of a new gathering (the second of Piers Plowman and twenty-second of the manuscript) shows that, before the manuscript was bound, the individual who inscribed the excerpt on the final verso made a rough copy of the lines in the identical location on the loose quire on his desk, the one that now begins at p. 495. There are at least two special cases. Hm² is an excerpt included in Huntington MS Hm 128, whose main text is Hm, which on the one hand does not get its own entry in these lists, but on the other retains separate sigils, in violation of the PPEA editors' claim that they “have chosen to represent each manuscript with a unique sigil” (Duggan and Lyman, “Progress Report,” §17). And Bodley 851, quite apart from the single line I list above, contains three texts most likely in three separate hands (George Russell and George Kane, eds., Piers Plowman: The C Version, [London: Athlone Press, 1997], 19); but the Piers Plowman that results is certainly intended to make up a single production.

57 See George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson, eds., Piers Plowman: The B Version rev. edn. (London: Athlone Press, 1988), 1.

58 See my “Latin Verses by John Gower and ‘John of Bridlington’ in a Piers Plowman Manuscript (BL Add. 35287),” N&Q 55 (2008): 127–31.

59 John M. Bowers, Chaucer and Langland: The Antagonistic Tradition (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 41, 126, likewise relying on Hanna, William Langland, 37–42, and adding the four-line extract of Prol.1–4 mentioned above that the PPEA includes and that is now published and discussed in Wendy Scase, “Dauy Dycars Dreame and Robert Crowley's Prints of Piers Plowman,” YLS 21 (2007): 186–7.

60 As in, e.g., Michael G. Sargent, “What Do the Numbers Mean? A Textual Critic's Observations on Some Patterns of Middle English Manuscript Transmission,” in Design and Distribution of Late Medieval Manuscripts in England, ed. Margaret Connolly and Linne R. Mooney (York: York Medieval Press, 2008), 205–44. See Warner, Lost History, 74 n.10 on other problems with Sargent's figures.

61 Benson, Public Piers Plowman, xii. The first half of the book, Chapters 1–3 (pp. 3–112), treats “the Langland myth.”

62 Ibid., xiii.

63 Thompson, “Bishop Thomas Percy's Contributions to Langland Scholarship,” 452.

64 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Tavistock, 1972), 26.

1 William and the werewolf

1 See, respectively, Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, A Lover's Complaint, and John Davies of Hereford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), and James I. Wimsatt, Chaucer and the Poems of “Ch” (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1982).

2 See Simon Horobin, “A Manuscript Found in the Library of Abbotsford House and the Lost Legendary of Osbern Bokenham,” English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700 14 (2007): 132–64 and “Politics, Patronage, and Piety in the Work of Osbern Bokenham,” Speculum 82 (2007): 932–49.

3 For arguments that the first portion of Piers Plowman in Oxford, Bodleian MS Bodley 851 represents an early authorial version, see Charlotte Brewer, “The Z-Text of Piers Plowman,” in Piers Plowman: A Facsimile of the Z-Text in Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Bodley 851, intro. Brewer and A. G. Rigg (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994), 1–22, and Schmidt, Parallel-Text, 211–30. For the idea that A is a later digest of B and C, see Jill Mann, “The Power of the Alphabet: A Reassessment of the Relation between the A and the B Versions of Piers Plowman,” YLS 8 (1994): 21–50 (cf. Warner, Lost History, 25–7).

4 Quotations are from William of Palerne, an Alliterative Romance, ed. G. H. V. Bunt (Groningen: Bouma's Boekhuis, 1985). The poem is attested only in Part I of Cambridge, King's College MS 13, of the later fourteenth century (3).

5 Winner and Waster may have been written as early as 1352, but David A. Lawton dates it after Piers Plowman A: “The Unity of Middle English Alliterative Poetry,” Speculum 58 (1983): 80–1.

6 Lawton, “Unity,” argues that the influence of Piers Plowman A brings about the unity of this corpus. William of Palerne is the only exception unquestionably dated before the A version.

7 See Hanna, William Langland, 2–3, 26, and Robert Adams, Langland and the Rokele Family: The Gentry Background to Piers Plowman (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2013).

8 Ardis Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language, and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 286. For recent treatments of Langland and the French tradition see Andrew Galloway, The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman, Vol. 1: C Prologue–Passus 4; B Prologue–Passus 4; A Prologue–Passus 4 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), which explores the parallels between Piers Plowman and the Roman de la Rose, and Nicolette Zeeman, “Tales of Piers and Perceval: Piers Plowman and the Grail Romances,” YLS 22 (2008): 199–236.

9 Respectively, Angus McIntosh, “Early Middle English Alliterative Verse,” in Middle English Alliterative Poetry and Its Literary Background: Seven Essays, ed. David A. Lawton (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1982), 25; Lawton, “ Alliterative Style,” in Alford, A Companion to Piers Plowman, 245.

10 George Kane, “Langland and Chaucer II,” in Chaucer and Langland: Historical and Textual Approaches (London: Athlone Press, 1989), 282 n.4. “When I first aired this notion years ago I was sharply told by philologists that there were linguistic reasons why Langland could not have written William of Palerne. I accepted this because I did not know then what scribes could do to the language of texts.”

11 Galloway, Penn Commentary, 14, referring to the earlier version of this chapter (Viator 37 [2006]: 397–415).

12 Schmidt, Parallel-Text, 272; see, e.g., 267 nn.45–55. Ralph Hanna says, “Piers has more in common, stylistically and metrically, with [William of Palerne] than with any text of the later ‘central tradition’,” but does not suggest any direct connection between the two (London Literature, 1300–1380 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005], 259).

13 I.e., Will “wrouзthe þat here is wryten” – Piers Plowman – “and oþer werkes boþe” (bothe = too, also) (A 12.101); see my “John But and the Other Works that Will Wrought (Piers Plowman A XII 101–2),” N&Q 52 (2005): 13–18.

14 See Anne Middleton, “William Langland's ‘Kynde Name’: Authorial Signature and Social Identity in Late Fourteenth-Century England,” in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530, ed. Lee Patterson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 15–82.

15 George Kane, Middle English Literature: A Critical Study of the Romances, the Religious Lyrics, Piers Plowman (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1951), 186, 189–90.

16 On “William” as Langland's most likely given name, see George Kane, Piers Plowman: The Evidence for Authorship (London: Athlone Press, 1965), 26–70 (65–70 on the acrostic). David Lawton has suggested that the “William” whose work has ended in line 5521 might refer to the protagonist rather than the poet, as reported by Richard Firth Green, “Humphrey and the Werewolf,” in Medieval Alliterative Poetry: Essays in Honour of Thorlac Turville-Petre, ed. John A. Burrow and Hoyt N. Duggan (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010), 107–8 n.5.

17 The first notice of the reference to the great storm was Tyrwhitt, Canterbury Tales, 5:v. See also Piers Plowman: The Z Version, ed. A. G. Rigg and Charlotte Brewer (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1983), 20, on their Z 5.32.

18 Respectively, Gerrit H. V. Bunt, “Localizing William of Palerne,” in Historical Linguistics and Philology, ed. Jacek Fisiak (Berlin and New York: Mouton, 1990), 82, and J. P. Oakden, Alliterative Poetry in Middle English: The Dialectal and Metrical Survey (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1930), 56.

19 The language of Harley 2376 has been thoroughly translated by its scribe: see Merja Black, “A Scribal Translation of Piers Plowman,” MÆ 67 (1998): 257–90. On the language of Trinity B.15.17, see The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, Vol. 2: Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B.15.17 (W), ed. Thorlac Turville-Petre and Hoyt N. Duggan (Ann Arbor: SEENET and University of Michigan Press, 2000), Introduction.

20 A. V. C. Schmidt, The Clerkly Maker: Langland's Poetic Art (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1987), 103, 104 (see 102–7). On William of Palerne's relationship to Guillaume de Palerne, see the convenient summaries by W. R. J. Barron, “Alliterative Romance and the French Tradition,” in Lawton, Middle English Alliterative Poetry, 75–80, and Bunt, William of Palerne, 30–6.

21 E.g., the “passion tag” found at Piers Plowman A 2.3 and so important in William of Palerne: lines 1669, 1802, 2083, 2360, 5534, part of a larger program analyzed by Roger Dalrymple, Language and Piety in Middle English Romance (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000), 64–81. On alliterative poets' use of such formulas see Thorlac Turville-Petre, The Alliterative Revival (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1977), 28–9. The difficulties inherent in such comparisons of vocabulary, sentence length, and the like are stressed by R. A. Cooper and Derek A. Pearsall, “The Gawain Poems: A Statistical Approach to the Question of Common Authorship,” RES n.s. 39 (1988): 370–3.

22 Galloway, Penn Commentary, 19; see also Walter W. Skeat, ed., The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman in Three Parallel Texts, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1886), 2:1. Another potentially interesting word is trieliche (A and B Prol.14), attested elsewhere in William of Palerne but nowhere else, but that is still “perhaps not so remarkable” since variants appear elsewhere. Turville-Petre, review of Galloway, in YLS 20 (2006): 232.

23 Cooper and Pearsall, “The Gawain Poems,” 372; see also Helen Barr, “The Relationship of Richard the Redeless and Mum and the Sothsegger: Some New Evidence,” YLS 4 (1990): 105–33. The first of these, the distribution of unstressed syllables, would work only if scribes never left their marks on the texts; the second, the use of and or but at line-opening, is useless for our situation, since many of these in William of Palerne simply render the equivalent terms in its French source, a problem exacerbated by the presence of anaphoric sequences such as the passage in which nine straight English verses (lines 1363–71) and eight of eleven French verses (lines 2500–10) begin with and/et. The French poem is cited from Guillaume de Palerne: roman du XIIIe siècle, ed. Alexandre Micha (Geneva: Droz, 1990).

24 George Kane, “Outstanding Problems of Middle English Scholarship,” in Chaucer and Langland, 233. The renewed prominence of such tests by, e.g., Cooper and Pearsall, “The Gawain Poems,” 376–82, signals a new version of the circularity that bedevilled the authorship controversy last century, during which, as Anne Middleton observes, it became clearer to all parties that the appearance of critical editions would not solve the problem, since such texts are the products of critical assumptions regarding the very characteristics that would subsequently be tested. “Piers Plowman,” in A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050–1500, ed. Albert E. Hartung (New Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1986), 2226–7.

25 On Langland's meter, see, e.g., Hoyt N. Duggan, “Notes on the Metre of Piers Plowman: Twenty Years On,” in Approaches to the Metres of Alliterative Verse, ed. Judith Jefferson and Ad Putter (Leeds: Leeds Studies in English, 2009), 159–86, and Schmidt, Parallel-Text, 253–60. Bunt analyzes the meter of the extant text of William of Palerne, but he makes no attempt to distinguish the author's metrical practices from that text's (William of Palerne, 77–84).

26 Turville-Petre, review of Galloway, 231.

27 Christine Chism, Alliterative Revivals (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 19. For consideration of how Langland would have responded to William of Palerne if he had read it, see S. S. Hussey, “Langland's Reading of Alliterative Poetry,” Modern Language Review 60 (1965): 163–70.

28 Turville-Petre, review of Galloway, 232, saying that “if Langland composed [William of Palerne], he had lost all his naïveté (and much of his charm) by the time he wrote Piers Plowman.”

29 Ibid. See the similar remarks by Elizabeth D. Kirk, The Dream Thought of Piers Plowman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 19 n.4.

30 The Romance of William of Palerne, or, William and the Werwolf: Together with a Fragment of the Alliterative Romance of Alisaunder, ed. Walter W. Skeat, EETS e.s. 1 (London: Oxford University Press, 1867), v.

31 On this aspect of the poem see Arlyn Diamond, “Loving Beasts: The Romance of William of Palerne,” in The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance, ed. Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert (London: Pearson, 2000), 148–9, and Dalrymple, Language and Piety, 69–70.

32 Translations are from Guillaume de Palerne: An English Translation of the 12th Century French Verse Romance, ed. and trans. Leslie A. Sconduto (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004).

33 David Mills, “The Rôle of the Dreamer in Piers Plowman,” in Piers Plowman: Critical Approaches, ed. S. S. Hussey (London: Methuen, 1969), 185; see Galloway, Penn Commentary, 28–9 for another recent articulation of the assumption. Regarding the other longstanding misconception surrounding these lines – that line 2's “shep” might mean “shepherd” – Turville-Petre has said that Galloway, 27–8, “puts the kibosh on that and shows once and for all that it means ‘sheep’” (review, 232); Schmidt, too, says “shepherd” “finds no lexical support” (Parallel-Text, 305).

34 Respectively, Dee Dyas, “A Pilgrim in Sheep's Clothing? The Nature of Wandering in Piers Plowman,” English Language Notes 39.4 (2002): 4; David Lyle Jeffrey, “Wolves in Sheep's Clothing,” in A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature, ed. Jeffrey (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1992), 844. Langland's sole unequivocal employment of the figure, quite opposed to the opening lines, accords with normative usage: “Riht so many prestes, prechours and prelates, / That ben enblaunched with bele paroles and with bele clothes / And as lambes they loke and lyven as wolves” (C 16.269–71).

35 Derek Pearsall, Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the C-Text (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2008), 43, n. to C Prol.3, citing Mills, “Rôle of the Dreamer,” 186. See also George Kane, “Poetry and Lexicography in the Translation of Piers Plowman,” in Chaucer and Langland, 95, and Galloway, Penn Commentary, 30–1. Schmidt deems this interpretation “lexically possible but unlikely” (Parallel-Text, 471).

36 What Hoyt N. Duggan identifies as the correspondence, “in almost every case,” of the alliterative line's caesura to “a major syntactic disjuncture” supports this reading: “Notes Toward a Theory of Langland's Meter,” YLS 1 (1987): 44 (Metrical Rule IV). While Macklin Smith has both argued against Duggan's claim and deemed the association of “unholy of werkes” with the hermit “the more natural reading” (“Langland's Unruly Caesura,” YLS 22 [2008]: 100), the b-verse's inaugural unstressed syllable is here not on a preposition or conjunction, as so often in the surrounding lines (“whan softe”; “as y”; “on Malverne hulles”; “of fairie”; “& wente” [A Prol.1, 2, 5, 6, 7]), reinforcing the power of the syntactical break between “hermite” and “unholy.” Will's later request of Holy Church, “Teche me to no tresour but tel me þis ilke, / How I may saven my soule, þat seint art yholden” (A 1.81–2), likewise features a clause subordinate to an understood pronoun. A lengthy separation of a clause from its referent, as between line 3b and 2a in my construal, appears in the English William of Palerne (it is not in Guillaume 492–5), when the cowherd, commanded by the emperor to explain the circumstances of William's discovery, describes “How he him fond in þat forest þere fast biside, / Cloþed in comly cloþing for any kinges sone, / Under an holw ok, þurth help of his dogge” (293–5). See also Kane, “Poetry and Lexicography,” 95, on the caesura.

37 The Twelve Books of John Cassian on the Institutes of the Coenobia, in A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Second Series, trans. Edgar C. S. Gibson, Vol. 11 (New York, 1894), 1.7, cited in John M. Bowers, The Crisis of Will in Piers Plowman (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1986), 102 n.18. See also Galloway, Penn Commentary, 29.

38 Lawton, “The Unity of Middle English Alliterative Poetry,” 77.

39 Cited by Skeat, Parallel Texts, 2:247–8.

40 On But's term, see my “John But and the Other Works that Will Wrought.”

41 See Bunt, William of Palerne, 305–6, and Galloway, Penn Commentary, 38–9. Cf. Clergie's remark to Conscience: “þow shalt se þe tyme / When þow art wery forwalked” (B 13.203–4).

42 Penn R. Szittya cites applications of the “wolves in sheep's clothing” motif to friars in Pierce the Ploughman's Crede, Henryson, the Romaunt of the Rose, Gower, Audelay (on whom see below), Upland's Rejoinder, and some anonymous verses. The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 211–12 and 211 n.84.

43 Olive Sayce, “Chaucer's ‘Retractions’: The Conclusion of the Canterbury Tales and Its Place in Literary Tradition,” MÆ 40 (1971): 238 (main), 242 (“topos of regret”).

44 Cited from the edition by A. S. G. Edwards and M. C. E. Shaner, in The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). See Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, “Langland and the Bibliographic Ego,” in Written Work: Langland, Labor, and Authorship, ed. Steven Justice and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 80.

45 Hanna, London Literature, 149.

46 Steiner, Documentary Culture, 115 (Ancrene Wisse), 116 (quotation).

47 Ancrene Wisse, Parts Six and Seven, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972), 21:4–5.

48 Steiner, Documentary Culture, 116; on 18.186 see also Stephen A. Barney, The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman, Vol. 5: C Passus 20–22; B Passus 18–20 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 50–1.

49 This is quite close to the French (8399–403). Messengers bear letters in other episodes (e.g., 1422–59 and 4151–283), though none is as close to the instances Steiner discusses as this.

50 The subsequent episodes of the “spectacular triple marriage and one abortive but also splendid preparation for marriage,” as well, look forward in interesting ways to the marriage of Meed in Piers Plowman A 2, as Galloway notes (Penn Commentary, 248, referring to 1463–631, 4990–5105). He remarks that “the broader setting in A [2.40–2], cut from the later versions, parallels the first, paternally arranged marriage in William of Palerne [lines 1625–31]”; also 249, 252, 255.

51 In the note to this line in William of Palerne: An Electronic Edition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), Bunt observes that “the alliteration could be improved if for [the MS reading] crist we read god,” though he does not emend. This edition includes a color digital facsimile of the entire poem, but much less of the supporting apparatus found in the hard-copy edition.

52 See C. W. Marx, The Devil's Rights and the Redemption in the Literature of Medieval England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995).

53 Wilber Gaffney, “The Allegory of the Christ-Knight in Piers Plowman,” PMLA 46 (1931): 156. See also Nicole Clifton, “The Romance Convention of the Disguised Duel and the Climax of Piers Plowman,” YLS 7 (1993): 123–8.

54 Augustine: Sermons on the Liturgical Seasons, trans. Mary Sarah Muldowney (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1959), 392; I substitute “mousetrap” for “trap” for the term muscipula.

55 One analogue in the sermonic tradition survives, but it focuses on a fine doctrinal point and does not appear, as in Piers Plowman, in the center of the drama of Atonement. See my “Jesus the Jouster: The Christ-Knight and Medieval Theories of Atonement in Piers Plowman and the ‘Round Table’ Sermons,” YLS 10 (1996): 129–43.

56 Audelay's anthology of verse is in Oxford, Bodleian MS Douce 302; on this manuscript and the poet's life, see My Wyl and My Wrytyng: Essays on John the Blind Audelay, ed. Susanna Fein (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2009). Two arguments that Audelay read Langland are James Simpson, “Saving Satire after Arundel's Constitutions: John Audelay's Marcol and Solomon,” in Text and Controversy from Wyclif to Bale: Essays in Honour of Anne Hudson, ed. Helen Barr and Ann M. Hutchison (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 387–404, and Richard Firth Green, “Langland and Audelay,” in Fein, 153–69; one against is Derek Pearsall, “Audelay's Marcolf and Solomon and the Langlandian Tradition,” in Fein, 138–52.

57 Michael J. Bennett, “John Audley: Some New Evidence on His Life and Work,” Chaucer Review 16 (1982): 344–55. Bennett finds “certain themes which might have stemmed from this traumatic experience” (351–2), and judges it “very probable” that he had written secular verse that “would have been rapidly jettisoned when he retired to Haughmond to compile his Concilium conciencie” (353).

58 Ibid., 353.

59 Adams, Langland and the Rokele Family, 105–20. For a bibliography of other recent approaches to the question of Langland's patronage see 97 nn.53–4. On Humphrey and the question of the poem's readership, see Bunt, William of Palerne, 14–19 and references.

60 Adams, Langland and the Rokele Family, 108.

61 See, e.g., Chris Given-Wilson, The English Nobility in the Late Middle Ages (1987; New York: Routledge, 1996), 32.

62 See The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom . . . , ed. G. E. Cokayne; new edn., rev. Vicary Gibbs, Geoffrey H. White, et al., 13 vols. in 14 (London: St. Catherine, 1910–59), 2:535–6.

63 Humphrey, second earl of Hereford (1208–75), was father of Alice Bohun, m. Roger de Toeni (c.1235–64) > Ralph de Toeni (1255–95) > Alice de Toeni, m. Guy de Beauchamp > Thomas Beauchamp. See Emma Mason, Beauchamp Cartulary Charters, 1100–1268 (London: Pipe Roll Society, 1980), 214–16 on Alice Bohun's marriage and motherhood, correcting The Complete Peerage, 12.1:771–2. On Ralph de Toeni and his daughter Alice, see Complete Peerage, 12.1:774 n.i (entry for Robert de Toeni), and 12.2:371–2 (entry for Guy de Warwick). On Thomas Beauchamp, see Anthony Tuck, “Beauchamp, Thomas, Eleventh Earl of Warwick (1313/14–1369),” in ODNB, www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/53085. The Bohun line goes through Alice Bohun's brother Humphrey (d. 1265) > Humphrey, third earl (d. 1298) > Humphrey, fourth earl (d. 1322) > Humphrey, sixth earl (whose brother John, fifth earl, pre-deceased him). See Complete Peerage, 6:459–62.

64 Michael J. Bennett, “William Called Long Will,” YLS 26 (2012): 1–25.

65 Thomas's sister Philippa married Hugh Stafford c.1350, and Ralph was their son, and Hugh was devastated by his death. See Carole Rawcliffe, “Stafford, Hugh, Second Earl of Stafford (c.1342–1386),” in ODNB, www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/26206.

66 Waldegrave was a retainer in the household of William de Bohun, earl of Northampton and brother of the patron of the William of Palerne poet, whose son Humphrey succeeded his uncle Humphrey as earl of Hereford and Essex. See J. S. Roskell, “Sir Richard de Waldegrave of Bures St. Mary, Speaker in the Parliament of 1381–2,” Suffolk Institute of Archaeology 27.3 (1957): 154–75, esp. 156–7 on his service for the Bohuns.

67 Simpson, “Saving Satire,” 402; see Szittya, Antifraternal Tradition, 247–87 on Langland's antifraternalism. The judgment about Humphrey's generosity is by Aubrey Gwynn, The English Austin Friars in the Time of Wyclif (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), 109. On Humphrey's sympathy with many of the themes and approaches of William of Palerne, see Green, “Humphrey and the Werewolf.”

68 Lucy Freeman Sandler, “A Note on the Illuminators of the Bohun Manuscripts,” Speculum 60 (1985): 364. This is John de Teye, bequeathed £10 to pray for Humphrey's soul, with an additional 40 shillings; see 365–6.

69 See Michael J. Bennett, “Mandeville's Travels and the Anglo-French Moment,” MÆ 75 (2006): 279–80, on the basis of its early date and his patronage of the arts and of the Austin friars, particularly in York. On Erghome's authorship of the commentary, see A. G. Rigg, “John of Bridlington's Prophecy: A New Look,” Speculum 63 (1988): 596–613.

70 See, respectively, The Friars' Libraries, ed. K. W. Humphreys (London: British Library, 1990), xxiv–xxvii, 11–154, and Hanna, William Langland, 35.

71 See Andrew Galloway, “The Rhetoric of Riddling in Late-Medieval England: The ‘Oxford’ Riddles, the Secretum philosophorum, and the Riddles in Piers Plowman,” Speculum 70 (1995): 68–105. In addition, a Leonine verse from the prophecy on which Erghome commented would end up after Langland's poem in an early MS: see my “Latin Verses by John Gower and ‘John of Bridlington’.”

72 I am grateful to Stephen A. Barney for suggesting the pertinence of the Austin friars to the opening lines in this context. See his Penn Commentary, 196.

73 This sentence is a précis of my book Lost History.

2 Localizing Piers Plowman C

1 David Wallace, Premodern Places: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aphra Behn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 15.

2 Walter W. Skeat, ed., The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman: The “Whitaker” Text; or Text C, EETS o.s. 54 (London: Trübner, 1873), lxxiv on the return to Malvern, citing as well the sense that in C London is a thing of the past, and the fact that Richard the Redeless, which he believed to be by Langland, is centered upon Bristol; lxxix on the poet growing conservative as he grew older.

3 Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 233, 239. See the similar line of argument in Bowers, Chaucer and Langland, 60–1, 122.

4 M. L. Samuels, “Langland's Dialect,” MÆ 54 (1985): 239, concluding that “Skeat's view that the author returned to Malvern in later life is thus shown to be highly probable” (240). The “i-group” is so called from the time when the Ilchester MS, MS J or I, was its representative witness. It comprises MSS XYJP²UDH: see Russell and Kane, The C Version, 41–6.

5 Simon Horobin, “‘In London and Opelond’: The Dialect and Circulation of the C Version of Piers Plowman,” MÆ 74 (2005): 263. His evidence for XYJUH's origins in London inheres in the fact that “certain features of the handwriting, ordinatio, and layout of the i-group of C manuscripts point to connections between them, and suggest links with the professional London book trade”; he comments as well on similarities in the hands of these scribes (251). Samuels acknowledges that MS J was “copied in London” and says that X shows “some slight signs of interference typical of a London copying” (“Langland's Dialect,” 239–40).

6 C 5.44 in both Schmidt, Parallel-Text and Pearsall, A New Annotated Edition.

7 Anne Middleton, “Acts of Vagrancy: The C Version ‘Autobiography’ and the Statute of 1388,” in Justice and Kerby-Fulton, Written Work, 253.

8 Chism, Alliterative Revivals, 9.

9 See Russell and Kane's apparatus and The C Version, 154. Joseph S. Wittig, “‘Culture Wars’ and the Persona in Piers Plowman,” YLS 15 (2001): 169–70, discussing Middleton's reading (see 7 note above), makes a similar point. On the P-group see Russell and Kane, 46–58.

10 Russell and Kane, The C Version, 154.

11 Skeat, Parallel Texts, 2:62, gloss to (his) C 6.44.

12 Russell and Kane, The C Version, 154. They begin by noting that “the implied self-criticism, of parasitism, is also contextually apt,” and concluding: “The form up, not actually attested, is adopted as likelier than upon to have generated the variant opelond. See OED s.v. Up prep.¹ II 4. Some scribes, understanding the meaning well enough, preferred on or by.”

13 Skeat, The Vision of William . . . Text C, lxxiv.

14 Bowers, Chaucer and Langland, 77; likewise Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Steven Justice say that the Ilchester MS bears “some important marks of proximity to the author” (“Scribe D and the Marketing of Ricardian Literature,” in The Medieval Professional Reader at Work: Evidence from Manuscripts of Chaucer, Langland, Kempe, and Gower, ed. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Maidie Hilmo [Victoria, B.C.: University of Victoria, 2001], 217). As Linne R. Mooney and Estelle Stubbs say, “it is possible that [John] Marchaunt (Scribe D) and Langland knew each other” any time from the late 1360s, when Marchaunt might already have been at the Guildhall, but even if so that acquaintance did not result in access to privileged authorial materials. Scribes and the City: London Guildhall Clerks and the Dissemination of Middle English Literature, 1375–1425 (York: York Medieval Press, 2013), 58.

15 A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English, ed. Angus McIntosh, M. L. Samuels, and Michael Benskin, 4 vols. (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1986). For an accessible and recent overview of the field, see Simon Horobin, “Mapping the Words,” in The Production of Books in England 1350–1500, ed. Alexandra Gillespie and Daniel Wakelin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 59–78.

16 Samuels, “Langland's Dialect,” 240. Cf. A. I. Doyle's similar argument: “What is difficult to conceive is that, if C had been released by the author in London, or reached it at an early date, no copies of the simple text should survive in other than West or W. Central Midland guise.” “Remarks on Surviving Manuscripts of Piers Plowman,” in Medieval English Religious and Ethical Literature: Essays in Honour of G. H. Russell, ed. Gregory Kratzmann and James Simpson (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1986), 45.

17 Pearsall, “Langland's London,” in Justice and Kerby-Fulton, Written Work, 198, and New Annotated Edition, 21, respectively. See above, note 5 on Horobin's essay, and note that two of the five scribes of the i-group's manuscripts have now been identified and are indeed based in London: John Marchaunt, based at Guildhall, who copied the Ilchester MS, and Robert Lynford, a member of the Brewers' Company (whose hall was near Guildhall), who copied Oxford, Bodleian MS Digby 102 (MS Y). See, respectively, Mooney and Stubbs, Scribes and the City, 38–65; and Simon Horobin, “The Scribe of Bodleian Library, MS Digby 102 and the Circulation of the C Text of Piers Plowman,” YLS 24 (2010): 89–112, and Mooney and Stubbs, 121–2.

18 Samuels, “Langland's Dialect,” 240. Likewise Horobin, who refers to “the textually superior i-group” which contrasts with “the textually inferior p-group.” “‘In London and Opelond’,” 248.

19 Andrew Galloway, “The Account Book and the Treasure: Gilbert Maghfeld's Textual Economy and the Poetics of Mercantile Accounting in Ricardian Literature,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 33 (2011): 82. This is part of his response to the fact that “the archive and the idea of London can again be central in Ricardian literary scholarship” (68).

20 Brewer, Editing Piers Plowman, 267, quoting Bessie F. Allen, “The Genealogy of the C Text Manuscripts of Piers Plowman,” MA thesis, University of London, 1923. Allen's remarks were summarized by F. A. R. Carnegy, An Attempt to Approach the C-Text of Piers the Plowman (London: University of London Press, 1934), who was the authority for Donaldson, The C-Text and Its Poet, 230–1, who in turn is cited by Samuels, “Langland's Dialect” (see note 18). The most prominent advocate of the P-group's “inferiority” is Derek Pearsall, e.g. at Piers Plowman by William Langland: An Edition of the C-Text (York: York Medieval Press, 1978), 20–1. The inherently subjective base of the Langland archive is clear from the fate of the TH²Ch group, judged by Allen to be the nearest to Langland, then i, then p, but now considered the worst of the lot: from 11.296–22.379, where the group attests C, Russell and Kane find some 399 errors (The C Version, 38–9).

21 Russell and Kane, The C Version, 176, where they also note that other MSS or groups (including “superior” ones) added significantly to the damage. MS P and its genetic twin E added some 270, and the X-scribe himself introduced some 323 to the text. See also previous note on TH²Ch.

22 See Russell and Kane, The C Version, 43–4, 46 for the X-family, and 46–58 for the P-family.

23 See Warner, Lost History, 2–7. On the probability that Langland died before C was released, which I endorse, see Russell and Kane, The C Version, 82–8.

24 Robert Adams, “The Kane–Donaldson Edition of Piers Plowman: Eclecticism's Ultima Thule,” Text 16 (2006): 137.

25 Warner, Lost History, 49–61.

26 John M. Bowers, “Dating Piers Plowman: Testing the Testimony of Usk's Testament,” YLS 13 (1999): 65–100, makes a powerful case against that idea, but A. V. C. Schmidt's defense (Parallel-Text, 276) is not easily dismissed.

27 James Simpson, “‘After Craftes Conseil clotheth yow and fede’: Langland and London City Politics,” in England in the Fourteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1991 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Nicholas Rogers (Stamford: P. Watkins, 1993), 110; see also the similar claim by Galloway, “Account Book,” 82.

28 Caroline Barron, “William Langland: A London Poet,” in Chaucer's England: Literature in Historical Context, ed. Barbara Hanawalt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 96; cf. OED, s.v. “regratery” with reference to “regrate” (v. [2]), and MED, s.v. “regraterie” (n.).

29 In line 102 I adopt the JDRMK reading mennes rather than Russell and Kane's men so as to reflect the pronunciation necessary to ensure the single long dip that must occur in the b-verse.

30 This is Batman's annotation in a copy of The Pricking of Love, the English translation of the Stimulus amoris, in Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.14.19, fol. 67^v. I transcribe from the reproduction of the item in Jennifer Summit, Memory's Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 115; see her discussion, 114–16. On Batman and Piers Plowman, see Simon Horobin, “Stephan Batman and His Manuscripts of Piers Plowman,” RES 62 (2011): 358–72.

31 Simpson connects Langland's cataclysmic result of regratery with the chronicler Thomas Walsingham's report that supporters of Northampton held that the whole city would be swallowed up into the earth if the city were not purged of its immoralities, but he is following the critical convention of treating lines 87–114 as merely an amplification of the B passage's discussion of false trade, so that the London character of the lines is the product of the poet's memory, not experience. “‘After Craftes Conseil’,” 123–4.

32 On the factional politics of 1380s London, see especially Ruth Bird, The Turbulent London of Richard II (London: Longmans, Green, 1949), 63–101, and Pamela Nightingale, A Medieval Mercantile Community: The Grocers' Company and the Politics and Trade of London 1000–1485 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 263–91.

33 My primary source, from which quotations in the next paragraph are taken, is The Westminster Chronicle, 1381–1394, ed. and trans. L. C. Hector and Barbara F. Harvey (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), 60–5 (see 34–5 on John Mowbray's death); the information about dinner with Waldegrave is from 285–6.

34 This detail about the length of the severed head's stay comes from Bird, Turbulent London, 8 n.9, citing Ludgate as the site. Bird follows the account of the events of February 7 from the Coram Rege Roll.

35 Russell and Kane discuss their reconstruction of this passage at The C Version, 159.

36 According to the Coram Rege Roll, Northampton was imprisoned in Tintagel, not Corfe, castle (Bird, Turbulent London, 83), but Letter-Book H, like the Westminster Chronicle, records Northampton's destination as Corfe castle (Calendar of Letter-Books . . . of the City of London: Letter-Book H, ca. A.D. 1375–1399, ed. Reginald R. Sharpe [London: John Edward Francis, 1907], 229).

37 A. G. Mitchell, “Notes on the C-Text of Piers Plowman,” London Mediæval Studies 1 (1948 for 1939): 487. On the figures here discussed, see Brewer, Editing Piers Plowman, 265–71.

38 Carnegy, Attempt, 12–13. I have altered the line numbers to accord with modern conventions.

39 Allen, “Genealogy,” had recently pointed out that at C 3.422, the i-group has a clear instance of a scribal gloss taken up into its text, “That dwelleth in amalek mebles” where the p-group reads just “mebles” (see Carnegy, Attempt, 12–13). Russell and Kane, The C Version, 141, classify this among the “many variants attested by X and its genetic associates . . . which appear as scribal derivatives of an alternative because more explicit.” See Kane and Donaldson, The B Version, 193 for a discussion of lines in the archetypal text deemed to be “induced by scribal response to the immediate context.”

40 Carnegy, Attempt, 13.

41 Mitchell, “Notes,” 488. Brewer remarks that in his edition “Mitchell nowhere gives any detailed information on the principles on which he had established his text, apparently assuming . . . that these would be unproblematic. Instead he makes merely general comments, as ‘In emendation we have sought to be as conservative as possible, without carrying conservation to an unreasonable extreme’” (Editing Piers Plowman, 270).

42 Pearsall's 1978 edition is the only one to cite Mitchell, claiming that “the sense [of ‘as an ancre’] is good” (Piers Plowman by William Langland, n. to C 3.140). This disappears from A New Annotated Edition; Schmidt prints the passage in its i-group form; and as we have seen the phrase is retained in the Athlone edition.

43 This list comes from Joseph S. Wittig, Piers Plowman: Concordance (London: Continuum, 2001), s.v. “ancre.”

44 See Samuels, “Langland's Dialect,” 244.

45 Horobin, “‘In London and Opelond’,” 263.

46 Mitchell, “Notes,” 487–8.

47 Ibid., 488, 487.

48 See Galloway, Penn Commentary, 29, also citing 5.2.

49 Ralph Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 18; see also 374–83, and Megan Cassidy-Welch, Imprisonment in the Medieval Religious Imagination, c.1150–1400 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), esp. 36–40.

50 Mary Rotha Clay, The Hermits and Anchorites of England (London: Methuen, 1914), 142–3. See also Ann K. Warren, Anchorites and Their Patrons in Medieval England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 79–81, which refers to the “real prison” in which Matilda was kept (80).

51 Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker, Lives of the Anchoresses: The Rise of the Urban Recluse in Medieval Europe, trans. Myra Heerspink Scholz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 69. See Warren, Anchorites and Their Patrons, 93–100 on the symbolism of the prison.

52 “The solitary vocation was always a choice, an individual embrace of a most difficult choice,” says Ann Warren (Anchorites and Their Patrons, 101–2). This “consent” was thus no mere fiction, as Elizabeth Fowler, discussing the Meed episode, has shown marriage to have been. “Civil Death and the Maiden: Agency and the Conditions of Contract in Piers Plowman,” Speculum 70 (1995): 760–92.

53 Mulder-Bakker, Lives of the Anchoresses, 145.

54 Neither Russell and Kane, The C Version, nor Schmidt, Parallel-Text, collates N²'s C material conflated into its A portion.

55 See Warner, Lost History, esp. 28–9, 31, 46–7, 57–8.

56 Mitchell uses this term at “Notes,” 488.

57 See Russell and Kane, The C Version, 87–8, and Duggan, “Notes on the Metre,” which argues that Langland was much looser regarding alliterative conventions, especially in the C version, than anyone (including Duggan) has been willing to grant.

58 Skeat, Parallel Texts, 2: 45; see Carnegy's objection to this (Attempt, 13). Galloway notes that there was widespread belief “that Edward II was not only incarcerated in Corfe but brutally murdered there”; see discussion in Penn Commentary, 307.

59 Donaldson, C-Text and Its Poet, 129. See also, e.g., Barron, “A London Poet,” 96–7, 107 n.35; Pearsall, “Langland's London,” 188–9.

60 Simpson, “‘After Craftes Conseil’,” 124 (tensions of 1376). In this essay he does not refer to Langland's uplandish location, but this assumption must explain why Simpson does not discuss the C nature of 3.87–114. He had earlier, like everyone else, claimed to find it “probable, from the dialectal evidence of the C manuscripts, that [Langland] moved back to Malvern in later life” (Piers Plowman: An Introduction to the B-Text [New York: Longman, 1990], 4).

61 Simpson, “‘After Craftes Conseil’,” 127.

62 See Warner, Lost History, 49–61.

63 Piers Plowman: The Prologue and Passus I–VII of the B text as Found in Bodleian MS. Laud 581, ed. J. A. W. Bennett (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), 136 (n. to B 3.76–86).

64 Pearsall, New Annotated Edition, 83, n. to 3.77–114. See Russell and Kane, The C Version, 86, for a plausible account of the material circumstances that would have brought about the repetition in lines 77 and 115; also, Galloway, Penn Commentary, 298–304.

65 See Russell and Kane, The C Version, 62–88, and summary at 89.

66 Carnegy, Attempt, 13; see also C. David Benson and Lynne Blanchfield, The Manuscripts of Piers Plowman: The B Version (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), 21.

3 Latinitas et communitas

1 For representative overviews, see Siân Echard, “With Carmen's Help: Latin Authorities in the Confessio Amantis,” Studies in Philology 95 (1998): 1–40; Graham D. Caie, “The Significance of the Early Chaucer Manuscript Glosses (with Special Reference to the Wife of Bath's Prologue),” Chaucer Review 10 (1976): 350–60.

2 Sarah Stanbury, “Vernacular Nostalgia and The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44 (2002): 96.

3 Fiona Somerset, “‘Al þe comonys with o voys atonys’: Multilingual Latin and Vernacular Voice in Piers Plowman,” YLS 19 (2005): 111.

4 Kane, The A Version, 167. They instead have, of course, the number of the preceding English line followed by the Greek letter alpha (or beta, etc.).

5 See Kane and Donaldson, The B Version, and Russell and Kane, The C Version.

6 See Kane, The A Version, 45–50; Kane and Donaldson, The B Version, 221–4; Russell and Kane, The C Version 183–5; and, for the two Latin quotations added to Huntington MS Hm 114, not included in any of those editions, George H. Russell and Venetia Nathan, “A Piers Plowman Manuscript in the Huntington Library,” Huntington Library Quarterly 26 (1963): 127–8.

7 John A. Alford, Piers Plowman: A Guide to the Quotations (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992), 9.

8 Butterfield, Familiar Enemy, xxiv. See, e.g., Tim William Machan's claim, based on his study of its code-switching (i.e., passages in which the Latin and English intermingle; a focus, again, on the extraordinary): “It is not that English was still completely subservient to Latin or even incipiently contentious with it but that Latin was already yielding to the vernacular.” “Language Contact in Piers Plowman,” Speculum 69 (1994): 380.

9 Butterfield, Familiar Enemy, xxiv.

10 The Vision of William, concerning Piers Plowman: The “Vernon” Text; or Text A, ed. Walter W. Skeat, EETS o.s. 28 (London: Trübner, 1867), xxi–xxii. The only other notice of the existence, if not the contents, of this item is Marie-Claire Uhart, “The Early Reception of Piers Plowman” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Leicester, 1986), 240: “Explicit: ‘Amen, Amen,’ followed by 12 lines, mostly illegible, one of which reads: ‘primus passus de vision passus secundus de dowell.’” It is not mentioned in W. H. Black, A Descriptive, Analytical and Critical Catalogue of the Manuscripts Bequeathed unto the University of Oxford by Elias Ashmole Esq. (Oxford, 1845), col. 1277, or Kane, The A Version, 1–2.

11 See Jane Roberts, A Guide to Scripts used in English Writings up to 1500 (London: British Library, 2005), 211–13. The distinctive Secretary features are its angularity, the horns found on the heads of the letter g, and the neat, pointed, single-compartment a. A few anglicana alternatives are the r with a slight descender and the sigma-shaped s.

12 These are (relying on Alford, Guide to the Quotations): line 1, 11.193α, “Rejoice with them that rejoice; weep with them that weep” (Rom. 12:15; quotations are from the Douay Rheims translation); line 2, 3.233α, “Amen amen I say to you” (Matt. 6:2); line 3, 11.196α, “he that shall do and teach, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 5:19); line 5, 10.120α, “every one that exalteth himself, shall be humbled: and he that humbleth himself, shall be exalted” (Luke 18:14); line 7, 11.263α, “And no man hath ascended into heaven, but he that descended from heaven” (John 3:13); line 8, 10.98, “If you live rightly you will not worry about words of evil” (Cato, Distich 3.2); line 9, 7.68α, “And with the just let them not be written” (Psalm 68:29); 7.78, “In the name of God Amen” (the usual formula for beginning of a will); line 10 (first part), 11.255, “Revenge is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord” (Rom. 12:19); line 12, 10.41α, “Let us make man to our image” (Gen. 1:26); line 13, same as line 8.

13 See C. W. Dutschke with the assistance of R. H. Rouse et al., Guide to Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Huntington Library (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1989), at 137, http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/hehweb/HM137.html. Fifteenth-century schoolboys inscribed it three times in a thirteenth-century schooltext intended to teach Latin: University of Nottingham Library, MS Mi LM 2, fols. 126^v (twice) and 142^v. See The Wollaton Medieval Manuscripts: Texts, Owners and Readers, ed. Ralph Hanna and Thorlac Turville-Petre (York: York Medieval Press, 2010), 14, 111.

14 On this item see Hans Walther, Proverbia Sententiaeque Latinitatis Medii Aevi, 5 vols. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1963–7), 594a, “In his versibus totum est ABC.”

15 In the hand of William Holyngborne, chaplain of the abbot of St. Augustine's without Canterbury. See Kane, The A Version, 7 and n.1.

16 Derrida, Archive Fever, 40.

17 See especially Robert Adams, “The Reliability of the Rubrics in the B-Text of Piers Plowman,” MÆ 54 (1985): 208–31. Kane's description of the manuscripts in The A Version includes the rubrics (pp. 1–2 for Ashmole 1468), but they disappear from the B and C editions. Schmidt has a helpful treatment: Parallel-Text, Appendix II, “The Rubrics,” 938–42.

18 Especially Lawrence M. Clopper, “Langland's Markings for the Structure of Piers Plowman,” MP 85 (1988): 245–55, and J. A. Burrow, “The Structure of Piers Plowman B XV–XX: Evidence from the Rubrics,” MÆ 77 (2008): 306–12.

19 Burrow, “Structure,” 311.

20 Judith A. Jefferson dates the manuscript to between 1514 and 1544, tending toward the latter. “Divisions, Collaboration and Other Topics: The Table of Contents in Cambridge, University Library, MS Gg.4.31,” in Burrow and Duggan, Medieval Alliterative Poetry, 140.

21 Ibid., 144.

22 John A. Alford, “The Role of the Quotations in Piers Plowman,” Speculum 52 (1977): 96, 80.

23 Ibid., 99.

24 Somerset, “Multilingual Latin,” 109.

25 Traugott Lawler, “Langland Versificator,” YLS 25 (2011): 62–3.

26 Derrida, Archive Fever, 40.

27 Schmidt, Parallel-Text, 656, n. to C 17.220; I standardize abbreviations.

28 Traugott Lawler, “William Langland,” in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, Vol. 1: To 1550, ed. Roger Ellis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 156, 154.

29 On this concept in the poem see John A. Burrow, “God and the Fullness of Time in Piers Plowman,” MÆ 79 (2010): 300–5.

30 For a few of the many other instances see Walter W. Skeat, “Age of the World II,” N&Q 4th ser. 3 (1869): 203, and Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.14.9, fol. 2^r (see M. R. James, The Western Manuscripts in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge: A Descriptive Catalogue, 4 vols. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1900–4], 2:291–2).

31 These images are accessible in The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, Vol. 3: Oxford, Oriel College MS 79 (O), ed. Katherine Heinrichs (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer for the Medieval Academy of America and SEENET, 2004), which is my source.

32 MS O's defective status “and the fact that C² is the later manuscript might suggest that C² was copied from O to 17.98,” say Kane and Donaldson: “But the existence of some 30 unoriginal readings peculiar to O makes this seem unlikely. For if C² were a copy of O they would presuppose a corrector of C² more intelligent than the character of that manuscript otherwise leads one to expect.” The B Version, 24 n.23.

33 See Stephen Partridge, “Designing the Page,” in Gillespie and Wakelin, Production of Books, 82. An image of one of the Chaucer examples, B.L. MS Harley 1239, fol. 82^r (Man of Law's Tale), is on 83. An early modern reader has bracketed the two Latin quotations, glossing them: “This is not in ye Printed Ed:” and “nor this.”

34 Alford, “Role of the Quotations,” 86.

35 Ibid., 87.

36 Helen Barr, “The Use of Latin Quotations in Piers Plowman with Special Reference to Passus XVIII of the ‘B’ Text,” N&Q n.s. 33 (1986): 443.

37 Alford, Guide to the Quotations, 29–30.

38 Walter W. Skeat, “Quotations Wanted,” N&Q 3rd ser. 10 (1866): 290–1.

39 For the identification see John A. Alford, “More Unidentified Quotations in Piers Plowman,” MP 81 (1984): 279, and Guide to the Quotations, 61; on this passage as evidence for Higden's prominence see Andrew Galloway, “Latin England,” in Imagining a Medieval English Nation, ed. Kathy Lavezzo (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2004), 70–1.

40 This is the loose translation by Griet Galle, ed., Peter of Auvergne: Questions on Aristotle's De Caelo: A Critical Edition with an Interpretative Essay (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2003), 207*, in his discussion of the question, 4.1.2.2. The question is II, 18 (200). On the structure of the questions see IV.1.2 (90*–92*), which explains why our item does not express Peter's own belief.

41 Galle, Peter of Auvergne, Liber II, quaestio 18, item 2 (200). My translation, based on Galle's discussion, 4.1.2.2 (207*).

42 This is Galle's summary, Peter of Auvergne, 4.1.2.2 (207*), of Peter's solution, 201.

43 Michael Calabrese, “Prostitutes in the C-Text of Piers Plowman,” JEGP 105 (2006): 284. Translation from Pearsall, New Annotated Edition.

44 Calabrese, “Prostitutes,” 285.

45 Walther, Proverbia Sententiaeque, no. 22348; also his Initia carminum ac versum Medii Aevui posterioris Latinorum (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1969), no. 14533. Neither of these includes its appearance amid a series of fifteenth-century additions to the closing flyleaves of a register of St. Alban's abbey (Oxford, Bodleian MS Rawlinson B 332: Chronica Monasterii S. Albani: Registra Quorundam Abbatum Monasterii S. Albani, Vol. 2: Registra Johannis Whethamstede, Willelmi Albon, et Willelmi Walingforde, ed. Henry Thomas Riley [London, 1873], 297). The anticlericalism here replaced the chauvinism of other fourteenth-century instances: “Parisius nati non possunt beati / sunt infelices, quia matres sunt meretrices” (Walther, Proverbia, no. 20716).

46 Sanford B. Meech, “A Collection of Proverbs in Rawlinson MS D 328,” MP 38 (1940): 124; this is one of Walther's items; also Bartlett Jere Whiting, with the collaboration of Helen Wescott Whiting, Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases from English Writings Mainly before 1500 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), P399.

47 Consulted in William Langland's The Vision of Piers Plowman: The C-Text: A Facsimile of Huntington Library, San Marino, MS Hm 143, ed. Tomonori Matsushita (Tokyo: Senshu University Press, 2010).

48 Schmidt, Parallel-Text, 616; cf. Christopher Cannon, “ Langland's Ars Grammatica,” YLS 22 (2008): 1–25, and especially Lawler, “Langland Versificator.” The translation is from Pearsall, New Annotated Edition.

49 Stella Pates relates her discovery on a webpage for a book in which she advances the claim that John Grandisson wrote the poem: “A New Discovery: Piers Plowman and Manuscript Bodley 463,” www.piersplowman.com/piersplowman_discovery.htm.

50 Dante Alighieri, Dante Alighieri: De Situ et Forma Aque et Terre, ed. Giorgio Padoan (Florence: Le Monnier, 1968), 21.72; Constantine of Pisa, Constantine of Pisa, The Book of the Secrets of Alchemy: Introduction, Critical Edition, Translation and Commentary, ed. Barbara Obrist Leiden (New York: Brill, 1990), 77. My thanks to David Juste for illuminating discussion of this material.

51 Barney, Penn Commentary, 118, on C.21.96–107, a passage on Jesus as conqueror.

52 Alford, Guide, 84. Anna P. Baldwin claimed to have identified an instance in the plural in The Testament of Job (endorsed by Schmidt, Parallel-Text, 629), but that text is in Greek, not Latin, and achieved minimal circulation in medieval Europe. “The Triumph of Patience in Julian of Norwich and Langland,” in Langland, the Mystics and the Medieval English Religious Tradition: Essays in Honour of S. S. Hussey, ed. Helen Phillips (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), 71–83, especially 72, 81.

53 B.L. MS Royal 7 E IV, fol. 237^r; translation mine. This is chapter 29, s.v. “humilitas.”

54 Alford, “Role of the Quotations,” 99; he is focusing on passus 14. “The possibility that Langland was influenced by Bromyard is improved by recent scholarship” that dates the Summa to c.1348–50 (99, n.60).

55 Cannon, “Langland's Ars Grammatica,” esp. 24–5; Lawler, “Langland Versificator.” Alford, too, emphasizes the pervasiveness of this mode of influence upon Langland (Guide, 24–7).

56 Cannon, “Langland's Ars Grammatica,” 17; A. C. Spearing, “The Art of Preaching and Piers Plowman,” in his Criticism and Medieval Poetry (London: Edward Arnold, 1964), 84–5 on digression, 88–9 on repetition.

57 These are from Oxford, Bodleian MS Bodley 649, fols. 91^r and 43^v respectively. See Siegfried Wenzel, Macaronic Sermons: Bilingualism and Preaching in Late-Medieval England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 89.

58 E.g., Siegfried Wenzel, Latin Sermon Collections from Later Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 153 n.10, 218, and 326.

59 Barry Taylor, “Medieval Proverb Collections: The West European Tradition,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 55 (1992): 33; see discussion, 33–4.

60 Wenzel, Latin Sermon Collections, 321, 322.

61 On the former, see Grindley, “A New Fragment”; on the latter, see Scase, “Dauy Dycars Dreame,” 186–7. Note also the excerpt of A 4.15–17 discussed in the Introduction.

62 A. G. Rigg, “MS Bodley 851,” in Piers Plowman: A Facsimile of the Z-Text, 41. Rigg identifies the line as B 1.188, noting its unique brennit for received worth cheyned, but in all B MSS the line begins with Forthi, while in the Piers text of Bodley 851 itself the line begins Suche (fol. 126^v; Z 1.117 in Rigg and Brewer), so its origins are probably in A or C, which begin Chastite – though Dodsthorp himself might have encountered it via oral transmission. For additional evidence that readers loved the aphoristic lines of English poetry represented here see Alison Wiggins, “What Did Renaissance Readers Write in their Printed Copies of Chaucer?” The Library 7th ser. 9 (2008): 3–36.

63 Rigg, “MS Bodley 851,” 38.

64 See George H. Russell, “‘As they read it’: Some Notes on Early Responses to the C-Version of Piers Plowman,” Leeds Studies in English n.s. 20 (1989): 181–6. A full discussion is now Simon Horobin, “John Cok and His Copy of Piers Plowman,” YLS 27 (2013): forthcoming, which I read after having written this section.

65 See Russell, “‘As they read it’,” 186, on the “extraordinarily high proportion” of errors Cok's text shares with this copy, which are identified in Russell and Kane, The C Version, apparatus for 16.82–198. It is of course possible that Cok consulted a now-lost manuscript closely related to MS F, but easier to believe it was F itself.

66 See Ralph Hanna, The English Manuscripts of Richard Rolle: A Descriptive Catalogue (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2010), 7. See also Horobin, “John Cok,” and Ryan Perry's description of the manuscript for the webpage of Geographies of Orthodoxy: Mapping English Pseudo-Bonaventuran Lives of Christ, 1350–1550, www.qub.ac.uk/geographies-of-orthodoxy/resources/?section=manuscript&id=13, revision date June 1, 2010.

67 On Langbaine's, in Bodleian MS Wood donat. 7, see A. S. G. Edwards, “Piers Plowman in the Seventeenth Century: Gerard Langbaine's Notes,” YLS 6 (1992): 141–4; for James's, see Simon Horobin, “Richard James and the Seventeenth-Century Provenance of British Library MS Cotton Caligula A.XI,” Journal of the Early Book Society 13 (2010): 249–54. See Introduction above.

68 The great bulk of the items, eighteen, come from passus 10–14. Most are proverbs, with the balance comprising patristic, biblical, and legal tags. They are, in the order of their appearance on the page: 1.141α/5.440α, 5.269α–β, 9.186α–β, 10.195–6, 11.231, 10.256α, 11.106α, 10.261α, 10.266α–β, 10.342α, 11.58α, 11.269α, 11.281α, 11.416α, 12.50α, 12.65α, 12.207α, 13.45α, 13.426α, 14.60α, 14.276, 15.39α, 15.343α, 17.341α. The eighteen items from passus 10–14 make for roughly 15 percent of the Latin available for citing there; the remaining quotations amount to about 3.6 percent of the available items from those passus. I am grateful to Ian Cornelius for examining the Yale Crowley and Rogers editions, alerting me to this item, and arranging for an image on my behalf.

69 Joanne Rice, in The Riverside Chaucer, 896–7, citing Egerton 2864's gloss pacientes vincunt, “which appears in Piers Plowman B 13.135 and 14.33,” together with other instances of the proverb in the singular (including, in English, Troilus and Criseyde 4.1484).

4 “Quod piers plowman”

1 Anne Hudson, “Epilogue: The Legacy of Piers Plowman,” in Alford, A Companion to Piers Plowman, 260, a view based in the main upon the Lollardesque works of some of the Piers Plowman tradition and the reformist pamphlets of the sixteenth century. See, e.g., Kelen, Langland's Early Modern Identities, 43–76.

2 Quotations of The Vision of Pierce Plowman, now fyrste imprinted by Roberte Crowley . . . (London, 1550; = Cr¹) are from the Lehigh University Library copy, available online at http://digital.lib.lehigh.edu/cdm4/eb_viewer.php?ptr=1027.

3 John N. King, English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 322.

4 John E. Paul, “Hampshire Recusants in the Time of Elizabeth I, with Special Reference to Winchester,” Proceedings of the Hampshire Field Club 21 (1959): 63, quoted by Edward Wilson, The Winchester Anthology: A Facsimile of British Library Additional Manuscript 60577 with an Introduction and List of Contents by Edward Wilson and an Account of the Music by Iain Fenlon (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1981), 11.

5 On the date and place of production, see The Winchester Anthology, 8–10 (on fol. 107^v the main scribe added a colophon with the date 1487); on the contents see 14–16 and updates by Wilson in N&Q: “A Newly Identified Middle English Lyric in ‘The Winchester Anthology’,” n.s. 45 (1998): 430; “A Middle English Verse Sermon in the Winchester Anthology,” n.s. 46 (1999): 17–20; and “A Newly Identified Copy of The ABC of Aristotle in ‘The Winchester Anthology’,” n.s. 47 (2000): 296. A digital facsimile of the entire MS is now available at www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/ > 60577.

6 Andrew G. Watson, “A Sixteenth-Century Collector: Thomas Dackomb, 1496–c.1572,” The Library 5th ser. 18 (1963): 206. On Dackomb's books see also Wilson, The Winchester Anthology, 12 n.22, which lists three more manuscripts Watson subsequently identified as having been owned by Dackomb. On the manuscript's owners, see Wilson, The Winchester Anthology, 10–13.

7 This item has never appeared in any lists of witnesses or in any studies of the sixteenth-century reception or production of Piers Plowman. To date its existence has been noted only in the list of contents of The Winchester Anthology, 35; Derek Pearsall, review of the facsimile, N&Q n.s. 30 (1983): 164; Helen Cooper, review of the facsimile, RES n.s. 35 (1984): 355; William A. Ringler, Jr., Bibliography and Index of English Verse in Manuscript 1501–1558, prepared and completed by Michael Rudick and Susan J. Ringler (London: Mansell, 1992), TM 753 (entry for “In a someres seyson”); and A. S. G. Edwards, “The Blage Manuscript and Alliterative Verse in the Sixteenth Century,” in Burrow and Duggan, Medieval Alliterative Poetry, 83 n.19.

8 See The Winchester Anthology, 4–5 on the hands of the manuscript.

9 Pearsall, review of The Winchester Anthology, 164, because the Winchester passage reads “thre” for received “two” (corrected later); substitutes line 325 for 329, and in that line reorders “flodes and foule wedres fruytes shal faille”; uniquely attests “bere rule & reigne” (328) as against “have þe maistrie”; and adds the unique afterthought “of þe erth” (329), as well as “Except” for “But if.”

10 For the process in a much different context see, e.g., G. W. Ahlström, “Oral and Written Transmission: Some Considerations,” Harvard Theological Review 59 (1966): 69–81.

11 See Benson and Blanchfield, Manuscripts, 167–8, 190, 264; also Christine Schott, Marginalia of Piers Plowman, www.rarebookschool.org/fellowships/rbs-uva/plowman6.html.

12 Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Reformist Apocalypticism and Piers Plowman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 2.

13 Lines 1724 and 1726, from The Piers Plowman Tradition, ed. Helen Barr (London: J. M. Dent, 1993). Helen Barr says these lines represent “the characteristic language of prophecies”: Signes and Sothe: Language in the Piers Plowman Tradition (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994), 25 n.14.

14 Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, Vol. 12 (1), ed. James Gairdner (London: HM Stationery Office, 1890), no. 534; also no. 1023. The similarities to Piers Plowman were first noted by Madeleine Hope Dodds, “Political Prophecies in the Reign of Henry VIII,” Modern Language Review 11 (1916): 282–3. On such “painted prophecy,” see Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972), 390.

15 Thomas, Religion, 398, 399. See Thomas's whole chapter (389–432), and Sharon L. Jansen, Political Protest and Prophecy under Henry VIII (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1991).

16 Thomas, Religion, 401.

17 Ibid., 400–1, citing Gairdner, Letters and Papers, no. 1212.

18 Wendy Scase, “Writing and the Plowman: Langland and Literacy,” YLS 9 (1995): 127; see also Benson, Public Piers Plowman, 62.

19 See Hanna, London Literature, 251–2; Galloway, Penn Commentary, 134; and Traugott Lawler, “Langland Translating,” in Answerable Style: The Idea of the Literary in Medieval England, ed. Andrew Galloway and Frank Grady (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013), 59–60.

20 For instance, the Winchester extract attests the “distinctive curly ‘z’ form” of the letter “r” that Benson and Blanchfield identify in the “Sion College” copy of Piers Plowman B, now Tokyo, Toshiyuki Takamiya MS 23 (sigil S), produced c.1550 (Manuscripts, 114; see the facsimile of fol. 66^r on 112). Ralph Hanna has suggested to me that the hand dates to after 1530, as evidenced by the use of “ar” for Middle English “er.”

21 On Buriton's career, see Joan Greatrex, Biographical Register of the English Cathedral Priories of the Province of Canterbury, c.1066–1540 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 678–9.

22 The Winchester Anthology, 10, and notes 14, 15. On Brynstan's career, including his final appearance at St. Swithun's as noted in the next paragraph, see Greatrex, Biographical Register, 678.

23 Gairdner, Letters and Papers, Vol. 10 (1887), no. 318; The Winchester Anthology, 10.

24 On sixteenth-century Plowman texts' engagement with the discourses of “antiquity” and “newfangledness,” see Kelen, Langland's Early Modern Identities, 52–8.

25 E.g., Francis Aidan Gasquet, The Last Abbot of Glastonbury and His Companions: An Historical Sketch (London: S. Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, 1895), 72–3.

26 Gairdner, Letters and Papers, Vol. 10, no. 318; quoted in The Winchester Anthology, 11.

27 The Winchester Anthology, 11. It seems more likely to me that Buriton is smarting over his former confrere's abandonment of St. Swithun's for the fraternal life at this difficult moment in the church's life. For such a context see Arnold Williams, “Relations between the Mendicant Friars and the Secular Clergy in England in the Later Fourteenth Century,” Annuale Mediaevale 1 (1960): 22–95.

28 Richard Rex, “Blessed Adrian Fortescue: A Martyr without a Cause?” Analecta Bollandiana 115 (1997): 350; see 325–9 on the missal. Fortescue is the scribe of Bodleian MS Digby 145, dated 1532 in his hand, on which see Thorlac Turville-Petre, “Sir Adrian Fortescue and his Copy of Piers Plowman,” YLS 14 (2000): 29–48 (43–4 on the missal).

29 This is Piers Plowman B 10.322–5 as transcribed by Bryan P. Davis, “The Prophecies of Piers Plowman in C.U.L. MS Gg.4.31,” Journal of the Early Book Society 5 (2002): 34, from fol. 42^v of that sixteenth-century manuscript.

30 B 19.470–4, C.U.L. MS Gg.4.31, fol 95^v, my transcription of the facsimile of this folio in Benson and Blanchfield, Manuscripts, 40; see also Davis, “Prophecies,” 35.

31 The C text in BL Additional MS 34779 is supplied with B 6.327–9 in the margin after misplaced C 8.348: see Russell and Kane, The C Version, 182. And the annotator of the A-text copy Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.14, probably Stephan Batman, Archbishop Parker's chaplain and owner of another Piers Plowman manuscript, glosses the end of passus 7: “Here is left oute v versis which is in the olde coppi & ar set be nethe,” adding them below (fol. 20^v). See Kane, The A Version, 38 n.1, and now, reprinting Kane's comments alongside a facsimile of the inscription, William Langland's The Vision of Piers Plowman: The A-Text: A Facsimile of Trinity College, Cambridge MS R.3.14, ed. Tomonori Matsushita (Tokyo: Senshu University Press, 2010), vii. See also Horobin, “Stephan Batman,” 362–3.

32 Benson and Blanchfield, Manuscripts, 21.

33 The title “The Prophecies of Piers Plowman” appears on the frontleaf (ii^v). On the treatment of prophecies in this MS see Benson and Blanchfield, Manuscripts, 40–3, 129–36; Davis, “Prophecies”; and Jefferson, “Divisions, Collaboration,” 147–50.

34 Wendy Scase argues against the dating of the tract to 1552, proposing “the likelihood . . . that the Dreame dates between February and September 1547”: “Dauy Dycars Dreame,” 192. Davy Dycars Dreame survives in a single copy, in the Society of Antiquaries. A transcription is in the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership, http://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A18727.0001.001/1:1?rgn=div1;view=fulltext.

35 See Scase, “Dauy Dycars Dreame,” 177–9.

36 For the assumption that this copyist purposely combined two passages from Langland's poem see Sharon L. Jansen, “Politics, Protest, and a New Piers Plowman Fragment: The Voice of the Past in Tudor England,” RES n.s. 40 (1989): 94–5, and Barr, Signes and Sothe, 13.

37 Jansen, “Politics, Protest,” 94, attributes these variants to carelessness. See above, note 9.

38 Scase, “Dauy Dycars Dreame,” 184.

39 Sharon L. Jansen [Jaech] mentions this aspect of the collection in an essay published before she recognized the Piers Plowman content of the second item: “British Library MS Sloane 2578 and Popular Unrest in England, 1554–1556,” Manuscripta 29 (1985): 32, but mistakes the two “22.a”s for “nota”s in her discussion of the Piers Plowman excerpt (“Politics, Protest,” 94, apparatus to her transcription).

40 The item also appears in Bodleian MS Arch. Selden B 8, fol. 268^r (six-stanza form) and Bodleian MS Rawlinson C 813, fols. 153^v–54^r, which gives stanza 1 as a standalone quatrain followed by “finis,” followed by stanzas 5 and 3 run together into four lines (Davy the Dykar), 4 as a quatrain (abbot of Abingdon), and another “finis.” Jansen [Jaech], “British Library MS Sloane 2578,” 40–1 notes the similarities among the Sloane, Arch. Selden, and Harley MSS (first appearance). See also Ringler, Bibliography and Index, TM 1858 (“When father blythe”), citing Harley 559 (first instance) and Arch. Selden B 8, and First-Line Index of English Poetry 1500–1800 in Manuscripts of the Bodleian Library Oxford, Vol. 2, ed. Margaret Crum (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), W1021, citing Rawl C 813.

41 Both Crowley's logic and attention span failed him, as noted by, among others, Brewer, Editing Piers Plowman, 14.

42 This gloss is identical in both the second and third editions, and is found on sig. I.iv^r in both. See The Vision of Pierce Plowman, now the seconde time imprinted by Roberte Crowley . . . (London, 1550), which is the second edition (Cr²), available online in the form of Lehigh University Library 828.1 L256p 550a, http://digital.lib.lehigh.edu/cdm4/eb_viewer.php?ptr=770 (select “Passus 6, 7. Fol. xxxvi^r” from the drop-down menu); and The Vision of Pierce Plowman, nowe the seconde tyme imprinted by Roberte Crowlye . . . (London, 1550), the third edition (Cr³), available in the form of University of California at San Diego Library PR2010.C76 1550, where the relevant page is http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.31822038199956?urlappend=%3Bseq=119. On the order of the second and third editions, which is commonly confused, see Hailey, “Robert Crowley and the Editing of Piers Plowman,” 143–4 n.2.

43 Larry Scanlon, “Langland, Apocalypse and the Early Modern Editor,” in Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England, ed. Gordon McMullan and David Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 59. The foundational discussion, starting from Crowley's distinction between “prophecy” and “truth” in his marginal glosses rather than this preface, is King, English Reformation Literature, 335–6.

44 Mike Rodman Jones proposes that Crowley's nervousness responded to “the impact that prophecy, and apparently verse prophecy, had had within a few months on the largest and most threatening mass civil revolt since 1381,” that is, Kett's Rebellion: “‘This is no prophecy’: Robert Crowley, Piers Plowman, and Kett's Rebellion,” Sixteenth Century Journal 42 (2011): 55. Crowley did write about that event in 1559's An Epitome of Chronicles (see Jones, 52–3), but there is no evidence for any direct connection between his Piers Plowman editions and the rebellion apart from the accident of timing (1549, 1550), given that, as Jones acknowledges, “Langland's prophetic passages are different in tenor, as well as in verse form, from those of the Dussindale rebels” (55).

45 James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, 1350–1547, Vol. 2 of The Oxford English Literary History, gen. ed. Jonathan Bate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 332, who points out that “King's arguments . . . are overstated” (n.21); indeed King never refers to Crowley's advice not to read the poem as prophetic.

46 Thomas A. Prendergast, “The Work of Robert Langland,” in Renaissance Retrospections: Tudor Views of the Middle Ages, ed. Sarah A. Kelen (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute, 2013), 82, 84, quoting John Harvey, A discoursive probleme concerning prophesies (London: Richard Watkins, 1588), 66. Richard Harvey's copy of Piers Plowman is now Beinecke Id L26 550F.

47 King, English Reformation Literature, 323; also, e.g., Kelen: “The reception of Piers Plowman played no small part in the reinterpretation of England's religious past as proto-Protestant rather than (more accurately, but less usefully) Catholic” (Langland's Early Modern Identities, 75).

48 Jansen characterizes the “particular variations of the Sloane lines” as “suggestive of Crowley's 1550 printed edition,” but goes on to identify BL Additional MS 35287, the only other to feature the readings wurke and fall, as closer (“Politics, Protest,” 94). But the two agreements with that copy are easily attributable to convergent variation: wurke manifests the error of “‘attraction’ to the whole or part of an adjacent or nearby word in the line being copied” (Kane, The A Version, 121), in this case, workmen, and faile/falle confusion is straightforward, occurring as well at, e.g., B 3.347, 15.432, C 3.350 in various manuscripts. The two “suggestive” variations Jansen cites in common with Cr are Davy . . . shall dye (6.330) and religious (10.322). Yet Davie is the reading of the Winchester excerpt, the title of Churchyard's broadside, and Cr²³ (Cr¹ attests received Dawe); shal die for die appears as well in the three MSS that make up the B sigil (at least one of which, Bo, has sixteenth-century glosses) and in Hm; and religious is the reading of MSS HmGYOC²CotF. See the apparatuses in Kane and Donaldson, The B Version, and Russell and Kane, The C Version. The post-1550 date of Sloane is secure, since it features a number of texts that refer to Mary's reign: see Jansen [Jaech], “British Library MS Sloane 2578.”

49 Cr³, sig. *2^v. The most likely explanation of this change is that the compositor was anticipating the first term of the C-text passage cited a few lines later (“Three shyppes”).

50 Davis, “Prophecies,” 21.

51 As argued by Hailey, “Robert Crowley and the Editing of Piers Plowman,” 161–2. This first consultation is evidenced in a number of Cr–G agreements in error, marginal keys to the text, and the marginal annotation “The Abbot of Abyngton” at precisely the same point (Cr¹, fol. 50^v); the second, in a number of Cr²³–G agreements, one of which occurs at B 6.328, “hight”/ “heyght” (MS F, too, has this reading) as against received “eiзte” (see Hailey, 169 n.69), and in the broad similarities (though not extending to verbal parallels; see Jefferson, “Divisions, Collaboration,” 145–6 n.23) between MS G's table of contents and the brief “summary” of principal points in Cr²³.

52 John Bale, Scriptorum illustrium maioris brytannie . . . (Basle, 1559), translated in Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, 332. See King, English Reformation Literature, 96–100, 324–6.

53 Scanlon, “Langland, Apocalypse,” 65–6; also Michael Johnston, “From Edward III to Edward VI: The Vision of Piers Plowman and Early Modern England,” Reformation 11 (2006): 47–78, which provides a full classification of Crowley's glosses, finding “only nine Polemical Response-theological glosses. Far more often, at doctrinally charged moments, Crowley chooses not to offer any marginal guides to the reader” (63, emphasis in original).

54 Hailey, “Robert Crowley and the Editing of Piers Plowman,” undermining a long-held conviction.

55 Hudson, “Epilogue,” 260, which on the basis of its contents dates it to later than the “1532” that is inscribed in another hand. For an overview of the Protestant and Catholic readings of Langland in the sixteenth century, see Bowers, Chaucer and Langland, 216–27 (220 on this work).

56 King, English Reformation Literature, 338. This is now Oxford, Bodleian Douce L 205.

57 Richard K. Emmerson, “‘Yernen to rede redels?’ Piers Plowman and Prophecy,” YLS 7 (1993): 68.

5 Urry, Burrell, and the pains of John Taylor

1 Thompson, “Bishop Thomas Percy's Contributions to Langland Scholarship,” 452.

2 Summit, Memory's Library, 2.

3 See, e, g., Kane and Donaldson, The B Version, 14–15. On Ht's text see most recently Patricia R. Bart, “Intellect, Influence, and Evidence: The Elusive Allure of the Ht Scribe,” in Yee? Baw for Bokes: Essays on Medieval Manuscripts and Poetics in Honor of Hoyt N. Duggan, ed. Michael Calabrese and Stephen H. A. Shepherd (Los Angeles: Marymount Institute Press, 2013), 219–43.

4 Mooney and Stubbs, Scribes and the City, 17–37. Writing in ignorance of Mooney and Stubbs, indeed suggesting that her findings “may provide a means of identifying him by name,” Bart profiled the scribe perfectly: “the Ht scribe may well have been an East Anglian man of law active in the capital – something of a man of influence rather than solely a professional copyist leading an entirely private life” (“Intellect,” 239).

5 Dutschke, Guide, at MS Hm 114, http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/hehweb/HM114.html. Also, the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts (http://dla.library.upenn.edu/dla/schoenberg/index.html), and the Late Medieval English Scribes database overseen by Linne Mooney, Simon Horobin, and Estelle Stubbs (www.medievalscribes.com).

6 See Kate Harris, “An Augustan Episode in the History of the Collection of Medieval Manuscripts at Longleat House,” in The English Medieval Book: Studies in Memory of Jeremy Griffiths, ed. A. S. G. Edwards, Vincent Gillespie, and Ralph Hanna (London: British Library, 2000), 240–4, relying on the Urry material below and Humfrey Wanley's detailed account of the Spelman auction in BL MS Harley 7055, fol. 235^r on this manuscript.

7 Timothy Thomas, “Preface,” The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. John Urry (London, 1721), sig. li^r. See Harris, “An Augustan Episode,” 243.

8 Thomas, first page of the “Preface,” with the bracketed matter added in Thomas's hand to the British Library copy of the edition (shelfmark 643.m.4). On Christ Church's use of the edition for fund-raising, see Sarah A. Kelen, “Cultural Capital: Selling Chaucer's Works, Building Christ Church, Oxford,” Chaucer Review 36 (2001): 149–57. On Urry's career see E. I. Carlyle, “Urry, John (1666–1715),” rev. A. S. G. Edwards, in ODNB, www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/28021.

9 Thomas, “Preface,” sigs. k1^v–k2^r. See Harris, “An Augustan Episode,” 243.

10 Harris, “An Augustan Episode,” 242, citing as well the possibility of a distant relationship between the two men, since Lord Weymouth's second cousin, Mary, married an “Urrey of London.”

11 On Barnes's edition see Joseph M. Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 148–57.

12 Cr² and Cr³ include the addition of A Prol.90–5, at least one correction from the C tradition, corrections from CUL MS Ll.4.14 (C² of B) or a lost manuscript closely related to it, and readings and apparatus very like C.U.L. MS Gg.4.31 (Hailey, “Robert Crowley and the Editing of Piers Plowman,” 155–62).

13 William L. Alderson and Arnold C. Henderson, Chaucer and Augustan Scholarship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 98. My thanks to Professor Horobin for informing me of his discovery.

14 Tyrwhitt, The Canterbury Tales of Chaucer, 1:xx. See Alderson and Henderson, Chaucer and Augustan Scholarship, 82 for this and other complaints.

15 Alderson and Henderson, Chaucer and Augustan Scholarship, 81, 101.

16 Ibid., 82, 145.

17 BP, 20, which is usually omitted from catalogues of the abuses heaped upon Urry's edition.

18 Bracketed words and lines sometimes occur in The Riverside Chaucer, for instance where Chaucer seem to have cancelled the lines (e.g., Nun's Priest's Tale endlink). But the editors say that they have only “reconsidered with special care” those places where F. N. Robinson “silently restored” grammatical forms such as final -e, “and where allowed to stand, notice is taken and the manuscript forms are listed in the Textual Notes”: i.e., no brackets (xli–xlii).

19 Alderson and Henderson, Chaucer and Augustan Scholarship, 102. See also Derek Brewer, “Modernising the Medieval: Eighteenth-Century Translations of Chaucer,” in The Middle Ages after the Middle Ages, ed. Marie-Françoise Alamichel and Derek Brewer (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), 104, and Joseph A. Dane, Who Is Buried in Chaucer's Tomb? Studies in the Reception of Chaucer's Book (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1998), 116–21.

20 See Alderson and Henderson, Chaucer and Augustan Scholarship, 93, 106.

21 Ibid., 114, 112.

22 Russell and Nathan, “A Piers Plowman Manuscript in the Huntington Library,” 121.

23 Ibid., 122.

24 Haverford College, Magill Library 96. On Farmer as Librarian, see David McKitterick, Cambridge University Library, a History: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 293–351; on his book collecting, which centered on early English books, see L. J. Lloyd, “Dr. Richard Farmer, 1735–97,” Book Collector 26 (1977): 524–36.

25 From Boswell's Life, April 25, 1778, as reported in John Nichols, “Dr. John Taylor,” in Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, Vol. 4 (London, 1812), 500n., and McKitterick, Cambridge University Library, 188–9, continuing: “I once dined in company with him; and all he said during the whole time was no more than Richard. How a man should say only Richard, it is not easy to imagine. But it was thus: Dr. Douglas was talking of Dr. Zachary Grey, and ascribing to him something that was written by Dr. Richard Grey. So, to correct him, Taylor said (imitating his affected sententious emphasis and nod), Richard!” Nichols's materials on Taylor are quite entertaining; see also McKitterick, 186–95.

26 Nichols, Literary Anecdotes, 493. See McKitterick, Cambridge University Library, 190–5.

27 Nichols, Literary Anecdotes, 510.

28 Ibid.

29 Letter to Dr. Ducarel, September 1753, advocating Burrell's membership in the Society of Antiquities, printed in Nichols, Literary Anecdotes, 665. On Burrell's career see these items by John H. Farrant: “The Family Circle and Career of William Burrell, Antiquary,” Sussex Archaeological Collections 139 (2001): 169–85; Sussex Depicted: Views and Descriptions, 1600–1800 (Lewes: Sussex Record Society, 2001); and “Burrell, Sir William, second baronet (1732–1796),” in ODNB: www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/4102. R. Carter Hailey describes the copy as “bound in two volumes and interleaved, with text very heavily annotated by Sir William Burrell,” but does not mention the Taylor connection, or the nature of the annotations. “Giving Light to the Reader: Robert Crowley's Editions of Piers Plowman (1550),” Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia (2001), 96.

30 For Percy, see Thompson, “Bishop Thomas Percy's Contributions to Langland Scholarship”; for Tyrwhitt, on the basis of his collations of his Cr¹, now B.L. shelfmark C.71.c.29, against BL MS Cotton Vespasian B XVI, see Hailey, “Robert Crowley and the Editing of Piers Plowman,” 145 and n.5.

31 Farrant, “Burrell, Sir William,” his ODNB entry.

32 Printed in Nichols, Literary Anecdotes, 520–2. On the history of the Harley library see A Catalogue of the Harleian Collection of Manuscripts . . ., 2 vols. (London, 1759), 1:1–7.

33 Dutschke, Guide, remarks that the price annotations of the Gough and Askew sales by its next owner, Richard Heber (1773–1833), are on the front pastedown and flyleaf.

34 Nichols, Literary Anecdotes, 495–6.

35 “Hearne left all his manuscripts . . . to William Bedford, and from Bedford's widow Rawlinson purchased them, probably in 1748, for £105,” according to www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/dept/scwmss/wmss/online/1500%961900/rawlinson/rawlinsonCLD.html, under the section of MS K, which includes MS poetry 38 in the list of these items.

36 The copy of Bibliotheca Askeviana manu scripta (London, 1784) that is now BL shelfmark 679.e.26 records the names of purchasers.

37 Dutschke, Guide.

38 McKitterick, Cambridge University Library, 328, notes that Gough purchased a Rogers annotated and interleaved by Taylor, but does not attempt to identify it.

39 William Dunn Macray, Annals of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, A.D. 1598–A.D. 1867 (London, 1868), 171–2. Ian Philip says this is not entirely fair, but the miscataloguing of Rawlinson 272–4 supports the general picture: The Bodleian Library in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 97.

40 See Macray, Annals, 211–15.

41 Letter to Sir Thomas Phillipps, April 4, 1834, in The Douce Legacy: An Exhibition to Commemorate the 150th Anniversary of the Bequest of Francis Douce (1757–1834) (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 1984), 17. I correct “suffer” to “suffered” in my transcription.

42 A Catalogue of the Books, relating to British Topography, and Saxon and Northern Literature, Bequeathed to the Bodleian Library, in the Year MDCCXCIX, by Richard Gough, Esq. F.S.A. (Oxford, 1814). Macray writes that a portion of the Rawlinson MSS were in the same room with the Carte, Dodsworth, Tanner, Willis, and Junius MSS, and that the Gough collection joined them (Annals, 211).

43 See Strickland Gibson and C. J. Hindle, “Philip Bliss (1787–1857): Editor and Bibliographer,” Oxford Bibliographical Society Proceedings and Papers 3 (1933): 179 on his duties of cataloguing the Rawlinson and Gough collections, 187 for the quotation.

44 P. B. [= Philip Bliss], “Pierce Plowman,” British Bibliographer 1 (1810): 443. I thank Dr. Katherine Watson for bringing this item to my attention; it is not in DiMarco, A Reference Guide, and to my knowledge has never been known to Langland scholarship. See Gibson and Hindle, “Philip Bliss,” 254 on this item.

45 Bliss, “Pierce Plowman,” 444 (“soft” / “set” and MS R's reading, which “differs from any hitherto pointed out”); 447 (Digby 145). See above, Introduction, on Ritson's reference to the two “editions” of Piers Plowman.

46 The Text of the Canterbury Tales, ed. John M. Manly and Edith Rickert, 8 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940), 1:633. The item is A Catalogue of the Libraries of Edward Webbe, Esq; Counsellor at Law, Alexander Davie, Esq; Late of Sidney-College, Cambridge, Francis Carrington, Esq; The Hon. Lady Mary Worsley, and Several Others, With One in Particular, the most considerable of them all, the Name of the Proprietor is not permitted to be published, 2 vols. (London, 1751, 1752).

47 Horace Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of King George III, ed. Derek Jarrett, 4 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 2:154–5; see also 3:110 n.2, 3:189, and 4:215–17.

48 Where Manly and Rickert in fact encountered this entry (which they represent accurately in its substantives if not accidentals) was London, BL SCS 68, a copy of A Catalogue of the Entire and Valuable Library (with the Exception of the Department of British Topography, Bequeathed to the Bodleian Library) of that Eminent Antiquary, Richard Gough, Esq., Deceased. Which Will be sold by Auction, by Leigh and S. Sotheby, Booksellers, at their House, No. 145, Strand, opposite Catherine Street, on Thursday, April 5, 1810, and Nineteen following Days, (Sundays and Good Friday excepted) at 12 o'Clock (London, 1810), 204. The sale price they record is what Heber paid for it (see note 33).

49 Manly and Rickert, Text of the Canterbury Tales, 1:645.

50 The description available via http://searcharchives.bl.uk (search “Add MS 34360”) cites the eighteenth-century signature “I. Taylor” on fol. 4^r and its later ownership by Askew and Gough. This was one of a number of Stow manuscripts that passed into the hands of William Browne of Tavistock, another of which has Longleat connections (Longleat MS 50, a Polychronicon). See A. S. G. Edwards, “Medieval Manuscripts Owned by William Browne of Tavistock,” in Books and Collectors, 1200–1650, ed. Colin Tite and James P. Carley (London: British Library, 1996), 441–9.

51 These are (using modern shelfmarks): Bodleian MSS Laud misc. 581 and 656, Digby 102, 145, and 171, Bodley 814 and 851, James 2 (excerpts), and Wood donat. 7 (excerpt); CUL MSS Dd.1.17 and Ll.4.14; BL Cotton MSS Caligula A XI and Vespasian B XVI; Cambridge, Trinity College MSS B.15.17 and R.3.14; and Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 293.

52 A. S. G. Edwards, “The ‘Worsley’ Manuscript of the Canterbury Tales,” The Library 6th ser. 7 (1985): 54–8.

53 A big help for anyone following this up is A. S. G. Edwards, “Two Piers Plowman Manuscripts from Helmingham Hall,” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 11 (1999): 423 n.9, which identifies those manuscripts that were in institutional libraries by the mid-eighteenth century and provides mitigating information about others as well. One minor error is his inclusion of the Douce MSS in that list; they did not arrive at the Bodleian until well into the nineteenth century.

54 Bibliotheca Askeviana manu scripta (London, 1784). This is item SCHOENBERG_97115 in the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts, http://dla.library.upenn.edu/dla/schoenberg/index.html.

55 My information on its binding and provenance is from Heinrichs, The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, Vol. 3, Introduction, I.11, I.12. There are other problems as well. “Dialogue of Piers Plowman, in English Verse. – The Wards of London, with their Taxes to the 15th – The Privilege of Westminster” is how this item is described in A Catalogue of valuable manuscripts in Greek, Latin, English, French, Italian, and Spanish . . . All which were collected at the expence of the late Lord Somers, and since belonged to the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Jekyll Knt. Master of the Rolls (London, 1739), 21, item 669 under the quarto manuscripts. It seems odd that neither Taylor nor the Askew catalogue mentions any of the other items. Oriel 79 belonged to Joseph Ames (1687–1759), and was gifted to Oriel by Francis Page, commoner of the college, in 1788, so the windows for Taylorian ownership are very small in any case. Simon Horobin is tracking the provenance of Oriel 79.

56 See Russell and Kane, The C Version, 7, and Edwards, “Two Piers Plowman Manuscripts,” 425. And BL Additional MS 35287 would fit, but it is too big to be described as a quarto. When sold in 1899, it was described as a folio, 12 × 8 inches, bound in crimson morocco. Catalogue of a Portion of the Collection of Manuscripts Known as the “Appendix” Made by the Late Earl of Ashburnham [and sold by H. Yates Thompson], Sotheby's, May 1, 1899, lot 77, p. 44. For descriptions see Kane and Donaldson, The B Version, 11, and Eric Eliason, Thorlac Turville-Petre, and Hoyt N. Duggan, “Introduction,” in The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, Vol. 5: British Library Additional MS 35287 (M), ed. Eliason, Turville-Petre, and Duggan (Cambridge, Mass.: Boydell and Brewer for the Medieval Academy of America and SEENET, 2005), I.1–9.

57 See Chapter 3. As the Schoenberg database shows, the remainder of Lowes's purchases were Latin and Greek items: Hermogenes, gospels, Homer, patristics, Pliny the Younger, Boethius, Caesar, Cicero, Guido delle Colonne, Justinian, a missal, and Virgil. On Lowes's ownership of Egerton 2864 see Manly and Rickert, Text of the Canterbury Tales, 1:147.

58 Edward Bernard, Catalogi librorum manuscriptorum Angliae et Hiberniae in unum collecti, cum indice alphabetico (Oxford, 1697). This vellum MS is missing eleven leaves, including at the beginning and ending, where Spelman's signature would have been if the losses occurred after he took possession, and which would be most likely to result in a description as imperfect.

59 E. St. John Brooks, “The Piers Plowman Manuscripts in Trinity College, Dublin,” The Library 5th ser. 6 (1951): 153.

60 The Ilchester MS is too small to be described as a folio, and in any case as mentioned above is more likely already to have been in the family than purchased by them at auction. In the Catalogue of the Harleian Collection, Vol. 1, Wanley describes MS 875 as a quarto; Rawlinson poet. 137 had a second item at this stage; Rawlinson poet. 38 was probably purchased by Peter Le Neve in East Anglia (The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, Vol. 7: London, British Library, MS Lansdowne 398, and Oxford, Bodleian MS Rawlinson Poetry 38 (R), ed. Robert Adams [Cambridge, Mass.: Boydell and Brewer for the Medieval Academy of America, 2011], Introduction, I.10); National Library of Wales 733B was almost certainly in private hands in Wales at this point (see Edwards, “Two Piers Plowman Manuscripts,” 425, relying on information Dr. Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan has shared with me as well); and Douce 104 was owned during Spelman's lifetime by James Ley, first earl of Marlborough (1552–1629). See also note 55 on Oriel 79's status as a quarto and its eighteenth-century provenance.

6 William Dupré, fabricateur

1 This is from a letter of November 12, 1794, to Horace Walpole Bedford, item 114 in The Collected Letters of Robert Southey, ed. Ian Packer and Lynda Pratt, Part One, 1791–1797, available online at www.rc.umd.edu/editions/southey_letters/Part_One/HTML/letterEEd.26.114.html. For recent account, see W. A. Speck, Robert Southey: Entire Man of Letters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).

2 I thank Professor Toshi Takamiya for informing me about this copy. One also wonders whether Southey's attraction to the world of Piers Plowman, and some of his tumult of emotion, is bound up in his composition of the radical play Wat Tyler. On January 12, 1795, he sought out publishers for Wat Tyler, but it did not appear: then, in 1817, now laureate and a member of the establishment, he saw an advertisement for its forthcoming publication, and he appealed for an injunction against its publication. See Kelly Grovier, “Cause Célèbre,” Times Literary Supplement 5742 (April 26, 2013): 3–5.

3 S. Schoenbaum, “A New Vertue Shakespeare Portrait,” Shakespeare Quarterly 28 (1977): 85. On this portrait see Schoenbaum, Shakespeare's Lives, new edn. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 202–6; Margreta de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 79–83; and Tarnya Cooper, ed., Searching for Shakespeare (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), esp. 52–75.

4 De Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim, 8. The best overview of forgery in the eighteenth century is Jack Lynch, Deception and Detection in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).

5 James Boaden, An Inquiry into the Authenticity of Various Pictures and Prints, Which, . . . Have Been Offered to the Public as Portraits of Shakspeare (London, 1824), 39.

6 See ibid., 40–1.

7 William L. Pressly, A Catalogue of Paintings in the Folger Shakespeare Library: “As Imagination Bodies Forth” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 277, on Folger Shakespeare Library FPs13. See also Boaden, Inquiry, 81–112; Schoenbaum, Shakespeare's Lives, 209–12.

8 Pressly, Catalogue, 276.

9 The Plays of William Shakespeare, in Fifteen Volumes, ed. Samuel Johnson and George Steevens, 4th edn. (London, 1793), 1:iv. See Boaden, Inquiry, 44; Schoenbaum, Shakespeare's Lives, 205.

10 Cooper, Searching for Shakespeare, 9. Pressly describes Felton as either “an altered early work or a fake made from whole cloth” (Catalogue, 277); Schoenbaum speculates that perhaps Steevens was behind the ruse (Shakespeare's Lives, 211–12). Boaden remarked, “I am assuredly unwilling to believe, that one who took so much interest in the detection of the forged PAPERS of the poet, could at the very time be guilty of counterfeiting his resemblance. But if still such a thing be possible, then I should think the matter capable of some extenuation” and so forth (Inquiry, 102).

11 Boaden, Inquiry, 103–4. See also de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim, 85–6, for discussion of the Ireland scandal and the Felton portrait: “William Henry Ireland's fabrication of Elizabethan and Jacobean manuscripts and documents was matched by the appearance of what was, in Malone's eyes at least, a counterfeit portrait of Shakespeare” (85).

12 See Schoenbaum, Shakespeare's Lives, 135–67 for full discussion of the forgeries and Malone's role in exposing them.

13 George Chalmers, An Apology for the Believers in the Shakspeare-Papers, which were Exhibited in Norfolk-Street (London, 1797), 32. Schoenbaum briefly discusses Chalmers: Shakespeare's Lives, 167–8.

14 Chalmers, Apology, 8; further citations in the text. The last phrase is Steevens's.

15 The “grappling to his heart” quotation is, of course, from Polonius's advice to Hamlet regarding his friends; “unauthenticated purchase” quotation is Steevens's: “if such a Portrait had existed in Eastcheap during the life of the industrious Vertue, he would most certainly have procured it, instead of having submitted to take his first engraving of our author from a juvenile likeness of James I and his last from Mr. Keck's unauthenticated purchase out of a dressing-room of a modern actress”: “Shakspeare,” European Magazine 26 (October 1794): 279. See Schoenbaum, Shakespeare's Lives, 583 n.58 on the attribution to Steevens.

16 The Monthly Magazine 14 (December 1802): 391. All the letters here cited are now available on GoogleBooks; to find them it is simplest to do a word search of phrases within quotation marks.

17 Mario Esposito publicized the fraud in “The Letters of Brunetto Latino: A Nineteenth-Century Literary Hoax,” Modern Language Review 12 (1917): 59–63, but even so prominent a historian as Ernst Kantorowicz was still misled: Frederick II, 1194–1250, trans. E. O. Lorimer (London: Constable, 1931), 354. Others who were ignorant of the correction had already suspected the letters were fake, as Esposito, 60, points out.

18 Mario Esposito, “Una falsificazione letteraria del secolo XIX,” Archivio storico italiano 13 (1930): 101–14.

19 Claudio Giunta, “Il triste destino di William Dupré, falsario” in Contrafactum: Copia, Imitazione, Falso, ed. Gianfelice Peron and Alvise Andreose (Padua: Esedra, 2008), 267–75; also available as an unpaginated.pdf file linked from www.claudiogiunta.it/2009/03/il-triste-destino-di-william-dupre-falsario. Giunta mentions the Kantorowicz citation (see note 17), at 274.

20 BL Additional MS 46706, fol. 274^r–v. Giunta quotes the great majority of these letters as well; I restore original punctuation. I have discovered one other letter in Dupré's hand, but it is in his capacity as secretary to an employer, dated August 21, 1793, and thus reveals little about Dupré other than that he held that position. BL Additional MS 35663, fol. 245^r.

21 BL Additional MS 22903, fol. 28^r–v; Giunta, “Il triste destino,” 268–9. Julia Bolton Holloway speculates that MS 319 “came from what may have been Brunetto Latini's own book production center at Arras and that it may even have been written by himself.” “Brunetto Latini and England,” Manuscripta 31 (1987): 16.

22 Review of Nathaniel William Wraxall, Historical Memoirs of My Own Time (London, 1815), in The Quarterly Review 13 (1815): 205.

23 See W. T. Sherwin, Memoirs of the Life of Thomas Paine (London, 1819), iv–v.

24 BL Additional MS 22903, fols. 34^r–35^r; Giunta, “Il triste destino,” 267, which does not say anything regarding the identity of Chalmers.

25 The objective of eighteenth-century editors, she points out, “was not the retrieval and preservation of what Shakespeare had put to paper,” as it became for Malone and our own era. “The process of establishing and evaluating Shakespeare served the broader cultural ambition of purifying English language, taste, and manners” (Shakespeare Verbatim, 63). So too with the question of history: “The same preoccupation with authenticity characterized Malone's account of Shakespeare's life as it did his treatment of Shakespeare's text; and the same indifference to authenticity typified earlier biographical accounts as it did earlier textual treatments” (71).

26 See Schoenbaum, Shakespeare's Lives, 66–72, 78 on these three legends.

27 See Alexander Du Toit, “Chalmers, George (bap. 1742, d. 1825),” in ODNB, www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/5028.

28 The Monthly Magazine 13 (July 1802): 553. Holloway claims that the letters were written “in order to encourage the sale of MS Douce 319 to the Bodleian Library” (“Brunetto Latini and England,” 11), but does not offer any support.

29 The Monthly Magazine 13 (March 1802): 129; see Giunta, “Il triste destino,” 269. The letter is item 662 of Packer and Pratt, The Collected Letters of Robert Southey, Part Two, 1798–1803, www.rc.umd.edu/editions/southey_letters/Part_Two/HTML/letterEEd.26.662.html.

30 Southey tells the whole sad story in his letter of November 1799 in The Monthly Magazine, accessible in Packer and Pratt, Collected Letters of Robert Southey, Part Two, 1798–1803, item 439, www.rc.umd.edu/editions/southey_letters/Part_Two/HTML/letterEEd.26.439.html. Croft responded in a series of letters, republished as Herbert Croft, Chatterton and Love and Madness: A Letter from Denmark, to Mr. Nichols, Editor of the Gentleman's Magazine, where it appeared in February, March, and April 1800 (London, 1800): see Nick Groom, “Love and Madness: Southey Editing Chatterton,” in Robert Southey and the Contexts of English Romanticism, ed. Lynda Pratt (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 28, and, on their rivalry, Brian Goldberg, “Romantic Professionalism in 1800: Robert Southey, Herbert Croft, and the Letters and Legacy of Thomas Chatterton,” ELH 63 (1996): 681–706.

31 Groom, “Love and Madness,” 28.

32 He would recount that in Croft's novel “the fate of Chatterton so strongly interested me, that I used frequently to envy his fate, and desire nothing so ardently as the termination of my existence in a similar cause. Little did I then imagine that the lapse of a few months was to hold me forth to public view as the supposed discoverer of the Shaksperian manuscripts”: The Confessions of William-Henry Ireland (London, 1805), 11. See Schoenbaum, Shakespeare's Lives, 136, and Bernard Grebanier, The Great Shakespeare Forgery: A New Look at the Career of William Henry Ireland (London: Heinemann, 1966), 59–69, on which my description of the novel below relies. What Ireland does not mention is that his mother, like the victim of the novel, had been mistress of the earl of Sandwich.

33 Herbert Croft, Love and Madness (London, 1780), 138. On the role of forgery in the novel, see Ellen Lévy, “Love and Madness: A Forgery Too True,” Plagiary 1 (2006): 88–99, online at http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.5240451.0001.008.

34 Goldberg, “Romantic Professionalism,” 682.

35 The Monthly Magazine 12 (January 1802): 525; the remainder appears in 13 (July 1802): 549–54.

36 The Monthly Magazine 13 (March 1802): 130.

37 See Kelen, “Langland Anthologized,” in Langland's Early Modern Identities, 77–100.

38 Catalogue of the Printed Books and Manuscripts Bequeathed by Francis Douce, Esq. to the Bodleian Library, part 2, Catalogue of the Manuscripts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1840), 57; Falconer Madan et al., A Summary Catalogue of Western Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, 7 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1895–1953), 4:595. More recently the online Imagining History portal, which describes manuscripts that contain the Brut, quotes Douce's attribution: www.qub.ac.uk/imagining-history/resources/wiki/index.php/Bodleian_Library,_MS._Douce_323. I have not found it mentioned in any discussion of the manuscripts of Piers Plowman.

39 Wright, Vision, 1:xlvi.

40 The great book collector Thomas Corser thought it “worth noticing, that a modern version of the Vision of Pierce Ploughman was attempted some years ago by Mr. Dupré, but it was never printed,” citing Madan's description of MS 323. “Mr. Wright also notices an attempt at modernization or translation of this poem, of which he gives a few lines as a specimen, but whether this is the same with that by Mr. Dupre, the editor is unable to say.” This is the closest anyone has come to recognizing that the lines Wright prints are those by Dupré in Douce 323. Collectanea Anglo-Poetica, or, a Bibliographical and Descriptive Catalogue of a Portion of a Collection of Early English Poetry, part 9, ed. James Crossley (Manchester: Chetham Society, 1879), 155.

41 See Esposito, “Una falsificazione letteraria,” 109, on a comment from 1863.

42 DiMarco, Reference Guide, vii.

43 Piers Plowman: The Norton Critical Edition, trans. E. Talbot Donaldson, ed. Stephen H. A. Shepherd and Elizabeth Robertson (New York: Norton, 2006); Piers Plowman: A New Translation of the B-Text, trans. A. V. C. Schmidt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); William Langland's Piers Plowman: The C Version, trans. George Economou (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996); Kane, “Poetry and Lexicography.”

44 John A. Alford and M. Teresa Tavormina, prefatory note to E. Talbot Donaldson, George Economou, and Richard Barnes, “On Translating Piers Plowman,” YLS 3 (1989): 1.

45 Ibid.

46 The Vision of Piers, the Plowman: An English Poem of the Fourteenth Century, done into Modern Prose, trans. Kate M. Warren (London, 1895). See, e.g., Middleton, “Piers Plowman,” 2425.

47 The Critical Review wrote, “we have not the slightest reason to impeach his diligence or his accuracy: on the contrary, we can feely commend both” (35 [1802]: 120); the Union Magazine, “We cannot agree with the author, that his work may be esteemed of little use to those who are intimately acquainted with French literature” (2 [1801]: 250). A less positive assessment appeared in the Anti-Jacobin Review: “We are rather inclined to think that the author has attempted too much; and that he has united things very much discordant” (9 [1801]: 397), but even this concludes by calling it “on the whole, . . . an useful publication” (398).

48 Eighteenth-Century Modernizations from The Canterbury Tales, ed. Betsy Bowden (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991), x.

49 Ibid., ix.

50 Brewer, “Modernising the Medieval,” 113. The introductory note claims that after completing this translation the author, “looking on it as a juvenile Trifle, . . . flung it by in a corner of his Study, where it hath lain about thirty Years” (Bowden, Eighteenth-Century Modernizations, 31–2). Bowden proposes that a search for the author's identity “might begin among other authors published by Jonas Brown, mostly remembered today in footnotes to Pope's Dunciad: Richard Blackmore, Thomas Purney, George Sewell, Lewis Theobold” (31); Brewer says that in its tone “the rendering has something in common with the writing of Sir John Mennis, the seventeenth-century dirty-minded courtier and rhymester (1591–1671) who was Pepys's colleague, who wrote Chaucerian imitations and who, according to Pepys, doted ‘mightily’ on Chaucer” (“Modernising the Medieval,” 113).

51 Brewer, “Modernising the Medieval,” 113. All of my quotations from the poem appear on p. 40 of Bowden, Eighteenth-Century Modernizations, and are cited in the text by the line numbers she supplies. I emend “of ” to “or” in quoting line 856.

52 This is the only confession printed by Warton; Ritson prints the whole passus (see Kelen, Langland's Early Modern Identities, 93, 95).

53 See Introduction, note 47.

54 Esposito, “Una falsificazione letteraria,” 103 n.3; Giunta, “Il triste destino,” 267, 269.

55 R. D. Sheldon, “Page, Frederick (1769–1834),” in ODNB, www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/21093.

56 “I conceive these 3 leaves to be part of a transcript from one of the MSS of P. Plowman's Visions in the Harl. Collection & made by a Mr. Page who about twelve years since frequented the reading room for that purpose. F. D. 1809” (fol. 29^r), Douce writes in the margin, but the source is clearly the Cotton Vespasian MS. I discovered it by looking under “In a somer seson” in the first-line index in the British Library manuscripts reading room; I have never seen any other mention of it.

57 The Monthly Magazine 16 (January 1804): 564.

58 Giunta, “Il triste destino,” 274 n.9, saying he could find no trace in either the British Library or the Biblioteca Nazionale di Parigi.

59 Memoirs of Margaret de Valois, Queen of Navarre; the First Wife of Henry the Fourth of France, commonly called The Great: Containing, the Secret History of the Court of France, for Seventeen Years, viz. from 1565 to 1582, during the Reigns of Charles IX. and Henry III. Including a Full Account of the Massacre of the Protestants, on St. Bartholomew's Day, Written by Herself, in a Series of Letters, 2 vols. (London, 1813). Worldcat.org lists three copies, one of which, now in the University of Wisconsin Library, is available as part of the Hathi Trust Digital Library: http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/005973550. In 1895 and ?1900 the edition would be reprinted as part of the “Court Memoir series,” with a somewhat shorter title and still as anonymous as ever. Memoirs of Margaret de Valois, Queen of Navarre Containing the Secret History of the Court of France for Seventeen Years, viz., from 1565 to 1582, during the Reigns of Charles IX. and Henry III. Written by Herself, in a Series of Letters (London, 1895; Philadelphia, n.d. [?1900]).

60 The Monthly Review 72 (December 1813): 437.

61 Dupré's translation is included in the bibliography of A Celebration of Women Writers: Writers Living between 1501 and 1600, http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/_generate/1501%961600.html.

62 The Douce Legacy, 146.

63 E.g., on the covers of The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Critical Edition of the B-Text, rev. edn., ed. A. V. C. Schmidt (London: Dent, 1995), and Anna Baldwin, A Guidebook to Piers Plowman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

Conclusion

1 Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, chapter 1, “The Melancholy of John Leland and the Beginnings of English Literary History” (7–33).

2 Anthony A. Wood, “John Leland,” in Athenæ Oxonienses: An Exact History of all the Writers and Bishops Who Have Had Their Education in the University of Oxford, ed. Philip Bliss, 3 vols. (London, 1813), 1:col. 198.

3 Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, 11.

4 Ibid., 17.

5 George Kane, “Langland and Chaucer: An Obligatory Conjunction” (1981), in Kane, Chaucer and Langland, 123–33. See Bowers, Chaucer and Langland for the most extensive of the many recent studies of this conjunction.

6 Henry Bradley, review of Skeat's parallel-text edition, as cited in DiMarco, Reference Guide, item 1887.3.

7 Robert Aris Willmott, Lives of the English Sacred Poets, 2nd edn., Vol. 1 (London, 1839), 6.

8 Kathleen Forni, The Chaucerian Apocrypha: A Counterfeit Canon (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2001), 10.

9 The classic treatment of Chaucer reception is Caroline Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion (1357–1900), 5 parts in 3 vols. (1908–17; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925); quotations are by part. For Langland, the equivalent to Spurgeon is DiMarco, Reference Guide; see also especially Hudson, “Epilogue,” 251–66, and Kelen, Langland's Early Modern Identities.

10 John Leland, De Uiris Illustribus: On Famous Men, ed. and trans. James P. Carley (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2010), 708–9.

11 Alexandra Gillespie, Print Culture and the Medieval Author: Chaucer, Lydgate, and Their Books, 1473–1557 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 199.

12 Leland, De Uiris Illustribus, Appendix 4, p. 844. Carley somewhat confusingly says that the paper stock on which the Chaucer chapter is written, Briquet 11383, “was not used for entries in Stage I, but it appeared soon afterwards. A number of entries in a characteristic hand, not quite identical to Stage I (cc. 180, 218, 246 etc.), are written on this paper” (cxxxii). Carley seems simply to mean that these are the products of the final stages of Stage I, as it were. He assigns the Chaucer chapter to Stage I on the basis of handwriting, place-names, and personal names.

13 Francis Thynne, Animaduersions vppon the Annotaciones and Corrections of some imperfections of impressiones of Chaucers workes (sett downe before tyme, and nowe) reprinted in the yere of oure lorde 1598, ed. F. J. Furnivall, Chaucer Society. 2nd ser., 13 (London, 1876), 7.

14 Gillespie, Print Culture, 199.

15 This copy, now Huntington Library 88317, is dated c.1533: see The Plowman's Tale: The c.1532 and 1606 Editions of a Spurious Canterbury Tale, ed. Mary Rhinelander McCarl (New York: Garland, 1977), 16, 45. There is also a MS of the tale added to an 1832 Thynne, now University of Texas, Q PR 1850 1532. Annie S. Irvine argues that it represents an independent textual tradition: “A Manuscript Copy of The Plowman's Tale,” University of Texas Studies in English 12 (1932): 27–56. But Joseph A. Dane asserts instead the likelihood that it is simply a copy of the 1542 edition: “Bibliographical History versus Bibliographical Evidence: The Plowman's Tale and Early Chaucer Editions,” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 78 (1996): 60–1 n.30. Gillespie puts forth some textual evidence for the idea that “The Plowman's Tale had an independent life in some lost edition or one or more manuscripts,” which in her view strengthens the idea that it might have attracted Leland's attention (Print Culture, 200), but she does not address Dane's demurral. In any case by that logic Piers Plowman itself is still a more probable candidate.

16 Bodleian MS Digby 145 (c.1531–2); C.U.L. MS Gg.4.31 (s. xvi¹); and B.L. MS Royal 18 B XVII (s. xvi¹). The excerpt in the Winchester Anthology, too, is from around this time (Chapter 4).

17 John Dryden, “Preface” to Fables Ancient and Modern (London, 1700), sig. B.ii^v.

18 Carley writes: “Although the De uiris illustribus was less widely copied than Leland's other prose remains, in part because Bale's bibliographical efforts appeared to replace it in the eyes of many individuals, antiquaries did continue to consult it” (Leland, De Uiris Illustribus, cxlix). Dryden certainly seems to have known it.

19 Horobin, “Stephan Batman.” Batman owned Bodleian MS Digby 171, on whose title page he offered a summary of the poem's virtues and a drawing of a ploughman, and, as Horobin now argues, Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.14.

20 This text was first published in an item called “The Vision of Pierce Plowman” by one “Silverstone” in N&Q 2nd ser. 6, 142 (1858): 229–30; see DiMarco, Reference Guide, item 1577.1; Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years, 4:41 (Appendix A). I have silently corrected some obvious errors in Silverstone's transcription. This copy was sold by Sotheby's as lot 16 on May 25, 1972, and for $19,975 by Christie's sale 9878, lot 77, October 8–9, 2001. It had been owned by Daniel Wray (1701–83); its current whereabouts are unknown. The Bale material is from his Catalogus of 1557–9; for discussion see Kelen, Langland's Early Modern Identities, 22–7. For the Bale material, see Chapter 4 at note 52.

21 The Plowman's Tale, 1533, lines 1065–6, in McCarl's edition.

22 See DiMarco, Reference Guide, items Post 1546.1 (Bale's ascription), 1580.1 (Stow, with full discussion of the history of the ascription and of its possible referents), and discussion by, among others, Benson, Public Piers Plowman, 4–5; Edwards, “Piers Plowman in the Seventeenth Century.”

23 See, e.g., the inscription after the explicit in Liverpool University Library MS F.4.8, p. 202, image at http://www.liv.ac.uk/library/sca/colldescs/medrenmss/images/LUL_MS_F_4_8_210.jpg, mentioning both candidates. Often an owner will endorse one candidate, and a later owner will counter with the other, as in the final page and first end flyleaf of the Cr¹ in the Folger Shakespeare Library, shelfmark STC 19906, at http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/1062dp, or University of Michigan, shelfmark PR2010.C95 1550, a Cr³ in which three hands debate the matter.

24 The Romaunt of the Rose, lines 2161–2.

25 Seth Lerer, “Latin Annotations in a Copy of Stowe's Chaucer and the Seventeenth-Century Reception of Troilus and Criseyde,” RES n.s. 53 (2002): 5–6. Lerer observes that “Pieces of Chaucer's poem [i.e., Troilus] were often excised, copied out, and rearranged into independent lyrics, centos of memorable lines, or verse epistolary exchanges” (6); I do not know of any equivalent tradition regarding the Romaunt.

26 A Catalogue of the Harleian Collection of Manuscripts . . . , Vol. 1 (London, 1759), entry for MS 875.

27 A Catalogue of the Harleian Collection of Manuscripts . . . , Vol. 2, entry for MS 2376.

28 Wanley's final entry was for MS 2407: see A Preface and Index to the Harleian Collection of Manuscripts (London, 1763), 27.

29 Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years, 2:41–2. The only other notice of the attribution I have encountered occurs in the opening sentence of Pamela Gradon, “Langland and the Ideology of Dissent,” Proceedings of the British Academy 66 (1980): 179, which must rely on Spurgeon.

30 www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/ > “2376.”

31 Tyrwhitt, Canterbury Tales of Chaucer, 4:74 n.57.

32 On the eighteenth-century tendency toward plagiarism among scholars of Piers Plowman, see Vincent DiMarco, “Godwin on Langland,” YLS 6 (1992): 125.

33 Ritson, BP, 27.

34 Lehigh University Library 821.1 L265p 1550, Frontmatter [5].

35 Ritson, Ancient Songs, From the Time of King Henry III, to the Revolution (London, 1790), xxxii n. Much of Ancient Songs had been printed by 1786 or 1787, and its title page bears the date 1790, but it did not appear until summer 1792; see Bronson, Joseph Ritson, 176. See also DiMarco, Reference Guide, item 1782.1; cf. Kelen, Langland's Early Modern Identities, 41–2.

36 Farmer cites it in the flyleaves of his Rogers, Haverford, Magill 96, adding ruefully that his friend “does not mention” that reason. Soon after they first met Ritson called Farmer “a most sensible, liberal, benevolent and worthy man,” and the two scholars' cordiality, observes Bronson, “seems not to have been broken off, in spite of the bolts which Ritson continued to discharge at the heads of Farmer's friends” (Joseph Ritson, 393). Farmer either did not ask his friend for his reasons, or did not record the answer here. So does Mitford, in the verso of the first flyleaf of his copy, where it is in bolder and more prominent script than are any of his numerous other references to contemporary scholarship, and in his review of Wright, The Vision and creed of Piers Ploughman, The Gentleman's Magazine n.s. 19 (April 1843): 340 n.

37 Ritson, BP, 29–31.

38 Ibid., 19–20 n., citing Thomas Chatterton, Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (London, 1778), 137, which enables the provision of a missing quotation mark in Ritson's text, provided here.

39 Quoted in Haslewood, Some Account, 31–2 n, and Bronson, Joseph Ritson, 380, whose text I follow.

40 Kelen, Langland's Early Modern Identities, 132.

41 Douce's comment about the dagger collection is in a letter of November 5, 1823, to his friend and biographer Haslewood, in endpapers of BL G.13123. See Bronson, Joseph Ritson, 54 n.8.

42 Bowers, Chaucer and Langland.

43 William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), xii–xiii.

44 Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, 32. See also Ralph Hanna, review of Brewer, Editing Piers Plowman, Speculum 73 (1998): 477–8, citing comments by A. S. G. Edwards.