The Lost History of "Piers Plowman". Lawrence Warner
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of any placement of MS X or J in close physical or even textual proximity to the author.
This body of data should also prompt a fresh analysis of our methodologies of dating the versions. In recent years, a terminus a quo of 1388 for the completion of C has gained widespread support on the basis of Anne Middleton’s argument that the apologia pro vita sua (C 5.1–104) stages an interrogation under the 1388 Statute of Laborers.40 The most surprising of this proposal’s many adherents is George Kane, who adds that “the latest topicality in C appears to be reference to the king’s implacable hatred of Gloucester and the Arundels after the dissolution of the Merciless Parliament (C 5.194–96),” that is, the months following June 1388.41 If so, we must marvel at the extraordinary rapidity with which early scribes set to work on C. Although this scenario is not impossible, it is much more difficult than has been acknowledged by most accounts of C’s early production, which seem to assume that Cx or other early manuscripts were available for copying at will by any given fourteenth-century scribe.
The Evidence of Allusion?
Kathryn Kerby-Fulton’s 2006 study Books Under Suspicion represents a major recent trend in claiming to identify allusions to the B version in works composed by 1382 at the latest. In the lines “With an O and an I, Si tunc tacuisses / Tu nunc stulto similis philosophus fuisses” from the 1382 broadside “Heu quanta desolacio” (which includes the phrase “rogo dicat Pers”), she finds a probable reference to B 11.416α, “Philosophus esses si tacuisses,” “you might have been a philosopher, if you had been able to hold your tongue”;42 later, she describes Chaucer’s “Thoo gan y wexen in a were” (House of Fame, 979) as a “deliberate echo” of Will’s “And in a wer gan y wex” (B 11.116).43 Kerby-Fulton finds “the hints of ‘Heu’s’ Langlandianism … significant since its date is so early in the period of B transmission.”44
Such proposals are “soft,” as it were, in occupying no more difficult a place than would the idea that, say, a given Shakespearean phrase comes from Chaucer. They can be adjudicated on the terms in which they are presented—linguistic, thematic—without regard to questions of transmission. The fact that no evidence supports the notion of B’s transmission by this stage, though, makes for a dilemma. Can we elevate their status to “hard,” constituting positive evidence, rather than derivative support, for B’s early circulation? Some have had no trouble doing so: one critic announces that a study finding B’s influence in John Ball’s letters “establishes that June 1381 is a terminus well post quem for the B version”;45 another says that a similar and separate claim regarding the House of Fame “demonstrates that the B text was probably circulating and known about in London at the time when Chaucer was living in Aldgate.”46 The assumption, in other words, generates the proposal, which in turn becomes the evidence upon which the assumption was presumably based in the first place. While those readers predisposed for whatever reason to believe in B’s transmission c. 1380 might well cite such claims as supporting indicators, I think it is fair to say that, when analyzed apart from that assumption, they remain securely in the “soft” category. Each such claim is either more easily explicable by recourse to other modes of influence (if any at all) or contradicts other, equally persuasive proposals, tossing us back to the very category of evidence we were seeking to bypass.
The appearance of the Latin item shared by “Heu” and the B version in both Odo of Cheriton’s thirteenth-century Fables (as I have recently discovered) and John Bromyard’s mid-fourteenth century, and hugely influential, Summa Praedicantium (as Alford pointed out and Kerby-Fulton acknowledges), for instance, indicates a mutual indebtedness to the homiletic tradition c. 1380 rather than one’s reliance upon the other.47 Much more promising is the parallel between the protagonists of Piers Plowman B and the House of Fame who “waxed in a were,” that is, “grew into a condition of doubt or anxiety.”48 Yet Paul and Dante, not Langland, are the most obvious models for Geoffrey’s situation here,49 and only slightly less immediate is Boethius, on the dreamer’s mind at this point (HF 972), who also “leaves us in fact with much the same kind of doubt that Chaucer now confesses to,” says J. A. W. Bennett, citing our line.50 When Chaucer wrote were, he was probably aiming for elegance, given that the alternative, from Philosophy’s diagnosis of Boethius’s affliction, was this: “thilke passiouns that ben waxen hard in swellynge by perturbacions flowyinge into thy thought.”51 Whichever option he chose, he would have almost certainly needed to use the term wax, which appears juxtaposed with these phrases not just in the House of Fame, the B version, and Boece, but also in Chaucer’s account of poor Hypermnestra, who “waxes” cold when she “falls” into a were:
As colde as eny froste now wexeth she
For pite bi the herte streyneth her so
And drede of deth doth her so moche wo
That thryes down she fill in suche a were.52
Both Langland and Chaucer are making best use of a psychological vocabulary that is already inherently alliterative. There is no need to attribute the parallels of these lines to anything other than this common body of sounds and ideas.
This is somewhat unfair to Kerby-Fulton’s proposal, which appeared in a critical milieu that not only took B’s earliness and A’s belatedness for granted, but also had been deeply influenced by Frank Grady’s argument that the House of Fame relied on B. Both poems, he says, interrogate authorities and authoritative discourses, use signatures at moments of poetic transition, and are potentially endless.53 Whatever the strengths of these suggestive parallels—many of which would fit A, too—they run up against Helen Cooper’s equally compelling claim that the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (1387 at the earliest) adopts the A version’s Prologue as a model.54 Grady’s Chaucer was particularly taken by the unresolved conclusion of B (i.e., passus 20) in the late 1370s, but Cooper’s remained ignorant of B passus 19–20 in the 1380s.55 Any adjudication would need to take recourse to other evidence—showing that Grady does not “demonstrate” B’s availability in the 1370s. The force of George Economou’s comments is clear: “wherever critical interpretation leads on the fellowship of Chaucer and Langland, it cannot avoid the mediation of ongoing bibliographical bulletins. Its steps into new pastures will always be dogged or herded, so to speak, by concomitant movements concerning the poems’—mainly Langland’s—provenance and dispersal.”56
The case of John Ball is especially pressing. For one, his letters inciting the Rising of 1381 refer directly to “Peres Plouȝman” (“Heu”’s “Pers” is the closest analogue above). More important, it is almost universally accepted that this appropriation of his poem was a primary instigator of the C revisions.57 Ball’s letter to the commons of Essex, as recorded by Thomas Walsingham, is the most fruitful of the Langlandian letters:
Johon Schep … biddeþ Peres Plouȝman go to his werk, and chastise wel Hobbe þe Robbere, and taketh wiþ ȝow Johan Trewman, and alle hiis felawes, and no mo, and loke schappe ȝou to on heved, and no mo.
Johan þe Mullere haþ ygrounde smal, smal, smal;
Þe Kynges sone of hevene schal paye for al.
Be war or ȝe be wo;
Knoweth ȝour freende fro ȝour foo;
Haveth ynow, & seith “Hoo”;
And do wel and bettre, and fleth synne,
And sekeþ pees, and hold ȝou þerinne;
and so biddeth Johan Trewaman and alle his felawes.58
Attempts to identify the version known to Ball, whether directly or via oral transmission, falter on the fact that all three of the relevant phrases (four, if one counts “John Sheep” as a reference to A Prol.2/B Prol.2) appear in both A and B: not just Peres Plouȝman, but also Hobbe the Robbere (A 5.233, B 5.461) and do wel and bettre (Dobet: A passus 9–11, B passus 8–14).
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