Chapter 2

      Scribal Conflation, Convergent Variation, and the Invention of Piers Plowman B

      The archetype of all surviving B copies, as we saw in the Preface, concludes with a rubric expecting a further, twenty-first passus: an odd error resulting from contamination by a C manuscript, in which the rubric worked perfectly well as an explicit. These few pen-strokes in manuscripts L and R thus have enormous consequences in that they identify the moment of Bx’s production as the era of conflation and conjoinment. The critical propensity for focusing only on authorial texts has led to an almost exclusive focus on the three versions, dated to the 1360s, 1370s, and 1380s respectively, but the landscape of Piers Plowman manuscripts in the final decade of the century was no respecter of that approach. This was when the desire for “completion” took hold: the energies that went into the compilations now found in the Ilchester Prologue, the BmBoCot group, and the TH²Ch group suggest that conflation and conjoinment might have been the normative modes of producing and reading the poem by this point in its history. Those who got their hands on a C version copy were set; the rest, though, sought out matter from here and there with the aim of compiling a complete Piers Plowman.

      Might Bx itself have been the result of this desire for completion? If its very final inscription came from C, could the previous 850 lines, which are nearly identical in the surviving B and C traditions, have as well? And if that possibility is viable, as Chapter 4 will argue in detail, should we perhaps consider the idea that such conflation occurred in other locations? Say, those passages extant in only one of the B families? Over the 150-year editorial history of the poem, such ideas have never been mooted. As a result, many today might dismiss such speculations out of hand. Conflated texts always reveal their nature via signs of scribal officiousness, such skeptics might aver, citing George Kane’s thorough analysis of manuscripts W, N, and K. And more to the point, no potential sources of conflation, other than those final two passus, present themselves. Yet such rejoinders are either just wrong, or the product rather than the foundation of critical approaches to the textual state of Piers Plowman. A three-pronged attack, comprising lemmatization, versioning, and the invocation of convergent variation at any signs of rupture to the existing paradigm, has buried the evidence that shows, contrary to that paradigm, that Bx was indeed affected by the C tradition to a far greater degree than the LR rubric indicates. In conclusion this chapter presents the bulk of my positive evidence that Bx, at one stage in its career as exemplar, was supplemented by lines and paragraphs of new C material, the existence of which has been obscured by its atomization into versions and then lemmas. In sum, an early scribe, like so many others between the Era of Ilchester in the 1390s and Sir Adrian Fortescue in 1532,¹ was jealous for the completeness of his copy, and thus turned to C materials to fill out the seemingly deficient manuscript in front of him.

      Officious Scribes, Inconsequential Transitions?

      George Kane’s chapter defining the character of Piers Plowman A, titled “Manuscripts and Versions,” has never featured very prominently in Langland scholarship. C. L. Wrenn’s early review, in effect saying that we knew all this before but there was no harm in Kane’s rehashing of the material, is representative: “Though little that is positively new here emerges, there is real value in this thorough re-examination of the reasons which lead to the generally accepted conclusions.” The “most important part of a very important Introduction,” he continued, lay farther afield, in the following chapter on the classification of the manuscripts.² Yet insofar as it determined which manuscripts and which lections of those manuscripts would and would not be classified in any given volume of the Athlone edition, “Manuscripts and Versions” established the framework within which the Athlone enterprise, and all Piers Plowman criticism in its wake, would operate. In sum, it puts forth the idea that, once the obvious instances of scribal conflation among the versions are identified, the editor is left with the authorial versions: here, “Piers Plowman A,” but by implication the other two versions, B and C, as well.

      The local problem is the inclusion in A-version witnesses of additional lines or passages corresponding to matter from the B and C versions. Kane argues “that these seven manuscripts received this B or C material, and their present shapes, through scribal compilation, and that they are actually contaminated and augmented copies of the A version.”³ The main offenders are the Duke of Westminster’s manuscript (W; 95 lines at twenty-eight points), National Library of Wales MS 733B (N; about 150 lines at twenty-one points, many shared with W), and Adrian Fortescue’s manuscript, Bodleian, MS Digby 145 (K; over 400 lines at thirteen points). Kane knows they are contaminated because they all bear the marks of “the officious copyist,” who “tended to leave signs of his activity in the character of the text produced by his conflation.” These signs “are happily unambiguous,” revealing themselves “in the presence of both primitive and revised forms of the same passage; inappropriate or misplaced augmentation; in broken syntax; and in broken or inferior sense.”⁴

      Kane’s first exhibit, where an irritated Holy Church identifies Meed in WN, provides a good snapshot of both the phenomenon and Kane’s approach to it:

      In þe popis palis she is pryvei as my selfe;

      And so scholde sche nouȝt be for wrong was hir syre;

      Out of wrong sche wer to wroþer haile many.

       Talis pater talis filia.

       For shal nevre brere bere bery as a vyne

       Ne on a croked þorne kynde fygge waxe.

       Arbor bona bonum fructum facit.

      I ouȝt ben herre þan she for I come of a better.⁵

      Kane identifies this as A 2.18–20, C 2.27α–29α (here in bold), A 2.21, and observes that in the C version A 2.20 “has been replaced by the point which C 2.28–29 are intended to drive home. Without this purpose, in WN, these lines are in the air. They can have been inserted only in ignorance of the local differences of meaning between the versions.”⁶ Since no poet could be ignorant of these differences, enter the officious scribe.

      The chapter’s insistent and antiscribal tone and close attention to example after example might lead some readers to conclude that conflation is always marked by signs of officiousness. But in fact Kane discusses only about one-third of the conflated passages, enough to imply that all of them represent scribal intrusions from other versions.⁷ Many others are perfectly smooth. For example, Kane cites nine of MS N’s twenty-one sites of intrusion as officious. Of the remainder, five consist simply of the Latin found in the C version, and two are single lines in the list of companions who enter the pub during Gluttony’s confession (added as well by MSS VH(EA)MH³); none of these affects syntax.⁸ That leaves five sites of intrusion, totaling over sixty lines, about which Kane says nothing. All of them consist of English additions integrated seamlessly into received A.

      Immediately after Holy Church’s enhanced identification of Meed in MS N, that document alone smoothly includes C 2.31–41α at the juncture of A 2.21–22.