I. Description of the Manuscript

The PPEA here presents its first edition of a C version manuscript, Hm 143 (X), as part of our continued project to provide detailed documentary editions of every manuscript witness to a poem that is, from the perspective of both literary critics and textual scholars, among the most demanding and most rewarding works of medieval literature. The editing and publication of several B-text manuscripts has already led to the creation and publication of the B archetype (Bx), the deduced common ancestor of all extant B manuscripts. This is a major step in working toward a better understanding of the poet's lost original B version of the poem. As we know, we will never discover with absolute certainty, by recension, the "original" poem, nor are we likely to find a holograph or autograph manuscript bearing the mark of Langland's own hand—should we indeed be able to discover that a given hand was Langland's. Even if we did with certainty discover such a treasure, it would itself likely be full of errors, like all written artifacts, whether produced by hand or by machine. Nonetheless, however varied are scholars' concepts of what actually constitutes the poem, the Archive is bound to uncover ever more mysteries in the transmission of the Piers Plowman texts and therefore to deepen our understanding of the poem itself, even with the entire enterprise of electronic editing still in its teething stages, an observation made by Thorlac Turville-Petre over a decade ago, and still true today.N The same process that established the B archetype is planned for the C version. The work here on Hm 143 will take its place in the corpus of data that will allow us to examine all the surviving evidence for the history of the C version, leading to the establishment and publication of the C archetype (Cx). The publication of Cx, with the electronic documentary editions of its source manuscripts, will in turn enable literary scholars and linguists to study C at the level of individual manuscripts and manuscript families, and to make cross-versional studies of C in relation to B as well.

However, the work here is not designed merely for facilitating that long-term, ongoing process. Rather, this documentary edition of Hm 143 (X), published in an archive in which the data are available all the way down to the source code, has many immediate uses. Scholarship on the poem can flourish without waiting for the establishment of Cx, as the phenomena recorded in each documentary edition lend themselves immediately to study. There is no need here to explain how changes in medieval scholarship over the last forty years have foregrounded the manuscript as a physical object and have transformed the changes wrought upon the text by scribes from so much cluttering rubbish into the precious artifacts of textual archeology. Medieval textual scholars now sift through manuscript evidence in the hope of revealing a verse, a word, a gloss, or even a single stroke that will develop our understanding of the history of a text, potentially revise previously established readings, or shed light on scribal working methods. Will a whole new Piers Plowman emerge from the study of Hm 143 (X), unrecognizable in comparison to the texts offered by Pearsall, Russell and Kane (RK), or Schmidt? Not likely, but we do not know exactly what the data established by the Archive will reveal.

The reading community of Piers Plowman, which is growing among scholars and students, is ever interested in as much information as can be generated about every verse of the poem. More than any of his contemporaries, Langland makes demands on language that language often cannot deliver. His verse displays a muscularity of sound and meaning that witnesses to his virtuosity while exceeding the limits of human expression in word and thought. For this reason alone, scholars are deeply invested in discerning whether particular readings are likely to have been transmitted faithfully, or whether they are instead likely to have been corrupted by scribes. We must also consider the possibility, accepted by many scholars, that the poet himself did not even have access to an accurate copy of his own best work when he set out to revise B into C, and thus may have been obliged to work from readings already altered by copyists beyond his supervision.

The details of the processes of transmission reveal a nearly endless set of detective mysteries that challenge us linguistically, paleographically, aesthetically, and historically. One only need open the three major modern editions of the C-text in order to witness disagreement about what the text should read. Reading the editors' textual apparatus—and also the sometimes daunting textual analyses that accompany them—reveals the degree of rigorous inquiry and discernment, not infrequently accompanied by ingenuity and sometimes sheer force of will that has gone into forging a particular verse in a modern edition. Gathering all the manuscript readings into a comparative archive will enable comprehensive access to all the manuscript information, inviting ongoing collational analysis of the witnesses, serving whatever purpose scholars, readers, and editors may generate. We want to emphasize as well the pedagogical value of this edition, and of the Archive as a whole. Because this work is freely available to the public, it can serve as a powerful tool in any classroom, bringing the complex world of textual archaeology directly to students who would not otherwise have access to these manuscripts in libraries around the world. We hope that teachers will embrace this democratizing power of the Archive.

The evidence offered in each manuscript, especially a heavily corrected and annotated manuscript like X, is not only of interest as data to be mined or munged in order to forge new critical editions. Rather, the manuscript is an event in itself that reveals hitherto unexamined but nonetheless very real human histories. These human histories, in turn, are the surviving evidence of the world in which Piers Plowman was read and transmitted. By examining the digital representation of Hm 143—both images and encoded transcription—readers can see medieval scribes at work as they labored to understand, transmit, correct, decorate, and annotate the text. Comprehending this process is in itself daunting. Who copied the text? Why? For whom? When? What exemplar or exemplars did they copy from? Who corrected the text and how? Did the corrector(s) use the same exemplar(s) as the main scribe (Hand 1) or another one, whether superior or inferior?N Among all these questions, we wonder if scholarship will ever reveal the historical identity of any of the scribes who worked on this manuscript. The growing body of work in identifying scribal hands, in fact, might prove to be the proper grounding for a full identification of the hands in X.N The present documentary edition is not designed to settle these questions, but rather to be a tool in the ongoing search for answers.

A few salient features of Hm 143 and its hands should, nevertheless, be noted here. One extraordinary aspect of the manuscript is its program of annotations. Many Piers manuscripts contain some form of marginal glossing—in the main scribal hand, in the hand of a corrector, and at times by later readers—but X is one of only a few C manuscripts that has an extended and detailed set of marginal annotations, in this case in a different hand from the main text, designated as Hand 2 in the discussion that follows and in the markup of the text.N Many of these annotations highlight clerical satire by drawing the reader's attention to institutional corruption and abuse. In this sense, the annotations supply what might be called sober and clear-headed outrage, though the question of their tone and motivation is open for debate, as we discuss below (I.6 Marginalia). Certainly, the annotations ensure that readers do not miss the critiques and warnings about lechery, greed, and simony, among other abuses, that so poison Holy Church. Because the programs of glossing in Piers manuscripts are not part of the poem itself, these marginalia do not make their way into any edition or translation, thus becoming invisible to the modern reader. Only in reading each particular manuscript as an artifact do we directly experience this evidence of the religious, political, and historical life of the poem in its time, with the glosses themselves representing a distinct genre arising from medieval clerical culture, of dramatic interest as evidence of medieval reading and reception—nothing less than a form of literary criticism, though of a different fashion from what we practice today.

Although invisible to the general reading public and to the many scholars who lack access to the manuscripts themselves or to documentary editions, these glosses have not, in fact, gone unnoticed. Working from Hm 143 and British Library MS Additional 35157 (Uc), Carl Grindley (2001) has wrought a system of categories of the various functions that the annotations serve in these two texts.N We have benefited from Grindley's detailed work in this regard, and our close work with the manuscript has prompted us to correct some of his transcriptions, which might help readers reinterpret both the particular functions and the overall role of the Hm 143 glosses in the poem's reception history. Sarah Wood (2017), in an essay that we consider to be critically important, and for which we provided access to our work in progress for this edition, explores how the annotations of Hm 143 in particular "reflect the work of a scribe acting on his own authority and adopting the 'authorial' voice of the poem as his own."N Wood shows in detail how the annotations are derived from earlier attested programs of annotation in the C-text tradition, but that the X annotator was inventive in expanding and adapting any inherited glosses to his own immediate, vital engagement with the topics of the poem. Hence, according to Wood, the real voice of an interested reader emerges from his work, one who was "willing to assert his own authority by adapting and extending what he found in his C-text exemplar."N Based on our experience with Hand 2's work as corrector of the main text, we agree with Wood's assertion that "to suppose that Hand 2 himself made many of the changes to the marginalia he found in his source would be consistent with his behavior in relation to the text as copied by Hand 1."N

Wood's work and that of the other scholars engaging with Hm 143 underlines the need for access to the manuscript text with its images and annotations. Without such access, it is impossible to engage fully with these annotations solely in scattered journal articles, in theses, and in dissertations. Even full transcriptions of marginalia in printed books such as Benson and Blanchfield's catalogue, however superior as a resource to the complete suppression of glosses in standard editions, unfortunately remove the glosses from their dynamic manuscript contexts. This documentary edition brings high quality color images of manuscripts together with editorial notes, and a rigorously marked up digital transcription of the text and marginal commentary. Short of examining the artifact itself, this digital model permits as close an engagement as possible with this particular manifestation of the poem, and thus with this particular event in medieval literary history. Readers can here engage with the poem in this unique scribal performance and can make their own analyses of the function of the marginalia.

In addition to this type of engagement with the glosses, which are on the margins of the text, readers can also examine here all the corrections to the poem itself, which, despite any edition's critical apparatus, are never comprehensively legible to modern readers. Editing one manuscript at a time in documentary editions provides a degree of detail simply impossible to express when editing the poem as a whole from the manuscripts deemed useful for establishing the archetype. The Archive's work as a whole also responds to the realities of scholarship in a digital age in this regard. Literature is simply not studied any more—or not exclusively studied—abstracted from the historical and material circumstances in which it was produced. Students of cultural studies, political history, labor, and religious reform can exploit productively all of the data found in each of the documentary editions.N The Archive, by providing a digital model of the primary evidence, with as much immediacy as one can experience short of holding the actual manuscript in hand, serves the concerns of modern scholarship and of classroom teaching as well.

We sense that scholarly engagement with the C-text of Piers Plowman is surging, as is the practice of reading in parallel versions, made possible by Schmidt's edition, which is bound to increase the visibility of the C-text itself. The modern digital classroom, moreover, is ever more accommodating to the use of the internet in allowing teachers at all levels to display and discuss the images and textual phenomena in the Archive's editions. This combination of historical factors convinces us that this is an ideal time to present the Archive edition of Hm 143 (X) to the community of scholars and teachers.

Hm 143 has been described before in the Huntington Catalogue by Dutschke (1989) and by all the C-text editors,N and we draw freely from the historical and technical information gathered in these sources in our own Description of the Manuscript. We have made independent checks and measurements, indicating any differences with the information listed in these prior descriptions. The manuscript has received significant critical attention. Even prior to Wood's Chaucer Review essay (2017), Grindley (1992) summarized Dutschke's work and supplemented it with a description of the various hands and charts of the corrections, in addition to his transcription of the annotations. Grindley (1997) has also studied the four-line fragment, written on 108r, of the opening of the poem in his essay in YLS.N George Russell, co-editor of the C-text with George Kane, has written two essays on the C-text manuscripts (1984 and 1989), including X.N Russell (1984) calls Hm 143, "the most important and interesting of the C-version manuscripts."N

Hm 143 (X) of the C text of Piers Plowman has been the base manuscript of every modern print edition.N Its status here as the first documentary edition of a C manuscript in the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive reflects the manuscript's status as the proposed copytext for the Archive's edition of the C archetype (Cx), in concurrence with Russell and Kane, Pearsall, and Schmidt. Chambers had argued that Hm 143—rather than Hm 137 which Skeat had used—should play this crucial role in all future editing of Cx:

". . . when a critical edition of the C-text is made, the manuscript which should be used as the base should not be, as it has hitherto been, HM 137, but rather HM 143. Additional 35157 comes very near in value to HM 143, but its erratic spellings would make it a bad manuscript upon which to base a text. The worst fault of HM 143 is its habit of omitting words, and these can be supplied from other manuscripts. It would appear that, from the point of view of the construction of a critical text, HM 143 is the most important of the Huntington Library manuscripts of Piers Plowman, and that it is, indeed, the most important manuscript of the C-text.N

Even beyond its importance to questions strictly of genetic affiliation among Piers manuscripts, there is much of intrinsic interest in MsX. Dutschke and Schmidt declare it to be one of the oldest of all surviving Piers witnesses, with Dutschke (1989) asserting a provenance in the final quarter of the fourteenth century and Schmidt (2011) offering a date of 1400.N

The dialect of the manuscript has been deemed by M. L. Samuels to be among the closest to that of the poet, a primary reason for its being selected as copytext by recensionist editors. Samuels argues for this identification on three primary grounds:

1 Langland's alliterative practice provides very strong evidence that his dialect was that of south-west Worcestershire, which is then found to tally with the Malvern area of internal evidence. 2 The C-MSS X, I and Y are, in basis, in south-west Worcester dialect, and the evidence of 1 above at least suggests that that basis is authorial. But the deciding factor is the close correspondence between it and the relict stratum in the B-MSS L and R. This greatly increases the probability that the features of that stratum, together with many more in the C-MSS, are authorial. 3 The reconstruction of Langland's dialect could probably be best achieved by adopting X as the basis and modifying it in a conservative direction.N

For those whose focus is scribal activity, Hm 143 bears witness to over a thousand instances of deletion, addition, and other forms of scribal correction or intervention, and its extensive program of marginal glosses serves as a record of reader response, witnessing the poem's reception close to the time of composition. Hm 143 (X), then, is of great importance as a site for the archeology of the text.

Thus, unlike many Piers Plowman manuscripts that the Archive is bringing out of obscurity, Hm 143 is by no means obscure or unknown. Chambers' awareness of the compelling nature of the manuscript led him to create a photostat facsimile, published by the Huntington Library in 1936, with a detailed list of corrections, evaluated for ink and hand under UV light and microscope by R. B. Haselden and H. C Schultz (HS), who were at that time curators of manuscripts at the Huntington. This facsimile has been instrumental in our own analysis of the text, and though we have not attempted to collate its attributions of scribal hands against ours, we cite it occasionally in our notes to highlight its insights and to indicate where our evaluations of the phenomena of correction differ from theirs.

In relation to the work of correction and thus relevant to our concerns in this edition are Russell's assertions that the initial scribe of X, "had a supervisor who reviewed his work and left evidence of his activity," as part of a "careful and responsible supervised process of copying," accomplished by a corrector who brought "accuracy [to the] text and suppl[ied] its deficiencies," while "verifying his completed handiwork with his mark which appears, usually, as cor, on many of the leaves."N But Russell, however confident about the character of this hand, is not absolute in his assessment, for in nearly the same breath he acknowledges that the corrector has made errors, some of which "may represent some kind of meddling officiousness. . . . the consequence of carelessness or stupidity or weariness. But equally," he admits, "they may be well-intentioned and partially successful attempts to rescue a damaged original with the onus for the disordered state of the text lying further back in the process of transmission."N Russell's dual evaluation is correct. It plays itself out dramatically in the many hundreds of notes we have written for this edition that trace the corrections and contemplate their effectiveness and motivation, particularly, of course, those by Hand 2. For though Hand 2's interventions do often correct the text, they sometimes—but by no means comprehensively—delete majority readings and introduce unique error. In these cases, to emphasize the negative aspect of Russell's assessment, we have to say that instead of rescuing a damaged original, Hand 2 has done some damage himself, or as Grindley (1992) puts it, "Scribe B's work was not without fault. At times, his corrections get in the way of accurate readings."N

Aware of the abiding interest in this manuscript, and ourselves fascinated by the critical attention it has received already, we offer here a rigorously encoded documentary edition of Hm 143 (X), the base manuscript of all modern editions of the C-text, a manuscript copied in a dialect closest to that of the poet. We can only hope that Hm 143, here manifested, will facilitate further study of medieval English textual history and of the mysterious poem that it has, in defying time and fortune, successfully (if imperfectly) transmitted.

I.1 Date:

"England, saec. xiv(ex)," as dated by Dutschke (1989). RK indicate late fourteenth or early fifteenth century; Schmidt (2011) dates it "c. 1400" and says its "handwriting places it among the half-dozen oldest copies of C."N

I.2 Provenance:

See I.6 Marginalia below for the names of early potential owners. According to Dutschke's description, the modern history of the manuscript can be traced "to the Sotheby family by the late seventeenth century."N On folios ii recto and 1r appears the name J. Sotheby (d. 1720), which Dutschke (1989) interprets as his signature and, as she also recounts, <Y666> or <D666>, with the number <80> below the signature.N Dutschke also identifies the "[a]rmorial bookplate of C. W. H. Sotheby on the front pastedown," and details the progressive changes in ownership of the manuscript from "Col. H. G. Sotheby . . . Sotheby's, 24 July 1924, lot 129 to A. S. W. Rosenbach," from whom Henry E. Huntington then acquired the manuscript "in 1924."N There is more text on folio ir that no one has transcribed, which appears to say "Ancient Engl. Poem. of . S .," prefaced and followed by illegible text.

I.3 Physical Description:

Written on parchment. Four leaves, not foliated (i modern paper and iii contemporary parchment) + 108 +1 (early modern paper). The manuscript has been trimmed, as is evident from the cropped appearance of the decorative flourish above the ornamented capital on folio 1r.

I.3.1 Binding:

Dutschke (1989): "Bound, s. XVIII, in tan calf by Thomas Elliott, blind tooled in a panel pattern with a carnation at each corner of the panel."N She cites H. Nixon (1975): "Harleian Bindings," Studies in the Book Trade in Honour of Graham Pollard. Oxford Bibliographical Society Publications n.s. 18 (1975), pp. 153-94, and especially plate 15 no. 8."N RK say that the "first and last vellum leaves were pastedowns in the earlier binding."N

I.3.2 Collation:

RK provide the following collational formula:

i+one+18 (lacks 1,3,4,5,6,8) 2-148154+one+iN

Quires, folios, and divisions of the text correspond as follows:

Ff. ii recto-iii verso: The first text in the manuscript is an excerpt from Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Book 1:71-140 and 1:421-490.N Dutschke describes it as "2 and 7 of a gathering of 8 leaves of a lost manuscript,"N dating it to the beginning of the fifteenth century. The page size is the same as the rest of the manuscript (253 mm x 189 mm) and the text area is 210 mm x 70-85 mm. 20 stanzas total, 5 7-line stanzas per folio side, with a blank line between stanzas. "Written," says Dutschke, "in an anglicana formata script with secretary features."N

For the Piers text, there are 14 quires: 1-13(8) and 14(4). "[I]n quire 8," Dutschke observes, "the inner bifolium has been reversed, transposing ff. 60 and 61."N All the catch words are visible at the end of each quire, and as Dutschke notes, the ones on 64v are underlined in red.N Quire signatures are in the bottom center of 1r and/or in the bottom right margin, written "in lead, in red ink, or in both."N Dutschke reports that there are "leaf signatures in arabic numerals, in letters, or in vertical or horizontal slashes."N But she also notes that many of these "are no longer visible" except "in the 1936 photostat" facsimile.N This is correct. The photostat reveals some signature marks now barely or not at all visible, such as on fols. 8r and 25r, displaying horizontal red lines in the bottom margins. Based on the photostat, RK provide a complete list of leaf signatures.N We list here those quire and leaf signatures that are still visible today, all of which are in red ink, a few of them accompanied by drypoint or plummet marks (9r, 17r, 57r); at the bottom of folios 7r, 43r (vertical or diagonal strokes); 81r, 82r, 84r (vertical strokes in right margin—probably Roman numerals); 74r, 75r (dots); in the bottom right margins of 90r, 91r, 92r, 93r (horizontal lines); and in the bottom center margins of 9r, 17r, 57r, 81r, 89r (arabic numerals); and 105r (a red smudge possibly associated with a cropped signature for quire 14). We do not see any leaf signatures in arabic numerals, though in the 1936 photostat we do see +1, +2, +3, and +4 on the first four folios of quire 1, so these and perhaps others have faded since the facsimile was made, to say nothing of what has faded since the book's initial production. The modern, library numbering of the folios is in graphite at the top right of each recto leaf. Likewise, modern graphite quire signatures appear in the lower left margin.

Quires and the Corresponding Sections of the Poem:

The text of Piers Plowman ends on 106v. The four-line version of the poem's opening, called "X2" by Grindley (1997), is on folio 108r. For the other pen trials, scribblings, and marginalia on the various otherwise blank leaves of this final quire, see below, section I.6 Marginalia.

I.3.3 Leaf Size and Arrangement of Page:

Dutschke (1989) measures the folios of the Piers portion of the manuscript as 253 mm x 180 mm, with the size of the text area 196-199 mm x 141 mm. The text of Piers Plowman is "[w]ritten in anglicana formata," with "36 lines of verse, ruled in lead with double bounding lines; slash pricking is visible in the outer margins."N

I.4 Script and Hands:

We identify the main scribal hand of Piers Plowman as Hand 1. We call the hand of the extensive marginal annotations Hand 2; Hand 2 is also, we can see from letter forms and ink, a corrector throughout the manuscript. In the markup we try to distinguish between the correcting hands, for Hand 1 is also an active corrector of his own text, usually quickly fixing an anticipatory error or a lapsus calami. These self-corrections usually result in no variants in the text, but rather just in immediate repair of the scribe's accidental mis-copying of his exemplar. Hand 1 can also create unique readings by self-correction. These can in turn make some sense in context, even if they do not conform to the readings seen in most witnesses. In these cases, we record a variant unique to X. See, for example, X.3.488 gonnes, and our note there.

Hand 2's corrections are more complex, because he sometimes appears to be repairing the text according to an exemplar superior to that employed by Hand 1; that is, he frequently replaces a unique or minority reading with a majority one. Whether the result may be considered archetypal is a matter to be established when all C manuscripts have been documented. In most cases of correction in X, either Hand 1 erred in copying his text—and thus Hand 2 restored the exemplar's reading—or Hand 2 had a superior text against which to check it. At other times, however, Hand 2 appears to be freelancing. In these cases, he has "repaired" a unique or minority reading with another error, sometimes with a unique reading. In yet other cases he has replaced a majority reading with a minority or a unique error. This extraordinary range of correction—some of which cannot really be called correction at all—indicates either multiple exemplars of varying quality or the inconsistent availability of one or more superior exemplars.

When no hand has intervened to correct a patently unintentional error, we mark up the text with TEI-conformant <sic><corr> encoding.

Scholars have noticed a decline in the rate of correction, which may relate, as Grindley (1992) proposes, to the evolving skill of Hand 1 as a copyist.N Or it may be related to the mysterious shifting between or loss of exemplar. It would be interesting to use this electronic edition to chart the corrections, and the relative (inferred) presence of an exemplar, passus by passus, to fill out a better picture of the stages of labor and the changing resources and tools applied to the work, as Bart (2007) has traced similar activity in San Marino, Huntington Library manuscript Hm 114 (Ht), a conflated Piers A-B-C text.N An important question would be whether or not there is a correlation between the overall decline in instances of correction and the accuracy of the corrections. Kerby-Fulton (1999), in a fascinating analysis that takes us into the realities of the scribal work environment, attributes the diminishing rate of correction, and of annotation as well, to what she calls Hand 2's "slacking off" on a professional assignment that he "sometimes apparently found tedious."N See our further discussion below, I.6 Marginalia.

Grindley (1992) distinguishes Hands 1 and 2 (his Scribes A and B) thus:

Scribe B's hand differs considerably from scribe A's, and can best be described as a documentary hand with some book hand features. In particular, scribe B used an angular 'w' with a left-leaning elongated central loop, while scribe A used a much less spacious character, quite rounded, and which leans to the right. Additionally, there are major differences between the letters 'h,' 'k,' 's,' and 'ȝ.' On the basis of these, and other, letter forms, and ink colour, it is easy to identify scribe B as being responsible for the manuscript's generous supply of annotations.N

Many of the corrections in the manuscript, mostly useful bits of local repair, constitute one letter or even one stroke. In these cases, it is difficult to attribute them, based on ink or letter forms, confidently to either hand, which is disappointing because they therefore cannot contribute to the textual profile of the scribes and clarify the layers of text. Hence, we have to attribute these corrections to the noncommittal Hand X. This frustrates us, of course, because the fewer hands one has to posit the better, and we have tried to use Hand X as sparingly as possible. In some cases when Hand 2 has written annotations and has corrected the text on a particular folio, it seems logical via Ockham's razor to associate even a small helpful tick to him, so we suspect that some of our Hand X attributions could have been Hand 2 and vice-versa.

The rubricator is a potential third Hand who wrote both the brown and red ink running headers.N He may also have done the paraph marking throughout the manuscript and underlined the Latin. In a few instances, some hand has carefully erased the red underline, when English words were accidentally underlined. The rubricator adds corrections in red on fols. 34v, 51r, and 70v.N The rubricator adds a punctus elevatus in red at the caesura, and an obelus in the right margin on folio 57r at X.13.13. This intervention may be a repair of mis-lineated verses. See the textual note at X.13.13. And he also adds one annotation in red on folio 48r at X.10.296, drawing attention to the Latin poetry in the text with the word versus.N We wonder, together with Grindley (1992) and Dutschke (1989), whether Hand 2 could also be this rubricatorN; Russell (1989) asserts that he is.N If this is so, the total number of hands working on the text of the poem is two: Hand 1 who wrote the text and Hand 2 who corrected, rubricated, and annotated it, on those occasions using his red ink to intervene in the text, likely for convenience when he noticed things that he wanted to change while rubricating.

We also detect three annotations that appear to be in a completely different hand from Hands 1 and 2, and distinct as well, if he is himself distinct, from the rubricator: Folios 17r: // p(ro)ph(ec)ia petri; 22v: // p(ro)ph(ec)ia petri; and 39r: // prophecia. Grindley (2001) does not distinguish them from the rest of the annotations and thus considers them to be part of the program of commentary by Hand 2. We discuss these three annotations, all concerning prophecy, below in section I.6: Marginalia. Wood (2022), describes the three instances as "the work . . . . of a subsequent reader who, finding no explicit notice of the poem's prophecies (and possibly having access to a manuscript of the p group), supplied his own."N

I.4.1: The Corrections to the Text

In this edition we examine each correction individually and reveal some of its micro-history, as well as it can be discerned and marked up. Russell (1989) has praised Hm 143 as a professional work because of the apparent great care that went into its creation.N Grindley (1992) and Calabrese (2005) have questioned the professional status of the labor, and both have noticed the irregular and at times bizarre nature of some of Hand 2's corrections, which have confused editors' presentations of the text.N This is apparent in the instances in RK where they have presented a reading in brackets as an emendation that is actually the original Hand 1 reading, which had been erased erroneously and replaced by a unique Hand 2 reading.

This situation sensitizes us to the erratic nature of Hand 2's work, and points to the inability of modern printed editions to express adequately the layers of correction that remain apparent only in the manuscript itself. It also reveals the complexity of determining "what X is," so to speak, for if the original X reading appears as an emendation of the inferior X correction, then a form of editorial chaos ensues. In the work of editing it is fundamentally important to say what any given manuscript reads. Our policy throughout, for clarity of presentation, has been to take the reading of Hand 1 to be the X reading in relation to other witnesses, whenever it is recoverable or apparent, before it was acted upon (converted, erased, corrected) by other hands. In instances where the reading of Hand 1 has been completely obliterated, and Hand 2 or Hand X has supplied a new reading, we inevitably have had to accept that reading as the reading of X.

Capturing all the information for every line in every manuscript, in anything resembling a convenient or accessible fashion, is surely beyond the purview of an editor who wants to produce a finished poem to be read, and it is, additionally, beyond the confining strictures of the printed page. By contrast, this level of specificity is the exact purview of the Archive, as well as the exact function of electronic editing.

Nevertheless, our edition is sufficiently guilty of its own limitations. For example, sometimes the standard TEI markup (P5) is not adequate to express the full nature of a correction, as at X.6.181, where the scribe converts an <a> to the final minim of an <m>. Furthermore, even though our markup of X relies completely on our own observation, concerning other C manuscripts in relation to X, our textual markup—encoded within <app> elements that appear under our stylesheets as highlighted words—are based on RK's textual apparatus. Hence, we rely on them to have determined the readings of all other C manuscripts and to have accounted for those readings that were obtained by correction. But what of those readings not obtained by but rather lost to correction, as in X? The Archive of course here suffers from its own absence, its own current incompletion. That is, to execute a textual note, one needs all the comparative textual data, including the nature of what is gained and lost in correction, from all the other manuscripts. Since X is the first of the C-text manuscripts edited, it can record data, but it has none of its own data beyond X with which to work, as it lacks all the encoded data from all the other, as yet unedited C-text manuscripts. The near Borgesian complexities—if not absurdities—we intimate here, as we start to build a new Piers Plowman "library," have not eluded us. We can only caution readers that aside from our transcription and encoding of X itself, our base data for the textual transmission of C is as of now—however temporarily—the textual apparatus of RK's C-text edition, just as the apparatus of KD was for the initial, documentary editions of B. This is not the case, of course, for the edition of Bx, which the editors based on the Archive's own, newly edited texts. Likewise, it will not be the case for Cx, which will be produced once the Archive has a sufficient number of C manuscripts transcribed and marked up.

I.4.2 Cor(rigitur) Marks

As we note locally within the text, corrector's marks, presumably by Hand 2, sometimes appear at quire ends. Many quire ends, however, are not so marked, and in addition, such marks can appear almost anywhere within quires, possibly demarcating the end of a particular stint of the correction that was neither invoked by nor limited to quire boundaries. This adds to the probability that more than one exemplar was in play and that the copying was not being done in conformity to the layout of any one exemplar, by a strict one-to-one casting off of lines. We list all the marks here (an * indicates an instance not listed by RK in their descriptionN: 7r, 8v, 12r, 16v* 23r, 27r (legitur), 29v, 37r*, 50v, 60r, 62v, 67r, 69r, 70r, 71r, 73r, 74r, 79r, 81r, 83r, 85r, 88r, 91r, 92v (mid folio), 93r, 95v, 96v, 103r. RK also incorrectly list 43r and 88v as having corrector's marks.

I.5 Punctuation:

The scribes use two marks of punctuation: the paraph, and the mid-line virgule. In rare instances—some of them in the course of correction—a punctus and also the punctus elevatus appear. Occasionally, a second virgule appears within the half-line in some cases to indicate apposition in what seems like a practice analogous to modern systems of punctuation. We comment on these features as they occur within the text, in notes. Most lines contain the virgule at the caesura, but dozens of virgules were omitted and some may perhaps have faded into illegibility as well. On occasion, confusion over placement of a virgule, or multiple virgules in the same line, is related to a larger textual problem or a unique non-metrical verse that must have stumped the scribe.

Parasigns appear in the left margin in red or blue, to mark both verse paragraphs and, occasionally, changes of speaker in dialogues, but by no means are all moments of dramatic transition so marked. Placement of paraph markers varies across Piers Plowman manuscripts, is by no means regular or standard, and is of uncertain authority. Hence, they cannot be attributed fully either to the poet or to the scribes. They are universally excluded from modern editions of the poem, though according to Benson and Blanchfield (1997), both Schmidt (1995) and Pearsall (1978) considered the parasigns when devising the paragraph divisions in their editions.N Benson and Blanchfield (1997) argue that when paraphs (colored or not) "call attention to important and striking lines," they "function very much like a nota, reminding us again that different forms of annotation may have a similar effect."N

Locations for additional intended parasigns are marked in the margins with an uncolored double slash <//>. Such slashes in ink are still visible under the actual, colored parasigns, so the uncolored <//> marker may indicate either those missed by the rubricator or those added to supplement the existing system of paraphs. Such omissions by rubricators are common in vernacular manuscripts. See folio 85v, near lines X.19.193 and X.19.207 for examples of <//> that never received color.

We also see some further form of textual division manifested by <cc> marks throughout the text, another practice that closely parallels that found in B manuscripts such as W, L, M, and Hm, and quite prevalent in Ht as well, the latter currently being prepared for publication.N Ralph Hanna, in personal correspondence with the editors, sees the <cc> marker as a form of Latin capitulo, indicating a means of division by dramatic sequence or "chapter." It must indicate a supplementary system of punctuation added to points in the narrative that seemed to need additional paraph breaks.

Hanna remarks to us that the marginal <//> and <cc> markers both "are trying to mark transitions or argumentative shifts."N He further considers the manuscript to be "under-paragraphed" in comparison to other Piers texts, which may account for the additional markings. We therefore must wonder when the <//> and <cc> were added and by what agent, though it is likely, of course, to be one of our manuscript hands: Hand 1, Hand 2, or the rubricator.

Paraphs, either colored or indicated by a <//>, and the <cc> markers as well, which we transcribe as black paraphs, can have a function akin to that of proper annotations in marking events and transitions in the text. Nevertheless, it is also important to distinguish them from the nota, especially in this manuscript where the latter are a distinct part of a particular system of annotation and commentary by Hand 2.N And yet, both the nota and the <cc>, generated by any hand, have the similar function of drawing a reader's attention to an event, character, or significant moment in the poem. Ultimately, readers should attend closely to the completed paraphs, to the uncolored <//>, and also to the <cc> marks, to determine their local functions.

I.6 Marginalia:

I.6.1 Miscellaneous Marginalia Unrelated to the Production of the Manuscript

In addition to the Sotheby marginal notes and signatures, there are other bits of marginalia unrelated to the text's production. On folio i recto: in modern pencil is the number <15>. On folio i verso: two signatures of John Russell with what Dutschke (1989) calls a "monogram flourish," which RK date to the sixteenth or early seventeenth century.N

On folio 107r: an illegible word perhaps ending in <g> by an unknown hand at the top line, center. On folio 107v: The name John Russ appears—likely the John Russell of folio i verso. In the same hand as the Russell signature, the Latin phrase In utra(que) fortuna, fidelis, presumably a family motto, not noticed in previous descriptions. Also on 107v, in an early fifteenth-century(?) hand, the verses, ihesu ihesu ihesu for thyn holy name to be me ihesus. Above that, an apparent attempt at the opening of the poem: In a.

On 108r, in what RK call an early sixteenth-century hand and Dutschke (1989) calls fifteenth- to sixteenth-century, we see the name Dan Jhon redbery, below which is the fragment designated X2 by Grindley (1997), discussed below at I.9. Also some illegible scribbles below and at mid-page, to the right.

I.6.2 AnnotationsN

Hm 143 has a full set of marginal annotations by Hand 2, which serve as a running commentary on the poem, alerting readers to topics, naming characters, remarking on moments of anticlerical satire, narrating events and identifying speakers—among a host of other functions. The glosses are usually underlined and marked with a single or a double slash. Grindley (1992 & 1997), and Kerby-Fulton (1999) have written important studies of the annotations.

When were the annotations composed? In an attempt to establish the sequence of labor on the manuscript, Grindley (1992) points to the annotation written over the flourish of the initial capital in quire 6, folio 48v, and concludes: "the initials must have been in place prior to the manuscript's annotation—at least in quire 6."N If this is so, then the annotations were among the latter or final features in the production of the manuscript. RK, however, citing the same folio, argue rather for the opposite sequence, maintaining that the "red of the flourishing passes over the marginalia" and thus that the annotations were "inserted before decoration of the capitals and before cropping," pointing out that on 26v the marginalia are cropped.N Our analysis confirms RK's evaluation, because we see the phenomenon of red written over the brown ink of the annotations also on 63r and 94r, confirming that the annotations preceded the decoration of the capital in these instances and thus presumably in the entire manuscript.

Many factors are at hand. First, the annotator is also a corrector of the text, so his work of annotation may be part of the intended teamwork of the professional scribes who were charged with producing the text. We currently know nothing, however, about the actual historical circumstances that produced the text. It is traditionally seen as a West Midlands manuscript because of its dialect, but Simon Horobin (2005a) has shown that London scribes were perfectly capable of using SWM forms, either because it was their native dialect or as a willful act of preserving (or restoring) what was perceived to be the poet's own dialect.N

Since we conclude that the annotations preceded the decoration of the initial capitals, their addition also cannot in any sense be said to post-date the production of the manuscript, unless the decoration was postponed and occurred later, something for which there is no evidence. Also, the fact that on 58v, an error in the marginal gloss at X.13.104, tithes, was corrected to titles, suggests but does not assure that the annotations may have had a source, against which Hand 2 checked his work, invoking the correction. If he were checking himself against another text, it would mean that the glosses come from another, lost or undiscovered, manuscript. Alternately, he could simply have been correcting his own slip of the pen, after having confused similar words. At this point in the text, Rechelesnesse is clearly discussing not tithes, but rather titles, as at X.13.108 and X.13.118.

Scholars have been offering much insightful and provocative analysis of these annotations that is of critical importance to readers of our edition. Kerby-Fulton (1999) sees them as displaying political caution, in contrast to the annotations in Bodleian Library MS Douce 104 (Dc), which she sees as bolder and more engaged with "practical and social theology . . . along with social injustices, political issues, and ecclesiastical affairs."N This activity renders the Douce annotator (Kerby-Fulton's "D") "a man of intense practical spirituality,"N composing notes perhaps "intended for the private reading of a person the annotator knew well and trusted intellectually."N By contrast, H (our Hand 2, the annotator), says Kerby-Fulton, composed notes that "look and read like professional work—sophisticated in paleographical and in literary terms, safe in what they highlight doctrinally."N And yet H, "is much more virulently antimendicant" than D. H, she avers, is a "professional reader" in that he "makes it clear that what we are being told is fictionalized,"N working as a "literary annotator, obviously a rhetorically trained reader of texts,"N "highly sensitive to the aesthetic concerns of [the poem's] 'maker,'"N preparing the text for "a communal, perhaps a monastic audience,"N who sometimes tries "not to notice the actual content of what he is summarizing" and "sticks to the storyline rather than the debate,"N and is "always somewhat uncomfortable with controversy."N D's greater engagement results in something more than a "typical 'professional reading,'" and renders his annotations "a good deal more thoughtful."N

Bowers (2005) argues for the annotations being "an integral part of the original text-producing project,"N and he sees the Hm 143 commentator as "sensitive to a variety of hot-button topics" and "alert to the contentious terms" in the emerging Lollard controversies, studiously resisting the "new oppressive definition" that was applied to Wycliffite heretics, "by returning to the earlier Langlandian sense of a slacker and religious pretender."N Ultimately for Bowers (2005), the annotator reveals himself to be part of a group of scribes who were "among Langland's most interested and politically astute readers," men of a "west Midlands community of scribes and civil servants resident in London."N Bowers (2005) wonders even if the annotator himself "was the patron" of the volume, which might indicate the book's production for personal use.N

Carl Grindley (2001) has made the most elaborate attempt to describe the function of the glosses by designating a number of categories for them: Narrative Reading Aids, Ethical Pointers, Polemical Responses, and Graphical Responses, all of which are then subdivided elaborately. We do not always agree with Grindley's precise categorizations, but they point provocatively to the myriad functions that the annotations might serve as reading aids and commentary on both the content of the poem and on the reader's invited participation in the interpretive process.

Our work in correcting the transcriptions offered by Grindley and also by Matsushita, already has changed our understanding of many of the glosses and more particularly alters some of the categories offered by Grindley. For example, Grindley classifies two notes on folios 6r and 95v, which read war, as "Literary Response: Reader Participation,"N but these notes are not a literary response to the poem. Rather, they draw readers' attention to lines that were first accidentally omitted and then supplied in the margins by Hand 1.

We isolate here in the right column the corrections we have made to Grindley's transcriptions, which appear on the left. These include instances where he confused <cc> for nota, citing the line in the poem most proximate to the gloss in question.

At X.20.283, the name Satan appears in a gloss next to the <cc> mark, and Grindley (2001) takes it as a unified phrase, nota Satan.N Rather, we read this instance of <cc> as part of the ordinatio, which was placed near the name Satan, or vice-versa. The two glosses—the <cc> and the word Satan—draw attention to the devil's arrival and speech. (See our codicological note at X.20.282.) But cp. folio 17r at X.3.486, where in the right margin we see cc / p(ro)phecia Petri; in this instance, <cc> cannot indicate a new paragraph or plot transition but rather serves to frame the marginal annotation.

Accordingly, these new transcriptions allow us to update Kerby-Fulton's assessment of the annotator (her H, our Hand 2), which she in part bases on the fact that he "shows some awareness of medieval literary theory on the subject of poetic imagery" in his having written the gloss notate imagine at X.16.272 to draw attention to a metaphor of the corrupt clergy as a tree with rotten roots.N How will this analysis have to be adjusted in light of our transcribing the gloss rather notate omnes, which still draws attention to the verses but does not directly reference imagery? Grindley (2001) reads notate image, taking the second word as English; Matsushita (2010) reads notate image as well.N

Wood's analysis of the running commentary (2017) considers prior scholarship and provides the important revelation that though the scribe's annotations are derived from a previous program, they nonetheless display creative imagination and adaptation. Wood identifies the local, topical energy that seems to motivate individual comments, since:

In some cases it is unclear whether the annotator addresses the reader of the manuscript or takes up the authorial pose of rebuke and admonition towards figures within the poem that form the object of the satirist's critique, for example at RK C.5.146 "/notate Religiosi" (folio 22v). In others, the rebuke of figures depicted in the text is made explicit, for example at RK C.13.124 "/beth war bischoppes" (folio 58v).N

Wood (2017) confirms as well a similarity in Hand 2's work as corrector and as annotator, for his corrections to the text often demonstrate "the same 'feel' for Langland's vocabulary combined with the same willingness on [his] part . . . to intervene on his own authority—and perhaps also on his recollection of a form of the text he had copied previously," for he was willing "also to adapt the annotations he found in his source to his own ends."N Wood's reassessment of the voice and constructions of the annotations leads her to conclude that "Hand 2's willingness to adopt the hortatory voice of Piers Plowman as his own simultaneously encourages the manuscript reader's participation in the fiction, extending the poem's fictionalized address to an audience into the margins of the book."N Further, confirming an insight of Kerby-Fulton (1999), Wood (2017) senses that "Hand 2 preserves throughout his marginal notes a clear sense of the dreamer Will as a persona, even a fully realized dramatic character, distinct from the author of the poem."N "Altogether Hand 2's notes," continues Wood, "suggest an alert London reader who responded not only to the poem's concerns with clergy and pastoral care, but also to the urgency with which these concerns were increasingly directed to the reader in the poem's final version."N And so Wood concludes, in a statement that we believe plays out dramatically within the mark-up and notes to the text in our edition: "In his marginal annotations no less than in his interventions into the text, Hand 2 of HM 143 responded energetically to Langland's invitation to read Piers Plowman personally."N

The ongoing scholarship on the function and force of these annotations and the often-feisty controversies they create are a testament to the power of the manuscript as a mysterious witness to a mysterious past. Piers Plowman is a poem about the clergy and the social and political institutions of its time. The annotations in Hm 143, in that they are responses to issues in the poem itself, cannot help but engage us politically, morally, and ethically. Meaningful scholarly engagement with this dynamic set of comments shows no sign of diminishing. We are certain that our edition will be a tool in this process, for now all readers will have total access to the annotations in context.

I.6.3 Marginalia Relating to Prophecy

As mentioned above in I.4 Script and Hands—and potentially distinct from the program of annotations—are three notes concerning prophecy, on folios 17r, 22v, and 39r. We transcribe and comment briefly on these annotations within the edition. Richard Emmerson (1993) writes that "In the Middle Ages the vast majority of Old Testament books—including the historical and poetic books—was understood to be prophetic. . . . Since the gospels include the prophetic exhortations of John the Baptist and Jesus, Acts describes the visionary experiences of Peter and Paul, and the epistles and Apocalypse prophesy the events of the last days, much of the New Testament was also considered prophetic."N As our notes indicate, the exact biblical passages the annotator may have had in mind are not apparent. On 17r, the text of the poem near the annotation is referencing Isaiah 2:4, which may be echoed in 1 Peter 2:24: "[W]ho his own self bore our sins in his body upon the tree, that we being dead to sins should live to justice; by whose stripes you were healed."N Another verse in Isaiah, similar to the one referenced in the poem, may be relevant here as it concerns, as Christians see it, the torture of Jesus in Isaiah 53:5: "But he was wounded for our iniquities; he was bruised for our sins. The chastisement of our peace was upon him, and by his bruises we are healed."N Perhaps operative here also is another comment, by Peter (2 Peter 1:21): "For prophecy came not by the will of man at any time, but the holy men of God spoke, inspired by the Holy Ghost."N

Emmerson also points to the powers of prophecy as a form of promise to be fulfilled in salvation history.N This is most evident in Acts 2-3, particularly in Peter's Pentecost sermon in Acts 2 and also at 3:22, where Peter appears to see himself as the heir of the Old Testament prophets. Uhart (1986) reveals that several manuscripts, particularly C texts, contain annotations about prophecy.N And see Wood (2022) for a discussion of prophetic awareness in the p tradition of C-text manuscripts; Wood says that the hand who wrote these notes may have had access to one of those manuscripts.N

I.7 Decoration:

The text of Piers begins with an elaborate, nine-line opening initial <I> in gold. Blue and white branches frame the page with a foliage border, with gold, blue, and pink leaves. Each passus begins with what Dutschke (1989) calls "[c]ompetent 5-, 4- and 3-line blue initials with red flourishing."N We have re-examined and re-measured each initial, noting several at six lines and one at seven lines. (See our codicological notes on the ornamented capitals in the transcription.) As Dutschke also notes, "occasionally faces have been drawn into the loops of the flourishes" of the ornamented capitals (10v, 17v, 23r, and 87v).N 10v's capital itself, Dutschke observes, has a face drawn within it.N Grindley (1992) identifies that face as Lady Meed, the featured character in Passus 3. Such doodles, as Grindley correctly surmises, must be the work of the manuscript's decorator, for they are an inherent part of the initial capitals themselves.N

On 26r there is a freestanding head of a bearded man, whose stern look and exaggerated features identify him as Covetousness, who is announced at this point in the text and is depicted by Langland as scornful and vicious. Dutschke (1989) says that this drawing is in the ink of the text,N which is possible, but it could also be in the ink of the annotation, which echoes the poem at this point: hyere cam couetyse to schrefteward. At folio 22v we see a drawing of a crown (X.5.174.m.1, underneath the annotation prophecia· petri (X.5.172.m.1). Folio 7r displays a pointing hand at X.2.9.m.1, a line that announces the appearance of Lady Meed. Either Hand 1 or 2 may have penned these images as well. See our notes within the transcription for further discussion.

The Latin quotations are underlined in red or brown. Individual Latin and French words and phrases, and other evidently "'important' words" (to use RK's descriptionN), are also underlined.

Passus HeadingsN:

There is no general incipit at the beginning, nor an explicit at the end of the poem.

Schmidt (2011) reconstructs the proposed Cx schema of rubrics.N The inherent question when examining the rubrics is, what sort of structure do they impart to the poem? Some systems number all the passus in sequence, while others observe a two-fold division between a first long visio and what scholars (though few manuscripts and certainly not X) call the vita, that is, the search for Dowel, Dobet, and Dobest. Still others observe a tri-partite division in the so-called vita, distinguishing between Dowel, Dobet, and Dobest. Despite useful classification and observable general patterns, these divisions still display variety and hybridism. X appears to reflect closely the Cx archetype offered by Schmidt, because the x tradition from which it comes is closer to Cx than are the p branch manuscripts.N Hm 143 accordingly divides the poem into two major visions, and then divides the second into the Dowel, Dobet, and Dobest trio. Schmidt argues for a general uniformity of rubrics in B and C manuscripts, making him ponder their potential authority, yet resolving back into caution about how they ought to be used by editors:

It therefore seems reasonable to conclude that the main structural outline of the C-text as reflected in its archetypal rubrics does not differ greatly from that of its predecessor. . . . This last consideration strengthens the antecedent probability that the rubrics reflect authorial directions; but as it is not possible to be certain about the details, and all use of the "thematic" rubrics for literary interpretation must remain circumspect, they have been given no prominence in the edited text.N

I.8 The Erasure of the Name of Piers Plowman:

A major feature in this manuscript is not what we would call decoration per se but potentially, defacement. Throughout the text, the name of Piers, most often spelled peres plouhman, is erased.N Uhart (1986) cites Russell (1984), who argues that the erasures were to prepare the text for rubrication of the character's name; she allows the possibility and cites instances in other manuscripts (O and Bm) where the character's name in marginalia is rubricated or perhaps prepared for rubrication.N But she also wonders if the act might be an attempt to deface the manuscript's perceived references to the pope by association with Piers/Peter. The question, then, is whether these erasures were to prepare the text for the rubrication of the character's name, which would show an intention to confer a celebratory urgency upon it, or whether they are acts of censorship and hence of deliberate defacement. Bowers (2005) argues for "textual policing" and "tactical censorship" because of the potential associations of Piers with heretical Lollard ideology and with the Rising of 1381, connecting the actions in X with other instances of censorship in manuscripts that reveal how "[d]efacement became a radical version of reader-response."N Defacement here in X however, says Bowers, may have had the "opposite effect of winning reprieve for both book and owner as subjects liable to official investigation."N That is, an owner erased the name to protect himself from the dangers that associating with even just the name of Piers Plowman might bring. Grindley (1992) wonders if they are not later, Protestant acts, "during the rule of Queen Mary."N Calabrese (2005) argues that instances of contemporary correction that actually repair some letters accidently damaged during the erasure of the character's name indicate that the erasures were not later, sixteenth-century defacements but were accomplished closer to the time of the manuscript's production, though they are still of uncertain motivation.N

In this edition we have applied mark-up and (where appropriate) composed further notes for these deletions, describing as best we can the various states of visibility, since the work of erasure is both imperfect and inconsistent. Some names are completely obliterated; some are partially visible; and some are still completely readable despite the attempt at erasure. Some appear more clearly in the 1936 photostat, making us wonder if the past ninety years have led to some fading, or if perhaps the high contrast photography itself enhanced the original graphs. Our transcriptions are based on what we can actually see, but were made in consultation with the photostat, though we did not directly adopt its readings without independent confirmation from the manuscript itself. Throughout the text, the erased name of the poem's title character appears variously as Peres, Peris, Perus, Pers, Pers, with or without the word Plouhman or Plohman, and with the initial <p> in each word rendered variously as upper or lower case. In all instances, we transcribe whatever is still visible, supplying dots for the graphs that are no longer legible. In codicological notes, we try to explain what was likely erased. Readers should be aware as well that in numerous instances the program of erasure was completely neglected (or missed) by the erasing hand. We have not supplied notes alerting the reader to every missed erasure, though we do indeed alert the reader to parts of the text where the lack of erasure seems to be of particular interest. On occasion the erasure extends to the marginalia (e.g. 34v, 35v, and 37r) and even to the name when it does not refer to the poem's main character, but simply another Peter with the same nickname, a certain character named Peres of prydie, who gathers with Gluton and his mates at the pub (X.6.375). So, there is a bit of chaos and confusion in this supposed program of censorship, defacement, or planned rubrication. We invite readers to study further this intriguing aspect of the manuscript, one of the most compelling features of Hm 143.

I.9 A Fragment of the Poem (X2):

Hm 143 also includes—after the end of the poem, on folio 108r—a four-line version of its opening verses. RK transcribe the lines.N Grindley (1997) offers a full study of what he identifies as "the sixth fragment of the Piers Plowman C text to come to light" and names it "X2."N We concur with Grindley that the hand of the X2 fragment is in a "nearly contemporary hand to that of X's main text."N He argues that the lexical sample is too small to locate the dialect of the fragment. But Grindley notes in particular the significance of the word schrobbe, "bush," against X's shroudes "shroud," or "cloak." He also asserts a lexical distinction between the forms schep, which he defines as "sheep," and shep, which he defines as "shepherd." Hence, he translates the line in X2 thus: "I moved to a bush as if I were a sheep," while erroneously thinking that this varies from the X reading, shep, which he incorrectly translates as "shepherd."N

Grindley also examines the stemmatic implications of the fragment, tracing its variants and affinities, particularly its resemblances to "certain members of the P family of Piers Plowman C-text manuscripts," wondering if its affinities to Mc (Grindley's M) could indicate that "some manuscript closely related to manuscript M was the source of X2"N but noting that the fragment must "represent an incomplete quotation from a lost or yet-undiscovered manuscript."N

We have done our own independent analysis of the fragment, and have marked it up with <app> tags and textual notes, anatomizing the detailed textual relationships of the fragment to all of the surviving Piers Plowman manuscripts across the three traditions. Five variants do indeed point strongly to an affiliation with C: schrobbe and schep (X2.P.2); Wente, forth, and in þe (X2.P.4). Two of these variants are discriminant for C only: forth and in þe. The three others point to the two families in C. Schep and Wente are in strong agreement with the x family. Shrobbis reads against x's shroudes (DcP2Uc), agreeing more closely with the p witnesses' versions of shrobbis (AcEcFcMcNcPQRcScVc), though X2's reading is uniquely in the singular, with an indefinite article. The full account of the variants in X2 appears in the documentary edition of the fragment.

As we note above, near the fragment is the name Dan Jhon redbery, who may have written the verses and thus been an early owner.N Russell (1989) discusses the fragment and its motivations; he is summarized and critiqued by Grindley, passim, particularly for erroneously identifying it as a B-text fragment. Grindley argues finally that Redbery sought "to preserve an alternate reading" of the opening of the poem out of respect for it and "also for its textual integrity."N Below the fragment, in a lighter ink and unknown hand, are what appear to be two further, very short fragments. The first, in the lower left margin might be an <I> followed by a smear. In the right margin, in the same had, we see the following letters, which appear to be <In a> followed by what might be an <s> and three minims, matching the first words of the fragment. These could both be simply pen trials.

In view of discrepencies between our observations and those of Grindley (1997) and RK, we have marked up fragment X2 from scratch, and in the markup and notes to the X2 transcription, we offer our analysis.

II. Editorial Method:

II.1 Presentation of the Text: Levels of Inscription

II.1.1 The Authorial Text

Because, as we have discussed above, this is the Archive's first presentation of a C-text, there is no pool of data from which we can establish an argument about X's textual relationships independent of the editorial work done by Russell-Kane and Schmidt.N We therefore refer the reader to those lengthy and detailed discussions. In our creation of a documentary edition, of course, textual relations play no part in our presentation of the text, except in the occasional comment we might make concerning other manuscripts that display a similar crux or mis-lineation. And, as stated above, we have drawn on the textual information in RK as a provisional basis for our application of <app> elements, specifying X's variants in relation to other C-text manuscripts. As the Archive evolves, these notes themselves will evolve, as we gather more data including more information about layers of correction in the other C-text manuscripts. RK do not produce a stemma per se, but they do associate manuscripts according to patterns of shared error, as determined by the Kane (1988) tradition of analyzing scribal practice set forth famously in the A-text Athlone edition. Schmidt (2011) creates a traditional stemma that locates X with manuscripts HcIYc as descended from a shared ancestor y, descended from i, descended from x1, descended from Cx, descended from C.N

From the vast and choppy waters of the textual criticism of C, we want here briefly to guide the readers down one small, manageable rivulet, so that they can contemplate the place of this edition of X within the larger and unfinished labor of editing the poem from all C-text manuscripts. This one issue, here reductively summarized, is that of emendation: the act of a modern editor correcting a reading in the base manuscript and substituting another reading that is shared by some, many, most, or all of the other surviving manuscripts, based on the direct proof or notion that the initial reading is wrong and the emended one is right. One can even seek a reading from another version, rejecting the particular manuscript evidence in favor of what can be argued to be a superior reading in another version. Fundamental to Russell and Kane's philosophy of editing is the scenario they discovered (based in part on Kane and Donaldson's's B-text work) of the C poet working from a flawed copy of his B-text poem and laboring to repair as he revises, having to fix errors that had seeped into the poem. Russell and Kane write about the C-text poet, whom they never, by the way, call Langland:

That he never systematically checked his B manuscript for errors of copying must appear from the number of scribal readings that survived his revision. Whether or not he had the means for such a check, and his use of the scribal copy might seem to imply that he did not, he seems to have read his text so to speak pen in hand, with variable degree of critical attention. A turn of language which he sensed to be not his own, or imperfect alliteration, or nonsense error that caught his eye would sharpen the critical attitude already implicit in the intent to revise, giving local application to general dissatisfaction. Quite often his reaction was to repair by rewriting, even to the extent of incorporating the scribal reading in the revised line or passage.N

Nonetheless, as Derek Pearsall (2008) observes, there seems to be a consensus that the copy the C-reviser worked from, however corrupt, was not "in such an advanced stage of corruption as the archetype of all extant B MSS,"N which was itself therefore several removes from the poet's own text.N Schmidt, as part of his complete reconsideration of the evidence, questions these premises insofar as they authorize the Athlone editors to intervene in emending the text further than he himself does. RK's analysis of the archetype (the theoretical ancestor of all C-text witnesses), Schmidt (2011) says,

. . . leads them to think of the poet's holograph not as a fair copy awaiting only a final touching-up in places but as made up of working drafts (C Version, p. 89). Consequently, for someone copying what they see as a heavily-altered B-Text interleaved with new material, there was far more chance of error than had been the case for the scribe of B-Ø, who presumably worked from the author's fair copy. Such an interpretation allows the Athlone editors an ample license to intervene. But while it is naturally difficult to be uninfluenced in the process of editing by one's general sense of the probable process of revision, the richness of manuscript attestation in C and the relatively uncorrupt state of the archetype (compared with that of B) encourage editorial caution rather than boldness in its treatment.N

RK and Schmidt agree that the C-reviser's manuscript was corrupt, though superior to Bx, and yet the editors interpret this situation differently—RK emphasizing that the corruption licenses intervention and Schmidt (2011) asserting that the "relatively uncorrupt state of the archetype demands editorial restraint."N The question therefore is what—and with what authority—to emend? Assessing the relative state of corruption of any supposed source material for C, and assessing as well the verses that are new to C and which therefore have no source in B, are ongoing and expressly unsettled issues, as readers who compare Pearsall (2008), RK, and Schmidt (2011) will quickly discern, even though X is the base manuscript for all three C editions. The conflicts over whether to emend or not, and how to establish the grounds for emendation, arise from the very pages of parchment that are the subject of this Archive edition. And in many cases, the readings that modern editors struggle over were themselves the source of contention—in so far as it can be measured—among the scribes who produced the manuscript. That is, though Russell (1989) correctly asserts that Hm 143 is a professional production, over which much care was shown, the manuscript nonetheless reveals that a struggle for authority is being played out in the several hundred erasures and "corrections" to the text.N Schmidt is aware of this, and notes that X is the best candidate for copy text, even though it is "substantially less good than Y," which is rendered useless as copy text simply because it is defective before X.2.157 (in Schmidt's count).N As RK say, with characteristic litotes, "As for the third feature of an ideal basic text, that is relative freedom from obvious scribal error, Hm 143 does not commend itself."N In other words, all readers and editors will have to confront a great host of errors in X, for better or worse.

As far as the variants in X go, RK identify 323 errors that were "apparently introduced by its actual scribe."N One can trace the flow of these errors as RK perceive and express them by comparing their list against the words in brackets in their text. The Archive's very first presentation of a C-text manuscript is not about to alter the editorial designations of error, for to present a documentary model of X (our goal) is expressly not the same as editing C. It is apparent that many of the errors that RK isolate are clearly production errors, mis-read text, nonsense, repeated words and the like, apparent to any reader—except evidently the X corrector who missed a great many lapsus calami. So even though we are not editing C here, we have no doubt begun the compilation of a new data set that can be drawn from our new transcription, new discovery of erasure and correction, and new hand attributions.

Variants at the level of whole lines—missing lines, line divisions, partial lines—are indicated by the range of line numbers referenced to the line-numbering in RK. That is, each line of the manuscript as it is laid out on the page has a unique line number that is strictly sequential, regardless of the vagaries of line division. For those interested in the markup, this unique number is recorded in the "id" attribute of the "l" (or "line") element. The parallel of each line to the line numbering of RK is recorded in that line's "n" attribute. A single line in X can contain all or parts of two or more lines in RK, or it can contain only a fragment of what RK consider to be the whole line. Occasionally a whole line will be missing set against RK's lineation and some or all other surviving manuscripts, or a line will be present in X and many or even all other manuscripts that RK consider to be spurious. Our aligning of these parallels with RK is in no way intended to represent what X ought to read in our editorial judgment. Rather, it is strictly provided as a means of navigating the relationship of X to the lineations of other manuscripts as recorded in the RK apparatus. Sometimes, we have written a note on a line division in X that is not in accord with RK or with other manuscripts, but we have done so only in instances in which the textual situation is complicated, or in which that situation sheds light on relationships of X to other witnesses. In most of these cases, X will be in agreement with only a minority of manuscripts, which can make shared line divisions an added means of discerning genetic relationships.

For this reason, we maintain that the Archive's presentation of the text, with the images at hand for readers to check, is the very best way of offering textual data to a scholarly public hungry for factual information, and also the tools to examine for themselves any assertions we have made about the hands and about any given reading or correction. In this edition we do not explain the drama or solve the mystery, but we believe we have provided the necessary tools for this venture. The Archive can only hope that its fresh study of X and its new assessment of hundreds of readings and corrections will take its place in this ongoing inquiry, especially as other and eventually all of the C-text manuscripts are entered into the Archive.

II.2 Presentation of the Text: Transcriptional Policy

Our transcriptional policies are substantially those outlined in the Transcriptional Protocols of the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive. Highlights of our practice below do not represent divergence from Archive standards but rather are intended to provide useful clarifications of our practice in the context of manuscript X.

As a reminder to readers who want to see the text without any of our interventions, this can easily be accomplished by applying the Scribal Stylesheet.

II.2.1 <add><del> on Self-Corrections by Hand 1

Hand 1 makes numerous anticipatory errors, some of which he corrects by overwriting even before finishing the incorrect graph. In some cases, these erroneous strokes can be mistaken for otiose tildes or curls indicating a suspension that would be out of place. Hence, we mark up such instances with <del> and <add> to indicate clearly the self-correction and its likely motivation.

II.2.2 <app>

The <app> elements encode unique readings and those readings shared by X with only a small subset of manuscripts.

An interesting phenomenon here in X, and a very complicated issue for electronic editing in general, arises from trying to establish what the reading of manuscript X really is, and therefore what that reading is compared to other manuscripts. As noted above, we have tried to isolate what the original scribe, Hand 1, wrote, taking that to be the reading of X (I.4.1: The Corrections in the Text). We argue this because sometimes Hand 2, the corrector, revises away from a possibly archetypal or clearly majority reading toward a minority or erroneous reading. In the instances where an error by Hand 1 has been corrected by Hand 2, we identify in our markup and where necessary in notes the success or failure of the repair and its agreement or disagreement with a majority reading. In instances where Hand 1's reading has been completely erased, we have no choice but to accept the addition as the reading of X. Therefore, the ontological status of the X reading in each given instance is a fascinating and sometimes unanswerable question, because it depends on the local work that has been done in deleting and/or replacing any given word or phrase. We invite readers to examine each local situation, analyzing the markup and reading the notes, for we have described each situation as best we can in order to represent precisely what happened.

II.2.3 <damage> versus <del>

We have made no attempt to account for every instance of damage to the manuscript—especially where such damage does not interfere with the main text, a header, or a gloss. Rather, we have applied <damage> elements in cases where unintentional erasure or other damage might be mistaken for an intentional erasure.

II.2.4 Placement of <fw>, <head>, <marginalia> Relative to the Text

We have placed these features of the mise-en-page as carefully as possible in their exact physical position on the folio. Especially in the case of <marginalia>, this sometimes places the gloss a little further away from the text to which it appears to be referring. The display of such placements can also appear to be inaccurate as a result of how a browser interacts with a given monitor's screen resolution. Clicking on the marginal gloss will indicate the line to which it has been assigned. Most effectively, this can also be determined by examining the hyperlinked folio image.

II.2.5 <orig><reg> and "Shadow Hyphen"

Readers will note that determining the distance between letters in handwritten texts can be subjective. We have made every effort to apply <orig><reg> elements only in cases in which two words have clearly been written as one. In cases in which a single word has been rendered as two, we have applied "shadow-hyphens," which appear as modern hyphens in magenta under the All stylesheet.

The application of these so-called shadow-hyphens—actually tagged hyphens encoded in the transcription as <seg type="shadowHyphen">-</seg>—is not intended to correct a scribal error, which would be marked instead with <sic><corr> elements; nor is it intended to record a semantic distinction or distinction in part of speech, though it might at times coincide with such distinctions. Rather, shadow-hyphens join two or more groups of graphs that normally function as morphemic subdivisions of a single word, as in ho so or with oute, where the scribe might have written them in some places as separate units, but in others as an undivided word.

This hyphenation, in turn, is intended strictly to facilitate linguistic analysis and the building of accurate concordances that will be congruent across all documentary editions in the Archive. Hyphenation has been based in previous editions on the headwords of the OED rather than those in the MED because the MED was not complete in the early days of the Archive. This edition follows that standard in order to continue support for linguistic analysis in a uniform way among all documentary editions. Since the shadow-hyphen encoding has always been strictly a means of tokenizing words for machine analysis, forms attested in the OED beyond headwords have not been taken into consideration when developing the standard for this markup. Nor are the names of allegorical figures that are strings of two or more words hyphenated, such as in the many forms of Holi churche (e.g. X.1.73). In cases where the term holychirche (e.g. X.P.64) or any other such phrase is written as a single word, whether in reference to the allegorical figure or to some other association of the phrase, <orig><reg> tags have been applied.

Concerning the issue of determining whether letters are run together or separated, we remind our readers that scribal spacing is inconsistent in medieval manuscripts. Judgement calls about spacing reside, therefore, with the editors. Since this element of the markup is not intended to facilitate paleographical analysis of scribal spacing habits per se, cases have not been adjudicated with micrometer accuracy. Given that both the folio images and our underlying data are openly available, anyone wishing to re-mark forms according to another standard and/or for another purpose can always do so. In the future, it could be that use of an AI application to make hyper-accurate spacing adjudications will support revision of the present encoding in this and all previous editions, enabling paleographers to rely on the shadow-hyphens to represent a greater-than-x spacing in a single word. In the meantime, representing words broken into smaller components with either a shadow-hyphen or by silently transcribing them as single words will continue to support linguistic analysis.

II.2.6 <sic><corr>

For text in English, we apply <sic><corr> when we believe that the scribe has made an unintended blunder—the equivalent of a modern typo, which we do not take to represent a genuine variant. Such erroneous readings do not receive <app> markup because they do not represent scribal intention, and because agreement with other witnesses in such cases is likely coincidental.

In Latin, we have marked up with <sic><corr> elements readings in which the scribe in haste has omitted a suspension mark, or has written a word or phrase incorrectly set against a well-known and readily available source such as Scripture or other surviving medieval Latin texts.

In all of these cases the form in the <sic> element is the scribe's original rendering. The supplied reading in the <corr> element is what we take to have been his intention, and therefore the reading of X. The content of <corr> appears only under the All and Critical stylesheets. It is completely suppressed under the Diplomatic stylesheet, and is hinted at only by purple coloration of the <sic> content under the Scribal stylesheet.

II.2.7 Presentation of Capital Letters

This section is not a full analysis of the handwriting in X. Rather, it outlines editorial policies regarding the transcription of Hand 1 in the main text and of Hand 2 in the marginalia and corrections. Every effort has been made to transcribe as capital any letter form that has dimorphism associated clearly with the upper and lower case distinction, regardless of where such a letter may appear. <A>, which is weakly dimorphic by size and sometimes by shape can, because of this ambiguity in its dimorphism, present questionable instances. At X.16.335, for example, the scribe has transformed a mistaken <c> to the required <a> by adding an upper chamber and a rightward, vertical stroke, making the letter appear to be a capital <A> by size—an effect most likely unintended by the scribe. Hence, we have transcribed such letters as lower-case forms. In the treatment of line-initial letters in Hand 1, we have presented all of them as capitals except those that are strongly dimorphic for case, making the lower-case form unmistakable, regardless of its position. In other than line-initial cases, we apply the same standard in reverse. These letter forms are transcribed as lower-case unless they are clearly in the capital form. Here, <A>/<a> and <S>/<s> present a problem, in that their capital is only slightly different from their lower-case form. Sometimes the sheer size of the letter demands transcription as a capital, but other cases are ambiguous. We have gauged these letters to be capitals based on the size of surrounding letters that rise vertically to a full line rather than a half line.

Allographs such as the multiple forms of lower case <g>, <r>, <s>, and <v> common to anglicana hands are transcribed without differentiation. All forms of <u>, <v>, and <w> are transcribed according to the graph rather than according to the phoneme that the scribe intended the graph to represent.

The letters that are strongly dimorphic for case in Hand 1 are <B>/<b>-<G>/<g>, <I>/<i>-<R>/<r>, and <T>/<t>. <H>/<h>, <K>/<k>, and <L>/<l> are strongly dimorphic for case, but Hand 1 rarely uses the capital forms of these letters, even at the heads of lines. As a result, we transcribe the lower-case forms of these letters as capitals at the heads of lines, where Hand 1 overwhelmingly uses capitals, but elsewhere, we transcribe them as capitals only when the upper-case form is clearly present. <V> is dimorphic, but Hand 1 uses the two forms in free variation, unrelated to any apparent sense of capitalization. One of the forms is familiar as a component of the anglicana <W>/<w>—essentially a doubled <V>/<v>—which is often very large, but which nevertheless remains outside of any clear capitalization rule. Like <V>/<v>, <Ȝ>/<ȝ> has two forms—these only slightly different—but we have capitalized it only as a line-initial letter because neither of the forms can be clearly identified as that of the capital or the lower-case. The scribe's <Þ>/<þ> is essentially monomorphic, with only a single instance of a possible dimorphism for case by size (X.9.179), but the size of this graph might have been influenced by its being part of a correction. <W>, <y>, and <z> are monomorphic. <U> probably is monomorohic in Hand 1, but there is a paucity of data from which to establish a norm. A single instance of a capital <X> appears in an abbreviation for Christus (X.21.154), where it represents the Greek letter chi.

In I.4: Script and Hands, we note Carl Grindley's comparison of Hands 1 and 2 (Grindley's A and B).N The sample available in X for Hand 2 is small—confined to most of the marginalia and to numerous but brief corrections. In all cases, we have transcribed as capitals all letters that have strong case-related dimorphism, regardless of their position. As is the situation with Hand 1, however, dimorphism indicating capitalization is weak for letters <A>/<a>, <S>/<s>, <Þ>/<þ>, and <Ȝ>/<ȝ>. Upper case forms in Hand 2 are unattested for <B>/<b>, <K>/<k>, <U>/<u>, <V>/<v>, <X>/<x>, <Y>/<y>, and <Z>/<z>. For <P>/<p>, attestation of the upper-case form is present only in the erased names of Piers. Some of these remain lightly visible, but their transcription as upper- or lower-case forms is admittedly conjectural, based at least in part on the size of the erased space. Since the sample size is very small, it is not possible to declare with certainty that Hand 2 lacked clearly differentiated upper-case forms for <U>/<u>-<Z>/<z>, but such would be the norm in anglicana hands. We have transcribed as capital <H> all instances of the letter in Hand 2 that have a rightward-facing stroke, and as lower-case all those without this stroke. Good examples of these forms can be seen in the glosses at X.P.51.m.1 and at X.P.57.m.1. Hand 2's word-terminal <s> is strongly differential from that of Hand 1, having a very bold, angular upper stroke that can be as much as two or even three times the width of the rest of the graph. Hence, this graph has sometimes been the point of differentiation between a hand attribution of the noncommittal Hand X and Hand 2 in corrections, where the sample would otherwise be too small for such a determination.

III Linguistic Description:

X is not mapped by LALME. However, Simon Horobin (2005a) has constructed a Linguistic Profile in "'In London and Opelond': The Dialect and Circulation of the C Version of Piers Plowman," Medium Ævum 74 (2005), 254-5.

III.1 Phonology

III.1.1

fram; man; many(e) (101x) ~ money(e) (62x) ~ meny (1x); wan. The minority <o> forms are western: cf. LALME 'many' 4.26-7; dot maps 90-1.

III.1.2

hand(es) (34x) ~ hoend(e) (5x) ~ hond(es) (2x); lond(es) (49x) ~ land(es) (6x) ~ long(e) adj. & adv. (57x) ~ lang (only in the technical expression lang cart X.2.197); lomb(e) (2x) ~ lamb X.22.35 ~ pl. lombren X.9.266 ~ lambren X.3.416 ~ lambes X.16.289; stand(e) (14x) ~ standeth (3x) ~ stonde X.10.36 ~ stondeth X.7.238. Cf. LALME 'land' 4.206.

III.1.3

bittere; dryuen; wed(d)ewe(s) (7x) ~ wid(d)ewe(s) (3x).

III.1.4

bisy; brugge; bugge(n) 'to buy' (5x); churche (72x) ~ chirche (16x); fulle 'to fill'; gult(es); hulle; mery(e) (11x) ~ mury(e) (7x); murthe(s) (8x) ~ merthe (2x) ~ myrthe X.3.12; kyn(e) 'kin'; kynde; synne.

The <u> ~ <uy> spellings are western and did not survive before nasals. Cf. LALME 'bridge' 4.135; 'church' 4.144-6, dot maps 385-6; 'fill' 4.168-9 and 'hill' 4.198, dot map 995; 'kind' 4.204-5; 'sin' 4.251-2.

III.1.5

fuyr 'fire'; fust(e) 'fist'; huyre; kuth; muys 'mice'; pruyde (38x) ~ pryde (6x) ~ wischen ~ weschen. The <u> ~ <uy> spellings are south-west Midland; cf. LALME 'fire' 4.170-1; dot map 412.

III.1.6

sulue(n) (72x) ~ sulf(e) (9x) ~ self (6x) ~ selue X.3.235 ~ seluen X.1.84. The -<en> instances are always at line-end. The <u> spellings are south-west Midland; cf. LALME 'self' 4.248-50; dot map 521.

III.1.7

mylke; selk(e); suluer (17x) ~ seluer (8x) ~ seluerles (1x) ~ syluer(es) (5x) ~ siluer (3x). Also seth(en) ~ senne(s) ~ senes (OE sioþþan, seoþþan). Cf. LALME 'silver' 4.251, dot maps 1065-7; spellings with <e> and <u> are western.

III.1.8

Uncommon in ME, the spelling <ae> is used regularly in some words, usually for ME /a/, especially those that had <æ> in OE. So haen (43x) is more frequent than han (28x), whereas haeth (3x) is much less common than hath; craeft X.18.136 used once against craft, crafty etc. (36x); pa.sg. saet (3x) as often as sat; (y)waer (6x); also schaef X.8.359 vs. shef (OE scēaf), wollewaerd X.20.1 (OE -werd), taek, 'take' (ON), and words of French and Latin origin: kaes 'case', debaet, repaest, samaritaen.

III.1.9

'One' is usually oen, beside on and oon, and once ooen; woet, 'know(s)' is commoner than wo(o)t. Other examples are (from OE /o:/) cristendoem, foet, stoed, stoel, swoet, toel; (from OE and ON /a:/) hoem, knyhthoed, roes, woen; (from OE /a/ in lengthening group) coeld, foend, hoend; (from OF and OE /o/ with lengthening) coest, loest, moes; also resoen (AN resoun), soercerye (OF sorcerie). The first example is goed at X.3.95. For the significance of this feature see III.3 Dialect, below.

III.1.10

vch(e) (47x) ~ vcche X.9.237 ~ eche (4x between X.5.205 and X.7.50). The <u> spelling is west Midland; cf. LALME 4.23-5.

III.1.11

ar (54x) ~ or (6x); adv. er X.10.298, X.15.324 ~ eer X.1.208.

The <ar> type is predominantly south-west Midland, <er> is Midland, <or> is widespread; cf. LALME 4.67-9, dot maps 232-4.

III.1.12

moche (49x) ~ mochel X.6.331 ~ muche (21x) ~ muchel (3x, first at X.3.457) ~ mechel X.16.340.

The <u> forms are south-west Midland, the other forms are generally southern; cf. LALME 4.29-32, dot maps 101-04, 108-09.

III.1.13

noþer (29x) ~ nother (12x) ~ noyther(e) (6x) ~ neyther (4x); cf. LALME 4.220-4, dot maps 473-9. Forms of 'either' are ayther(es) (6x) ~ ayþer (6x) ~ either (2x) ~ eyþer X.19.297; cf. LALME 4.157-8.

III.1.14

The spelling of 'yet' is always the south-western form ȝut (WS ȝet). Cf. LALME 4.73-4, dot map 244.

III.1.15

The spellings of 'after' are aftur (166x), aftir (8x), after (5x). Cf. LALME 4.50-2.

III.1.16

Voicing of initial /f/ is seen occasionally: vorgoers (X.2.65), vayre (X.17.117), velynge (X.20.135); cf. LALME dot map 1180.

III.2 Morphology

III.2.1

The plural inflexion is usually -<(e)s> or -<is>, though -<us> is not uncommon, especially following <d>: gomes X.16.377; freres (34x), Freris (1x, X.P.56); prestes X.17.124; Bidders and beggers X.P.41; Of wardus and of wardemotis wayues and strayues X.P.92; gomus X.P.44, gomes X.16.377; stewardus X.P.94; marchauntz X.13.52. Ending in -<(e)n>: oxen X.21.266; lambren X.3.419; kyne X.5.18; shon X.5.18, but shoes X.22.219, and 'eyes' is yes (17x), eyes (5x), eyus X.7.57. Without ending: shep; ȝere after a numeral X.7.65, beside ȝeres (9x); pl. 'winter' is usually wyntur, wynter, beside wyntres (2x). 'Brother' has plural bretherne. Mutated plurals are brech, feet, teth, etc. The ending -<us> is west Midland; cf. LALME 'substantive plural' 4.104-5, dot maps 639-42.

III.2.2

The distinction between the weak (definite) and strong (indefinite) declension, singular and plural, is rather inconsistently maintained, with final -<e> sometimes added to strong adjectives of one syllable in the singular. For example, forms of 'great': weak singular: þe grete Clerk X.5.153, his grete myhte X.6.289; plural: grete othes X.6.369; strong singular: a greet cherl, of gret witte X.10.89 but grete nede X.9.67, grete ferly X.18.54, wax grete with childe X.20.137, a grete oeste X.21.344 (cf. a greet oest X.22.113).

III.2.3 Personal Pronouns

III.2.3.1 Singular

III.2.3.1.1

y, I, ich, ych; me, my, myn(e), myen X.18.259. Cf. LALME 'I' 4.203-04.

III.2.3.1.2

thow(e), þou, þow, thou; the, þe, thy, thi, þy, thyn(e), þyn X.14.190, thien X.19.112.

III.2.3.1.3 Third Person

III.2.3.1.3.1 Masculine

a, he; hym; his

III.2.3.1.3.2

nominative: she (49x), he (44x), hee X.22.198, a X.2.17, X.2.149 (11x, the last at X.7.321. The forms with initial <h> are west Midland; a is narrowly south-west Midland; cf. LALME 'she' 4.7-8, dot maps 11 and 15. Oblique cases: her(e); cf. LALME 'her' 4.8-9.

III.2.3.1.3.3

hit, it.

III.2.3.2 Plural

III.2.3.2.1

we; vs; oure.

III.2.3.2.2

ȝe; ȝow, ȝou X.1.2; ȝoure.

III.2.3.2.3

Nominative: they (206x) ~ thei (68x) ~ þei (36x) ~ þey (18x) ~ thay X.20.216 ~ þai X.9.179 ~ þay X.16.396 ~ hy X.22.262 ~ a X.3.89; the form a is rare south-west Midland, hy more generally southern; cf. LALME 'they' 4.10-12, dot maps 32 and 36. Acc. and dat.: hem; gen. her(e); cf. LALME 'them' 4.12-14, 'their' 4.14-17.

III.2.4

The pronoun 'who' (including 'whoso') has these forms: nominative: ho (78x), who (14x); accusative and dative: wham (5x), whom (2x); genitive: heos X.2.17, hoes X.1.47. Cf. LALME 4.283-4, dot maps 1106, 1107.

III.2.5 Verbs

III.2.5.1

Endings derived from OE -<ian> verbs are quite well preserved: louye X.1.146, louie X.5.189; maky X.15.242, makyn X.21.299; hatien X.4.110; swerien X.5.59. Presumably sittien X.8.285 and wynnien X.11.233 are error.

III.2.5.2

abidynge X.21.300; dryuyng X.22.10; sittynge X.7.108; slepynge X.9.305.

III.2.5.3

ascuth X.P.21; beeþ X.8.53; bereth; goth; maketh; semeþ X.P.34; smyteth; wanyeth. Syncopated forms are: fynt, halt, smyt X.13.251, stant X.20.44.

III.2.5.4

The endings -<eth> ~ -<en> ~ -<e> are in free variation. For example: maketh (8x), maken (6x), make (2x). With -<eþ> is ryseþ, at X.P.45 only. The -<eth> forms are southern, the -<en> forms Midland.

III.2.5.5

beth X.1.177; cometh X.22.74; gyueth X.19.258; holde X.5.198 ~ holdeth X.22.246. The form with -<e> is used before a subject pronoun: loke ȝe X.8.36; deuyne ȝe X.P.215.

III.2.5.6

The <y>- prefix is quite regularly preserved, so the forms of 'made' are mad (3x), made (2x), maed (2x), maked (2x), Imade (1x), ymad (3x), ymade (1x), ymaed (1x), ymaked (3x).

III.2.5.7

bake; come; y-dronke ~ dronke; founde ~ y-founde ~ gete(n); gyue; y-tauhte; take ~ y-take.

III.2.5.8

infin. be(n); pr. 1 sg. am; 2 sg. art; 3 sg. is, ys; pl. ar(e), aren, beth, beeþ X.8.53, buth X.9.164, ben, been; subj. sg. be; pl. be(n); imp. sg. be; pl. beth. Cf. LALME 4.32-4.

III.2.5.9

pa.t.sg. say (9x), sayh X.5.130, saw (4x, first at X.5.117), seigh X.P.17, seyh (17x), seyhe X.13.140, sye X.20.262, sigh X.P.11, syhe X.20.368; sg. and pl. sey (11x); pl. seye X.17.319, sye X.14.80; ppl. seyen (2x), y-sey (2x), y-seye X.16.380, y-seyen X.19.292. Cf. LALME 4.245-8.

III.3 Dialect

The language of X is south-west Midlands, more specifically the Malvern area of south-west Worcestershire, together with forms associated with London.N Samuels (1985) noted similar features in other C manuscripts, especially IUcYc. He considered "the most important diagnostic feature for south Worcestershire texts" to be the spelling <oe> for ME /o:/ III.1.9.N Samuels (1988) notes also the rare <ae> spelling as in maed III.1.8, the use of a for 'he' and 'she' III.2.3.1.3.1-2, noyther for 'neither' III.1.13, and ar for 'before' III.1.11. He comments on other forms in X: rounding before nasals as in mony, 'many', recessive in Worcestershire and varying with many, man, can III.1.1; rounded vowels descending from OE /y/ and /y:/, as fuyr, 'fire', pruyde 'pride', buggen, 'buy', except before nasals, so synne, kynde III.1.4-5 variation between ech and vch III.1.10, suluen and siluen, 'self' III.1.6, suluer and seluer, 'silver' III.1.7, beth, buth, ben and aren, 'are' III.2.5.8; variations in the endings -<ur> and -<ir> III.1.15, -<us> and -<is> III.2.1, -<ud> and -<id> III.2.5.6.

On the basis that with two exceptions the C manuscripts "form a dialectically cohesive South-West Midlands group,"N Samuels puts forward the hypothesis that in later life Langland retired from London to his native Worcestershire to oversee the copying of the last revision of his poem by local scribes. "It seems likely," he writes, "that a majority of the C-MSS were written locally in the south-west Midland areas indicated by their dialects, and not by immigrant scribes in London."N Simon Horobin (2005a) interprets the evidence differently.N He argues that certain extralinguistic features of the i-group of manuscripts, in particular XHcIUcYc, are more typical of London than of provincial scribes. He points to similarities in the form of the rubrics and the explicit at the end of the visio, the particular version of anglicana formata employed by the scribes, and the known London activities of the scribe of I.N Horobin (2005a) notes that the manuscripts contain corrections by a supervisor, particularly evident in X, suggesting that they were produced within a scribal community. He identifies similarities of presentation: they are books of a similar size with a similar number of lines on the page. These features, he argues, suggest a group of scribes working in proximity in London. In addition, these manuscripts have strong textual affinities. He therefore proposes that the south-west Worcestershire features of the language of the i-group reflect the language of their common exemplar, which presumably closely represented the language of Langland himself, and that the layer of London features are more likely to reflect the language of the scribes: "The authority of the text these manuscripts transmit demonstrates that their common archetype was close to the poet's holograph, and is thus likely to preserve features of the author's own dialect."N

Horobin further observes that the unusual spellings <ae> in words such as haen and craeft III.1.8 and <oe> to represent /o:/ as in oen, hoem, etc. III.1.9, characteristic of the Malvern area and frequent in X, are first used in Passus 3: haen at X.3.271, goed at X.3.95; before that the forms are han and gode.N This suggests the phenomenon known as "working in"; a scribe encountering a spelling that is not part of his own system will initially alter it to his preferred form, but gradually come to accept it and to reproduce it as it becomes more familiar. This gives strong support to the view that the manuscript was copied by a scribe who was not from Worcestershire, but who was content to reproduce many of the Worcestershire forms of his exemplar.

It is significant that such Worcesterisms frequently appear at the same positions in X as in the related manuscripts IHcYcUc, offering further evidence that they are not due to the individual scribes but are relict forms descending from the archetype.N The mixture of characteristic south-west Midland spellings with forms consonant with a London origin, such as many III.1.1, chirche and mery III.1.4, pryde III.1.5, self III.1.6, eche III.1.10, etc., can therefore most easily be accounted for by positing a London scribe copying an exemplar with Malvern forms, altering some to his own dialect, particularly at first, and reproducing others spellings as they stood in his exemplar. These Malvern forms are likely to be a close representation of Langland's own dialect.

IV List of Manuscript Sigils:

The following list of sigils of the manuscripts of Piers Plowman differs in some respects from the traditional sigils used since Skeat's edition. To a degree the inconsistencies in the sigils reflect the sequence of discovery of the relationships among them. If we were to use the traditional sigils, we would court ambiguity in an electronic text with identical sigils representing different manuscripts and different sigils identifying single manuscripts. British Library Additional 10574, for instance, has no sigil for A, is B's Bm, and C's L. We have, therefore, chosen to represent each manuscript with a unique sigil.

For descriptions of the C manuscripts, see A. V. C. Schmidt, "The Manuscripts of Piers Plowman," in Piers Plowman: A Parallel Text Edition of the A, B, C, and Z Versions, ed. A. V. C. Schmidt, vol. II.1 (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2011), 5-9; George H. Russell and George Kane, "The Manuscripts," in Piers Plowman: The C Version., ed. George H. Russell and George Kane, rev. ed. (London: The Athlone Press; Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 1-18; Derek Pearsall, "The Present Text," in Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the C-Text, ed. Derek Pearsall, Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies (University of Exeter Press, 2008), 16-20; A. I. Doyle, "Remarks on Surviving Manuscripts of Piers Plowman," in Medieval English Religious and Ethical Literature: Essays in Honour of G. H. Russell, ed. G. Kratzmann and James Simpson (Cambridge, 1986), 35-48; and W. W. Skeat, "Manuscripts of the Poem," in The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman in Three Parallel Texts, Together with Richard the Redeless, vol. 2, (Oxford, 1886), lxi-lxxii.

IV.1 C Manuscripts:

IV.2 A Manuscripts:

IV.3 B Manuscripts:

IV.4 BA Splice:

IV.5 AC Splices:

IV.6 ABC Splices:

V Bibliography

V.1 Editions

Burrow, John, and Thorlac Turville-Petre, eds. The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, Vol. 9: The B-Version Archetype. SEENET A.12. Raleigh, NC: SEENET, 2014. http://piers.chass.ncsu.edu/texts/Bx.

Calabrese, Michael A., Hoyt N. Duggan, and Thorlac Turville-Petre, eds. The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, Vol. 6: San Marino, Huntington Library Hm 128 (Hm, Hm2). SEENET A.9. Boston, MA: The Medieval Academy of America; Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 2008.

Chambers, R. W., R. B. Haselden, and H. C. Schulz. Piers Plowman: The Huntington Manuscript (Hm 143) Reproduced in Photostat, with an Introduction by R. W. Chambers and Technical Examination by R. B. Haselden and H. C. Schulz. San Marino, CA: The Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, 1936.

Kane, George, ed. Piers Plowman: The A Version. Will's Visions of Piers Plowman and Do-Well: An Edition in the Form of Trinity College Cambridge MS R.3.14 Corrected from Other Manuscripts, with Variant Readings. Rev. ed. Piers Plowman: The Three Versions 1. London: The Athlone Press; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

Kane, George, and E. Talbot Donaldson, eds. Piers Plowman: The B Version. Will's Visions of Piers Plowman, Do-Well, Do-Better, and Do-Best: An Edition in the Form of Trinity College Cambridge MS B.15.17, Corrected and Restored from the Known Evidence, with Variant Readings. Rev. ed. Piers Plowman: The Three Versions 2. London: The Athlone Press; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

Matsushita, Tomonori, ed. William Langland's the Vision of Piers Plowman, the C-Text: A Facsimile of Huntington Library, San Marino Ms Hm 143. Senshū Studies in Language and Culture 11. Tokyo: Senshū University Press, 2010.

Pearsall, Derek, ed. Piers Plowman by William Langland: An Edition of the C-Text. York Medieval Texts, Second Series. London: Edward Arnold, 1978.

———, ed. Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the C-Text. 2nd ed. Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies. Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 2008.

Russell, George H., and George Kane, eds. Piers Plowman: The C Version. Will's Visions of Piers Plowman, Do-Well, Do-Better, and Do-Best: An Edition in the Form of Huntington Library MS HM 143, Corrected and Restored from the Known Evidence, with Variant Readings. Piers Plowman: The Three Versions 3. London: The Athlone Press; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Schmidt, A. V. C., ed. The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Critical Edition of the B-Text Based on Trinity College Cambridge Ms B.15.17. London: J. M. Dent; North Clarendon, VT: C. E. Tuttle, 1995.

———, ed. Piers Plowman: A Parallel-Text Edition of the A, B, C and Z Versions: Text. 2nd ed. Vol. I. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2011.

———, ed. Piers Plowman: A Parallel-Text Edition of the A, B, C and Z Versions: Introduction and Textual Notes. Revised edition. Vol. II.1. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2011.

———, ed. Piers Plowman: A Parallel-Text Edition of the A, B, C and Z Versions: Commentary, Bibliography, and Indexical Glossary. Revised edition. Vol. II.2. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2011.

Skeat, W. W. ed. The Vision of William Concerning Piers Plowman in Three Parallel Texts, Together with Richard the Redeless. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1886; repr. 2001.

V.2 Studies

Alford, John A. The Manuscripts of Piers Plowman: A Guide to the Quotations. Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies 77. Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1992.

Bart, Patricia R. "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, edited by Michael Calabrese and Stephen H. A. Shepherd. Los Angeles: Marymount Institute Press, an imprint of Tsehai Publishers, 2013.

———. "The Whole Book: Textual, Codicological, Paleographical and Linguistic Artifacts in Huntington Library Hm 114 (Ht) of Piers Plowman." Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 2007.

Benson, C. David, and Lynne S. Blanchfield. The Manuscripts of Piers Plowman: The B-Version. Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK and Rochester, NY: D.S. Brewer, 1997.

Bowers, John M. "Langland's Piers Plowman in Hm 143: Copy, Commentary, Censorship." YLS 19 (2005): 137-68. https://doi.org/10.1484/J.YLS.2.302593.

Calabrese, Michael A. "[Piers] the [Plowman]: The Corrections, Interventions, and Erasures in Huntington MS Hm 143 (X)." YLS 19 (2005): 169-99. https://doi.org/10.1484/J.YLS.2.302594.

———. "Posthuman Piers?: Rediscovering Langland's Subjectivities." YLS 32 (2018): 3-36. https://doi.org/10.1484/J.YLS.5.116147.

Calabrese, Michael A., and Stephen H. A. Shepherd, eds. "Yee? Baw for Bokes": Essays on Medieval Manuscripts and Poetics in Honor of Hoyt N. Duggan. Los Angeles: Marymount Institute Press, 2013.

Doyle, A. I. "Remarks on Surviving Manuscripts of Piers Plowman." In Medieval English Religious and Ethical Literature: Essays in Honour of G. H. Russell, edited by Gregory Kratzmann and James Simpson, 35-48. Cambridge and Wolfeboro, NH: D. S. Brewer, 1986.

Chambers, R. W., R. B. Haselden, and H. C. Schulz. "The Manuscripts of Piers Plowman in the Huntigton Library and their Value for Fixing the Text of the Poem." The Huntington Library Bulletin 8 (1935): 1-27. https://doi.org/10.2307/3818102.

Duggan, Hoyt N. "The End of the Line." In Medieval Alliterative Poetry: Essays in Honour of Thorlac Turville-Petre, edited by J. A. Burrow and Hoyt N. Duggan, 67-79. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010.

Dutschke, C. W. Guide to Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Huntington Library. 2 vols. San Marino, CA: The Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, 1989.

Emmerson, Richard K. "'Or Yernen to Rede Redels?': Piers Plowman and Prophecy." YLS 7 (1993): 27-76. https://doi.org/10.1484/J.YLS.2.302860.

Fonzo, Kimberly. Retrospective Prophecy and Medieval English Authorship. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022.

Galloway, Andrew. The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman: C Prologue-Passus 4; B Prologue-Passus 4; A Prologue-Passus 4. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.

Grindley, Carl James. "A New Fragment of the Piers Plowman C Text?" YLS 11 (1997): 135-40. https://doi.org/10.1484/J.YLS.2.302786.

———. "From Creation to Desecration: The Marginal Annotations of Piers Plowman C Text Hm 143." M.A. thesis, University of Victoria (Canada), 1992.

———. "Reading Piers Plowman C Text Annotations: Notes toward the Classification of Printed and Written Marginalia in Texts from the British Isles 1300-1641." In The Medieval Professional Reader at Work: Evidence from Manuscripts of Chaucer, Langland, Kempe, and Gower, edited by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Maidie Hilmo, 73-141. ELS Monograph Series 85. Victoria, BC: The University of Victoria, 2001.

Hanna, Ralph III. "Studies in the Manuscripts of Piers Plowman." YLS 7 (1993): 1-25. https://doi.org/10.1484/J.YLS.2.302859.

Horobin, Simon. "'In London and Opelond': The Dialect and Circulation of the C Version of Piers Plowman." Medium Ævum 74, no. 2 (2005): 248-69. https://doi.org/10.2307/43632733.

Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn. "The Professional Reader as Annotator." In Iconography and the Professional Reader: The Politics of Book Production in the Douce Piers Plowman, edited by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Denise L. Despres, 68-91. Medieval Cultures 15. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. https://muse.jhu.edu/book/32818.

Kratzmann, Gregory, and James Simpson, eds. Medieval English Religious and Ethical Literature: Essays in Honour of G. H. Russell. Cambridge and Wolfeboro, NH: D. S. Brewer, 1986.

McIntosh, Angus, M. L. Samuels, and Michael Benskin. A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English. 4 vols. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1986.

Mooney, Linne R., and Estelle Stubbs. Scribes and the City: London Guildhall Clerks and the Dissemination of Middle English Literature, 1375-1425. Manuscript Culture in the British Isles. Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: York Medieval Press; Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2013.

Nixon, Howard. "Harleian Bindings." In Studies in the Book Trade in Honour of Graham Pollard, edited by Ian Gilbert Philip, Richard Julian Roberts, and Richard William Hunt, 153-94. OBSP New Series 18. Oxford: The Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1975.

Parkes, M. B., and R. Beadle. Geoffrey Chaucer: The Poetical Works. A Facsimile of Cambridge University MS Gg.4.27. 3 vols. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1979.

Russell, George H. "'As They Read It': Some Notes on Early Responses to the C-Version of Piers Plowman." Leeds Studies in English 20 (1989): 173-89.

———. "Some Early Responses to the C-Version of Piers Plowman." Viator 15 (January 1, 1984): 275-303.

Samuels, M. L. "Dialect and Grammar." In A Companion to Piers Plowman, edited by John A. Alford, 201-21. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

———. "Langland's Dialect." Medium Ævum 54, no. 2 (1985): 232-47. https://doi.org/10.2307/43628894.

Schmidt, A. V. C., trans. Piers Plowman: A New Translation of the B-Text. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Steinberg, Theodore L. Piers Plowman and Prophecy: An Approach to the C-Text. Routledge Library Editions: The Medieval World 49. New York: Routledge, 2019.

Thorndike, Lynn. "Unde Versus." Traditio 11 (1955): 163-93.

Thorpe, Deborah. "Tracing Neurological Disorders in the Handwriting of Medieval Scribes: Using the Past to Inform the Future." Journal of the Early Book Society for the Study of Manuscripts and Printing History 18 (2015): 241-248, 325.

Turville-Petre, Thorlac. "Editing Electronic Texts." In Probable Truth: Editing Medieval Texts from Britain in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Vincent Gillespie and Anne Hudson, 55-70. Texts and Transitions 5. Los Angeles: Brepols, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1484/M.TT-EB.1.101733.

Uhart, Marie-Claire. "The Early Reception of Piers Plowman." Ph.D. diss., University of Leicester, 1986.

Warner, Lawrence. Chaucer's Scribes: London Textual Production, 1384-1432. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Weiskott, Eric. "Middle English fobbere and the Critical Editing of Piers Plowman." English Studies 105, no. 4 (2024): 529-35. https://doi.org/10.1080/0013838X.2024.2330814

Wood, Sarah. Piers Plowman and Its Manuscript Tradition. York Manuscript and Early Print Studies 5. Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: York Medieval Press; Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2022.

———. "Two Annotated Piers Plowman Manuscripts from London and the Early Reception of the B and C Versions." The Chaucer Review 52, no. 3 (2017): 274-97. https://doi.org/10.5325/chaucerrev.52.3.0274.

V.3 Works Consulted

Adams, Robert. "The Reliability of the Rubrics in the B-Text of Piers Plowman." Medium Ævum 54, no. 2 (1985): 208-31. https://doi.org/10.2307/43628893

Ashdowne, R. K., D. R. Howlett, and R. E. Latham, eds. Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources (Online). Turnhout: Brepols, 1952-2001. http://clt.brepolis.net/dmlbs/pages/AdvancedSearch.aspx. Accessed August 16, 2024.

Benskin, M., M. Laing, V. Karaiskos, and K. Williamson, eds. An Electronic Version of A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English. Edinburgh: The Authgors and the University of Edinburgh, 2013. http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/elalme/elalme.html

Brown, Michelle P. A Guide to Western Historical Scripts from Antiquity to 1600. London: The British Library, 1990.

Cappelli, Adriano. Lexicon abbreviaturarum: Dizionario di abbreviature latine ed italiane. 6th ed. Milan: Ulrico Hoepli, 1967.

Dane, Joseph A. "Copy-Text and Its Variants in Some Recent Chaucer Editions." Studies in Bibliography 44 (1991): 164-83.

Du Cange, O.S.B., Charles du Fresne. Glossarium mediæ et infimæ latinitatis. Edited by D. P. Carpenter, G. A. L. Henschel, and Leopold Favre. 8 vols. Niort: L. Favre, 1883.

Duggan, Hoyt N., et al, eds. Transcriptional Protocols. Last modified June 7, 2018. Society for Early English and Norse Electronic Texts, 1994-2019. http://piers.chass.ncsu.edu/resources/transcriptionalProtocols.html. Accessed August 16, 2024.

Lewis, Charlton T. and Charles Short, eds. A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879. The Perseus Digital Library, Gregory R. Crane, ed. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/search?doc=Perseus%3atext%3a1999.04.0059

Galloway, Andrew. "Reading Piers Plowman in the Fifteenth and the Twenty-First Centuries: Notes on Manuscripts F and W in the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive." (Review of Corpus Christi College, Oxford MS 201 (F). Society for Early English and Norse Electronic Texts (SEENET) 1. Edited by Robert Adams, Hoyt N. Duggan, Eric Eliason, Ralph Hanna III, John Price-Wilkin, and Thorlac Turville-Petre.) JEGP 103, no. 2 (2004): 232-52.

Guy de Chauliac. The Cyrurgie de Guy de Chauliac Edited by Margaret S. Ogden. Vol. 1: Text. EETS OS 265. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971.

Hailey, Robert Carter. "Giving Light to the Reader: Robert Crowley's Editions of Piers Plowman (1550)." Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 2001.

Hanna, Ralph, III. "A New Edition of the C Version." Review of George Russell and George Kane, eds. Piers Plowman: The C Version. YLS 12 (1998): 175-88. https://doi.org/10.1484/J.YLS.2.302769.

———. William Langland. Authors of the Middle Ages 3. Aldershot, Hants. and Brookfield, VT: Variorum, 1993.

Herrtage, Sidney J, ed. The English Charlemagne Romances I: Sir Ferumbras. EETS ES 34. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1879; repr. 1966.

Horobin, Simon. "The Scribe of Rawlinson Poetry 137 and the Copying and Circulation of Piers Plowman." YLS 19 (2005): 3-26. https://doi.org/10.1484/J.YLS.2.302587.

Kinney, Angela, ed. The Vulgate Bible: The Major Prophetical Works [with] Douay-Rhiems Translation. Vol. 4. 6 vols. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 13. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.

———. The Vulgate Bible: The New Testament [with] Douay-Rhiems Translation. Vol. 6. 6 vols. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 21. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.

Kurath, Hans, Sherman M. Kuhn, and Robert E. Lewis, eds. The Middle English Dictionary. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1952-2001. (Middle English Dictionary Online edited by Frances McSparran, et al. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Library, 2000-2018. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary)

Niermeyer, J. F. and C. van de Kieft, eds. Mediae Latinitatis Lexicon Minus. Revised by J. W. J. Burgers. 2 vols. Boston, MA: Brill, 2002.

The Oxford English Dictionary.. https://www.oed.com. Accessed August 16, 2024.

Pearsall, Derek Albert, and Kathleen L. Scott, eds. William Langland's Piers Plowman: A Facsimile of Bodleian Library, Oxford, Ms Douce 104. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1992.

Rothwell, W., S. Gregory, D. Trotter, Michael Beddow, and Verginie Derrien, eds. Anglo-Norman Dictionary. 2nd ed. London: MHRA, 2010. (Anglo-Norman Dictionary Online [AND2] edited by Geert de Wilde, Delphine Demelas, Karen Jankulak, and Brian Atiken. Aberystwyth and Swansea: University of Wales, 2024. https://anglo-norman.net/)

TEI Consortium, eds. TEI P5: Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange. Version 4.8.0, revision 1f9891a87. Last modified July 8, 2024. TEI Consortium, 2024. http://www.tei-c.org/Guidelines/P5/. Accessed August 16, 2024.

V.4 Abbreviations: