The London Book-Trade and the Lost History of Piers Plowman.

We examine the conflated text of Piers Plowman in NLW MS 733B, tracing its relationships with other conflated texts of the poem, which we locate as products of the metropolitan book-trade. We first show that the A-text section of MS 733B, with its passages intruded from the C text, link it to Borthwick MS Add. 196. We then look at its C-text section to reveal that it is a pair with the C-text passages from the most thoroughly conflated of all texts of Piers Plowman, Huntington MS HM 114. We show that these two manuscripts record a C-text many generations removed from the original. Finally, we look at readings shared by MS 733B with the beta branch of the B text. An investigation of these features is intrinsically valuable, but added interest derives from Lawrence Warner’s recent proposal that the B readings in MS 733B actually survive from a good early draft of the C text and were only subsequently introduced into the B tradition. We argue that this is an impossible hypothesis. Instead, we show that MS 733B, though of no value for determining Langland’s text, illustrates a different ‘lost history’ from the one proposed by Warner: the circulation of passages from the poem among professional London scribes keen to provide as complete a version of Piers Plowman as possible. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]