Protestant Elements in the Piers Plowman Texts of Robert Crowley and Takamiya MS 23

Abstract

INTRODUCTION

It is well known that certain sixteenth-century Protestant readers of Piers Plowman perceived this poem as a forerunner to their projects of social and religious reform and adopted the character Piers as ‘mouthpiece’ for polemical writings on these topics.¹ Moreover, the circumstances of the first printing of Piers Plowman have invited an imputation of narrowly sectarian motive and character to that enterprise: the editio princeps and two subsequent editions appeared in 1550, a period of flourishing of English Protestant printing, and were edited by Robert Crowley, a Protestant radical. In an influential study, John N. King described Crowley as having ‘kidnapped’ the medieval poem.² That assessment is almost uniformly countered by subsequent students, who emphasize instead Crowley’s fidelity to the manuscript tradition and anxiety to produce an accurate and comprehensible text.³ The current consensus is based in a firmer understanding of textual relations among Crowley’s three editions of Piers Plowman and a more comprehensive reading of Crowley’s marginal annotations to these editions. Other sixteenth-century engagements with the text of Piers Plowman are of interest in this connection as comparanda for Crowley’s treatments. Recent scholarship has focused productively on annotations entered by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readers in manuscript and printed copies of this poem, uncovering a wide range of responses to it.⁴ Though fewer in number, copies newly produced in the sixteenth century have a special claim on attention. This is the field we till in the present article.

The editions printed by Crowley in 1550 and Owen Rogers in 1561 join four surviving integral sixteenth-century manuscript copies of Piers Plowman.⁵ New Haven, Beinecke Library, MS Takamiya 23 (olim Sion College, MS Arc. L.40. 2/E) may be an especially instructive comparandum, as it is contemporary with Crowley’s prints and textually very close to his first edition; it could derive from the very manuscript employed by Crowley as his principal exemplar.⁶ The Sion manuscript (sigil S in the textual scholarship) is distinguished as a comprehensive modernization, offering copious and fine-grained evidence of the scribe’s apprehension of the language of Langland’s poem.⁷ The manuscript was described by George Kane as a ‘translation of Piers Plowman into Tudor English’.⁸ J. R. Thorne and Marie-Claire Uhart observe that S ‘exhibits … a religious orientation of the kind observable in Crowley’s marginalia’ and conclude that it ‘serves to illustrate a range of potential alterations which were apparently open to Crowley but which he nevertheless chose not to employ’.⁹ Thorne and Uhart did not support that statement with illustrative quotation, and the manuscript remains little known in the scholarship. Closer inspection turns up provocative detail. The great majority of S’s unique readings have no evident motive beyond linguistic modernization, and lines omitted in S have the appearance of routine mechanical error, not deliberate excision.¹⁰ Specifically doctrinal alterations to the text are infrequent, touching a small fraction of the relevant material in the poem, yet they are an unambiguous feature of the scribe’s practice, as Thorne and Uhart emphasize. A few readings supply new evidence relevant to an old question, Crowley’s treatment of Catholic materials. This is where we begin.

DOCTRINAL VARIANTS

The Crowley Texts

All modern treatments of Crowley’s doctrinal alterations to the text of Piers Plowman descend from Walter W. Skeat’s reports, with typical slippages along the way. In critical notes to his edition of the B-text, first published in 1869, Skeat recorded peculiar readings of the Crowley editions.¹¹ In the introduction to that volume he printed a summary list of lines in which, he affirmed, Crowley ‘falsifies his text of set purpose’.¹² The list comprises three lines only, and the final line-reference is erroneous, reading ‘xiii. 159’ for ‘xiii. 259’. In the 1880 Oxford University Press reprint, Skeat corrected this reference and added one more, bringing the count of ‘falsifications’ to four. Unfortunately, the uncorrected list was carried forward into Skeat’s widely used parallel-text edition.¹³ King seems to have known only the uncorrected list, to which he added three items, ignoring Skeat’s bad reference.¹⁴ Subsequent discussions have based themselves on King’s list.¹⁵ In the most recent discussion known to us, R. Carter Hailey shows that one of King’s additions to Skeat’s list—Christe in place of scrifte at Bx 5.78—surely originated as a misreading of exemplar by Crowley or his compositor, for scrifte was restored in Crowley’s later editions.¹⁶ Another of King’s additions is adequately (and repeatedly) answered in the scholarship. It need not be mentioned again. Taking due account of Skeat’s corrected list and subsequent tradition, scholars today may recognize, as attributable to Crowley, five doctrinally motivated alterations in his text of Piers Plowman. These remove references to Marian devotion (Bx 7.212), transubstantiation (Bx 12.98), the mass (Bx 13.272), Marian devotion again (Bx 15.188), and purgatory (Bx 15.362).¹⁷ The first four of these variants were remarked by Skeat; the last is King’s unique addition.

In each of the four lines remarked by Skeat, the Takamiya manuscript retains the reading of the B-version archetype and hence its expression of Catholic religion. These preserved readings are noteworthy for two reasons. First, the scribe’s non-interference might not be predicted, on the basis of Thorne and Uhart’s summary evaluation of this manuscript—a prima facie warrant for the kind of re-assessment we undertake in this article. Second, given that S is the extant copy most nearly related to Crowley’s principal exemplar, S’s retention of ancestral readings in these four lines tends to support the imputation of responsibility to Crowley: in these four lines, Crowley does seem to have falsified his text by suppressing reference to Catholic religion. The exception to the pattern is Bx 15.362, King’s unique addition to Skeat’s list. In this line S gives a reading clearly related to the Crowley text. It deserves special attention.

Bx 15.362 pertains to Anima’s description of charity. In the B-version archetype, Anima affirms that Charity frees the soul from the burden of guilt ‘And many a prisone fram purgatorie · þorw his preyeres he delyureth’. At this point S reads ‘And many prisoner from peyne / through his prayers he delyuereth’ (fol. 65 ^v) and the Crowley editions (sigil Cr) read ‘And mani prisoner by his praier he pulith from paine’ (sig. X2^v).¹⁸ Interpretation may begin by observing that S is intermediate between the archetype and Crowley’s text, reading prisoner in place of archetypal prisone and peyne in place of archetypal purgatorie, but without Crowley’s changes to phrasing or word order. A decisive explanation for this distribution of readings cannot be expected, but any explanation ought to take account of a related agreement later in the text. In passus 19 the besieged inhabitants of Unity are inspired to cultivate holiness, some through praying the rosary or making pilgrimages, ‘And other pryue penaunce · and some þorw penyes delynge’ (Bx 19.388).¹⁹ In place of penaunce, CrS again read paines, and the same substitution appears in London, British Library, MS Additional 35287 (sigil M). The M-reading is decisive here: following a shift in exemplar late in passus 16, the M-scribe copies from a manuscript either the same as or directly anterior to the one(s) later sourced by Crowley and the S-scribe.²⁰ Agreement of the three copies MCrS in the final four passus is firm evidence for the reading of their common ancestor, so we may be confident that the penaunce] paines variant at Bx 19.388 entered the stream of textual transmission at least a century before the Reformation; it probably originated as mechanical error, induced by attraction to subsequent copy (peynes ∼ penyes). The purgatorie] peyne variant at Bx 15.362 precedes M’s shift of exemplar, so we lack a pre-Reformation witness to the copy directly anterior to CrS, but CrS agreement could indicate that peyne had already displaced purgatory in the unique common ancestor of these two copies, perhaps induced by semantic attraction to prisone earlier in the line. Under this scenario, the S-scribe transmitted essentially the reading of the common ancestor, while Crowley made further changes to phrasing. (The shared CrS reading prisoner is not dispositive, for it is equally credible as independent convergent variation between these two copies, or another inheritance from their common ancestor.) This distribution of variants is paralleled elsewhere in the texts.²¹

Charlotte Brewer and Hailey have each questioned whether Crowley can be held responsible for the form of Bx 15.362, for why would he have left all other references to purgatory untouched?²² One should never presume that the textual interventions of a medieval scribe or sixteenth-century printer will embody a consistent application of principles: often they are demonstrably erratic. In the present case, however, Brewer’s and Hailey’s incredulity receives support from textual criticism. The number of doctrinally motivated changes securely attributable to Crowley drops from five to four. These are the same four remarked by Skeat in 1880.

TAKAMIYA 23: VARIANTS IN PASSAGES ANNOTATED BY CROWLEY

Students of Crowley’s Piers Plowman have always recognized that paratext, not textual emendation, was the principal vehicle for the expression of Crowley’s doctrinal commitments. Crowley greatly expanded the paratext in his second and third editions, adding a ‘briefe summe of all the principall matters’ and increasing the number of marginal notes almost tenfold, from about 50 to nearly 500.²³ In studies published in near simultaneity, Larry Scanlon and Michael Johnston observe that only a small fraction of the marginal glosses in the later editions polemicize on matters of theology or otherwise express an ‘anti-Catholic’ orientation.²⁴ Hailey, with reference to sixteenth-century discussions of printed marginalia in English Bibles, terms such notes ‘bitter’.²⁵ The typologies of marginal notes elaborated by Scanlon and Johnston differ in detail, and each is open to challenge, but they confirm a general point: the great majority of Crowley’s notes are not ‘bitter’. Johnston counts either seven or nine glosses in his category ‘Polemical Responses–theological’; Scanlon counts 15 ‘anti-Catholic glosses’. As Scanlon also lists the 15, his study will be preferred here: his list provides a convenient focus for comparative study of Crowley and S. If S exhibits ‘alterations which were apparently open to Crowley but which he nevertheless chose not to employ’, as Thorne and Uhart state, we may expect doctrinally motivated variant readings in S at loci that received ‘bitter’ annotation from Crowley. Such readings exist, but there are not many. Scanlon’s 15 ‘anti-Catholic glosses’ cluster in a dozen passages. S has interpretative variants (as opposed to linguistic modernization) in three of these.

The line between interpretative variant and linguistic modernization is a fine one; sometimes the two categories merge, as our examples below will demonstrate. One other preliminary caveat: to recognize the textual interventions of the S-scribe, one must be able to reconstruct the probable readings of the scribe’s lost exemplar. Our discussion of Bx 15.362, above, has already exemplified this problem in acute form. In the great majority of cases, however, reconstruction is not controversial. The readings of the S-scribe’s exemplar can usually be established by comparison with S’s nearest surviving genetic relations, namely, Crowley’s first edition and the medieval members of their subfamily: Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B.15.17 (sigil W) and San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 128 (sigil Hm), joined by M at the end of passus 16. Where the testimony of these copies indicates that the S-scribe’s exemplar probably retained the substantive reading of the archetype of all B-version copies, we compare S directly with the corresponding line in the archetype, as edited by John Burrow and Thorlac Turville-Petre (see n. 10). In such cases, quoting the published edition of the B-version archetype simplifies our apparatus. However, where S’s nearest surviving relations show that their group ancestor differed from the B-version archetype, we infer the probable reading of the S-scribe’s exemplar in the usual way, and quote this probable reading in the form of W.²⁶ W is selected for this purpose because it supplies a good approximation of the spellings of the S-scribe’s medieval exemplar, whereas Crowley’s prints have modernized spellings. The reconstruction of the S-scribe’s exemplar is the subject of a prior publication, to which we refer interested readers.²⁷ Quotations from W are indicated explicitly in subsequent discussion. Bearing these caveats in mind, we may turn to the three passages that attracted the attention of both Crowley and the S-scribe.

The first of the three passages is Clergie’s admonition to the religious orders (Bx 10.339–54). This was a salient passage in sixteenth-century reception of Piers Plowman: flagged by Crowley in his preface and with marginal notes, and often annotated in manuscript copies by sixteenth-century readers, this passage also enjoyed independent manuscript circulation, amalgamated to the prophecy of famine that forms the ominous conclusion to the passus on cultivating the half-acre (Bx 6.328–38).²⁸ In S neither ‘prophetic’ passage received marginal annotation. The only interpretative variant is a subtle one, pertaining to Clergie’s warning that the Abbot of Abingdon must receive a punitive ‘knokke’ from a king (Bx 10.350). Clergie adduces Isa. 14:4–6 in support of his warning, and the line that introduces this scriptural proof-text is rewritten in S. Where the S-scribe’s exemplar probably read ‘That þis worth soth seke ȝe · þat oft ouer-se þe bible’ (Bx 10.351), the S-scribe rewrote as ‘Whether this be true / Loke you that ofte ouerse the byble’ (fol. 39 ^v). Substitutions in this line are typical of the S-scribe’s interventions and unexceptional in themselves: Middle English worthen and soth, both obsolescent in sixteenth-century English, are replaced by easier synonyms, and you encroaches on ȝe in nominative-vocative usage, alongside other minor rewording. Worth is always revised out in S, but the scribe elsewhere sometimes renders this verb with shalbe, preserving the denotation of futurity. By rendering worth with be in the present line, the scribe apparently places the truth of Clergie’s warning in the present. On this evidence, the scribe very likely read Clergie’s speech as a prophecy fulfilled by the Henrician suppression of the monasteries. Yet he assigns no exceptional importance to this aspect of the poem.

The second passage that attracts the attention of both Crowley and the S-scribe is Anima’s discourse on ecclesial temporalities and the Donation of Constantine. In the text likely received by the S-scribe, Anima says that ‘Whan costantyn of curteysye · holykirke dowed’, an angel appeared over Rome, warning that the Church had been poisoned (Bx 15.555–9). The S-scribe replaced holykirke with the churche of Rome (fol. 68 ^r), while Crowley placed a marginal annotation ‘A medicyne for y^e Cleargie’ beside Anima’s exhortation ‘Take her landes ye lordes’ (sig. Y1^v, Bx 15.562), just below the line revised by the S-scribe. The differing responses of Crowley and the S-scribe at this textual nexus are exemplary. Crowley’s annotations tend to be extractive or way-finding: they indicate passages as having moral, doctrinal, or narrative significance. By contrast, the S-scribe performs little clarifications of ecclesiology and theology, always from a Protestant perspective.

The final convergence occurs in response to the lewed vycory’s bitter complaints about the papal court and cardinals, late in passus 19. Crowley marked this passage with an acerbic note, ‘The praise of cardinals’ (sig. Ee2^v), while the S-scribe indulged a unique interpolation. Where Langland’s vicar quips ‘I knewe neuer Cardinall / But þat cam from the Pope’ (quoting S; cf. Bx 19.426), the S-scribe added ‘And fewe vertues be there / or elles non’ (fol. 86 ^v). This is the sole line added by the S-scribe in the entire text of the poem; it amplifies the us/them polarity that runs through the passage. The vicar’s discourse clearly resonated with early modern readers, for the participatory responses of Crowley and the S-scribe are paralleled in other copies, for instance, in London, British Library, MS Additional 35157 (sigil U of C), where the corresponding passage has the annotations ‘A vile vicare’, ‘Lecherye regneth wher Cardynals dwell’, ‘the pope shold save’, and ‘the popes vyces’ (fols 116 ^v–17 ^r), entered in two hands of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.²⁹

TAKAMIYA 23: VARIANTS IN OTHER PASSAGES

The variants surveyed in previous paragraphs join a small number of similar doctrinal changes elsewhere in S, at points not marked by ‘bitter’ notes in Crowley’s editions. There is one polemical annotation in S: the main scribe enters ‘popery’ in the margin against a reference to the Gregorian mission to England (fol. 67 ^r, at Bx 15.463).³⁰ References to intercessory prayer, Marian devotion, the rosary, purgatory, and doctors of the Church are suppressed in at least the following lines:

• ‘Eche piler is of penaunce · of preyeres to seyntes’ (Bx 5.614). For preyeres to seyntes S reads Holie preyers (fol. 22 ^v).

• ‘And of crystes passioun and penaunce · þe peple þat of-rauȝte’ (Bx 18.6). S omits and penaunce (fol. 76 ^v).

• ‘Þat man shal man saue · þorw a maydenes helpe’ (Bx 18.143). For a maydenes S reads goddes (fol. 78 ^v).

• ‘In my prisoun purgatorie · til parce it hote’ (Bx 18.405). The S scribe writes the first four letters of purgatorie, then extends the head-stroke of g into a loop that crosses back through the word (fol. 81 ^v; Fig. 1).

• ‘Quod Piers harweth alle þat kunneth kynde witte · bi conseille of þis doctours’ (Bx 19.325). For þis doctours S reads grace (fol. 85 ^v).

• ‘Somme þorw bedes byddynge · and some þorw pylgrymage’ (Bx 19.387). For bedes byddynge S reads praying (fol. 86 ^r).

Fig. 1.

New Haven, Beinecke Library, MS Takamiya 23, fol. 81 ^v (detail), showing lines corresponding to Bx.18.403–6. Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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Additions to this list are likely, for we have studied the Prologue, passus 1–7 and passus 17–20 more closely than 8–16, but the cluster of doctrinal alterations in passus 18 and 19 does seem to be real, that is, not an artefact of our search procedures. Perhaps the narrative mode of passus 18 and 19 provoked the scribe in ways that earlier discursive treatments of similar topics did not. Or perhaps the scribe became more comfortable with the poem over its length, with consequent expansion in the scope of his activity.³¹ Whatever the reason, passages censored in S comprise a small fraction of relevant material.³² The suppressed or suspended reference to purgatory is the last in the poem; nine earlier instances of the word purgatorie were transmitted intact. Nor did the scribe suppress other instances of seyntes, nor any instance of the name Marie. At Bx 18.6 the S-scribe perhaps objected to the notion that Christ’s passion was an act of penance (rather than unique atonement). The objection must have been narrow, for no other instance of penaunce was deleted by the scribe.³³ Suppression of doctours at Bx 19.325 needs to be set beside the scribe’s handling of an earlier passage, in which Langland attributes a maxim of canon law to holy writ (Bx 17.315). The S-scribe changed the attribution to S. Augustine (fol. 76 ^r). That substitution is unique among copies of Piers Plowman and well informed, for treatises of canon law indeed cite Augustine as a source for the maxim Non dimittitur peccatum donec restituatur ablatum.³⁴ S also corrects the quotation to its standard form: other copies here read numquam for non. The scribe had some knowledge of medieval church law and a reformer’s zeal to separate Scripture from later accretions. What one finds in S is not so much censorship as sporadic efforts to clarify points of theology and ecclesiology.

BIBLICAL LANGUAGE, LITERALISM, AND PERIOD VOCABULARY

Biblical translations are also sometimes updated in Takamiya 23. Most changes to Biblical translation merely exemplify the lexical modernizations ubiquitous in this manuscript, yet one occasionally finds the scribe harmonizing the poem with the language of sixteenth-century translations of the Bible. A clear example is the treatment of Proverbs 13:24, quoted in Latin at Bx 5.40 and rendered into English two lines later, as ‘Who-so spareþ þe sprynge · spilleþ his children’. That is the wording of the fourteenth-century poet. The S-scribe adopted rodd and hatith in place of sprynge and spilleþ, respectively, and adopted the singular childe in place of children, yielding the line ‘Who spareth the rodd / hatith his childe’ (fol. 15 ^v). This is modernization of a sort, but not a modernization of vocabulary, for the vocabulary of the received text is not archaic. The sense ‘switch, cutting’ continued to be expressed with spellings in -n- in the sixteenth century (OED Online, s.v. ‘spring, n.¹’, sense IV.23.b; compare ‘sprig, n.²’), while the scribe elsewhere confirms that spill was part of his active vocabulary.³⁵ In this instance the scribe’s aim was not to weed obsolete words, but instead to harmonize biblical language with a recent and authoritative translation of the Bible into English. In the Coverdale Bible of 1535 and the Great Bible of 1540, the verse reads ‘He that spareth the rodde, hateth his sonne’.³⁶ The reading adopted by the S-scribe is a compromise between the fourteenth-century poem and sixteenth-century Bible translations.

Other minor revisions perhaps show a reformist concern with scriptural literalism. In passus 3, in debate before the King, Conscience opposes Meed with an exposition of Psalm 14. He poses the Psalmist’s question ‘Domine quis habitabit in tabernaculo tuo | Lorde who shal wonye in þi wones’ (Bx 3.236–7), then unfolds the Psalmist’s answer, alternating Latin quotation with English paraphrase and expansion. Conscience’s presentation of the fifth verse reads as follows in W, here a good representative of the presumed spellings and substantive readings of the S-scribe’s exemplar. Where the W-scribe truncated the Psalm verse in the third line, we supply the omitted words in square brackets:

The first line in this passage is a close literal rendering of the opening member of the Psalm verse. The second, fourth, and fifth lines are a free expansion of the second member of the Psalm verse, perhaps influenced by elements of the (unquoted) third verse of this Psalm: qui loquitur veritatem in corde suo, qui non egit dolum in lingua sua, nec fecit proximo suo malum, et obprobium non accepit adversus proximos suos. Most strikingly, from the Psalm’s injunction against accepting bribes for unjust rulings (munera super innocentem, clarified as contra innocentes in Peter Lombard’s commentary), Langland derives an injunction against accepting legal fees from the destitute. The godly man, in Conscience’s telling, is he who ‘enformeþ pouere men’, ‘Wiþ-outen Mede doþ hem good’. This interpretation of the Psalm verse is seemingly without precedent in the exegetical tradition, yet Langland insists upon it in the B-version.³⁷ The S-scribe accepted Langland’s argument in outline, but removed the reference to the pouere men: in S the beginning of the second line reads ‘And helpeth true men’ (fol. 11 ^r). The scribe’s wording in this case is indebted to subsequent clauses of the poem (‘pursueþ truþe’, ‘þe truþe helpeþ’), not the Great Bible, in which the beneficiaries of the godly person’s abstention from evil are designated predictably as ‘the innocent’ and ‘his neyghbours’. Yet S’s true men is a synonym for innocent/innocentem in a way that pouere men is not. The S-scribe declines to follow Langland in deriving, from this Psalm’s reference to money and gifts, the implication that holiness entails special consideration for those whose poverty inhibits them from buying legal advice or favour. The change is discrete, and S has no interpretative variants in the corresponding passage in the exposition of Truth’s pardon (Bx 7.39–65; fol. 28 ^r).³⁸ Yet it is hard to imagine Crowley making a similar change. Crowley’s vigorous denunciations of economic injustice are among the most striking qualities of his writings in the period in which he edited Piers Plowman, and a prominent theme in his marginal annotations to this poem.³⁹ In a marginal note Crowley endorsed Langland’s views on lawyers’ fees: ‘Lawiars shold take no money’ (sig. K1^r, at Bx 7.46).

Returning to the topic of biblical language, we observe two striking instances outside the context of translation. In passus 7, after Will wakes from his second dream, he muses on what he has dreamt and rehearses standard auctoritates for and against the trustworthiness of dreams. The line ‘And as danyel deuyned · in dede it felle after’ (Bx 7.172) appears in S with a rewritten b-verse, ‘so hit came to passe’ (fol. 29 ^v). What is striking here is the idiom: come to passe was established in literary English by William Tyndale, who employed it to translate Greek ἐγένετο (see OED Online, s.v. ‘pass n.³’). Later, when Will relates the fate of Noah’s assistants within a rant against clerical learning, the line ‘God lene it fare nouȝt so bi folke · þat þe feith techen’ (Bx 10.434) appears in S in the rewritten form ‘God graunt it come not so to passe / by them þat the feith teache’ (fol. 40 ^v). It seems very likely that the S-scribe derives the expression come to passe from sixteenth-century English Bibles and that his use of it is prompted by the biblical narratives related in these two lines. Perhaps the expression come to pass also lends gravity to the prophetic reproof in the second line. Like Crowley, the S-scribe was interested in prophecy not as ‘talk of wonders past or to com’ (as Crowley put it in his preface), but rather as the ancient Hebrew mode of moral exhortation.

The idiom come to pass is exceptional, for the S-scribe’s language is not generally innovative. In the course of linguistic modernization, the scribe regularly introduces lexical items not used by Langland, but the great majority of these are recorded by the MED or OED prior to 1450, a century before the writing of S. Exceptions are scattered here and there among several thousand unique variants. At Bx 2.221, the scribe renders the verb trusse (‘pack up, depart’?) with trudge (fol. 8 ^r), first recorded by the OED Online in 1547 in the sense ‘walk laboriously’ and in 1562 in the sense ‘go away, be off, depart’.⁴⁰ Also notable are lyvishe ‘alive, living’ (OED Online, s.v. ‘livish, adj.’), rendering the adjectival genitive lyues at Bx 19.161 (fol. 83 ^v) and the expression passeth not, meaning ‘does not care’ (OED Online, s.v. ‘pass, v.’, sense XI.51), rendering counteth nouȝt at Bx 19.457 (fol. 87 ^r).⁴¹ The first of these, livish, was used by Orm, John Gower, and John Capgrave, but most of the OED’s few quotations are from the mid sixteenth century and none are after 1552. Use of the word in an English translation of Erasmus’s Sermon of the chylde Iesus (STC, 2nd ed., 10,509, dated ‘?1536’), may be significant, as may uses by the prolific English reformer Thomas Becon (1512/13–1567). The OED’s first record of pass in the sense ‘care, regard’ is from the 1534 translation of Enchiridion militis christiani (STC, 2nd ed., 10,480), Erasmus’s most popular and widely translated devotional work.⁴² Such details of usage, properly contextualized within datasets larger than the OED, may eventually help to place the production of S.

LITERARY MEANING

Usually the S-scribe’s only evident motives are modernization and simplification. Yet there are rare exceptions, where lexical substitutions express something like a reading of the poem. As illustration we examine four lines from Conscience’s attack on Meed in debate before the king. The passage reads as follows in W, here again a good representative of the presumed spellings and substantive readings of the S-scribe’s exemplar:

In S the lines read as follows:

In the first line the S-scribe changes the spellings only. In the second line, the scribe supplies a subject-pronoun, as often elsewhere. The scribe also drops the -eþ inflection from maynteneþ and (two lines below) from bryngeþ, a change that puts the syntax and sense in some doubt. The forms maynteyne and bring could be third-person singulars with zero inflection, as one finds sometimes elsewhere in S.⁴³ But it is also possible that maynteyne is a third-person plural, with preistes as subject, and that bring is an infinitive, parallel with haue. On that reading, the target of incrimination abruptly shifts, midway through the second line. In Langland’s poem, Conscience’s focus is squarely on Meed, whom he blames for the bad behaviour of priests; in the S-scribe’s version, it is possible that the poem’s speaking voice becomes unmoored from the allegorical mise-en-scene and incriminates priests directly.⁴⁴ The effect of the restructured syntax, if it is indeed such, is an amplification of anti-clerical polemic, and this effect is unambiguously achieved by the remaining substantive variants in these lines. The variants comprise three lexical substitutions unique to S: prouendreþ is replaced by fedithe; lotebies by hoores; and barnes by bastardes.

Kane, in agreement with the MED Online, glosses provendreþ as ‘obtains prebendaries for’.⁴⁵ The S-reading fedithe expresses instead a sense apparently first attested in the sixteenth century (OED Online, s.v. ‘provender, v.’, sense 2). On this assessment, the scribe may appear guilty of semantic anachronism, rendering provendreþ with a sense current in his own century, not Langland’s. Yet the verb provendren is a hapax legomenon in Middle English, recorded by MED Online only at this location, so we should treat its sense with some caution. The verb derives from provendre (n.), the original sense of which is indeed ‘food allowance’ and the sense ‘animal fodder’ is well attested in Middle English. Langland himself plays on the ecclesial and equestrian senses of provendre later in the poem (Bx 13.254, 256). Kane and the MED perhaps define the hapax verb too narrowly. The less dignified senses—feeding people or animals—are relevant in Conscience’s attack on Meed and evoked by the bestial allegory of passus 2, where the members of Meed’s marriage party saddle legal officials and ride them like horses (Bx 2.164–8). As the S-scribe accepted provendre (n.) in passus 13, we may suspect that his treatment of the verb in passus 3 is not motivated by lexical discomfort. The reading of S is more emphatic, not merely easier; it sharpens an anticlerical polemic.

The scribe’s handling of provendreþ is consistent with his lexical substitutions in the next two lines. The etymological meaning of lotebi is ‘one who lies concealed nearby’ (< loten ‘to hide’ + by). The word occurs in Piers Plowman only here, but it occurs often enough in other records of Middle English to show that its sense was approximately that of lemman. These words name an amorous partner unsanctioned by wedlock; they are also deployed in the language of hot religious devotion. (The Northern Homily Cycle describes God as ‘vre soules lotebi’ and Christ as a ‘leue luttbye’: see MED Online, s.v. ‘lōte-bī, n.’) The third edition of the OED records no original instances of loteby after 1450, so the scribe’s rejection of the word is unsurprising, yet the word he puts in its place is not a synonym. Hore is what ‘þe moste comune’ call Meed once Reson turns the court against her (Bx 4.168). It is also a word irate nuns throw at one another in the C version, when possessed by Wrath.⁴⁶ Much later in the poem, Anima complains bitterly that clergy accept alms from usurers, whores, and avaricious merchants—that is, they accept gifts of ill-gotten gains (Bx 15.91). The pragmatics of this word are primary: it is a violent word, a gendered slur used by Langland at moments of exceptional stridency and bitterness.⁴⁷ By inserting this word into the present passage, the S-scribe sharpens the pejorative force of Conscience’s accusations. The substitution of bastardes in place of barnes has the same effect. Elsewhere in S, barn is sometimes rendered as childe (3x) or babe (1x). More often, the scribe let the word stand (14x). The scribe knew the word barn and expected readers to know it, but evidently judged it inadequate to the present context. He varied towards greater explicitness and sharper polemic.

Langland’s satiric knife was usually sharp enough in the condition received: variants of the type surveyed in previous paragraphs are rare. Such variants perhaps align S with the anticlerical themes and polemical tone of sixteenth-century Protestant ‘plowman writings’, surveyed by Anne Hudson, Sarah A. Kelen, and others (see n. 1, above), but fifteenth-century scribes of Piers Plowman also sometimes participated in the meaning of the poem, by varying towards a more explicit or emphatic reading.⁴⁸ The specifically Protestant orientation of S is unquestionable but sporadic; it is not controlling. In this respect S is somewhat more like the Crowley texts than previous treatments have allowed, and lends qualified support to recent revisionist accounts of the sixteenth-century reception of Langland’s poem, in which the Protestant temper of this reception history is decentred. Spencer Strub describes a category of annotators who ‘respond to the poem in ways that are hard to predict from printed references to Piers Plowman’ and are not ‘driven by confessional or polemical ends’.⁴⁹ Strub designates these annotators ‘idle readers’, which will not do for the S-scribe, but even the S-scribe’s busyness may be enlisted to support some form of Strub’s challenge: the scribe’s activities are not, on the whole, polemical, and even where polemical they are indeed ‘hard to predict’. This point may be sharpened by comparing the scribe’s modernizations of spelling, lexicon, and aspects of grammar: by contrast with the doctrinal interventions, linguistic modernizations do tend to be consistent, even predictable. A further contrast emerges if we turn to the matter of prophecy, another focus of revisionist scholarship.⁵⁰ As we have shown, the S-scribe was almost entirely unresponsive to this theme. For a more adequate account of the reception of Piers Plowman in the sixteenth century, students may need to look beyond both Protestantism and prophecy, and re-focus on practices of literary reading.

CONCLUSION: PIERS PLOWMAN IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

In a recent study Sarah Wood surveys fifteenth-century manuscripts of Piers Plowman to show readers’ persistent engagement with the poem as story, and she contrasts these story-centred readings with extractive reading practices, especially the circulation of ‘prophetic’ extracts, that took off in the sixteenth century.⁵¹ The contrast is apt, and Crowley’s apparatus of marginal notes has long been recognized as an instrument of extractive reading. Yet any treatment of the sixteenth-century reception of Piers Plowman must take account of the integral copies newly produced in that century. As the prophetic extracts figure prominently in recent treatments, we offer some remarks on these materials in conclusion, aiming to place the extracts and integral copies within the same field of view.

The extracted prophetic passages are exiguous, textually distant from the integral manuscript tradition, and often shorn of overt acknowledged connection to Langland’s poem, yet they circulated widely and deserve recognition as a distinct stream of reception.⁵² The prophetic stream reached its high-water mark in a pamphlet battle initiated, probably in 1547, by publication of a short verse tract under the title Dauy Dycars Dreame.⁵³ As its title implies (the reference is to ‘dawe þe dyker’, Bx 6.337), this tract draws from the same pair of Langlandian passages that circulated as reworked extracts in manuscript books of prophecy. Wendy Scase shows that the Dauy Dycar pamphlet battle extended over some five years, and she speculates that early instalments may have ‘stimulate[d] the market for printed copies of Piers Plowman’.⁵⁴ What can be said with confidence is that the reformist and prophetic strands of Piers Plowman-reception were united, a decade after Crowley’s prints, in the commercial ventures of Owen Rogers. Rogers reprinted the Dauy Dycar series in 1560; in the following year he reprinted Crowley’s Piers Plowman in conjunction with the Lollard spin-off Pierce the Plowman’s Crede.⁵⁵ Crowley himself seems to have perceived antagonism, not synergy, between the two streams. In the prefatory epistle to his editions of Piers Plowman, Crowley impugns the authenticity of one extracted passage and directs readers toward a moral-ethical apprehension of the other; marginal notes assert baldly that key passages are not ‘prophecy’ but rather ‘a reasonable gathering’, ‘truth gathered of the scriptures’, or ‘prognostication’. Crowley’s remarks on prophecy have received much attention in the scholarship, but a fundamental contribution is made by Mike Rodman Jones, who points to the circulation of seditious political prophecy among the insurrectionists of Kett’s Rebellion (1549).⁵⁶ Preparing the first printed edition of Piers Plowman, Crowley sought anxiously to prise the poem free of prophecy-mongers, absolve it from association with the rebellions of the previous summer, and render it safe for reading.

Whereas prophetic extracts and Protestant pamphlets might grasp Langland’s poem in shreds and patches, complete or notionally complete copies, newly produced in the sixteenth century, testify to a desire to read the poem. Scanlon describes ‘the expansion of vernacular literacy’ as ‘the most basic and consistent ideological motive’ expressed in Crowley’s editions: Crowley, Scanlon writes, ‘wants to make Piers Plowman available to a much larger audience and he wants to equip that audience with the information necessary to understand the poem in an unmediated fashion’.⁵⁷ Crowley’s aims are expressed in his paratexts, but also in his attention to minute textual detail, as shown by changes between the first and later editions. The Takamiya text differs from Crowley’s editions as sixteenth-century manuscript differed from print. Crowley, curating the poem for print, was obligated to ‘reproduce a text faithful to the MS tradition’ because his text needed to be acceptable to a wide range of unknown readers, including those who had come to know the poem in manuscript.⁵⁸ The publicness of Crowley’s enterprise is evident also in his prefatory effort to counter a reading practice that, in his view, formed an obstacle to sane reading of the poem. S, by contrast, was probably a household or coterie production. In this private context an unfavoured reading practice need not figure at all, while the received text could be transformed at will. S is indeed a text transformed, yet Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson’s statement that ‘the copyist entertained no notion of fidelity to his exemplar’ cannot stand without qualification.⁵⁹ The scribe copied the poem line by line, in the order received, with few omissions and just one added line. There are very occasional interventions to clarify or modify doctrine or impose a meaning. The scribe’s text is usually coherent on its own terms and it expresses a consistent intention: to produce a ‘plain English’ version of Langland’s poem. Its strongest claim to attention today is probably as a document of linguistic change. As such, Takamiya 23 illustrates the linguistic negotiations entailed in reading Middle English literature in the sixteenth century.

Footnotes