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Notes
I am grateful to the Committee on Research, the University of California at Riverside, which has helped defray transportation costs so that I could examine all three manuscripts. Derek Pearsall first suggested to me that HM 114 might be an object worthy of study; A. I. Doyle has been constantly encouraging and generous with his wealth of information about Middle English manuscripts.
See E. T. Donaldson's good-humored yet derisive summary of such views, "The Psychology of Editors of Middle English Texts," in Speaking of Chaucer (1970), p. 110.
See Walter W. Skeat, The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman (2 vols., 1886), II:lxx; and R. W. Chambers, "The Manuscripts of Piers Plowman in the Huntington Library and their Value for Fixing the Text of the Poem," Huntington Library Bulletin 8 (1935): 1-27, esp. pp. 2, 15. Interestingly, Chambers believes in the necessary stupidity of the "good" scribe and cites Housman for support; see pp. 7-8. George Kane and Donaldson refuse to collate the manuscript for their edition, Piers Plowman: The B Version (1975), because of the frequency of textual deviation, not limited to conflation; see pp. 14-15.
G. H. Russell and Venetia Nathan, "A Piers Plowman Manuscript in the Huntington Library," Huntington Library Quarterly 26 (1963):119-130, do not speculate on the agent responsible for the Piers, the conflations in which they describe with care. M. C. Seymour, "The Scribe of Huntington Library MS. HM 114," Medium Ævum 43 (1974):139-143, gave the scribe a name and an individuality.
Descriptive information follows in the appendix; there I make use of the concept of the "booklet" as developed by P. R. Robinson; see "The 'Booklet,' a Self-Contained Unit in Composite Manuscripts," Codicologica 3 (1980):46-69.
See A. I. Doyle, "The Manuscripts," in David A. Lawton ed., Middle English Alliterative Poetry and its Literary Background (1982), pp. 88-100, 142-147, esp. pp. 94 and 144, nn. 22-23.
For probable identifications of the paper stocks, see the Appendix. On the life of papers, see the discussion of Jean Irigoin, "La Datation des filigranes du papier," Codicologica 5 (1980):9-36, esp. pp. 21-22.
For a description of the so-called "Egypt gap," see M. C. Seymour, "The Irish Version of Mandeville's Travels," Notes and Queries 208 (1963): 364-366, at p. 364. The excerpt lifted from The Three Kings describes the garden of balm in Egypt, a sight which appears in ch. 7 of the Cotton version; see Seymour, Mandeville's Travels (1967), pp. 35-37.
Although other explanations are possible, they seem generally less plausible. For example, Huntington could be considered earlier than Harley, were one to assume that the correcting archetype did not remain available to the scribe when he came to copy the latter. Or the manuscripts might have been simultaneous productions, but only the completed Huntington ready for corrections when the manuscript containing them came to hand.
I am grateful to the generosity of Angus McIntosh for material on the scribe's dialect. See McIntosh, Michael Benskin, and M. L. Samuels, A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English (4 vols., 1986), 1:194, where the scribe is placed in the Rayleigh area (scribe 6030, grid 578 190). There is a developing literature on scribal migration; see my "The Origins and Production of Westminster School MS. 3," Studies in Bibliography 41 (1988): 197-218; M. L. Samuels, "Langland's Dialect," Medium Ævum 54 (1985):232-247; and A. I. Doyle, "Remarks on Surviving Manuscripts of Piers Plowman," in G. Kratzmann and J. Simpson eds., Medieval English Religious and Ethical Literature: Essays in Honour of George Russell (1986), pp. 35-48.
Conceivably the final booklet of Lambeth was shorter, only two quires, but all material after f. 290 has been lost.
"The Textual Transmission of the Alliterative Morte Arthure," in Norman Davis
The localization is based upon features preserved in rhyme—Old English ā both retained as ā and raised to q̄ (thus close to the border between these features) and OE ēag/ēah rhyming as ē (see lines 271 and 337), a highly restricted feature in northern areas.
In addition to the Kölbing-Day edition of the poem (EETS 188), J. R. Hulbert has discussed the relations of the manuscripts; see "The Text of The Siege of Jerusalem," Studies in Philology 28 (1931):602-612. I am grateful to Jean Preston for providing me a microfilm and an opportunity to examine the Petre/Taylor MS.
Frampton also copied two Duchy of Lancaster coucher books (now PRO D.L. 42, 1 and 2), Glasgow Univ. Library, Hunterian T.4.1 (two Latin historical texts which also appear in the Cambridge manuscript), a two-volume breviary for Henry IV (now lost), and Huntington HM 19920 (Statuta). See A. I. Doyle and M. B. Parkes, "The Production of Copies of the Canterbury Tales and the Confessio Amantis in the Early Fifteenth Century," in Parkes and Andrew G. Watson eds., Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts, and Libraries: Essays Presented to N. R. Ker (1978), pp. 163-210, esp. pp. 192-195 and nn. On the manuscripts of The Siege, see Doyle, "The Manuscripts," pp. 93-96, 143-144 (nn. 17-29); on HM 128 and Morgan M 818 (mentioned in the next paragraph), see Doyle, Piers, pp. 40, 42. The Morgan manuscript provides further evidence of south to north transmission in the east: it eventually returned to Yorkshire, where it belonged to the Ingilbys of Ripley Castle.
See "The Shaping of the Vernon and Simeon Manuscripts," in Beryl Rowland ed., Chaucer and Middle English Studies Presented to Rossell Hope Robbins (1974), pp. 328-341; and "University College, Oxford, MS. 97 and its relationship to the Simeon Manuscript (British Library Add. 22283)," in Michael Benskin and M. L. Samuels eds., So meny people longages and tonges (Edinburgh: privately, 1981), pp. 265-282. For a similar example of London exemplars making their way to the provinces, cf. Harley 7333, based in part on John Shirley archetypes but copied by the Austin canons of Leicester.
For the fullest listing, see Thorlac Turville-Petre, "'Summer Sunday', 'De tribus regibus mortuis', and 'The Awntyrs off Arthure': Three Poems in the Thirteen-Line Stanza," Review of English Studies 25 (1974):1-14, esp. pp. 12-14. To these uses, one can add, depending on the extent to which one chooses to take specific line-lengths and persistent alliteration as typifying the form, a number of other examples. Dux Moraud, in addition to the examples cited, contains at lines 46-54 a fragment of a full stanza. Turville-Petre's listing from "Ludus Coventriae" ignores seventeen further examples of the stanza, in a variety of metres, line-lengths, and rhyme-schemes: the entire "Proclamation" play; "The Creation and Fall" 1-91, 100-138, 143-272, 365-416; "Cain and Abel" 1-13, 32-44, 79-91, 105-195; "Noah" 1-117; "The Betrothal of Mary" 1-91, 116-141, 146-154, 171-183, 203-228, 242-254, 259-297, 354-408, 474-486; "Joseph's Return" 21-46, 49-61, 71-83, 147-159, 180-192; "The Adoration of the Shepherds" 1-13, 90-102; "The Adoration of the Magi" 69-94, 216-229; "Herod" 9-21, 28-40, 129-284; the entire "Baptism" play; the entire "Temptation" play; "The Passion I" 183-221, 462-513; "The Passion II" 17-29; "The Ascension" 18-43, 57-95; "Pentecost" 14-39; "The Assumption" Prologue 1-26, and play 1-80, 127-139, 149-161, 343-460, 468-494; the entire "Doomsday" play. In addition, two of The Digby Plays, generally in syllabic verse, include a number of stanzas—"Mary Magdalene" 114-126, 313-325, 381-393, 602-614, 938-949, 979-992, 1336-348, 1754-766, and a few fourteen-line variants, e.g. 452-465; "Christ's Burial and Resurrection" 1-13, 1147-1236, 1608-620. There are also a few stanzas, some fully alliterative, in the unpublished dialogue or morality play "Occupation and Idleness" (Index of Middle English Verse Sup. 3430.5), in Winchester, St. Mary's College 33A, ff. 65-73v; these occur at lines 1-26, 32-44, 192-204, 218-229 (with a line dropped). See Norman Davis, "Two Middle English Dialogues and their Language," Revue des langues vivantes 35 (1969), esp. pp. 464-465, with quotation of lines 1-13 and 192-195. Further, three brief alliterative poems deserve at least notice here; because of differing handling of the "bob and wheel" at stanza end, they have fourteen lines to the stanza,
See G. H. V. Bunt, William of Palerne (Groningen: Bouma's Boekhuis, 1985), pp. 23-26 (for discussion) and pp. 328-331 (for a text of the fragment, now lost).
See N. F. Blake, "Wynkyn de Worde and the Quatrefoil of Love," Archiv 206 (1969):189-200. de Worde's editorial alterations of the text, which Blake neatly categorizes, show considerable continuity with earlier scribal behavior and thus provide a useful introduction to both the East Midlands dissemination of alliterative verse and to the HM 114 handling of textual detail in Piers Plowman.
The raw materials for a study of Susannah parallelling that of The Siege below are available in the collations of A. A. Miskimin's edition (1969). Generally speaking, Vernon and Simeon are derived from the same archetype as HM 114, but with at least one intervening copying. HM 114 retains a substantial number of archetypal readings rejected in this process; cf. among many others, 303 "a senek," retained in HM, but Vernon-Simeon "askede." But the archetype common to all three manuscripts, like that behind East Midland copyings of The Siege, already contained a number of errors which rendered it less satisfactory than the copies available to the Morgan and Caligula scribes; cf. 289 "fonned," but "fendes" in HM, Vernon, and Simeon. For fuller information on the variants of The Siege, see the collations in EETS 188 (although the Petre/Taylor manuscript was not available for the edition).
Thus the scribe was persistently aware of repetition as a formal device in The Awntyrs and occasionally intensified it beyond what other manuscripts would suggest was in his archetype.
The Textual Tradition of Chaucer's Troilus, Chaucer Society 1 ser. 99 (1916; rep. New York: Johnson, 1967).
This manuscript, as I hope to show elsewhere, derived its copy of Troilus by the quire from several different dismembered manuscripts; as a consequence, only portions of the text represent what Root called alpha (and are thus comparable to HM 114 and Harley 3943).
The majority of these variants are metrical in nature—retention or loss of -e, often with concomittant supply or suppression of compensating syllables, y- and -en, for example.
That some of the readings cannot have come from the archetype shared with Harley may imply only a single act of correction against an otherwise unrelated manuscript. For example, II:530 appears in both copies in the same non-metrical form "As likith the but from desperaunce"; in HM 114 "derke" is interlined after "from." HM 114 omitted II: 26; it is supplied, but in a form which includes "sped," not the erroneous "did" of Harley.
Harley lacks the hymn to love, the only one of these passages which occurs in the portion of the manuscript copied by this scribe.
The scribe had already signed the quires, and the inserted leaves disrupt the signature sequences. For example, in quire 17 (ff. 257-273), f. 264 is signed "7," although the addition of the hymn to love on f. 261 renders this now the eighth leaf.
Frank Shaer of the University of Adelaide is investigating this text and other versions of The Three Kings.
I find unconvincing the arguments for Bodley 851 as an authorial version put forward by A. G. Rigg and Charlotte Brewer, Piers Plowman: The Z Version (Toronto: Pontifical Institute, 1983). Certainly, that the HM 114 scribe was capable of similar textual concordance undercuts considerably the uniqueness of the activities Rigg and Brewer describe and would attribute to the author.
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