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Appendix 2
Some Athlone rejections of archetypal B variants as "easier" readings exhibit a rather casual disregard for the distinctive features of versional context. Thus at 5.195 the B archetype presumably read, "And in a tawny tabard of twelf wynter age." Kane and Donaldson emend this to read, "In a [torn] tabard of twelf wynter age." The truly striking emendation, "torn" for "tawny," has a very good chance of being right. But what has happened to the archetype's "And"? The answer is that this conjunction is not found in the archetypes of either A or C. The editors have accordingly suppressed it as a symptom of the well-known scribal tendency toward explicitness and parataxis. However, they have also overlooked key differences between the versions here that make this judgment less than apt. First, the A version lacks the three lines immediately preceding B5.195, the most important of which is B5.194: "Wiþ an hood on his heed, a hat aboue." C, on the other hand, has a near-equivalent which reads "With his hood on his heued and his hat bothe." By contrast with C, archetypal B ends line 194 with a locative preposition ("above") and begins line 195, if unrevised from A, with another locative preposition ("In"). The combination is awkward and momentarily disrupts the reader's perception of what is being described: "Is Avarice's hat tucked into a tabard that he wears on his head?" The addition of "And" breaks this clumsy syntactic pattern and prevents the misreading. So Kane and Donaldson were correct in sensing that its purpose was "smoothing." But they were probably wrong in imagining that we owe this helpful touch to a scribe's intervention. When Langland came to revise B to C, he noticed a way to clarify the relationships here without sacrificing tightness, viz., by changing "above" to "bothe." The change forfeits very little in vividness and enables him to do without the clarifying conjunction introduced in B. Surely such small progressive changes are exactly what we should expect of an author?
An apt illustration of how one can overlook contextual complexity while seeking to apply the criterion of the "harder" reading is provided by B6.179. Archetypal B here read "Ne hadde Piers wiþ a pese loof prayed hunger to cesse," while AC presumably read the b-verse of the same line, "preyed hym byleue." At first glance one is strongly inclined to endorse the choice of Kane and Donaldson to emend B; its phrase sounds inferior by comparison and is certainly more explicit. Moreover, it eliminates an obsolescent word, byleue, replacing it with a commoner synonym, cesse. Our initial verdict begins to seem doubtful, however, once we notice that the line(s) immediately following this phrase have been revised extensively in both of the later versions. In A, this phrase describes the first of a series of actions Piers takes to protect the folk against Hunger. Grammatically, the format is of a familiar contrary-to-fact sort, cast in the past subjunctive: "Had Piers not done x, and y, and z, and had the physician not done q, they [the folk] would have been dead etc." By contrast, in B all of the stipulations separating the first subjunctive (Had not Piers prayed Hunger to cease) from the conditional conclusion (they would have been dead) are excised. The larger effect is almost certainly beneficial. Some vivid details are sacrificed, but the stylistic result seems tighter and the key idea of the passage (massive death avoided) now seems more forcefully presented. Unfortunately, the elimination of the intervening A material, where Hunger's name is reasserted, obscures the reference point of hym in preyed hym byleue; thus Langland revised the phrase so as to make it more explicit. But when he re-examined this passage in revising to C, he still appears to have been dissatisfied; and the dissatisfaction seems to have been with the wording rather than the ideas. Now he chooses to restore the key phrase from A, preyed hym byleue, which is obviously stronger on its own merits than B's preyed Hunger to cesse. But he is able to do so because he has once again
Why did Kane and Donaldson fail to note these small points? For one thing, there are countless thousands of such details in every passus—too many for any editor ever to feel certain he has observed them all. But, more important here, I suspect, was their tendency to focus too exclusively on lexical rarity (i.e., the obvious superiority of byleue to cesse). This matter rendered the entire phrase suspect in their eyes. They might well have asked themselves, "Why would an author replace a relatively rare word with a more common one in his first revision, only to revert in his final revision to the more archaic term with which he began?" In one sense, such a question is unanswerably complex and is far from being the rhetorical question (with an obviously negative answer) that they appear to have imagined it. On the other hand, one superficially plausible answer may be supplied immediately, viz., that the B version, unlike A and C in this regard, specifically addresses a London audience and shows many more concessions to the lexical limits of such an audience than A (begun either before or shortly after the author had taken up residence in the capital) and C (whose surviving manuscripts strongly suggest that he had by then retired to his native region). At any event, dozens of simple variants between the versions raise this same issue, but Kane and Donaldson appear never to have considered it from any perspective but the most narrowly editorial.
A final example of this sort, where presuppositions of textual corruption in B have caused Kane and Donaldson to overlook subtle differences between versions, occurs at 9.17. Archetypal B here read, "Ac þe Constable of þat Castel þat kepeþ al þe wacche." Athlone alters this to "Ac þe Constable of [þe] Castel þat kepeþ [hem alle]." Once more B has been brought into line with A and C; "al þe wacche" is rejected as an "easier" reading. Presumably this phrase seems more obvious or explicit to Kane and Donaldson than its cognate, but that is merely another way of saying that it is slightly more vivid and appropriate as well. It seems doubtful that they would ever have replaced it on purely eclectic grounds; rather, it is the victim of covert recensionist reasoning. Two limbs of a trifid archetypal super-stemma have been voted against it and an eclectic rationale has been invoked to legitimize, and conceal, this process. Once more, however, the editors have failed to note significant distinctions between the versions. As in the case discussed above, B has enhanced the A-version passage by several details (in three new lines) before we reach the line in question. Specifically, B tells us that "Dobest is aboue boþe, a Bisshopes peere; / That he bit moot be do; he [boldeþ] hem alle; / [By his leryng is lad þat lady Animal]" (14-16). C preserves the first and third of these added lines but cancels the second. The explanation, then, for the shift from "hem alle" to "al þe wacche" to "hem alle" once more is found in the addition of the three new lines in B (the second of which ends with "hem alle") and the ensuing cancellation of one of them in C. Langland appears to have sensed the awkwardness of the repeated line endings in B and accordingly changed the latter (line 17) to "al þe wacche." When he dropped B9.15 from the C version, he reverted to "hem alle" in the later line since no problem of repetition now existed.
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