Nonauthorial Piers: C-text Interpolations in the Second Vision of Piers Plowman in Huntington Library, MS HM 114

The copy of Piers Plowman in San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 114 (sigil Ht), a B-version framework into which has been interpolated material from both the A and C versions, as well as a number of unique lines, has achieved a certain notoriety.¹ Ht’s heavily conflated Piers Plowman, copied by “a clever London professional” recently identified as Richard Osbarn, clerk of the London Guildhall,² has been rejected by all editors as devoid of value for establishing the authorial text of the poem.³ However, the manuscript contains, interpolated after B 6.158, a version of C 9.66–87, 96–163, 189–280 plus C Prol.91, 95–127 that appears in a textual form unique to Ht and to one other copy, London, University Library, MS S. L. V. 88 (sigil J, the “Ilchester” manuscript), where the same passages from C appear as insertions into an A-text Prologue. Wendy Scase, who first identified the textual relationship between the C-text interpolations in Ht and J, simultaneously presented the controversial proposal that these interpolations reflect authorial draft materials subsequently revised in the received C text.⁴

The suggestion that Ht might, together with J, preserve traces of authorial activity surely represents a case of wishful thinking, as Ralph Hanna argued in a response to Scase and as Vance Smith has affirmed in the most recent study of the Ilchester manuscript.⁵ The textual evidence reviewed below places the HtJ materials at many removes from Langland’s pen. Ht’s interpolations of C-text material in the second vision nevertheless command interest precisely as a nonauthorial production, a particularly complex instance of how the poem was read—and sometimes rewritten—in the fifteenth century. As such a rewriting, the Ht redactor’s text of Piers Plowman rewards a more sustained literary-critical attention than it has typically received hitherto. In their recent remarks on the manuscript, Robert Adams and Thorlac Turville-Petre describe the materials from C shared with J as “slotted . . . randomly” into the ploughing scene of Passus 6 in Ht.⁶ Yet Hanna had earlier hinted at a certain literary intelligence behind the decision to interpolate these passages into Piers’s standoff with Waster and his companions in Passus 6: for the Ht redactor, Hanna pointed out, the false hermits described in the interpolations from C Passus 9 “apparently exemplify wasting.”⁷ Kathryn Kerby-Fulton similarly described Ht’s interpolation of these passages into the second vision as “audacious” and “inspired by enthusiasm for Piers’ confrontation with the wasters, whom the Ht redactor associated with lollars” (the latter another subject of the materials from C 9).⁸ Again implying a particular literary agenda in HM 114, John Thorne suggested, in an essay on confusion of Will and Piers in the early reception of Piers Plowman, that Ht’s version of Passus 6 showed a desire to expand the role of Piers, representing “a conscious augmentation rather than a confusion of identities, of Piers’s character at the expense of Will.”⁹

A closer examination of the use, in HM 114, of the C-text materials shared with J, alongside other interpolations in the second vision, allows some refinement and expansion of these earlier comments on the purpose and effects of Ht’s insertions. Ht’s use of these C-text interpolations in the second vision does not seem wholly “random,” displaying indeed an attentiveness to the themes and language of the poem that extends beyond simply connecting “lollars”/bad hermits and wasters. The intrusion of additional lines into Passus 6 represents not only a seemingly deliberate adjustment of the respective roles of Piers and Will but also one that stands interestingly at odds with the poet’s own use of his new C-text materials—although equally with some of the redactor’s own “editorial” decisions elsewhere in the second vision. The Ht redactor works, in general, against the direction of the authorial revisions in C in order to re-emphasize Piers the Plowman’s status...