The Vision of Piers Plowman, Said to be Wrote by Chaucer:

Abstract

While critics today have become accustomed to taking Chaucer and Langland to form an “obligatory conjunction,”1 previous generations were much likelier to deem the attempt to compare these two poets “simply absurd.”2 After all, as Robert Aris Willmott would observe, “the author of Pierce Plowman is a shadowy personage, whom it is impossible to bring clearly before our eyes; but Chaucer stands prominently forward in one of the most interesting epochs of our history.” Chaucer, in sum, is upper class: Langland, with a vigorous mind and abundant powers of satire, spoke in the harshest language and with the most unmusical voice; Chaucer, with a fancy infinitely richer, and a vein of humour, more keen and brilliant, combined all the learning and accomplishments of the time. Instead of wandering among the Malvern Hills, he mingled in the pageantry of Edward's court, and cultivated his taste by foreign travel, and by intercourse, not only with the most distinguished persons of his age and country, but with the poets and scholars of the South.3 Such judgments, of course, are inescapably circular. Bodies of poetry are ascribed to each poet on the basis of assumptions about what those ascriptions should be. As Kathleen Forni has remarked with regard to the Chaucerian apocrypha, “texts, and authors, do not enjoy aesthetic autonomy and their value is ultimately extraliterary and historically contingent.”4 There is no “Chaucer” with a keen and brilliant humor apart from the texts assumed to be his on the grounds of their keen and brilliant humor. If, say, Piers Plowman had been ascribed to Chaucer, Willmott's characterization of the urbane poet would not have held up—which is why Willmott would probably have rejected any such ascription: Piers Plowman does not display the infinitely rich fancy we all know to have been Chaucer's.My hypothetical proposal is itself not so fanciful as it might at first appear, for this brief essay lays bare the existence of a longstanding tradition according to which Chaucer did in fact write Piers Plowman. A few of the items I will survey are not new to Chaucer scholarship, but mistakes of dating and other accidents of history have prevented a proper understanding of them. The others are wholly new. Recognition of this tradition is important on a number of fronts, aside from its inherent interest to students of Chaucer's and Langland's reception histories. For instance, the first item, by far the best known of the group, has substantial implications for the histories of the Plowman's Tale and William Thynne's edition of 1542. A set of eighteenth-century items—published in a massively influential book that has flown below the radar of Chaucerians—is derived wholly from that first item, but in turn sets the stage, somewhat perversely, for the first modern attribution of Piers Plowman to “William Langland.” And the other items are no less interesting as they shed light on the interpretive milieus of figures as disparate as Stephan Batman (a manuscript collector at the center of power in Elizabethan England) and one Elizabeth Johnson (an otherwise unknown reader in whose copy of Piers Plowman was a Chaucerian item that might have influenced her thinking). In sum, this essay contributes something new to the growing body of work on Chaucer reception and to the smaller, companion history of Langland reception. Together, these fields have revealed the power of concepts of authorship and the richness of the early modern archive.5 Perhaps Chaucer did not write Piers Plowman, but the notion that he did had a three-hundred-year run, and it made for some fascinating episodes that underscore the contingency of our own ascriptions of Middle English poetry.John Leland's sixteenth-century De uiris illustribus does not mention Langland or any independent poet of Piers Plowman, but it does include chapters on Gower and a substantial one on Chaucer, whose catalogue of works begins thus: Fabulae Cantianae uiginti quattor, quarum duae soluta oratione scriptaeSed Petri Aratoris fabula, quae communi doctorum consensu Chaucero, tanquam uero parenti, attribuitur, in utraque editione, quia malos sacerdotum mores uehementer increpauit, suppressa est.Twenty-four Canterbury Tales, of which two are written in proseThe Tale of Piers Plowman, however, which is attributed by the common consent of scholars to Chaucer's authorship, has been suppressed in both editions because it vigorously attacked the bad morals of the clergy.6 This item is universally taken to be a confused reference to the apocryphal Plowman's Tale. This assumption has both fueled and been enabled by another assumption: that Leland wrote this in the mid-1540s, a few years after the Plowman's Tale was first ascribed to Chaucer, in William Thynne's 1542 edition.Yet, as Alexandra Gillespie points out, the item was apparently produced before the 1542 edition of The Workes that includes The Plowman's Tale (Leland uses a 1532 edition of Chaucer to list his works), and Leland thinks of Langland's Plowman, Piers, not the unnamed pseudo-Chaucerian Plowman, as he writes up his bibliography.7 Gillespie's crucial point now receives confirmation in James P. Carley's edition of Leland's De uiris illustribus, which shows that this item is part of what he terms “Stage I” of Leland's production, ca. 1535–37, rather than “Stage II,” which began ca. 1542.8 This suggests that Thynne's inclusion of the Plowman's Tale in that edition might well be a sign of the influence of the De uiris illustribus rather than the other way around. That influence might also be seen in Francis Thynne's claim, in 1598, that Cardinal Wolsey had prevented his father from including a “pilgrymes tale,” presumably the Plowman's, in the 1532 Works.9 There is great confusion here, not least in the fact that Wolsey was dead by 1532. One of the likely explanations of the younger Thynne's claim, as Gillespie suggests, is that it developed from Leland's own account rather than from an event known to both of them.10Indeed this redating of Leland's item raises serious questions about whether the Plowman's Tale is his referent at all. Whatever poem he was referring to, he had not read it carefully: the Plowman's Tale has no Piers; Piers Plowman is no fabula, no “Canterbury tale.” On that criterion the two cancel each other out. But every other indication, it seems to me, would favor Piers Plowman alone. Whereas only a single copy of one edition of the Plowman's Tale (securely datable before 1542) is extant,11Piers Plowman was extant in numerous manuscripts, three of which (plus one excerpt) were themselves products of the first half of the sixteenth century.12 If by “Piers Plowman” Leland meant Piers Plowman, the absence of that poem's author from De uiris illustribus is no longer a problem. No one would wonder about the absence of the Plowman's Tale. Finally, Leland would no longer be guilty of a glaring and extraordinarily uncharacteristic error of confusion. (The charge of erroneous attribution would still stand, though.)It is difficult to dissociate these indications from their subsequent influence: The Plowman's Tale, perhaps as a result of Leland's confused remark, soon made it into the Chaucer canon, after which it seemed to be his obvious referent. When John Dryden in his preface to the Fables (1700) asserted that Chaucer “seems to have some little Byas towards the Opinions of Wickliff, … somewhat of which appears in the Tale of Piers Plowman,” he was channeling Leland and certainly meant the Plowman's Tale.13 But whether it was because others were confused by this important comment or because they referred independently to a tradition already known to Leland, the belief that Chaucer had written Piers Plowman and not the shorter Wycliffite poem had taken hold.14On August 22, 1577, a learned commentator inscribed his copy of Owen Rogers's 1561 edition of The Vision of Pierce Plowman and Pierce the Ploughman's Crede (STC 19908) with a treatment of this plowman problem. Simon Horobin has convincingly proposed that the best identification of this hand is Stephan Batman, noted collector of medieval manuscripts and chaplain to Archbishop Parker, who owned and inscribed two manuscripts of Piers Plowman.15 The inscription opens with (item 1 in a list) John Bale's Latin attribution of the “Visionem petri Aratoris” to Robert Langland and description of the poet as a disciple of Wyclif, together with additional thoughts on authorship: 2.Mention is made of Peerce Plowghman's Creede, in Chawcers tale off the Plowman.3.I deeme Chawcer to be the author. I thinke hit not to be on and the same þat made both: for that the reader shall fynde diverse maner of Englishinge on sentence; as namelie, Quid consyderas festucam in oculo fratris tui, trabem autem in oculo tuo etc.4.And speciallie, for þat I fynde Water Brute named in this Creede: who was manye yeeres after þe author off þat Vision.16 The Plowman's Tale is here unquestionably Chaucer's, as is the Crede, of which this annotator “deems Chaucer to be the author” because of its lines “Of Freres I have tolde before/In a makynge of a Crede.”17 But the author of þat Vision is not “on and the same” as Chaucer, a claim made on the grounds of dating and, it seems, the prominence of Latin therein but not in the Crede. Given how conclusively Batman (or whoever is writing this) takes the evidence against Piers Plowman's ascription to Chaucer to be, one wonders why he mentions the possibility at all. The belief must have been prominent enough—whether only in Leland's account, in this annotator's own previous thoughts, or in the literary circles of his day—to merit rebuttal. If not for that belief, however it was manifested, this note would not exist, at least not in this form.An inscription on the title page of a copy of Robert Crowley's first 1550 edition of Piers Plowman (STC 19906)—now Cambridge, CUL (Cambridge University Library), shelfmark Syn. 7.55.12—is explicit about the phenomenon Batman takes for granted: “The Vision of Pierss Plowman sd to be wrote by Chaucer some say by a Wickliffian about Rc 2d time.” This copy is signed “Ez. Johnson” in a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century hand. It seems very unlikely that Johnson was aware of the scholarly debates over the authorship of Piers Plowman that had occupied scholars since at least Leland's time. Had she been, she would have mentioned not Chaucer but instead one or both of the candidates discussed by every other such annotator. Each of these candidates has his own champion in the copy of Crowley's third edition (also 1550; STC 19907) now at the University of Michigan:18[hand 1 (except for = hand 3), 18c?]: N. B The author of this Poem was John Malverne Fellow of Oriel College in Oxford, who finished it in 1342. 16 Edw III.[hand 2, below, 18c?]: Another chronicle MSS attributes it to the Same but says it was finished 1427.See Ames H. Print, p. 270.It seems to be well esteemed as the first [Edn (?)] was in the yea[cropped].Ripe cheries many fol 35. l. 12 [verso in pencil, later hand] measles fo 38 l. 5See more particulars in Wharton's H. Eng. Poetry p 266 Vol 3.[hand 3, below, early 19c?]: I presume, whoever inserted the above names, mistook thus—the seat of the Poem is the Malverne Hills—but the Author was Robert Longlande a secular priest.See Warton, ut supra. So thoroughly intertwined in the consciousness of readers were “John Malvern” (John Stow's ascription, popularized in John Pits's 1619 Relationum Historicarum de Rebus Anglicis Tomus Primus)19 and “Robert Langland” (Crowley's candidate) that Thomas Tanner treats them as equivalents rather than competitors in his influential Bibliotheca Britannico-Hibernica of 1748.20 And those making such claims in their copies inevitably cite modern scholarly authorities—here, Joseph Ames and Thomas Warton.Johnson was the last in a long line of owners to have marked the Cambridge copy. A sixteenth-century hand inscribes the most comprehensive alphabetical index to the poem's topics I have ever encountered, and this hand makes a number of changes to the text and its punctuation. But if Johnson attended carefully to any of the earlier annotations, the likeliest candidate was another sixteenth-century hand—appearing on the back of the same page upon which she wrote her comment—which wrote: “An abell reader, a good sentence dothe ofte spill./quod Chaucer.” This comment is a digest of a couplet from the Romaunt of the Rose: “For a reder that poyntith ille/A good sentence may ofte spille” (2161–62).21 is a of the in which copies of Langland the same of as did those of more thoroughly copies of Chaucer or not these were to be the same for edition a to a edition of Chaucer in the same shelfmark Syn. says with a of apparently many years and many the and probably the In this has a Chaucerian from in I of and the couplet from the Romaunt in is and and the of the or to Chaucerian a more still for attribution of Piers Plowman to Chaucer than does the scholarly of Robert Langland and John Malvern in the for it is that she the to to the of the poem in her It seems most that she is what she has up from Dryden or a Whatever the in her Elizabeth Johnson had a a or so later in the of one who an Piers Plowman and Chaucer, as in her 1561 edition now held in the in in makes mention of a of and of his good Piers the Plowman the early the attribution of Piers Plowman to Chaucer the of scholarly in the form of catalogue of the is this description of of which That English One of the it to Robert and from one of the some have the Author to be one John but Leland the or of the in his that Chaucer was the Author of which to seems the most for Leland's had been in of which understanding seemed to to the two more Malvern and Robert we might wonder how so well in the have something so long as Piers Plowman, if the A were assumed to be as a of the Canterbury description of the Piers Plowman copy in the of the is this explicit de Plowman. among the persons to whom the of Piers Plowman have been I not any so that if Chaucer was the he his for of the who are against in these And to that the and another that will soon are of some I these extant in of in þat by “The of Piers Plowman,” takes this to be a of which his of the shows to be the first item of the manuscript and what he is here and the three two The is that to the that will would certainly have in the description of had long This description of has some modern but only in a very confused includes the item in of Chaucer and but she the is it appears as an item the but that is because she was on a of the which had been in And the item was much earlier than inscribed on the of of (an of which is now on the and he in description of not as the of the tradition this essay more for its in the of medieval literary For it if somewhat perversely, the of “William Langland” as the by which we now the author of Piers Plowman, as for the first and perhaps most influential modern of rather than Langland as author of Piers Plowman, by Thomas in his edition of the Canterbury a manuscript and three lines to in the from whom he at least has the to if not by The of Pierce are ascribed to one Robert but the best that I have the of the author his So in at the of p. 1 is this de de And in of p. 2, instead The also the account of in the of rather than itself from that he has here in the As it his copy of Crowley's first now shelfmark is carefully against the manuscript the to the of the than he has or than is to as the the of in the of authorship: a de for Chaucer in the of the poet in is the at the of “William Langland” as author of Piers Plowman. his power this new ascription is in whose has been prevented by modern of in eighteenth-century for the of MSS and were well known among the scholars of the later both on their own and reference to the The of College and of Cambridge University description of into the of his copy of Rogers's edition shelfmark its author as and points as well to the description of in the for in his the and literary Joseph says that proposal that the was is by the evidence that the is some to no more than a of the for which and three is if mentions In his own copy of Crowley's first 1550 edition in University shelfmark and on the in says that is for the by an inscription of and on “William claim to very to the of his and with of wonders whether readers of his of the attribution of Piers Plowman to the as an of is still wrote is no to that it was Robert Langland, or John but on the a substantial one that it was least two scholars would this comment into the of their Piers who that his not that and John literary and of the who also it in his of Thomas In the Crowley's and Bale's attribution of the poem to of the Langland, a little since is every to that he was a by at if not by the “John proposal is and the poet seems to be a such to his wholly but no candidate of his it would have been perhaps for his readers to wonder whether was his for of from in his on Chaucer as had his for of the The single with which his account of Chaucer's to, to the that he was at the the of that are to that he was two for a in a of Thomas his p. says that Chaucer copies of the tale of Piers Plowman it is known he did not the wrote a upon The point to Piers Plowman rather than the Plowman's Tale as the referent. The in this would be since all that was well known to most readers was that Langland wrote Piers Plowman, and Chaucer did a belief that a few The of Chaucer a was in own as in this display of which a his and scholarly The are for for he with or with this one and in another a great I a most and to no For such I and And and And the of the that by account of the as points now is to have his his was Francis a collector of who had one on to we know how readers or to on the authorship of Piers Plowman, we know something to in the of his at in fact did not author of this poem … is It is ascribed to Robert Langland a secular in and some have most it the work of But whoever the it seems that his was by the of which he is some at in the of the on every other of the had on this one his was only the author was not William Langland, Robert Langland, or do no than Piers Plowman to and that not in the light of In any this comment to the of a belief in Chaucer's authorship that has become wholly to certainly and might well have been the referent of who have belief to which only a single his in be to have any the very existence of a tradition that attributes Piers Plowman to Chaucer suggests that perhaps we should not at value the of earlier in which any such is Such claims as if Chaucer's from the unmusical poem with which his had been in some John notion their to Chaucer to be seen as the and as to Langland's might be a to up important in that Chaucer had to his because of Piers Plowman's but in he that the two not only in the and in as suggests, but also in and perhaps tradition by and has so in the Chaucer and Langland have seemed so It probably to to for But another is that some of the most have from histories of reception. into this has long upon a body of the in editions and such as those of or literary histories such as those by and his Thomas and in by the and manuscript and the the copies of the and editions in from to to but on the William at “the of produced by early of and at “the of and they a of about the of and their in the of their readers that we have only to If this survey of the Langland a tradition that our on so many one wonders what a of the Chaucer which is so much and richer, would bring to

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