Langland Versificator

Abstract

My starting point is Anima’s complaint that teachers nowadays cannot ‘versifie faire’ in Latin, with its implication that Langland himself was taught in school so to do. The essay has three parts: first, a gathering of the evidence, both from England and elsewhere in Europe, that verse-writing was regularly taught in medieval schools; second, a discussion of the schoolbook in Rylands, MS Latin 394, arguing that its proverbs, all in verse and arranged in alphabetical order of keywords, many offering multiple version of the same proverb, were models to be mined by schoolboys assigned to write verses; and finally, a survey of the quantitative verses in Piers Plowman, pointing out that the ends of hexameters and the ends of alliterative long lines have similar features, and arguing that the verses unfound elsewhere were composed by Langland. Four appendixes treat further aspects of the subject, including two other schoolbooks, Oxford, Bodleian Douce 52 and Yale 3.38.

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