The Lost History of "Piers Plowman". Lawrence Warner

A. V. C. Schmidt, are also advocates of Ball’s knowledge of B (as they must be), but as we have seen the textual indications in fact point toward the opposite conclusion. The case for B, if it is to stand, must thus rely entirely on much more impressionistic responses to the letters. þe Kynges sone of hevene, maintains Schmidt, “is a characteristic group-genitive phrase little instanced outside the poem (B 18.320 //), and its conjunction here with the idea of ‘paying for all’ will recall the argument of B 18.340–41.”⁶⁰ So it might in the minds of readers predisposed to believe Ball knew B, but others might take more convincing. The concept of Christ as son of the king of heaven is pervasive, and its expression via this grammatical construct is not as rare as Schmidt suggests; Richard Rolle, too, refers to “Criste, the keyng sonn of heven.”⁶¹ Whatever affinities the phrase schal paye for al has with the argument of lines 340–41, “Ergo soule shal soule quyte and synne to synne wende / And al þat man haþ mysdo, y man wole amende,” seem to me very general as well. In this phrase George Kane finds a different echo, of “Ac for þe pore y shal paye, and puyr wel quyte here travaile” (B 11.195), which is even more distant.⁶²

      Kane cites another parallel, between sekeþ pees, and hold ȝou þerinne and

      Quod Consience to alle cristene tho, “my consayl is to wende

      Hastiliche into unite and holde we us there.

      Preye we þat a pees were in Peres berne þe Plouhman” (B 19.355–57)

      which seems more promising.⁶³ The appearance of Ball’s injunction immediately after the dowel tag seems to offer support—but, again, all this is also in Psalm 33:15, “recede a malo et fac bonum, quaere pacem et persequere eam” (“turn away from evil and do good: seek after peace and pursue it”).⁶⁴ Such phrases are everywhere in medieval devotional writings.

      The same problem attends Steven Justice’s extraordinarily influential assertion that Ball knew a particular passage of the B version. Attempting to understand Walsingham’s claim that Ball taught “that no one was fit for the kingdom of God who was born out of wedlock,” Justice cites Wit’s invective against those born out of wedlock: “Aзen dowel they do yvele and þe devel plese” (B 9.199): “Here are Ball’s bastards.”⁶⁵ Yet the teaching that those born out of wedlock are unfit for the kingdom of God is biblical: “A mamzer [KJV: bastard], that is to say, one born of a prostitute, shall not enter into the church of the Lord, until the tenth generation” (Deut. 23:2).⁶⁶ In any case, this line appears in A as well (10.213),⁶⁷ so the reasons for Justice’s nomination of B as Ball’s source cannot be found here. But the assumption that the line’s B rather than A appearance incited Ball prompts Justice to claim that “Ball found the epithet that dictated” the execution of Simon Sudbury, the archbishop of Canterbury, in Wit’s claim that “Proditor est prelatus cum Juda qui patrimonium christi minus distribuit” (“He is a traitor like Judas, that prelate who too scantily distributes the patrimony of Christ” [B 9.94α]). And on the basis of this second assumption he indulges in a third, claiming that the rebel letters revise Langland’s portrayal of the poem as inquiry, as an endless quest, in passus 8, 12, and 20.⁶⁸

      As Justice grants, however, anyone looking to connect bastardy, disendowment, and capital punishment, as does Ball, would find little in Langland.⁶⁹ What he does not acknowledge is that great riches, of the highest authority, await discovery in the chapters leading up to Moses’ invective against bastards:

      Thou shalt bring forth the man or the woman, who have committed that most wicked thing [i.e., idolatry], to the gates of thy city, and they shall be stoned…. Thou mayst not make a man of another nation king, that is not thy brother. And when he is made king, he shall not multiply horses to himself…. He shall not have many wives, that may allure his mind, nor immense sums of silver and gold…. But the prophet, who being corrupted with pride, shall speak in my name things that I did not command him to say, or in the name of strange gods, shall be slain. (Deut. 17:5,15–17; 18:20)

      St. Paul strikes a very similar chord in warning that “neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor the effeminate, nor liers with mankind … shall possess the kingdom of God” (1 Cor. 6:9–10; cf. Eph. 5:5). Langland’s own interest in this is suggested by his citation, just before the passage Justice quotes, of 1 Corinthians 7:1–2, “Bonum est ut unusquisqui uxorem suam habeat propter fornicacionem” (194α). Isabel Davis nominates this letter as a likely source for Wit’s discussion of marriage.⁷⁰ And Bromyard’s citation of both the Deuteronomic and Pauline materials in the entry on luxuria in his Summa Praedicantium is especially suggestive.⁷¹

      Ball is not speaking Langland, then; rather, both Ball and Langland are speaking St. Paul, most likely via a conduit such as Bromyard. Invectives against sexual misconduct pervaded medieval religious and ethical thought. A parallel debate about the relationship between Ball’s letters and Piers Plowman will bring my objection into focus. At least three commentators have argued that the absence of wrath from the lists of the deadly sins in both Ball’s first letter and Piers Plowman A, but not B, “points towards the A version as that known to the participants in the rebellion.”⁷² To this Jill Mann objects, “given the familiarity of the sevenfold scheme, it is difficult to see why Ball would have shown so slavish an adherence to the A text, especially since the six-line poem on the sins does not show any verbal influence from Piers Plowman.”⁷³ Just so—and given the familiarity of Deuteronomy, Paul’s letters, and sermonic materials, it is difficult to see why Ball would have shown so slavish an adherence to the B text, especially since the sermon on bastards does not show any verbal influence from Piers Plowman.

      John Ball’s writings have turned into a hothouse of allusions, in which evidence keeps sprouting without having established roots in an explanation of why Ball, who had long been preaching and taunting his ecclesiastical adversaries, would suddenly need Piers Plowman for such bedrock ideas as “doing well.” Thus while Richard Firth Green cites do wel and bettre as “confirmation, if any were needed, that this is a conscious Langlandian allusion,”⁷⁴ those not as invested in identifying Ball’s reading of the poem could just as easily see it as a conscious allusion to St. Paul’s “both he that giveth his virgin in marriage, doth well; and he that giveth her not, doth better” (1 Cor. 7:38), the verse in which Isabel Davis finds Langland’s inspiration for Wit’s definition of Dowel. We ourselves might do well to heed Margaret Aston’s revival of an earlier approach to the topic:

      “Lokke that Hobbe robbyoure be wele chastysed….” Of course it was possible to apply the words to Robert Hales, but the alliterative Rob or Hob Robber was an ancient and familiar figure. Should we not be wary (pace today’s literary scholars) of assuming that Piers Ploughman, who appears alongside Hob Robber, is a reference to Langland’s poem? The words “do well and better” scarcely prove the point, since “Do well” had its proverbial context long before the poem appropriated it. The figure of Piers the honest ploughman may already have been an alliterative type (as much as Tom Tinker, Miles Miller and Piers Potter) called on by John Ball as by Langland for their different purposes. This is an unfashionable view, but it had the support of C. S. Lewis.⁷⁵

      In light of the strength of her objection, and of the fact that the only items with strong Langlandian resonances appear in A and are traceable back to Bromyard, St. Paul, and the like, attempts to depict Ball as a sophisticated reader of the B version go far beyond what the evidence will support. The most these letters tell us is that some catch-phrases from A might have made their way somehow to Ball; and they might not even tell us that.

      Conclusion: The Earliest Circulation of Piers Plowman

      It is not impossible that Ball or Chaucer could have read the B version by c. 1380, just much more likely that they knew A, if any version at all. The quick promulgation of C (if indeed it is to be dated to c. 1390)—an average of almost one copy a year in each line of transmission, culminating in the surviving fourteenth-century manuscripts—underscores, as does the A line before it, just how shadowy the pre-1390 B tradition is by comparison. Over the course of this book the belief in an integral pre-1390