6 - The Anonymous Huntington Scribe and Public Piers Plowman

Summary

The best-known scribe to copy Piers Plowman and Mandeville’s Travels together produced unusual copies of both: a paraphrased version of Mandeville apparently the result of speed-copying, and a notorious splice of materials from all three versions of Langland’s poem interspersed with unique verses probably of his own invention. Critics have generally approached the two productions, now bound together in the pages of Ht, as typical of the varied approaches that the prolific ‘Huntington scribe’ adopted toward different texts. But in fact these seemingly eccentric copies of Piers and Mandeville have more in common with one another, and with the Huntington scribe’s other work in literary manuscripts and London documents, than might at first appear. As he interpolated materials from Piers Plowman A and C into his B-text base, the Ht scribe created a peculiarly encyclopaedic form of Langland’s work. His text often looks to scholars like the eccentric product of the same ‘sometimes downright fanatical work habits’ frequently ascribed to the poet himself. But his apparently idiosyncratic approach was at the same time almost certainly influenced, I propose, by his familiarity with Mandeville and other popular Middle English texts of the kind he copied in his two literary compilations, Ht and London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 491. His work therefore illustrates the importance of extending the scope of enquiry beyond the individual manuscript to consider the whole oeuvre of a scribe. Although his Piers Plowman is typically studied apart from the remainder of his copying, the Huntington scribe’s other output can cast light on his Langlandian labours in ways not considered before.

The Ht scribe also provides a final instance in this book of the incipient ‘common’, ‘traditional’ or public presentation of Langland’s work that I introduced in detail in Chapter 2. Although his work demonstrates the value of studying an individual scribal oeuvre, that project is complicated by the way that he silently incorporates the work of many earlier, anonymous hands. The Huntington scribe has recently found himself at the centre of a series of disputed identifications that would place him within an elite group enjoying access to early authorial exemplars.