Latin Verses by John Gower and 'John of Bridlington' in a Piers Plowman Manuscript (Bl Add. 35287)

Abstract

LONDON, British Library, MS Additional 35287, produced c. 1400, is most widely known as an early and very important witness to the B version of Piers Plowman (sigil M), the only substantive work it contains. Also noteworthy, though, are the myriad jottings on its final leaf, fol. 104v, ‘which’, say George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson, ‘might reward expert and leisured study’,1 a promise fulfilled in the recent edition of the manuscript for The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive by Eric Eliason, Hoyt N. Duggan, and Thorlac Turville-Petre.2 The first of these jottings, they remark, is ‘a Latin nota concerning the ten post-resurrection appearances of Christ’, which, one might add to the editors’ account, traces its lineage to Augustine's De Consensu Evangelistarum III, xxv, 83, quoted as well in Aquinas's Summa Theologiae IIIa q. 55 a. 3 ad 3. Beneath this list, ‘the leaf is dominated by a competent drawing of an elaborate mace standing on a base; the spike of the mace is not completed where it meets the Latin nota, which must therefore have preceded it.’ At the scroll drawn as part of the mace, at the bottom of the leaf, is a version of the Index of Middle English Verse 4202 in a mid-fifteenth-century hand, with ‘mace’ for ‘betul’: ‘With this mace be he smete / That al the worlde may it wete / That geuyth a-way his owne thing / And goth hymsilff a-Beggyng’; above that appears, in a mid-sixteenth-century italic hand, Ovid's Heroides V, 7–8, ‘Leniter ex merito quicquid patiare ferendum est / Que uenit indigno pena dolenda venit’ and the monogram ‘DEN’ dated 1545.