IntroductionIn an article on Langland's dialect M. L. Samuels identified the majority of the manuscripts of the C version as belonging to a regionally coherent group whose production and dissemination were focused on the south-west Midlands.1 The manuscripts were shown to divide into two principal regional clusters which coincided with their textual affiliations: those manuscripts belonging to the i-group were focused on the Malvern area, while the p-group radiated outwards from that centre to adjacent counties: south-east Herefordshire, north Gloucestershire, east Warwickshire, and north Oxfordshire. Such a distribution fits well with the evidence of textual affiliation, with the two great manuscript families found to be closely related in terms of dialect. Furthermore the textually superior i-group focused on Malvern is thus closest to the poet's origins, while the textually inferior p-group shows a more dispersed distribution.It is of course possible that the dialects of these manuscripts indicate only the dialects of their scribes and not their places of production. A scribe's dialect is a reflection of where he acquired his literacy, rather than an indication of where he copied a particular manuscript. This point was emphasized by the editors of The linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English in their introduction, where they state that 'the Atlas tells us, in essence, where the scribe of a manuscript learned to write; the question of where he actually worked and produced the manuscript is a matter of extrapolation and assumption' (their italics).2 This point is of particular relevance for the identification of London manuscripts, given the evidence that provincial copyists migrated to the capital in search of employment, bringing their native dialects with them. However, Samuels argues that the close correlation between their dialects indicates that the C manuscripts were local productions and not produced in London by immigrant scribes. A useful comparison may be made with the B version manuscripts, many of which were copied in London. The London B manuscripts show a range of different dialects indicating copying by immigrant scribes in London using a variety of dialects. By contrast the C manuscripts show very close correlation in their dialects which could not be due to the input of a large number of immigrant scribes working in London. As Samuels notes: 'it would therefore be very strange indeed if each C-MS (if written in London) had found a SW Midland scribe.'3 Samuels goes on to argue that this high concentration of C manuscripts in the south-west Midlands is very unlikely to have occurred without 'an authorial presence' in the area, and he concludes that this provides further support for Skeat's view that Langland returned to Malvern later in his life.There is an element of circularity in this argument given that Skeat's view of Langland's return to Malvern was in part based on the dialect evidence of the C manuscripts, supported by references in the poem to his residence in London as a 'thing of the past', and the evidence of Richard the Rede/ess that Langland was in Bristol in 1399.4 Modern scholarship has rejected both Skeat's autobiographical reading of the poem and his attribution of Richard the Redeless to Langland, leaving only the dialect evidence as support for Skeat's theory concerning Langland's biography. In spite of this Samuels's discussion of the dialect evidence of the C manuscripts, and the support it appears to lend to Skeat's argument, have been influential in subsequent scholarship. For instance S. S. Hussey has likened Langland's return to Malvern to Shakespeare's return to Stratford, equating this move with a return to a 'simpler society, to a C-text where the tearing of the Pardon might have seemed unnecessarily dramatic (and so was omitted), where constant self-justification was no longer so necessary, and where the poet is an outsider no more'.5 The view that Langland returned to Malvern has since become widespread and has been reproduced in authoritative accounts of Langland's life. …