On Latin Verses Probably by William Langland ( Piers Plowman C.17.285 A–B )

In baculi forma sit, presul, hec tibi norma; Fer, trahe, punge gregem, seruando per omnia legem. (‘In the shape of the crozier, bishop, may you find your rule: carry your flock, and pull and goad it[,] observing the law in everything’.)1 Among the internally rhymed (‘leonine’) Latin hexameters spliced into Langland’s Piers Plowman are two on a bishop’s responsibilities. Traugott Lawler identifies Langland’s first line as a variant of a known sententia that uses the form of the crozier as a metaphor for pastoral care.2 The second line has resisted source study. Derek Pearsall, citing Hans Walther’s index of Latin proverbs, referred it to ‘three lines copied in B.L. MS Lansdowne 397, f. 9v’, the first of which matches Langland’s first.3 However, Pearsall did not check the manuscript. Walther quotes only the incipit from the three lines in Lansdowne 397 (fourteenth c.).4 Having examined the manuscript, I can report that neither of the other two lines matches Langland’s second. The passage, found among other didactic Latin verse on this page, reads (italics mark my expansions of scribal abbreviations; ‘·’ represents the scribe’s punctus): In baculi forma presul datur hec tibi norma Attrahe per primum · medie rego · punge per ymum Attrahe peccantes · rege iustos punge vagantes. (BL MS Lansdowne 397, fol. 9v) In the second line, read medio rege for medie rego: reciprocal e/o confusion. Thus, we can dismiss the three-line passage in BL MS Lansdowne 397 as a source of Langland’s ‘Fer, trahe’ line. The Lansdowne passage matches one in the Ordinary Gloss to the Decretals of Gregory IX, which is among the parallels cited by Lawler.5 Lawler’s verdict that ‘L[angland]’s second line is not found elsewhere’ stands.6 The force of this conclusion is not merely negative. In an important article-length study of Langland’s Latin verses in the context of medieval elementary education, Lawler advanced the striking hypothesis that many of the unsourced Latin verses in Piers Plowman are Langland’s own compositions.7 Much of this Latin takes the form of leonines.8 Langland would have learned to compose Latin poetry at the same time that he learned to read, in grammar school. Lawler notes that the tripartite structure of Piers Plowman C.17.285b is inspired by other Latin maxims employing the crozier metaphor, many of which use the verbs (at)trahe and punge, yet Langland’s line is not a close match for any other.9 For example, no analogue for the line that John A. Alford, Pearsall, or Lawler could cite uses the noun lex ‘law’.10 Only one analogue known to me uses grex ‘flock’, the third of three lines inscribed on Otto of Hildesheim’s crozier: ‘Pasce gregem norma, | doce, serva, corrige forma’.11 The correspondence is not close: gregem is not a rhyme word, and the trio of verbs appears in Otto’s second hemistich, not the first. Even in Langland’s first line, 17.285a, none of the sources or analogues cited by prior scholars have sit presul. BL MS Lansdowne 397, fol. 9v, the Ordinary Gloss, and other instances all read, instead, presul datur. Langland himself may have adapted the line to achieve a more ornate syntax, with the apostrophe presul interrupting the second clause, ‘sit…hec tibi norma’, and embedded in the second hemistich, rather than coming between the two clauses, ‘In baculi forma’ and ‘datur hec tibi norma’, and located just after the midline caesura. Langland’s variant also increases the line’s metrical heft, replacing a dactyl (-sul datur) with a spondee (presul, with short -sul unclassically closed by h-). It is a very small adjustment, and as it happens one out of keeping with the strictest classical Latin rules for syllabification, which do not count h as a consonant. But it is an adjustment of a kind a medieval poet might think to make to a received sententious line, and of a kind that Langland can be seen to have made in other Latin in Piers Plowman with known sources or analogues, including biblical Latin.12 Langland was forever tinkering, in fact, with the form of the Latin quotations he transmitted. In the passage under consideration here we can see him fusing quotation to adaptation and adaptation, apparently, to original poetry. The passage’s precepts are ubiquitous, but Langland makes the phrasing and style his own.