Since the pioneering researches of George Russell and Marie-Claire Uhart, various studies have attempted to uncover the significance of the marginal annotations left in the manuscripts of Piers Plowman by scribes and by subsequent medieval and early modern readers. These investigations tend to focus, however, on a few copies of the B and C versions with unusually extensive material in the margins. That emphasis not only leaves the greater mass of manuscripts under-explored but also tends, as David Benson notes, to create a misleading impression of the general character of the marginalia. Most often in fact, as Benson observes, ‘the marginal notes reflect and index what is already in Piers rather than developing, commenting on, or challenging the text’; they are ‘elusive’ and ‘neither deep nor consistent’.

The continued focus on a small number of scribes who provide unusually full commentary also misleads in other ways. Because scholars have typically studied single manuscripts in isolation, or in comparison with just one or two other copies, they have underestimated the extent to which scribes treated marginal rubrics as an authoritative part of the work, to be copied alongside the rest of the textual material. It has therefore become commonplace to assert, like Christine Schott in a recent study of B-text annotators, that ‘[b]ecause no set or standardized pattern of ordinatio developed for Piers Plowman, it fell to the producers of each manuscript to present the text according to their needs and tastes’.

In fact, as I will demonstrate, Piers Plowman scribes combined, adapted, and quite often simply faithfully reproduced, several traditional forms of marginal presentation. Clear evidence survives for a programme of marginal annotation that originated in the B-version archetype and for two traditions of C-text annotation that correspond with the division of the manuscripts of that version into two large textual families. There are also some fragmentary survivals of possibly archetypal annotation in the A and C traditions. The general pattern of marginal glossing by the producers of Piers Plowman manuscripts is not, then, the expansive idiosyncratic copy, but rather minimal sets of notes that often proved remarkably durable in subsequent copyings over a long period.