Two lines added by a scribe to the end of the romance Kyng Alisaunder record the strong sympathetic response that the Macedonian’s life story often excited in medieval readers. The tale of the hero’s conception, his victory over the Persians, his travels in India and his death seems at first remote from the concerns of Piers Plowman. Yet this scribe who lamented the fate of a flawed but magnificent pagan is also the copyist of Piers Plowman A, as well as of three other romances with which Langland’s work appears in a manuscript anthology of c. 1400 (La). In fact, no fewer than eight distinct romances appear alongside Langland’s work in five surviving manuscripts, and the genre therefore provides an important context for the poem in both composition and reception. In those romance manuscripts, lives of Alexander constitute the most frequent pairing along with The Siege of Jerusalem: two Piers manuscripts contain that alliterative poem, two books contain Piers Plowman alongside Alexander romances and three Alexander texts in total appear in the Piers manuscript corpus.

Scholars have not always been sure whether such text combinations should be considered deliberate or mere chance survivals, reflections of the ‘relative popularity’ of the various works in question. But a closer look at the two books that contain Langland’s poem and Alexander romances suggests that Piers Plowman’s manuscript associations with ‘pseudo-historical romance’ reflect something more than coincidence. They witness rather a wider tendency, recorded in various ways in the corpus, to approach Piers Plowman as Will’s life history. As I will show, evidence from the marginalia indicates that medieval readers perceived Piers Plowman and The Wars of Alexander similarly as poetic chronicles, while the marginal notes in the well-known C-text copy X point to a reader who approached Langland’s work as a type of romance. Scribal alterations to the text also record the activities of ‘romance readers’ of Piers Plowman. I have already suggested in Chapter 1 that the state of the text in Sc might reflect the work of a reader who attempted to turn Piers Plowman into something more of a terrestrially bound ‘romance’ of Will’s quest for Piers.