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Manuscript Description
Wales, Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS 733B
 
Title:Piers Plowman, AC hybrid
Author:Langland
Contents:ii flyleaves containing 14th century notes on common law; Piers Plowman
Language:English and Latin
Scribal Hands:
Examples of the hand. Click on the link above for full details and images of individual letter forms.
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Material:Parchment
No of Folios:ii + 1-192
Pagination:Modern pencil pagination on every folio in the upper outer corners recto and verso.
Quiring:Regular 8s.
Catchwords:Catchwords in scrolls half way down the lower margin towards the right of the text box. All catchwords appear to be in place except on the final folio where damage to the folio has caused loss.
Page Size:185 x 130
Frame:No ruling visible but pricking survives on most folios.
Writing Space:140 x 100
Incipits and Explicits:The titles of each Passus occur within the text next to the first line of the pen initial, as for example on f107r 'Passus sextus de Dowel'.
Marginal Headings:Certain lines and glosses are surrounded by boxes or scrolls in red ink. Some corrections are visible in the margins.
Flourished Initials:3-line blue ink initials with red pen-flourishing to begin each Passus.
Further Information:From the NLW website for this manuscript at www.llgc.org.uk/index.php?id=piersplowmannlwms733b 'It was rebound in blind-tooled calf in the first half of the eighteenth century, but retains as flyleaves two cropped leaves from a fourteenth-century manuscript containing a Latin text on canon law, which may well be part of the original binding structure. NLW 733B was acquired by the National Library in 1913 from Plas Power, Denbighshire, home of the Lloyd family. It may perhaps have come into the family's possession through Thomas Lloyd (c. 1673-1734), the Welsh scholar and lexicographer who spent his last years there and, like NLW MS 735C , this could be one of the 'three or four old manuscripts' mentioned in the 1778 catalogue of the library at Plas Power'. R. W. Chambers, 'A Piers Plowman manuscript', National Library of Wales Journal, 2 (1941-2), 42-3. Lawrence Warner, 'The Ur-B Piers Plowman and the earliest production of C and B', The Yearbook of Langland Studies, 16 (2002), 3-39. Piers Plowman Electronic Archive (http://www.iath.virginia.edu/seenet/piers/).
Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York, King's Manor, York YO1 7EP