Modern scholarship
The first modern edition of Piers Plowman was Thomas Whitaker's in 1813, from a
copy of the C text. He dismissed Crowley's copy as a bad, late manuscript reflecting
revision by the poet. In 1824 Richard Price identified a new form of the poem in the
first component of a conjoint AC copy, which he thought might be a ‘first draught’. In
1832 Thomas Wright published an edition of a B copy. Reviewing Whitaker in 1834,
and in his second edition, he challenged him: his own text was based on the best and
oldest manuscript; the differences that characterized Whitaker's copy were made by
some other person, who was perhaps induced by his own political sentiments to
modify certain passages, and was gradually led on to publish a revision of the whole.
In 1866 Walter Skeat, having examined twenty-nine copies of Piers Plowman,
identified five forms of the poem of which he judged three, each preserved in a
distinctive manuscript tradition, to be authorial. In 1867, 1869, and 1873 he