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Stella Pates, Piers Plowman Manuscript Trinity College: Dublin 212—The Annals Revisited, Notes and Queries, Volume 56, Issue 3, September 2009, Pages 336–340, https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjp124
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Extract
ANY light on the obscure origins of this poem's many manuscripts is to be welcomed, so a return (through recent research) to the set of Annals by the scribe who wrote the famous note about Stacy de Rokayle and his landlord Hugh le Despenser III1 (first summoned to Parliament in 1338) is overdue. The Annals tell the story of Hugh's ancestors and heirs, and, by its association with the Lords of Tewkesbury, MS TCD 212, like its textual ‘twin’, MS University of London SL v 17,2 belongs to the cluster of manuscripts placed in the area east of the Malvern Hills rather than to Abergavenny.3 A former part of MS SL v 174 bears the impaled arms of Sir William Clopton and Joan Besford his wife, who owed service for lands held of Richard Beauchamp, 5th Earl of Warwick, Lord of Tewkesbury (then in the Diocese of Worcester) and husband of Isabel le Despenser.5 The Hoo family (whose arms are on Piers MS British Library Harley 6041) intermarried with the Despensers, through two Ferrers of Groby daughters. It is suggested that closely related families and trusted tenants borrowed each other's manuscripts of the poem for copying.
