Piers Plowman and Chancery Tradition

English orthography and morphology were gradually being regularized in the fifteenth century by the cohort of Chancery and Chancery-trained scribes. The manuscripts of the B version of PPl produced over the course of the this century increasingly reflect the trend toward standardization into the Chancery hand. MS. W reflects very few of the features that mark this trend, so that Kane and Donaldson’s selection of this manuscript for their base text does more to indicate WL’s ideolect and ideograph than to illustrate the process by which his ideolect is absorbed into the changing language.