L.13.127KD.13.120 I haue seueneL.13.127: Like the original L scribe, R omits seuene. sones he seyde · seruen in a castel
Cr1.13.127KD.13.120 I haue seuen sonnes he sayd seruen in a castell ,
C.13.128KD.13.120 I haue seuene sonnes he saide · seruen at a castel
R.13.124KD.13.120 I haue sonesR.13.124: Before sones, R omits seuene, an
omission exclusively shared with L (whose corrector supplies the missing word in the right
margin). Because of the stemmatic primacy and steady accuracy of both L and R, only two
explanations of this apparent omission seem plausible. Either an authorial marginal in Bx was transmitted in the same form by both alpha and beta, allowing the L
and R scribes each to overlook it by chance, while other beta scribes noticed and inserted it
into their text; or there is no omission here at all, merely an editorial addition of seuene by the scribe of beta prime (progenitor of the CrW subset of beta), a
change which then was passed laterally to the corrector of L. In favor of this latter
possibility is the fact that the line is metrically unexceptionable in the form shared by LR,
and the fact that a reiterative phrase, þo seuene, is invoked two lines
below this passage by the archetypal text. The wording there could well suggest to anyone
that the number reference might have dropped out of the earlier line and thus invited early
editorial "repair." On the other hand, the strongest evidence in favor of the first
hypothesis (randomly shared LR error caused by an overlooked marginal) is that seuene occurs in M as part of the scribe's original copying and not as an erasure /
writeover (the usual sign, in this otherwise independent witness, of later lateral
"correction" from the CrW branch of beta). The line does not appear in the C version. he seyde seruen in a castel .