  Walter Skeat published his critical edition of William Langland's 14th
century alliterative poem, Piers Plowman, in 1886. In preparation for this he
located forty-five manuscripts, and to compare dialects, he published excerpts
from each of these. This paper does three statistical analyses using these
excerpts, each of which mimics a task he did in writing his critical edition.
First, he combined multiple versions of a poetic line to create a best line,
which is compared to the mean string that is computed by a generalization of
the arithmetic mean that uses edit distance. Second, he claims that a certain
subset of manuscripts varies little. This is quantified by computing a string
variance, which is closely related to the above generalization of the mean.
Third, he claims that the manuscripts fall into three groups, which is a
clustering problem that is addressed by using edit distance. The overall goal
is to develop methodology that would be of use to a literary critic.
