Authorial or Scribal? : spelling variation in the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales Caon, L.M.D. Citation Caon, L. M. D. (2009, January 14). Authorial or Scribal? : spelling variation in the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales. LOT, Utrecht. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/1887/13402 Version: Corrected Publisher’s Version Licence agreement concerning inclusion of doctoral thesis in the License: Institutional Repository of the University of Leiden Downloaded from: https://hdl.handle.net/1887/13402 Note: To cite this publication please use the final published version (if applicable). 2 Scribe B and his manuscripts 1. Scribe B During the past thirty years the scribe of the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales , as well as his manuscript production, have received a great deal of interest from scholars, and this has recently culminated in the discovery of his identity and in the identification of other manuscripts which might have been copied by him. According to the latest findings (Mooney 2006), the scribe’s name was Adam Pinkhurst; furthermore, he was not only the copyist of Hg and El, but also the Adam mentioned in the following poem by Chaucer: Chaucers Wordes unto Adam, his Owne Scriveyn Adam scriveyn, if ever it thee bifalle Boece or Troylus for to wryten newe, Under thy long lokkes thou most have the scalle, But after my makyng thow wryte more trewe; So ofte adaye I mot thy werk renewe, It to correcte and eke to rubbe and scrape, And al is thorugh thy negligence and rape. (Benson 1987:650) This is, however, not the first time that Adam Pinkhurst has been proposed as a possible identity for ‘Adam Scrivener’ in this poem. In the past the names of Adam Stedeman, Adam Acton and Adam Pinkhurst were put forward by Bressie (1929:383), Manly (1929:403) and Wagner (1929:474), respectively. The name of Adam Pinkhurst was first suggested in a short note that was published in an issue of the Times Literary Supplement in June 1929. In this note, Bernard Wagner claimed that he had found Pinkhurst’s name in the records of the Scrivener’s Company and, in particular, that he had come across it in a list of some forty men who “appear to have been of ye Brotherhood [of writers of the Court Letter of the City of London] between 1392 and 1404”. As this is the earliest list among the records, it is not known if Pinkhurst was a member of the Brotherhood at the time the Troilus was being written. However, 16 CHAPTER 2 if he were a member in 1392 he would have been engaged in the profession as an apprentice since 1385 – as a minimum of seven years was required. (Wagner 1929:474) Wagner’s suggestion was confirmed by Mooney (2006:98), who shows that Adam Scrivener and Scribe B, or the Hengwrt/Ellesmere scribe, were one and the same person: Adam Pinkhurst. Mooney’s evidence for this was Pinkhurst’s signature to an oath in the earliest records of the Scriveners’ Company, which the scribe joined shortly after 1392, as she noticed that the handwriting in the oath and the signature matched the handwriting in the Hg and El manuscripts. Mooney also believes that the scribe was from Surrey, and that his surname derived from Pinkhurst’s Farm, near Abinger Common, between Guildford and Dorking (see Figure 1). Figure 1. Map of Surrey (from www.A1Tourism.com) This implies that his dialect would not have differed much from the London dialect that was presumably spoken by Chaucer. In addition, Mooney writes that Adam Pinkhurst also seems to have had regular employment with the Mercers’ Company of London, whether on a part-time, full-time, or piece-by-piece basis. His affiliation with the Mercers is attested by three legal documents in which his name is linked with those of several mercers and by his handwriting both in a petition from the Mercers to the Lords of the King’s Council and in accounts of The Mercers’ Company. Together these documents demonstrate a long- standing affiliation with the Mercers from at least 1385 and lasting until at least 1395 and possibly as late as 1427. (Mooney 2006:106) SCRIBE B AND HIS MANUSCRIPTS 17 As a result of this discovery, it can be assumed that Pinkhurst was active as a professional scribe at the time when Chaucer was composing his Canterbury Tales , that is, between ca. 1387 and his death in 1400 (see below). He was apparently both a literary and a bureaucratic scribe, because seven of the ten manuscripts that Mooney attributes to him are literary works and three more are bureaucratic ones. The ten manuscripts that Mooney ascribes to Adam Pinkhurst are listed on her website of the Late Medieval English Scribes Project, and are the following: Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Peniarth 392D, Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales (the Hengwrt manuscript) Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Peniarth 393D, Geoffrey Chaucer, Boece Cambridge, Trinity College Library, B.15.17 (James 353), William Langland, Piers Plowman, B-text Cambridge, Trinity College Library, R.3.2 (James 581), folios 9–32v, John Gower, Confessio Amantis Cambridge, University Library, Kk.1.3, Part 20 (single leaf), Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales , end of Prioress’s Prologue and beginning of Prioress’s Tale Hatfield House (Marquess of Salisbury), Cecil Papers, Box S/1 (fragment of one leaf), Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde Kew, National Archive, SC 8/20/997, Mercers’ Petition to King’s Council, late 1387 or early 1388 London, Guildhall Library, MS 5370 (Scriveners’ Common Paper), page 56, oath of Adam Pinkhurst London, Mercers’ Hall Archives, Accounts 1391–1464, folios vi–x verso, accounts for 1391–1393 San Marino, California, Henry E. Huntington Library, MS EL 26.C.9, Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales (the Ellesmere manuscript). (http://www.medievalscribes.com/scribes.html) In the previous chapter, I pointed out that five of these manuscripts, Hg, El, Tr, Hatfield and Kk, had already been attributed to the same copyist, even though Doyle and Parkes (1979) express some doubts about Kk. Despite the fact that they find many similarities between this and the other four manuscripts, they hesitate to state that Kk is in Scribe B’s hand as well (Doyle and Parkes 1979:xxxv, Doyle 1995:60). As for the other texts, Stubbs (2002) describes the Boece manuscript as a possible work by Scribe B or somebody with very similar handwriting, while Horobin and Mooney (2004) unequivocally ascribe the Piers Plowman manuscript to Pinkhurst. The hand of this manuscript had already attracted the attention of other scholars (cf. Kane and Donaldson 1988:13 n.91 and Doyle 1986:39 in particular), who noted a 18 CHAPTER 2 strong similarity with the hand of the Hengwrt and Ellesmere scribe but did not find this enough evidence to attribute that manuscript of Piers Plowman to the same copyist (see Horobin and Mooney 2004:68–69). As for the legal documents, the page containing the oath and the signature of Adam Pinkhurst, the seventh item in the list above, is the document that has reveals the scribe’s identity. Together with the other two manuscripts, this document provides evidence that Pinkhurst was also, and probably primarily, active as a bureaucratic scribe between late 1387 and 1393. In the almost thirty years between Doyle and Parkes’ identification of Scribe B’s hand in three quires of Tr and Mooney’s discovery of his identity, very little new information has come to light about this copyist and his writing practice. By analysing the evidence from his manuscripts, several scholars agreed he was a professional scribe (Doyle and Parkes 1979, Blake 1995). According to Doyle and Parkes (1979:xxi), Scribe B was somebody who knew Latin and was familiar with contemporary English poetry, although he probably was not a full-time literary scribe. Blake (1985:59) speculated that ‘he may have been employed, like Hoccleve, in some semi-official capacity as a scrivener’. The possibility that he was a clerk working for the government would explain why he was involved in the production of Tr together with Hoccleve, who is ‘Scribe E’, the fifth copyist, in that manuscript. It would also account for a link between Scribe B, Chaucer and Gower, who worked as government officers as well, and who might have given him texts to copy because they knew him. The language of Hg and El places Scribe B in the London or Westminster area (LALME , vol. III, Linguistic Profile 6400, Blake 1997a:6), and it has been identified as London English Type III, the dialect that was probably used by Chaucer (Samuels 1963:87, Smith 1995:73). Yet the two manuscripts show a certain degree of spelling variation, which has been explained by Samuels (1988a:40–41) as an adaptation to the milieu in which the scribe lived. At that time, the London dialect was rapidly changing, because of massive immigration from the Central Midlands. London was also the place where Chancery English, the new standard language, was emerging, and becoming the model to be imitated (Samuels 1963). Scribes who were neither speakers of the London dialect nor faithful copyists of their exemplars – the latter being fairly uncommon (see the classification of medieval scribes below) – contributed to this linguistic confusion. In particular, scribes who came from other parts of England often used alternative spelling forms, either by retaining their regional spelling variants and thus translating the language of the exemplars into their own dialects, or by trying to conform to what they thought was the acceptable London dialect.