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Chaucer scribe revealed

19 July 2004

University of Cambridge scholar identifies mystery scribe of The Canterbury Tales

Professor Linne Mooney, Visiting Fellow at Corpus Christi College, has identified Geoffrey Chaucer's scribe, who wrote the earliest and most authoritative copies of The Canterbury Tales, as Adam Pinkhurst, a scrivener of London. This important discovery shows from other documents that Chaucer actually employed the scribe who wrote these copies of the Tales, and lends support to recent scholarly opinion that one or both of them were written before Chaucer's death in 1400 and therefore may have been written under his direction.

Geoffrey Chaucer did not finish writing The Canterbury Tales, and he died in 1400, seventy-six years before print was introduced to England by William Caxton. All the early copies of Chaucer's works are in manuscript.

The earliest surviving copy of The Canterbury Tales is in the so-called 'Hengwrt' manuscript now in the National Library of Wales. The copy most often used as base text for editions of The Canterbury Tales is the so-called 'Ellesmere' manuscript, now in the Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California. It was written after the Hengwrt manuscript but by the same scribe, whom Mooney has now identified as Adam Pinkhurst.

Scholars have long accepted that these two manuscripts were written by the same hand, but we have not until now had any information about who this scribe was or where he came from, where he lived and worked.

Professor Mooney identified the scribe as Adam Pinkhurst, based on the handwriting of Pinkhurst as he signed his oath on joining the Scriveners' Company of London shortly after 1392. Scriveners, or Writers of Court Letter, were trained in writing and in the correct forms for legal documents. The Scriveners' Company of London kept a 'Common Paper' or book of the regulations of the Company in which new members wrote an oath and signed their names beside it.

Chaucer wrote a short poem gently chiding a scribe named Adam who was working for him for inattention to his work and haste in copying, which Chaucer said resulted in many errors that he (Chaucer) had to correct in proof-reading.

With the identification of the scribe of the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts as 'Adam Pinkhurst', it seems that these two important manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales were written by the scribe whom Chaucer had supervised, and corrected in copying the first copies of his prose translation of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy ('Boece') and Troilus and Criseyde, written in the 1380s. Pinkhurst was probably also working for Chaucer in the late 1380s and 1390s while he was working on writing the unfinished Canterbury Tales, so the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts were not just written by someone hired by Chaucer's executors to copy his last unfinished work but by a scribe who had worked for Chaucer over a number of years. This identification lends more authority to these two copies of the Tales since, even if written after Chaucer's death, they would have been written by someone who had a close working relationship with Chaucer while he was creating the Tales and might thus have known his intentions for ordering and linking the unfinished Tales.

The two manuscripts copied by Adam referred to in Chaucer's short poem may also be identified: a copy of Chaucer's prose translation, Boece, has recently been tentatively identified as written by the same scribe as Hengwrt and Ellesmere. This manuscript is also in the Hengwrt collection, National Library of Wales. A tiny fragment, part of a single page that was cut up to reinforce the spine of a book in rebinding, survives of a copy of Chaucer's completed love story, Troilus and Criseyde written by this scribe, now belonging to the Marquess of Salisbury, Hatfield House. These may be the manuscripts that Chaucer says this scribe was careless in copying, causing him to take so much time and trouble to correct.

Notes for Editors:

1. Professor Mooney was a Visiting Fellow at Corpus Christi College during the 2003-2004 academic year on a National Endowment for the Humanities grant for Collaborative Research, working with Dr John Daugman at the Cambridge Computer Lab on computer-assisted identification of medieval scribal handwriting. Her home university is The University of Maine in the USA.

2. Mooney has been compiling a database of scribes who were working in England 1375-1425 whose handwriting is found in more than one surviving manuscript, and she now has more than 200 in the database.

3. Adam Pinkhurst probably came from Surrey, where his surname derived from Pinkhurst Farm, near Abinger Common, between Guildford and Dorking. There are records of property transactions involving an Adam Pinkhurst (probably the scribe's father) and his wife Johanna in the 1350s and 1370s involving properties in Dorking and surrounding villages. Pinkhurst was thus a son of a small landowner within a relatively short distance of London, who went into the City to learn the trade and make his living as a writer of court letter. We do not yet know how he came to the notice of the poet, but Chaucer was well connected in the city, being son of a vintner. He was for 12 years the Controller of the Wool Custom, so daily at the Custom House adjoining the Tower of London, and lived in the rooms over Aldgate, during 1374-1386, encompassing the time he would have been writing Boece and Troilus and Criseyde.

4. From 1392 onwards all members signed an oath in the Common Paper on joining the Company and signed their names in the margin beside their oaths. Pinkhurst's is the eighth signature in the book, appearing on the fourth page of oaths, so he probably joined the Company in or soon after 1392.

5. The poem found chiding Adam Pinkhurst:

Chaucer's Wordes Unto Adam His Own Scriveyne

Adam scrivener, if ever thee befall

Boece or Troilus for to write new [again],

Under thy longe locks thow maist have the scall,

But [unless] after my makinge thou write mor trew,

So oft a day I mot [must] thy werke renewe

It to correct, and eke to rubbe and scrape,

And all is thorowe thy necligence and rape [haste].

For more information, contact:

• 1. Karen Dean, Press and Publications Office University of Cambridge Tel: 01223 332300; email: kjd42@cam.ac.uk