Chaucer's Scribe

Among late-medieval scribes of manuscripts in English, the hand most studied and discussed is the hand of the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts—Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Hengwrt 392 D, and San Marino, Calif., Huntington Library, MS EL 26 C9, respectively—the earliest and the most authoritative copies of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. With some recent scholarship suggesting that Hengwrt, and perhaps Ellesmere as well, was prepared during Chaucer's lifetime, and therefore possibly under his supervision, scholars have begun to speculate increasingly about this scribe: Was he a full-time professional scribe, maybe a government clerk moonlighting as a writer of texts? And can any connection between him and Chaucer be established? The identification of his hand in a number of documents of the 1380s and 1390s helps us to answer those questions.