Studies in the Age of Chaucer

A history of middle english literary production in London c. 1380–1420 remarkable for its richness, elegance, and detail has taken shape over the last decade or so, thanks to a series of stunning studies by Linne Mooney and her collaborators Simon Horobin and Estelle Stubbs.¹ In the 1370s, so we learn, one Adam Pinkhurst, king’s archer, became acquainted with Geoffrey Chaucer, fellow member of Edward III’s household. This Adam eventually retired to his family’s home region of Surrey–Sussex, but in the meantime his son or nephew, and namesake, came to be Chaucer’s scribe, copying Boece and Troilus (perhaps in copies fragments of which are still extant) for the poet in the 1380s and earning a notorious place as addressee of a light-hearted stanza bemoaning his copying errors. He also did bureaucratic work for some guilds and John of Northampton and produced a beautiful Piers [End Page 55] Plowman, thus altering our understanding of Chaucer’s political affiliations and knowledge of Langland’s work, and even of the development of standard English.

For it is as “Chaucer’s own scrivener” that Pinkhurst is so important: the Hengwrt Canterbury Tales, Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 392D, was produced just before the poet’s death and possibly under his supervision, and over the following decade he copied the lavish Ellesmere Canterbury Tales, San Marino, Huntington Library, MS EL 26 C.9, his greatest production. During this period, and perhaps earlier, Adam Pinkhurst held a clerkly position in the Guildhall, recording a handful of entries in Letter Book I and working alongside the only other copyist of vernacular literature who could approach his own importance and ambition in the dissemination of vernacular English poetry, one John Marchaunt, Common Clerk. Pinkhurst was “Scribe B,” and Marchaunt “Scribe D,” of Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.2, the Confessio Amantis, dated after 1408.²

At this point the other major figure of the story, notable as scribe, poet, and civil servant, comes into the picture of the Guildhall’s central role in Middle English literary production. For “Scribe E” of the Trinity Gower, and possibly its supervisor, was Thomas Hoccleve, clerk at the Privy Seal, in which capacity he came to know Marchaunt, his apprentice John Carpenter, and, most remarkably, Chaucer himself, on whose behalf he wrote a petition in 1399, as Pinkhurst had done as well. Hoccleve remained active, if beset by frequent psychological and financial hardships, in the 1410s and 1420s. A major new addition to this history is the claim that London, British Library, MS Royal 17 D.XVIII, an ordinary-looking Regiment of Princes, is in fact a holograph copy, with new readings reflecting the changed circumstances of both country and poet in the year since this poem was first issued. Any discovery of a holograph by a Middle English poet is a major event, and this one has implications for his career, our editorial practices, and our understanding of how scribal behavior could change over long periods of time.

This is a thrilling account, and it is no wonder that the Pinkhurst [End Page 56] identification in particular has captured so many imaginations. Less than a decade after Linne Mooney’s “Chaucer’s Scribe,” Adam Pinkhurst has received an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,³ featured prominently in the latest biography of Chaucer,⁴ and become a mainstay of criticism on his poetry and career and on medieval manuscript production. What I most admire about this history, which grows from Mooney, Stubbs, and Horobin’s project seeking to identify the scribes of Middle English literature,⁵ is the way it demonstrates paleography’s centrality to the interpretation of medieval English culture at large and not just of a poet’s meaning. These scribes, like Chaucer and Langland, had names, relations, and political affiliations.

All the same, the alacrity with which the story has been embraced should give us pause. Jane Roberts’s has been a lonely voice in attempting, in some detail, “to indicate how the Adam Pynkhurst canon has elaborated quickly and perhaps ill-advisedly,” concluding: “Convincing evidence that Adam...