Scribes and the City: London Guildhall Clerks and the Dissemination of Middle English Literature, 1375-1425

Abstract

In 2006, generating much excited interest, Linne Mooney published in Speculum her identification of the London scrivener Adam Pinkhurst as the scribe who copied the two oldest and most celebrated manuscripts of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales: National Library of Wales, Peniarth MS 392D (known as the Hengwrt Chaucer) and Huntington Library, MS EL 26 C.9 (Ellesmere). Since then she and her research associate, Estelle Stubbs, have continued their painstaking research into the hands of professional clerks working in or around the London Guildhall, and their role in copying literary texts by major authors. This volume presents the findings of a four-year, AHRC-funded project focusing on the manuscripts of English writings by John Gower, John Trevisa, William Langland, and Thomas Hoccleve, as well as Chaucer. Following an opening chapter outlining the structure of London government in the late-fourteenth and early-fifteenth centuries, and its hierarchy of officials and clerks, the authors devote individual chapters to four of the professional scribes – Richard Osbarn, John Marchaunt, Adam Pinkhurst, and John Carpenter – who were employed to keep the administrative wheels turning. Between them, their working lives span a period of some sixty years, from c. 1378 to 1438. The most important single source used in building up the evidence is the book of customs, rights, and privileges of the City of London known as the Liber Albus, which was compiled by one of these scribes, John Carpenter, and completed by him in 1419. This and other documents written in the Guildhall, such as letter-books, have enabled Mooney and Stubbs to use signatures to match names not only with documents produced as part of their duties by these clerks affiliated to the Guildhall but also to link them in turn with the hands of literary manuscripts. In this manner, they have been able to identify, often for the first time, the scribes of many important copies of Middle English texts, and in so doing suggest revised datings for certain manuscripts. A further chapter provides briefer accounts of other scribes, including Richard Frampton, Thomas Usk, and Thomas Hoccleve, who were employed for perhaps shorter periods at the Guildhall or worked for major livery companies nearby. That these professionals moved in very much the same circles as the Guildhall-based four is underlined by the helpful map of London (p. ix), which conveys clearly the proximity in which they all worked and, indeed, lived.

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