Reading Chaucer's Words to Adam

Abstract

This essay is about the poem Chaucers Wordes unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn and Linn? R. Mooney's discussion of it in her 2006 Speculum arti cle, Scribe. In this article, Mooney identifies the scribe who copied most of the Hengwrt and all of the Ellesmere manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales (Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Hengwrt 392 D; and San Marino, Huntington Library, MS EL 26 C9).1 The work of the Hengwrt-Ellesmere scribe has long been a matter of interest to scholars of late medieval English literature. A. I. Doyle and M. B. Parkes identify him as Scribe B of Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.2 (a copy of the Confessio Amantis) and as the scribe of a fragmentary copy of Chaucer's Troilus (Hertfordshire, Hatfield House, Cecil Papers, Box S/1). Estelle Stubbs describes his hand as that in an incomplete Boece (Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 393 D). Simon Horobin and Mooney argue that he copied a Piers Plowman manuscript too (Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.15.17).2 In her 2006 article Mooney confirms that, as Doyle and Parkes suggest more tentatively, it is his hand that appears in another Chaucer manuscript: a fragment of the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge, University Library MS K. 1.3/20). And Mooney finds more evidence of his scribal work in documents that enable her to name him. He was Adam Pinkhurst. He was a Londoner; he signed the Common Paper of the London Company of Scriveners in about 1392. In this sense, he was, as Doyle and Parkes first suggested, a professional: he made his living from scribal work, by taking on the sort of jobs that might fall to a writer of the court letter or a similarly skilled literate?the copying of writs, deeds, accounts, petitions, and the odd book of poems.3 He appears to have worked as a scribe for the Mercers' Company in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries: Mooney argues that it was he who copied the famous 1387/8 petition of the Mercers to the King's Council (Kew, The National Archives, SC 8/20/997), the first petition of this sort to be presented in English. Mooney turns up some fascinating life-records for Pinkhurst (possible evidence of his father's role at the court of Edward III, for instance),4 and speculates about his involvement in fourteenth-century London political and economic life in circumstances that might have brought