by Mary Robertson

Despite six centuries of intensive study by generations of scholars, the Huntington’s famous “Ellesmere Chaucer” manuscript still guards some of its secrets. Although scholars have long understood it to be the earliest complete text of the Canterbury Tales, the identity of its scribe has remained a mystery. Until now.

Credit for this landmark discovery goes to Linne R. Mooney, an American scholar who is a professor of Medieval English Palaeography at the University of York, in North Yorkshire, England. Thanks to her, we can at long last put a name to the Ellesmere scribe. He was Adam Pinkhurst, member of the Scriveners’ guild of London, professional copyist, sometime moonlighting accountant for the powerful Mercers’ (clothiers) Company, and almost certainly a man employed for many years by Chaucer himself as scribe and copyist.

Over the years, scholars had worked doggedly to learn as much as they could about the Ellesmere manuscript. They have known, for instance, that the scribe worked in or around London within a decade of Chaucer’s death in 1400. The same scribe also made another copy of the poem, now in the National Library of Wales (the “Hengwrt” manuscript—pronounced “HENG-ert”). Chaucer’s own handwritten drafts have not survived, so the Ellesmere and Hengwrt manuscripts are the closest we can come to his original intent for the work. The layout of the text and its decorations appear carefully designed to create a unified whole from the disparate stories of 23 pilgrims. Three anonymous artists collaborated to create miniature paintings of Chaucer and the other pilgrims, presenting a vivid, visual cross section of late medieval English life to match the literary genius of the text. By the early 17th century the precious manuscript had come into the possession of the Egerton family, who were dukes of Bridgewater and earls of Ellesmere (from whom the volume took its nickname). It was the crown jewel of the great English Renaissance library purchased by Henry Huntington for $1 million in 1917. The celebrated volume is the model for most modern printed editions of Chaucer’s greatest work.

Questions about the manuscript have always captured the attention of scholars. For whom was the manuscript made? Why does the Hengwrt copy, written by the same scribe, vary in so many details, omit some of the text, and rearrange the order of the tales? Was the Hengwrt written first, as most scholars now believe? Could either or both have been made in Chaucer’s lifetime, and if so, could the poet himself have been involved in their creation? Who were the earliest owners of the Ellesmere Chaucer, and—more frivolously—which of them scribbled in the preliminary flyleaves, “Margery seynt John ys a shrew”?

Sometimes, after many long years of pursuit, answers emerge. And sometimes, a certain amount of serendipity enters the picture. Mooney’s epiphany came in the course of her more general research on medieval English scribal practices. After spending a morning in 2004 in the Mercers’ Hall archives in London, she came across what she recognized as the hand of the Hengwrt-Ellesmere scribe in account books. Energized by her find—and shut out of the Mercers’ archives during the lunch hour—she walked two blocks to the Guildhall Library, where she opened the “Common Paper,” a record book of the Scriveners’ Company. In it new members signed their names and wrote out the text of their oath of admission to the guild. There, on page 56, was the familiar hand of one Adam Pinkhurst. Mooney’s expert eye recognized that the wide spacing, spikey curves, idiosyncratic decorative strokes, and a dozen other characteristic markers matched perfectly the hand of the Ellesmere scribe.

After taking some notes and requesting a photograph, Mooney started to walk back to Mercers’ Hall when corroborating evidence suddenly popped into her head. “About halfway back,” Mooney recalls, “I stopped still in the middle of a busy intersection as the penny dropped—as the British say—and I said aloud, ‘Oh, his name is Adam!’” She was thinking of Chaucer’s short, well-known poem addressed to “Adam, his owne Scriveyn,” in which the poet ruefully chides someone named Adam for careless mistakes in copying two of his earlier poems. If this literary Adam was the very real Pinkhurst, then his association with Chaucer was long standing and of some affection.

Scholarly precision required further proof, however, and after more than a year of additional meticulous research the full details of Professor Mooney’s argument have only recently appeared in her article “Chaucer’s Scribe” in the January 2006 issue of Speculum, the journal of the Medieval Academy of America. We now know far more about Adam Pinkhurst’s life as a professional scribe in the world of London manuscript production, about the production and dissemination of Middle English poetry, about his work for the Mercers’ Company, about the nine other (so far) surviving literary or business manuscripts written in his hand, and most importantly about his long and close working relationship with Chaucer, for whom he apparently made the first copies of the poet’s three great works—Boece and Troilus and Criseyde as early as the mid-1380s and the Canterbury Tales around the time of Chaucer’s death in 1400 or shortly thereafter.

This last, the most exciting outcome of Mooney’s discovery beyond the actual identification of Adam Pinkhurst, means that the Ellesmere and Hengwrt manuscripts were written by someone who knew and worked directly with the author over many years. As such the two manuscripts now speak with far more authority about the text of the Canterbury Tales than in the past, when the circumstances of their copying were less clear. The Huntington’s Ellesmere Chaucer, admired for six centuries as a literary and artistic treasure from late medieval England, now at last enjoys the added luster of a direct connection to the father of English poetry. What else will future scholars find?

Mary Robertson is the William A. Moffett Chief Curator of Manuscripts at The Huntington.