5 - Seeking Scribal Communities in Medieval London

Summary

Amanuscript in the Parker Library, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 296 [Corpus 296] ‘contains a late fourteenth-century (after 1383?) collection of lollard tracts and sermons written in Middle English’. The description of the manuscript by M. R. James quotes the opinion of Nasmith: ‘Several treatises written by Wickliff. In this booke be gathered together all the sharpe treatises concernynge the erroures and defaults which John Wickliff did fynde in his tyme specially in the clergie and religiouse and in other estates of the worlde’. Although the thirty separate items were originally thought to be by Wyclif himself, it is now generally accepted that a number of unknown authors probably contributed to the collection. Of the tracts copied, twenty-nine are in the same scribal hand, but the final item, a Petition from Wyclif to the King, Parliament and John of Gaunt is in a second hand which I believe to be that of a scribe of the London Guildhall. He was formerly known to literary scholars as Scribe D, but has now been named as John Marchaunt, chamber clerk or financial controller of the city of London from 1380 and its common clerk from 1400–17 when he retired, to be succeeded by John Carpenter.

A second manuscript, Dublin, Trinity College MS 244 (C.3.12) [TCD 244] is, according to Ralph Hanna, the ‘partial twin’ of the Corpus book. It contains many of the same tracts found in Corpus 296, with blocks of items copied in the same order and with many texts quite clearly sharing the same exemplar.

A number of scholars have contributed articles on various subjects relating to these two important manuscripts, either singly or as a pair. Their studies cover an analysis of the form, features and type of subject matter, the ‘common lawyer’ as a supporter of many lollard activities, the codicology of the two manuscripts and location of copying, with the suggestion that each set of scribes may have been ‘attached to some center of Lollard copying and, through that association, in a borrower-lender relationship with other Lollard writers and copyists’, and a tentative identification of one of the scribal hands in TCD 244 as that of Adam Pinkhurst, Chaucer's scribe.