The Scribe of the Helmingham and Northumberland Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales

Abstract

This article argues that two manuscripts of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales were copied by a single scribe. Both manuscripts are subjected to palaeographical and linguistic analyses, and linguistic differences between the two manuscripts are explained according to the process of standardisation. The article concludes by drawing attention to the significance of the identification of scribes active in more than one Middle English manuscript for the study of linguistic standardisation and book production in fifteenth-century England.