Academic detective work leads to scribe from Surrey chided in poem for his errors

After more than 600 years, it was his handwriting that gave him away. A scribe - who until the weekend was known to history only as Adam the scrivener - so infuriated Geoffrey Chaucer with his carelessness that the poet threatened to curse him with an outbreak of scabs.

Now alert academic detective work has unmasked the sloppy copyist of the words of the father of English literature as Adam Pinkhurst, son of a small Surrey landowner during the 14th century.

The revelation of his name and some of his background, announced by Cambridge University yesterday, has caused intense excitement and admiration among specialists in the subject. It indirectly helps to authenticate the two most authoritative texts of Chaucer's great work, the Canterbury Tales, the first long poem written in an approximation to modern English.

And it discloses the scribe as the writer of an elegiac reference in the text of the tales to the fact that Chaucer had died before completing them.

Professor Linne Mooney, a scholar from Maine, who is a visiting fellow at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, tracked Pinkhurst down by studying his signature to an oath in the earliest records of the Scriveners' company in the city of London, and comparing it with Chaucer manuscripts.

His signature is the eighth earliest entry in the company's Common Paper, or members' book of regulations. This indicates that he joined soon after the scriveners began keeping systematic records in the year 1392. The date squares neatly with the period of Chaucer's life and authorship.

"Lots of people have looked at these records before, but they did not happen to be people who were working on scribes," Prof Mooney told the Guardian yesterday. They were not equipped to recognise that Pinkhurst's signature is also the handwriting of The Canterbury Tales and of two earlier Chaucer works, Troilus and Criseyde, and Boece, his translation of Boethius's The Consolations of Philosophy.

Neither would they have had Prof Mooney's formidable immersion in the calligraphic side of the period. She has compiled a database of more than 200 scribes working in England between 1375 and 1425, the years immediately before and after the birth of printing. The handwriting of all her scribes is found in more than one surviving manuscript.

Until she confided her discovery to the British New Chaucer conference on Saturday, Adam was known only as the butt of a sardonic short poem published with The Canterbury Tales after the poet's death.

The poem is titled Chaucer's Wordes Unto Adam His Own Scriveyne. It chides Adam for all his errors in the two earlier manuscript books:

Adam scrivener, if ever thee befall

Boece or Troilus [the earlier books] for to write new [again],

Under thy longe locks thow maist have the scall [scabs],

But [unless] after my makinge thou write mor trew,

So oft a day I mot [must] thy werke renewe

It to correct, and eke [also] to rubbe and scrape,

And all is thorowe thy necligence and rape [haste].

The poem has the primal rage of writers through the ages whose work is sloppily reworded during the editing process.

But Pinkhurst, far from being an incompetent, emerges as Chaucer's most favoured scribe in an age where writers worked closely with individual scriveners rather than dealing with scriptoriums (script factories) as they came to do after Chaucer's death in 1400.

He can now be recognised as the scrivener of the two most authoritative copies of the Canterbury Tales: the Hengwrt manuscript, which is now in the National Library of Wales, and the Ellesmere manuscript, kept in San Marino, California.

Prof Mooney says Pinkhurst is likely to have come from Surrey, where his surname derived from Pinkhurst Farm, near Abinger Common, between Guildford and Dorking.

Records exist of property transactions involving an Adam Pinkhurst (probably the scribe's father) and his wife, Johanna, in the 1350s and 1370s over properties in Dorking and surrounding villages.

This would have made Adam the scrivener a son of a small landowner brought up a short distance from London, who went into the City to learn a trade and make his living as a writer of court letters.

Chaucer was already well connected in the city, as the son of a vintner. For 12 years he was controller of the wool custom and had rooms over Aldgate from 1374-1386, when he would have been writing Boece and Troilus and Criseyde.

He also emerges as the closest the poet had to an obituarist. A note in Pinkhurst's handwriting at the end of the Cook's Tale, one of the unfinished Canterbury Tales, says, "Of this tale Chaucer wrote no more".

One academic at the New Chaucer conference said that the discovery had given these seven words the note of an elegy.