Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
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Manuscript Study
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Melissa Townsend-Crow
San Jose State University
Prof. Elizabeth Wrenn-Estes
LIBR 280-12
March 7, 2013
Table of Contents
Introduction
History and Provenance
Context
Author and Scribe
Composition
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Writing Support and
Size
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Collation and how was it put together: rulings, page, or
leaf layout
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Binding
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Inks/Pigments
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Decorations,
Illumination, and Photo(s)
o
All images are from
the Huntington
Catalog Database, Huntington Library. Digital Publishing
Group ©2002
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Incipit
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Explicit
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Colophon
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Script(s) or type of writing
Summary
Reference
Page(s)
Introduction
The Canterbury Tales is a collection
of stories written in Middle English verse, the vernacular of the time and Geoffrey Chaucer was among the first poets/writers to create works in the language of the people instead of the Latin of the Church or the French of the court . Chaucer started the
ambitious work around 1387 and it is unfinished. The premise of the Tales is
that a group of pilgrims on their way to Canterbury would take turns telling
stories to their fellow travelers. He had originally planned for there to be
120 tales, but finished only 24 before his death in 1400, but even incomplete,
this piece establishes Chaucer's reputation as the premier English poet of his
time and for some time to come. Over a century and a half later, Edmund Spenser
tried to emulate him in his Faerie Queen. There are eighty-three surviving manuscripts
and fragments of the Canterbury Tales, and of these, the
Ellesmere Chaucer (MS EL 26 C 9) which is
located at the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA is the most complete. It is approximately 16 inches by 11 inches there are 240 leaves
of calfskin vellum, including 8 flyleaves. an extravagance which leads experts
such as Herbert Schulz to infer that this manuscript was commissioned as a
"de luxe" edition (Schulz p. 55).
The manuscript was next in the
possession of the Egerton family, earls of Bridgewater as evidenced by writing
on the first flyleaf in the manuscript in the handwriting of the first earl
whose father was titled "Baron of Ellesmere" under Elizabeth I. His
son, Sir Thomas, was the founder of the Bridgewater Library. This is where the
manuscript remained, though the library itself and its contents passed through
many other hands until Henry Huntington bought the entire lot in 1917 through the auction house
of Sotheby & Co.
The Ellesmere Chaucer is currently
off display (much to the disappointment of this writer) because, as the placard
in the display case stated, manuscripts must, every 18 months, be closed for a time to preserve the spine.
Furthermore, the Huntington is renovating the Main Exhibition Hall where the
rare manuscripts are usually displayed. In the meantime, a replica of the
Ellesmere Chaucer, created by the Huntington in 1995, is on display in its stead (Schulz pp. 60-61).
Context
The
Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
is an anthology with a frame involving pilgrims on their way to the shrine of
the martyr Thomas à Becket in Canterbury cathedral. Chaucer lived in
interesting times. He was born during the Hundred Years War between England and
France and was once held for ransom by the French – which Edward III paid, a
sum of 16£, which was a quite a bit at that time.
The threat of Plague, the "Black
Death," was still raging throughout
Europe, with the death toll peaking around the middle of the century. In fact,
Queen Phillipa, wife of Edward tIII and Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster and the
first wife of John of Gaunt (the third son of Edward III and future husband of
Chaucer's sister-in-law, Katherine de Roet-Swynford) succumbed to bubonic
plague. John of Gaunt commissioned a poem from Chaucer, an elegy to his late
wife, called "The Book of the Duchess."
The Church was a strong influence on
every aspect of medieval life. One has only to look at the great cathedrals and
imagine the energy and resources it took to erect them to see that, however,
not everyone was complacent with the theocratic rule and the abuses of agents
of the Roman Catholic Church. Lollardy was a heretical movement founded by John
Wycliffe and it agherents questioned the absolute authority of the Pope and the
Church, although other religious doctrines were accepted. To be a Lollard was
punishable by death, (this was despite the fact that, although not a member of
the movement himself, one of the strongest defenders of the Lollards was John
of Gaunt), and was one of the factors that led to the Peasants' Revolt in 1381
(the other being a poll tax instituted by John of Gaunt to help pay for the
Hundred Years War with France which made him one of the most disliked men in
the land, despite his defense of religious freedom). Dissatisfaction with the
abuses of the church, or certain agents of the church, is also evident in the
work of William Langland, a contemporary of Chaucer who wrote the poem Piers Plowman in which agents of the
church are portrayed as greedy villains, using their religious authority to
gain worldly goods and power. Similarly, Chaucer's character the Pardoner in The Canterbury Tales confesses liking
money while preaching that the root of all evil is this love of money and he
also confesses to "selling" pardons and fake relics.
Chaucer's use of the vernacular Middle
English in his works had an impact on those who followed. Although the language
of the royal court was still French (despite the ongoing war against France, it
would seem) and Latin the language of the Church and the educated among the
population, works such as The Canterbury
Tales were created for those who spoke the language in which they were
written and, it may even be conjectured, helped raise the literacy rate
amongst a more plebian population.
Author and Scribe
Author
Sir
Arthur Ward, a professor of history at Oxford and Cambridge and biographer of
Geoffrey Chaucer writes, "The biography of Geoffrey Chaucer is no longer a
mixture of unsifted facts, and of more or less hazardous conjectures"
(Ward p. 2. Kindle Edition) . Chaucer
was the son of a vintner and himself, a civil servant in the employ of the
Plantagenet King, Edward III. Clearly, Chaucer was well-educated and his wife,
Phillipa de Roet, daughter of a Flemish Knight, was a lady in waiting to the
queen. Phillipa's sister, Katherine de Roet, was married to Hugh Swynford, a
knight in the king's service. Later, after Katherine was widowed, she became
the governess to the children of John of Gaunt and his wife Blanche, Duke and
Duchess of Lancaster. After Blanche died of plague, Katherine became Gaunt's
mistress, and eventually his third wife and bore him four children who were the
ancestors of the House of Tudor. When the queen died, Philippa Chaucer went on
to the service of Constance of Castile, John of Gaunt's second wife. In other
words, Chaucer was rather well connected and thus, his name appears in official
records, including one in which it was
recorded that Edward III paid 16£ ransom when Chaucer was taken prisoner by the
French while in the employ of Lady Elizabeth, wife Lionel of Antwerp, in whose
retinue he was when he was captured on a march to a battle at Rheims in 1360. Clearly, Geoffrey Chaucer was
a valuable member of the royal staff and held many positions of service to the
Crown during his lifetime including that of comptroller of customs, member of
parliament, clerk of the kings works, and deputy forester. He also was employed
as an ambassador of goodwill. In this capacity, Chaucer visited Italy and the
influence of these journeys is evident in both "The Clerk's Tale" and
also in his poem, "Legend of Good Women."
He
was sponsored by Edward III and later by Richard II. Although Richard was
overthrown the new king, Henry IV renewed the pension granted to Chaucer by
Richard until Chaucer's death, usually believed to be October 25, 1400,
although there are no official records like a death certificate to show this,
merely the inscription on his tomb, erected one hundred years after his death.
Chaucer was the first to be buried in what is known as "Poets'
Corner" at Westminster Abbey
Scribe
The allowance income he received
from the crown probably allowed Chaucer to concentrate on his literary works in
his earlier days, in particular, The
Canterbury Tales (Davis, pp 129-130). He was, for example, able to employ
scriveners or scribes to copy his works. The
Ellesmere Chaucer as well as the Hengwert manuscript, the
two most complete and authoritative copies of the Canterbury Tales, are
believed to have been copied by the same scribe who has now been identified as
Adam Pinkhurst or "Pynkhurst"
by Linne Mooney. Mooney writes, " recent
scholarship suggesting that Hengwrt, and perhaps Ellesmere as well, was
prepared during Chaucer's lifetime, and therefore possibly under his
supervision," (p. 1). The Huntington dates the Ellesmere manuscript from
1405-1410 which is a few years after Chaucer is believed to have died, though
no one knows the exact date.
Records show that Adam Pinkhurst was
a freelance scribe who belonged to the Scriveners' Guild in London and did
freelance work for Mercer's Company as
well as being a wrier of letters of Court, a position similar to that of modern
day notaries (p. 109). Pinkhurst was identified as the probable scribe of the
Chaucer manuscripts by his indiosyncratic signature and oath. Mooney writes,
MS 5370 in
the Guildhall Library in London is the Scriveners' Company Common Paper, in
which new members from ca. 1391-92 onwards signed an oath of loyalty to the
company, together with their signatures and notarial marks if they were
imperial notaries. On page 56, entered
in 1392 or thereabouts, are the oath and signature of "Adam
Pynkhurst," whose handwriting in both oath and signature reveals their
writer by characteristic idiosyncrasies as the scribe of the Hengwrt and
Ellesmere manuscripts of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The hand of Pinkhurst's oath in the Common Paper is
unmistakably that of the Hengwrt/ Ellesmere scribe (pp. 99-100).
The Ellesmere Chaucer is written in
the hand of one scribe, now believed to be the "Adam Scriveyn,"
poetically chastised by Chaucer in a poem:
Chauciers Wordes, a Geffrey vnto Adame his owen scryveyne:
Adam scryveyne if euer it thee byfalle
Boece or Troylus for to wryten nuwe,
Vnder thy long lokkes thowe most haue the scalle
But affter my makyng thowe wryte more truwe,
So offt adaye I mot thy werk renuwe
It to corect and eke to rubbe and scrape,
And al is thorugh thy necglygence and rape.
Although
he scolded the scribe for mistakes on other works, it is generally believed
that Chaucer employed Pinkhurst to work on the Canterbury Tales before his death. One of the reasons for this
belief is that Pinkhurst writes in his own voice and in the ink of the final draft at the end of the
unfinished Cook's Tale, "Of this Cokes tale maked Chaucer na moore,"
(Mooney, p. 105).
Manuscript Composition
Herbert Schulz (2004, pp. 52-56).
describes the composition of the manuscript as follows:
232 vellum leaves, measuring 15.75 inches
by 11.125 inches; the writing space is 12.325 inches by 6.125 inches
The
largest calfskins measured about two feet by three feet after they had been
prepared for use. Such a skin would have made four leaves (or eight pages).
Thus the Ellesmere manuscript took at least fifty-eight of the largest skins.
ruled in pink ink in single columns,
composing 48 lines for text
there are 8 ruled flyleaves, four at the
beginning of the book and four at the end
there are 29 quires, trimmed
line prickings are intact and appear to
have been made through all eight leaves of each quire
On the occasion of its disbanding
and rebinding in 1995, the conservators doing this work took the opportunity to
examine the manuscript in great detail.
Writing Support
The Ellesmere Chaucer was written on
vellum, probably calfskin. There is an unusual crease or fold in the parchment,
probably caused by being folded by the parchmenter for storing (Cains,
p.129). See fig.1 below:
Although the manuscript has been
rebound at least twice, remnants of the original binding remain and indicate
that the cover was of white tawed leather, probably sheepskin, and dyed red. It
is not certain what kind of wood served as the cover boards, though evidence of
wood worm infestation is present, it does not indicate the species of wood. Verdigris staining indicates that
copper clasps had been used.
Inks
and Pigments
The text ink is reddish brown and
was written before the decorations were added.
Catalog of some of the inks and
pigments (from Cains):
text ink:
transparent organic brown
ink used for ruling:
transparent medium stained pink by an organic crimson pigment (from madder,
kermes, or orchil)
blue (decoration):
aquamarine/lapis lazuli either pure pigment or mixed with an inert white
orange-red pigment:
red lead (darkened when overpainted on to the ultramarine and oxidized
in some areas to brown)
white:
chalk (inferred from the stability and transparency of the pigment)
opaque yellow
pigment (Portrait of the Pardoner):
orpiment
carbon black
brown-black asphaltum,
verdigris (green)
folium or turnsole (red-purple)
gold leaf and gilding prepared on gesso
Illustrations
Twenty-three
portraits of the Pilgrims illustrate the manuscript . Style differences and
levels of skill in the rendering point to at least three artists. For example,
one of the artists would paint the Pilgrim and horse on a field of grass.
According to Schulz (p. 36), "Quite apart from the paintings of the
Pilgrims, the Ellesmere Chaucer is the most elaborately decorated of the Canterbury Tales." Borders fill the
left margins of the pages and are augmented by elaborately drawn and filled
colorful initials.
 
Incipit and
Excipit
There
is an incipit and an excipit between each tale. For example, here is the page
where the Wife of Bath's Tale begins:
There is no
colophon that I could discover. Instead, a succession of owners wrote their
names on the flyleaves. The Scribe, now believed to be Adam Pinkhurst, left his
unique signature in his idiosyncratic way of writing, a style for which he was,
perhaps, humorously chastised by Chaucer himself. Schulz notes that,
The
scribe was a skilled writer but had a pronounced tendency, when he interrupted
his copying at intervals … then to resume his task with a rather abrupt change in the size of letters, the shade of
ink, ot the bite of his pen nib.
His script
is a form of English cursive called "anglicana
formata" (Schulz p. 55).
Summary
Geoffrey Chaucer is frequently
touted as the man who brought literature to the people because he wrote in the
vernacular of the day, although this writer must confess that it is sometimes
difficult to imagine a time when almost everyone spoke Middle English. Scholars
have since disputed that Chaucer was that influential, that the trend for
English authors to write in their own language was already in progress with
Wycliff's Bible translation, John Gower,
and William Langland all writing in the vernacular of that time and place.
What Chaucer has done, perhaps all
unknowing, in the Canterbury Tales
and especially in this beautiful manuscript, is he has allowed those of us in
the 21st century to step back in time. We can read his words to this
day and hear the voices of his pilgrims, telling their stories. We can peek in
the 15th century through this work created so long ago. If indeed,
as some conjecture, Geoffrey and Phillipa's son, Thomas Chaucer commissioned
this beautiful work of art, it is a fitting tribute to the immortality of "the well of English undefiled, On Fame's eternal beadroll worthy to be
filed," as Edmund Spenser said of him. Indeed, this manuscript seems to
speak of immortality, not only of Chaucer's words, but of books and words and
stories over all.
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