Trinity College, Cambridge, MS R.3.15 [Tc2] is a late fifteenth-century copy of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales whose text is very closely affiliated to that of Caxton's first edition, although critics disagree as to the exact nature of this relationship. The presence of individual lines in Caxton's edition that are not found in Tc2 rules out the possibility that the manuscript served as Caxton's exemplar, but it remains possible that the manuscript was copied from the printed text. N. F. Blake included Tc2 in his listing of ‘Caxton prints for which a copy-text survives, or which were used as a copy’, suggesting that the manuscript may have been copied from Caxton's first printed edition. C. A. Owen Jr considered Tc2 to have used the exemplar employed by Caxton for his edition as its copytext, while D. W. Mosser concludes that the precise nature of the association is impossible to determine.

In addition to its text of the Canterbury Tales, Tc2 contains several other Middle English works, copied by a secretary hand of the sixteenth century, as follows:

• 1. (folios 1r–2r) ‘Eight goodlie questions with their answers’ (NIMEV 3183/1)

• 2. (folios 2r–3r) ‘Balade au tres noble Roy H[enri] le quint’ (Hoccleve NIMEV 3788/1)

• 3. (folio 3r) ‘Whan faithe faileth in prestes sawes’ (NIMEV 3943/10)

• 4. (folios 317r–28r) Pierce the Ploughman's Crede (NIMEV 663/1)

The three items that precede the Canterbury Tales in Tc2 appear in this same position in William Thynne's edition, The Workes of Geffray Chaucer (STC 5068), first issued in 1532, and scholars have consequently assumed that they were copied directly from this edition. Collation of Thynne's version of these texts with those in Tc2 confirms that they are very close to the printed text. Variants shared by both witnesses include the following readings in the opening lines of the Canterbury Tales, added by the sixteenth-century copyist as a replacement for a missing leaf: 2 droghte] drought; 5 sweete] sote; 6 in] om.; 10 the] om.; 13 for] om.; 19 Bifil] it befel; in that] om.; 21 wenden] go; 22 ful] om.; 23 At] That.

THESE FOUR WORDS, merveille, virginite, swiven, and craft raise a variety of different issues for assessing the significance of Chaucer's lexical practices. As each of the essays demonstrates, as well as considering the words themselves, we must take account of the many synonyms that existed alongside them in Chaucer's usage. The choice of a particular word might be conditioned by a number of different factors. A word might seem more appropriate in a romance than a fabliau, or might suit a tale told by a miller rather than one narrated by a monk. The choice might be made on stylistic grounds, or because of metrical or rhyming factors. Often we find Chaucer drawing on more than one word, so that the switching between these synonyms becomes significant, such as the shifting between virginite, maydenhede and chastitee in the Wife of Bath's Prologue. This mode of stylistic switching is apparent in the way the wife demonstrates her competence in appropriating the Latinate terms of academic and theological debate, auctorite, diffinicioun, bigamye, and turning them upon her opponents. She adopts a similar register when discussing procreation, or engendrure, and uses euphemisms to refer to thynges smale, such as bele chose, sely instrument and quoniam. But the wife is also able to switch registers effectively, adopting a highly colloquial and insulting tone when addressing her husbands, kaynard, dotard, shrewe, and employing terms that pun on more crude alternatives, such as queynte. In order to fully appreciate such stylistic modulation we need a detailed understanding of Chaucer's lexical choices and the ways they would have been perceived by his contemporary audience.

One way of trying to gauge the status of Chaucer's words is through an understanding of their etymological origins. In merveille and virginite we have words of Anglo-Norman provenance, although both are ultimately of Latin origin. Swiven and craft are both recorded in Old English and ultimately go back to Germanic roots. But while such etymological distinctions may be salient to us today, to what extent were they significant or even apparent to Chaucer and his readers? Modern readers of Chaucer can turn to resources such as the MED to establish the etymology of a given word, or the ongoing third edition of the OED for a more extensive narrative account of a word's history.

Much critical discussion of the collection of poems that survives as London, British Library MS Harley 682 (H), has focused on the question of its authorship. In the early twentieth century the authorship debate was taken up by Henry Noble MacCracken, who attributed the poems to William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk. The case for Charles’s authorship was convincingly argued by the editors of the EETS edition. Along with various kinds of linguistic evidence in favour of the duke's authorship, Robert Steele drew attention to the importance of the relationship between H and the duke's autograph collection of his French poetry, now Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France MS fr. 25458 (O): ‘The close connexion between Charles's personal manuscript (which never went out of his possession) and the relative portions of Harl. 682 is of prime importance in determining the authorship of these latter poems.’ Building upon this suggestion, Mary-Jo Arn's detailed comparison of the two codices led her to conclude that the format and layout of H was deliberately modelled upon the features of O. These similarities suggest that a single individual was responsible for overseeing the production of both books, and therefore also the production of the texts themselves: ‘In short, H is more like O in significant details than it is like other manuscripts of courtly verse written in England in the first half of the fifteenth century. This argues for one mind at work on both manuscripts – and if on both manuscripts, then by necessity on both bodies of poetry.’ In this way, the similarities between the two manuscripts came to function as important pieces of evidence in the authorship debate that occupied much scholarly assessment of the poems of H. In this chapter I will move beyond the evidence that H and its relationship to O brings to the authorship question, to consider what light these two manuscripts can shed upon the production, circulation, and ownership of copies of Charles's verse in fifteenth-century England.

I will begin my assessment of the two manuscripts with a consideration of their appearance, starting with the scripts in which the texts were copied.The main text of H was written using a mixed script of the mid-fifteenth century, combining features proper to the anglicana and secretary scripts.

The eighty-four surviving manuscripts containing all or part of the Canterbury Tales present something of a headache for modern editors of the work, who must select from among these competing authorities in order to present the work in a single form. But this large number of diverse copies, and the nine extant fragments that probably attest to once-complete MSS, can tell us much about the way Chaucer’s work was read and repackaged in the century following his death. When we look beyond the famous Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts, early and authoritative witnesses to Chaucer’s text, we discover that just as valuable are the so-called “bad texts,” with their abundance of scribal readings, linking passages, and rearrangements of the tales; copies like these have much to tell us about scribal attitudes to Chaucer’s work and its reception and about the development and professionalization of the London book trade.

We must begin with names. ‘Tony Edwards’ is the person to whom this volume is dedicated, but it is not a name that everyone will immediately recognize, particularly those who know him only from his published work, for he has made himself known in public, from the first, as A. S. G. Edwards. When he began his career, this was the manner in which most scholars, most men at least, named themselves. Fashions have changed, and given names, one, two, or more, are now almost universal. But Tony has held on tenaciously to his initials, perhaps because he has three of them. We do not believe that he did so in any spirit of emulation of or desire to align himself with ‘Edwards A. S. G.’, the Edwards Active Strain Gauge well known to Google, an advanced form of technical engineering equipment which guarantees the vacuum conditions needed for the manufacture of certain precision instruments, such as aircraft engine turbine blades. It seems strangely apt as an analogous form of ‘A. S. G.’, whether one thinks of the ‘active strain’ involved as what he exerts upon himself or upon other people. The analogy fails, of course, when one comes to the creation of vacuum, where it works back to front, for Tony's work has essentially been to fill the vacuum that once existed in the study of manuscript history.

Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 201 (F) is an early fifteenth-century manuscript of Piers Plowman, which presents an idiosyncratic and textually divergent copy of the poem. But while textual critics have been tempted to discard it as an unreliable witness, with numerous erratic and evidently scribal readings, its status as one of only two surviving witnesses to the alpha textual tradition of the B version means that it cannot be ignored, especially in cases where the other alpha witness, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson Poetry 38 (R), is clearly corrupt or missing text. When editing the B version, Skeat did not have access to R and consequently was unaware of the alpha sub-group, leading him to discard F completely; more modern editors, especially Kane and Donaldson, have made considerable use of F.

The proposal that F can be rejected as a witness to the poem has been argued more recently by Sean Taylor, who claims that the close relationship between F and R is not the result of a shared exemplar, but rather due to the F scribe copying directly from R. If this argument were to be accepted, then F could simply be discarded by editors as having no independent textual value: ‘If F descends from R in a linear fashion, its value as a corroborative witness to the original intentions of the author in composing the B-text must be denied’. There are various types of evidence cited in support of this argument. The textual evidence includes readings in F which appear to be direct responses to errors in R. These instances, however, are not especially compelling. In all cases, readings in both R and F could be attempts to repair an error in their shared copytext. None of the readings cited from F can only be explained with reference to R. For instance, Taylor argues that the R scribe’s mistaken copying of ouerhuppe as oue huppe at 15.380 caused the F scribe to render oue as oon. According to Taylor, this error is ‘directly traceable to the error in R’, where the letters <u> and <n> are written identically. But R is not the only medieval scribe who traces these letters identically; it is perfectly possible that both scribes are responding to confusion in their exemplar, perhaps caused by the omission of an <-er> abbreviation.

Beaupré Bell was born in 1704 into an ancient family whose seat was at Beaupré Hall in Norfolk. He was educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated BA in 1725 and MA in 1729. Beaupré Bell inherited the ancient manor of Outwell and Upwell from his father of the same name, whose eccentric behaviour and neglect of his estates had allowed the manor house to fall into disrepair. Beaupré Bell senior is reported to have been ‘one of the strangest of mortals, letting his wild colts and cattle of twenty or thirty years old come into the very house, which was quite uncovered and every other way suitable, in a very ruinous condition’. The younger Beaupré Bell remained unmarried and without issue; at his death the manor passed to his sister Elizabeth, who married William Greaves of Fulbourn. Despite his father's neglect of his estates, Beaupré Bell inherited sufficient lands to indulge fully his diverse antiquarian interests. His particular obsession was medals and coins; he devoted much energy to a study of the coins of the Roman emperors, which remained unpublished at his death in 1741. A proposal for a publication by subscription of his work on Roman coins, with the title Tabulae Augustae, was issued by Cambridge University Press in 1734; a copy of this proposal, accompanied by collections and notes towards this work, is now bound with other materials as Trinity College MS R.10.10.