TheHengwrt Chaucer manuscript is an early-15th-centurymanuscript of theCanterbury Tales, held in theNational Library of Wales, inAberystwyth. It is an important source for Chaucer's text, and was possibly written by someone with access to an original authorialholograph, now lost.
TheHengwrt Chaucer is part of a collection called thePeniarth Manuscripts which is included by UNESCO in its UKMemory of the World Register, a list of documentary heritage which holds cultural significance specific to the UK.[1] It is catalogued as National Library of Wales MS Peniarth 392D. Following the terminology developed byJohn M. Manly andEdith Rickert, the manuscript is conventionally referred to asHg in most editions giving variant readings.[2]
The Hengwrt Chaucer has been in Wales for at least 400 years.This was one of the collection of manuscripts amassed at the mansion ofHengwrt, nearDolgellau,Gwynedd, by WelshantiquaryRobert Vaughan (c.1592–1667); the collection later passed to the newly established National Library of Wales.
The Hengwrt manuscript's very early ownership is unknown, but recent research suggests that Chaucer himself may have partly supervised the making of the manuscript, before his death in October 1400, according to the Welsh newspaperThe Western Mail.[3]By the 16th century it can be identified as belonging to Fouke Dutton, adraper ofChester who died in 1558. It then seems to have passed into the ownership of the Bannester family of Chester andCaernarfon, and through them was in the possession of an Andrew Brereton by 1625; by the middle of the 17th century it had been acquired by Vaughan.[1]
Peniarth MS 392 D contains 250 folios with a page size of around 29 x 20.5 centimetres (11½" x 8"). It is written on heavily stained and rather damagedparchment. Vermin have eaten around nine centimeters (3½") from the outer corners of the leaves. It is less complete than the Ellesmere manuscript, and the tales are in an order that is unique to itself.[4] The main textual hand has been identified with one found in several other manuscripts of the period (see below); there are a number of other hands in the manuscript, including one of a person who attempted to fill in several gaps in the text. This has been tentatively identified as the hand of the poetThomas Hoccleve.[5]
There is someillumination in blue, gold and pink, used on the border and on initial letters at the opening of individual tales and prologues, but the manuscript contains no illustrations.[4]
The Hengwrt manuscript was written by the same scribe as the lavishly illustratedEllesmere manuscript, which, following the examples of the editorsFrederick Furnivall andW. W. Skeat, was thought to be superior to Hengwrt and used as the base text for many modern editions of theCanterbury Tales. Since the work ofJohn M. Manly andEdith Rickert in compiling theirText of the Canterbury Tales (1940), however, the Hengwrt manuscript has had a much higher degree of prominence in attempts to reconstruct Chaucer's text, displacing the previously prominent Ellesmere andHarley MS. 7334. Recent scholarship has shown that the variant spellings given in the Hengwrt manuscript likely reflect Chaucer's own spelling practices in his East Midlands / London dialect ofMiddle English, while the Ellesmere text shows evidence of a later attempt to regularise spelling; Hengwrt is therefore probably very close to the original authorialholograph.[6]
The scribe of the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts has been identified by Linne Mooney, a palaeographer at theUniversity of York, asAdam Pinkhurst, a documented member of theWorshipful Company of Scriveners.[7] The attribution has been widely accepted, and other manuscripts have since been added to Pinkhurst's scribal canon.[8] However, other scholars, includingJane Roberts, who drew Mooney's attention to Pinkhurst in the first place, have expressed skepticism about the identification on various palaeographical, literary, and historical grounds.[9][10]
The tales are presented in the following order:
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
