The Hengwrt Canterbury Tales: Inadmissible Evidence?

Pidd, Stubbs, and Thomson interrogate the evidentiary status of the Hengwrt manuscript by demonstrating that its material testimony has changed over time and that modern scholars may, paradoxically, have access to less information than earlier editors. While Manly and Rickert’s work is often criticised, the authors argue that their holistic methodology—integrating text, codicology, palaeography, provenance, and physical evidence—remains exemplary, precisely because they worked from material features that are no longer visible today.

The article centres on the now-lost “Stokes” inscription on folio 85v of Hengwrt. Although Manly and Rickert described this red plummet inscription as a key clue to the manuscript’s early history, later scholars treated it with caution or ignored it entirely because it is no longer visible on the manuscript itself. Through direct examination of early photostats and microfilms commissioned by Manly and Rickert in the 1930s, the authors demonstrate conclusively that the inscription once existed and has likely disappeared due to mid-twentieth-century conservation or rebinding. As a result, earlier facsimiles preserve codicological evidence that the physical manuscript no longer retains.

Reinstating the validity of this lost evidence allows the authors to reopen Manly and Rickert’s research into the manuscript’s provenance. They explore the possibility that the inscription refers to Richard de Stokes, a late fourteenth-century royal clerk with social and geographical connections compatible with Chaucer’s milieu and with early Canterbury Tales manuscript production. While the identification remains circumstantial, it raises the possibility that Hengwrt was produced during Chaucer’s lifetime.

The authors conclude by challenging the assumption that newer technologies necessarily yield better evidence. They argue that facsimiles, photostats, and earlier descriptions are themselves witnesses and must be critically integrated into manuscript study, lest crucial historical data be lost altogether.