Harley MS. 7334
Encyclopedia
Harley MS. 7334, sometimes known as the Harley Manuscript, is a mediaeval manuscript of Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer , known as the Father of English literature, is widely considered the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages and was the first poet to have been buried in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey...

's Canterbury Tales held in the Harleian Collection of the British Museum
British Museum
The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its...

.

It was formerly used as a base text for modern editions of the Tales, following the examples of Thomas Wright, who used it as the basis for his 1847 edition, and W. W. Skeat, who felt it gave authoritative variant readings.

Description

The Harley MS. was likely produced in a London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

 workshop within a decade of Chaucer's death, and is therefore one of the earliest extant manuscripts. It has some decoration in red, blue, pink and green, with gold leaf
Gold leaf
right|thumb|250px|[[Burnishing]] gold leaf with an [[agate]] stone tool, during the water gilding processGold leaf is gold that has been hammered into extremely thin sheets and is often used for gilding. Gold leaf is available in a wide variety of karats and shades...

 used on borders and initials, and like the Ellesmere Manuscript represents a commission for a wealthy patron (the style of the decoration is very similar to that seen in Ellesmere, perhaps indicating that the same limner
Limner
A limner is an illuminator of manuscripts, or more generally, a painter of ornamental decoration. One of the earliest mentions of a limner's work is found in the book Methods and Materials of Painting by Charles Lock Eastlake .-Scotland:...

 worked on both). In the fifteenth century it appears to have been owned by relatives of the Haute family of Ightham Mote
Ightham Mote
Ightham Mote is a medieval moated manor house close to the village of Ightham, near Sevenoaks in Kent .The name "mote" derives from "moot", "meeting [place]", rather than referring to the body of water....

.

Scribe

The scribe of Harley 7334, conventionally referred to as "Scribe D", is known to have been responsible for several other important manuscripts of the period, including eight copies of the Confessio Amantis
Confessio Amantis
Confessio Amantis is a 33,000-line Middle English poem by John Gower, which uses the confession made by an ageing lover to the chaplain of Venus as a frame story for a collection of shorter narrative poems. According to its prologue, it was composed at the request of Richard II...

of John Gower
John Gower
John Gower was an English poet, a contemporary of William Langland and a personal friend of Geoffrey Chaucer. He is remembered primarily for three major works, the Mirroir de l'Omme, Vox Clamantis, and Confessio Amantis, three long poems written in French, Latin, and English respectively, which...

 and one of Piers Plowman
Piers Plowman
Piers Plowman or Visio Willelmi de Petro Plowman is the title of a Middle English allegorical narrative poem by William Langland. It is written in unrhymed alliterative verse divided into sections called "passus"...

. He is also known to be responsible for one other manuscript of the Tales, Corpus Christi College MS. 198, and his work appears in a Gower manuscript alongside that of Adam Pinkhurst
Adam Pinkhurst
In 2004, Professor Linne Mooney was able to identify the scrivener who worked for 14th century poet Geoffrey Chaucer as an Adam Pinkhurst. Mooney, then a professor at the University of Maine and a visiting fellow at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, was able to match Pinkhurst's...

, now identified as the scribe of the Ellesmere MS. Scribe D was active in London between the 1390s and 1420s, though his spellings indicate that he was originally from the southwest Midlands. Academic Jeremy Smith has characterised Scribe D as particularly interesting, as his texts display a history in which he moved to London from north Worcestershire
Worcestershire
Worcestershire is a non-metropolitan county, established in antiquity, located in the West Midlands region of England. For Eurostat purposes it is a NUTS 3 region and is one of three counties that comprise the "Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Warwickshire" NUTS 2 region...

, tried hard to eliminate his Worcestershire dialect from his copying, and gradually assimilated peculiar spellings particular to Gower, eventually transplanting them into his work on Chaucer's texts.

Relation to other manuscripts

The Harley MS. displays a different tale order to that of other significant manuscripts of the Tales, such as the Ellesmere and Hengwrt
Hengwrt manuscript
The Hengwrt Chaucer manuscript is an early 15th century manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, held in the National Library of Wales, in Aberystwyth, where it is known as MS Peniarth 392D.-History of the manuscript:...

 manuscripts. As well as the Tale of Gamelyn, now thought not to be by Chaucer, it also contains many peculiar variant readings which were, in the nineteenth century, considered to represent either a first or second draft by the author himself. Modern opinion is that the manuscript's scribe, in common with the practice of the time, would have felt it acceptable to expand or edit the author's text as they felt appropriate. In general, modern editors have agreed with the opinion of Stephen Knight, who noted that while Harley 7334 "seems so handsome and authoritative [...] it is in fact heavily and even whimsically edited". However, Scribe D was, in his Gower manuscripts, known to have proceeded in a manner similar to "a photocopier
Photocopier
A photocopier is a machine that makes paper copies of documents and other visual images quickly and cheaply. Most current photocopiers use a technology called xerography, a dry process using heat...

[and] often copied simply what was before him", so it remains possible that the idiosyncratic variant readings might have some other source.

The manuscript is often conventionally referred to as Ha4, following John Manly and Edith Rickert's notation. A facsimile edition of the manuscript has been published.
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