Tuesday, July 20, 2004

Linne Mooney, Visiting Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, has discovered that Chaucer's scribe, immortalised in verse for his carelessness, was Adam Pinkhurst, the son of a Dorking landowner, and, far from being despised by the writer, he was Chaucer's favourite scribe, and responsible for the immortal line at the end of The Cook's Tale, "Of this tale Chaucer wrote no more."
'The scrivener's tale: how Chaucer's sloppy copyist was unmasked after 600 years' by John Ezard. The Guardian, Tuesday 20 July 2004.