Paleography and Scribes of Shared Training

Paleography and Scribes of Shared Training R. Vance Ramsey Ohio University In his vigomus ,rrack on my artide "The Hengwrt and Ellesme I can only wish that Samuels had shared the double and treble counts alluded to in the first quotation as having been detected in my original study. Here, however, is my only opportunity to check his figures and to explain why not only is theexclusion of line-initial That "methodologically preferable" but so is my focus upon contrasts to the exclusion of likenesses. "Line-initial That" should be excluded from the count because this is a position where neither scribe ever uses the brevigraph. Over the same stretch of poetry where Samuels found the word that spelled out 354 times in Hg to 507 times in El, I found a total of274 times when the word that began a line of poetry, a position where the brevigraph for that, for with and others is always excluded: a likeness has no meaning where contrast is impossible. Taking just these 274 instances away from the Hg total of 354 offered by Samuels left that manuscript with the word spelled out in other positions just 80 times to 334 times when the brevigraph was used; taking the 274 times the word begins a line away from El's 507 times the word was spelled out left a total of 233 to 181 times when the brevigraph was used. Further study would have refined these totals (for example, at the ends of lines), but already Hg's 334 to 80 preference for the brevigraph (80.68 percent) versus El's 181 to 233 (43.72 percent) looks a clear enough difference to be significant. (That the Hg preference for the brevigraph thatis not a function ofits being a generally less formal manuscript than El, as paleographers often suggest in such cases, is shown by the reversed situation of Hg spelling out with and El preferring the brevigraph for with.) 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., p. 56. 118 SCRIBES OF SHARED TRAINING The primary methodological reason for limiting my counts to contrasts between the two manuscripts was to avoid just such variables as the shared prohibition against beginning or ending a line of poetry with the that brevigraph, the with brevigraph, and the and brevigraph. After all, the question was never whether two scribes who had trained together for years shared most of their habits in the registration of accidentals just as they shared their habits ofstroking a pen: as Manly and Rickert noted, scribes of shared training "inevitably formed habits ofspelling as ofwriting."26 The real potential difficulty for my study was from the possible complications posed by the influence ofthe varying exemplars used in copying Hg and El. Hinman and others could take for granted that the different compositors set up the First Folio from shared texts; for most of the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts, I could not. Hence my reliefto discover the Manly­ Rickert judgment that the scribes had shared the same exemplar for The Friar's Tale and The Summoner's Tale through line 1990; as noted above, a third chart demonstrated that the contrasts obtained whether the exem­ plars were the same or very different, reassuring proof that the variations stemmed from the scribes themselves rather than from their exemplars.27 In attempting a counterdemonstration, Samuels wrote that "when a special questionnaire of at least 100 common variables" was applied to the Hengwrt and Ellesmere MSS, they were found to agree for all variables except for a few where there was a difference of emphasis found in each MS, e.g., agayn-ayeyn, aske-axe, heigh-bye, hundred-hondred, murye-myrie, neigh-ny, noght-nought-nat, seigh-saw-saugh, thogh-though, thowsand­ thousand, weere (n)-were (n). Since none ofthese forms was exclusive to one MS, the profiles for both MSS were regarded as those ofa single scribe who had slightly changed his habit and/or come under the influence of varying exemplars.28 I find three problems with this. First, the possibility of "the influence of varying exemplars" had already been dealt with in the earlier study's second and third charts, which demonstrated that shifts in manuscript...