Auchinleck Manuscript - Production

Production

Auchinleck is believed to have been produced in London around 1340, by professional scribes, who were laymen, not monks as was usually the case. The number of scribes involved in the production is a source of debate with scholars of Middle English. The controversy involves not only the number of scribes who actually wrote the text out, but if they, in fact, only copied the work from the exemplar, the original, or translated the works from French or Latin, inadvertently into their own Middle English dialects.

Through the use of palaeography, or the study of ancient handwriting, it has been determined that there had to be at least four, perhaps five, different scribes. Some scholars have argued that there were six scribes, yet most agree that the majority of the manuscript is in the hand of one man, who it is believed translated most of the literature. With this knowledge, when one looks at the photographs of the manuscript found on the website of the National Library of Scotland, it is easy to see the discrepancies in the actual handwriting of the scribes. Some is tight and regimented, attributed to Scribe 1, while some more loose, as if the scribe did not make the correct adjustments for space and repeatedly ran out of room at the ends of the lines. While this makes for fun visual entertainment when looking at the folios, or pages, the historical importance is that it gives clues into how the book might have been produced in a time when the commerce of making books for private clients in a secular bookshop began to flourish.