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My subject is a familiar manuscript with a familiar scribe: the Harley Lyrics manuscript.1 London, British Library MS Harley 2253 is filled with an eclectic range of entertainments and edifying matter in French, English, and Latin, copied in the vicinity of Ludlow, England, near the Welsh border, from around 1331 to 1348. Its main scribe is well known, but less well recognized is how his labor is situated sequentially between the work of two others and how on the flyleaves it is conjoined with another scribe s product.2 The relationship among these four scribes is the focus of this article. To be specific, the different styles of rubrication in Harley 2253 reveal how, in the manuscript proper, successive scribes received and used each other's work. By observing the sequence and mix of hands, we can perceive how two of these scribes did more than write texts: they also read the texts they had inherited from a previous scribe. And we can learn more: upon the flyleaves, which are cut from an old roll, we have the hand of a colleague-scribe whom the main Harley scribe knew personally.
The principal scribe, that is, the person responsible for preserving such an important and remarkable array of texts, was a Ludlow-area man who worked as a legal scrivener-a fact we know because of the brilliant detections of Carter Revard, who discovered the scribe's hand at work in forty-one writs, each precisely dated and placed in Ludlow or its environs. The scribe had training in religion and law, to judge from his known library, which survives not just in Harley 2253 but in two other books as well: British Library MSS Harley 273 and Royal 12.C.xii. Scholars think it likely that he served as chaplain for a well-to-do household and that he held among his general duties, besides being spiritual counselor, the education of boys (that is, young heirs in a French-speaking English household) and the planning of entertainments for mixed-gender social events.3
Two names have been used to designate this anonymous man: he is called, generally, either the "Ludlow scribe" or the "Harley scribe."4 Most of the critical literature on the Harley 2253 texts has centered on his work alone, and it is his hand that is featured...