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We have little explicit evidence of attitudes to script in later medieval England. Neither scribes nor readers were given to overt comments on handwriting, though a few words in surviving inventories reveal that people could make evaluative judgments.1 The range of scripts available to later medieval English scribes was relatively small, and so, unsurprisingly, no link between a particular script or style of execution and a delimited genre or type of work has ever been firmly established.2 Scholarship does, however, operate on the broader understanding, established by M. B. Parkes, that there was a "hierarchy of scripts."3 The array of scripts available as models for scribes was ranked, and scribes selected scripts of Different ranks in order to establish hierarchy on the page, distinguishing more important text to aid reading.
Researchers have adopted this concept and applied it widely: it can now, for example, be invoked without further explanation in a journal with an audience reaching well beyond paleographers.4 However, the small-scale hierarchical gradations of formality that might once have been perceived in writing are much less well understood. I discuss here a disagreement between two book producers that offers a tantalizing glimpse of fifteenth-century people differing on a graphetic point.5 Their disagreement might seem pedantic today, but it is an example of dissent over the relative positions occupied by different graphs within the hierarchy of scripts as perceived by medieval readers. Such evidence reminds us that this hierarchy was not a rigid, immutable system. Parkes remarks that script choices could "represent or enhance" the status ofpatrons and recipients: social and political hierarchies were subject to change, and contemporaries could affect them using books.6
These characteristics-changeability and openness to contestation-were also characteristics of the hierarchy of scripts itself, and struggles over relative formality could occur at the small scale of individual graphs. Past scholarship has identified occasional examples of disagreement over formality, but the phenomenon has to my knowledge never been systematically surveyed.7 Such a survey exceeds the scope of this article, but I hope to point out the topic's potential value, to prime readers to identify more examples during their own researches, and to emphasize the fact that the hierarchy of scripts is best understood as a live historical process rather than a set...