The Hengwrt manuscript (National Library of
Wales Ms. Peniarth 392 D) is the earliest surviving
manuscript of Geoffrey CHAUCER’s CANTERBURY
TALES, and is therefore of prime significance in
helping scholars establish Chaucer’s intent for his
text. The scribe responsible for the manuscript appears to be the same one that produced the more
famous ELLESMERE MANUSCRIPT of the Tales, though
the less finished nature of Hengwrt suggests that it
is almost certainly an earlier production. The manuscript is usually dated to the first decade after
Chaucer’s death in 1400, though recent studies of
the manuscript by modern editors have revealed
the presence of a second hand in the composition,
which some have suggested is the hand of a supervisor for the project. It has been suggested that
Chaucer himself may have supervised part of the
manuscript’s production. If that were true, then
the traditionally accepted date of the manuscript
would be pushed back to the last decade of the
14th century.
However, the Hengwrt manuscript has certain
defects. It would seem that the scribe received the
text in small pieces rather than all at once (and
some parts of the text seem never to have reached
him at all). As a result the sequence of the tales is
not logical. In addition, when the manuscript was
bound, some fragments were put out of order. The
Hengwrt manuscript is missing The CANON’S YEOMAN’S TALE completely, as well as the prologue to
The MERCHANT’S TALE, and the end of The PARSON’S TALE. These problems would suggest that
Chaucer was not alive, or was incapacitated, when
the final manuscript was put together. Thus it
makes sense to date the Hengwrt manuscript to
about the time of Chaucer’s death.
There are additions to the manuscript that were
made in the 16th and 17th centuries. It seems to
have belonged to one Fouke Dutton, a draper of
Chester, by the mid-16th century, and by the 1570s
was associated with a family called Banestar, who
brought it to Wales. It was acquired by the collector
Robert Vaughan of Hengwrt, Meirionnydd, who
died in 1667. Vaughan’s library was bequeathed to
W. W. E. Wynne of Peniarth in 1859, in whose possession it began to be studied by Chaucer scholars.
Wynne sold the Vaughan manuscripts to Sir John
Williams in 1904, who, in turn, donated them to the
newly founded National Library of Wales in 1909,
where it has resided ever since.
Bibliography
Ruggiers, Paul G., ed. The Canterbury Tales: A Facsimile and Transcription of the Hengwrt Manuscript, with Variants from the Ellesmere Manuscript.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979.
Stubbs, Estelle, ed. The Hengwrt Chaucer Digital Facsimile. Leicester, U.K.: Scholarly Digital Editions,
2000. CD-ROM.