Auchinleck manuscript

The English were continuing to reclaim their language and national identity, and to distance themselves from the Norman conquerors who had taken over the country after the Battle of Hastings 300 years before.

[1] Auchinleck is believed to have been produced in London around 1340 by professional scribes who were laymen, not by monks, as was more usually the case with medieval manuscript texts.

[6] 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.

While this has an entertaining visual effect when looking at the folios, or pages, its historical importance lies in the clues that it gives to the process of book production for private clients in a secular bookshop at an early period in the emergence of that industry.

This contrasts with the method more usual in monasteries whereby the monks would copy directly from the exemplars one page at a time, with a catchword inscribed at the bottom corner for later collation.

[10] It was during this time that the English were beginning to shift away from French and to form a separate identity, socially and politically, so it would follow that the use of "Inglisch", as it is referred to in the manuscript, in the written word would be a source of national unification.

Within its folios, it tracks not only the literature of the period, reflecting the tastes of readers in Chaucer's time and how its subjects were increasingly diverging from religious topics, but also the development of a language as part of a national self-image.

[13] It speaks to us of the independence of spirit with which the English people wanted to identify themselves as separate from their French cousins by claiming their own language in a fundamental expression, in their literature.