British Library, Harley MS 7334

[1] Academic Jeremy Smith has characterised Scribe D as particularly interesting, as his texts display a history in which he moved to London from north Worcestershire, tried hard to eliminate his Worcestershire dialect from his copying, and gradually assimilated peculiar spellings particular to Gower, eventually transplanting them into his work on Chaucer's texts.

As well as the Tale of Gamelyn, now thought not to be by Chaucer, it also contains many peculiar variant readings which were, in the nineteenth century, considered to represent either a first or second draft by the author himself.

[4] Modern opinion is that the manuscript's scribe, in common with the practice of the time, would have felt it acceptable to expand or edit the author's text as they thought appropriate.

[5] In general, modern editors have agreed with the opinion of Stephen Knight, who noted that while Harley MS 7334 "seems so handsome and authoritative [...] it is in fact heavily and even whimsically edited".

[6] However, Scribe D was, in his Gower manuscripts, known to have proceeded in a manner similar to "a photocopier [and] often copied simply what was before him", so it remains possible that the idiosyncratic variant readings might have some other source.