Scribe D

[1] Scribe D was first identified in the 1970s by Ian Doyle and Malcolm Parkes, who noticed that the same scribal hand occurred in a range of prestige manuscripts of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century date.

[6] More recent scholarship has proposed he was in fact a Londoner influenced by his extensive work with manuscripts from the south-west Midlands, such as those of Langland.

[8] One of Scribe D's earliest identified works, based on the style of the illumination used in the manuscript, is the important "C text" of William Langland's Piers Plowman, contained in University of London MS. v.88.

[9] It may be significant that Scribe D's first surviving commission was for Piers Plowman, a work written in the same south-west Midland dialect that he could have spoken himself.

Some scholars, such as Estelle Stubbs, have argued that Scribe D and his colleagues may, rather than trying to assemble the Canterbury Tales after Chaucer's death in 1400, have been steadily revising and recopying manuscripts in several stages with possible authorial supervision or input.