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The Eccentric Sixth Quire
Four of the five scribes who transcribed the first booklet wrote in quire 6. This alone suggests that the production procedure for this part of the manuscript was extremely unusual. Doyle and Parkes state that the usual work stint for a scribe was governed by the quire structure; that is, the smallest customary unit of work was the quire. But what is even more peculiar is that the pattern of alternation revealed by change in hand shows there were no less than twelve changes in the quire:
| Scribe 3 ff78-83 line 28 | Clerk's Tale (5½ ff) |
| Scribe 2 ff83 line 29-84 | Clerk's Tale (1 f) |
| "Truth" (½ f [½ of folio is blank]) | |
| Scribe 3 ff84v-85 line 16 | "Uppone a Cross" (¾ f) |
| Scribe 2 ff85 line 17-85v line 9 | "Anelida" (½ f) |
| Scribe 3 ff85v line 10-86 line 20 | "Anelida" (½ f) |
| Scribe 4 ff86 line 21-88v | "Anelida (1 f [½ f87 blank]) |
| "Midsomer Rose" (1½ ff) | |
| Scribe 3 ff89-90 | "Midsomer Rose" (1 f) |
| "Song of Virtue" (1 f) | |
| Scribe 4 ff90v-91 line 9 | "Song of Virtue" (1¼ f) |
| Scribe 3 f91 lines 10-13 | Testamentum (4 lines, plus title) |
| Scribe 2 ff91 line 14-91v line 20 | Testamentum (1 f) |
| Scribe 3 ff91v line 21-92v line 6 | Testamentum (½ f) |
| Scribe 5 f92v lines 8-9 | Testamentum (two lines) |
| Scribe 4 f92v lines 10-35 | Testamentum (¾ f) |
This breakdown shows that the stints of the scribes are short and the changes of hand are frequent. The twelve changes, marking thirteen scribal work stints, is a phenomenal number, given that the standard work portion was a quire. The stints range from two lines to five-and-a-half folios with most of the stints (eight) a folio or less. Even more significant is that both the shortness of the stints and frequency of change increase towards the end of the quire, where fourteen stanzas of Lydgate's Testamentum are placed, suggesting that the writing was much interrupted and finally discontinued before the transcription of the work was completed. Although it cannot be absolutely determined from the residue of the manuscript whether or not the transcription of the Testamentum ended at f92v, I suspect that it did. I arrive at this conclusion because the next folio, which was the last of the quire, has been cut, most likely because it was blank, indicating that the copying of the work had been discontinued.[8]
A plausible narrative of the booklet's production is one that describes it as moving away from a well organized effort where the ordinatio of the manuscript was known and where the work was being portioned out in the usual fashion. The regular pattern of the scribal writing stints in the first five quires, which follows the standard length, supports this thesis. The exception at the beginning of quire 5 where the second hand writes only the first page of f63 (one half folio) can easily be explained in terms of scribe 2's presumed supervisory role. The execution of the ordinatio in these first quires would also support such a thesis. In these, the writing, format, and decoration of the booklet's relatively plain ordinatio is well done and consistent. Although the ordinatio changes in the fifth quire, from the more elaborate formatting of St. Albon to the plainer layout of the Clerk's Tale, it is not until the sixth quire that the quality control of the booklet's production radically decreases. For example, rubrication ceases at f78v, the second page of the first folio in the sixth quire. At this point, the orderly production process was increasingly disrupted, and the transcription finally was halted in the initial stanzas of the Testamentum.
The pattern formed by the different scribal hands and stints thus points to a narrative in which the production of the first booklet moves from a well organized effort to one that is much less so, indeed one that leaves the booklet unfinished. Such a pattern of destabilized and incomplete production can been seen in the booklet's larger organizing structure, its ordinatio.
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