Hengwrt Chaucer

The Hengwrt Chaucer manuscript is an early-15th-century manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, held in the National Library of Wales, in Aberystwyth, where it is known as MS Peniarth 392D.

This was one of the collection of manuscripts amassed at the mansion of Hengwrt, near Dolgellau, Gwynedd, by Welsh antiquary Robert Vaughan (c.1592–1667); the collection later passed to the newly established National Library of Wales as the Peniarth or Hengwrt-Peniarth Manuscripts.

The Hengwrt manuscript's very early ownership is unknown, but by the 16th century it can be identified as belonging to Fouke Dutton, a draper of Chester who died in 1558. It then seems to have passed into the ownership of the Bannester family of Chester and Caernarfon, and through them was in the possession of an Andrew Brereton by 1625; by the middle of the 17th century it had been acquired by Vaughan.

The Hengwrt Chaucer has been in Wales for at least 400 years, and recent research by English scholars suggests that Chaucer himself may have partly supervised the making of the manuscript, before his death in October 1400, according to the Welsh newspaper The Western Mail.

Peniarth MS 392 D contains 250 folios with a page size of around 29 x 20.5 centimetres. It is written on heavily stained and rather damaged parchment. The main textual hand has been identified with one found in several other manuscripts of the period (see below); there are a number of other hands in the manuscript, including one of a person who attempted to fill in several gaps in the text. This has been tentatively identified as the hand of the poet Thomas Hoccleve.

There is some illumination in blue, gold and red, used on the border and on initital letters at the opening of individual tales and prologues, but the manuscript contains no illustrations.

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