St John's College : A collection of carols; English and Latin; second half of fifteenth century.

Two scribes (here called ‘A’ and ‘B’) collaborated in the copying, and are clearly distinguishable on the first surviving page (f. 1r), where Scribe A wrote the first four lines, and Scribe B the remainder. Their division of labour is as follows: Item 1, A; item 2, B; item 3, A; items 4-6, B; items 7-8, A; item 9, B; item 10, first two lines (the refrain), A, remainder B; item 11, B; item 12, lines 1-3 and 5, B, remainder A; items 13-15, A; item 16, B (except the word ‘Nowell’, not part of this text, at head of f. 10v, in A’s hand); item 17, B; items 18-19, A; item 20, B. Here and there both scribes have added minor features (e.g. omitted refrains) to one another’s work. Frequent changes in inking and in the cut of the pen shows that they were only able to give intermittent attention to their project.

Scribe A’s hand is the smaller and neater of the two, predominantly current anglicana in aspect, using the characteristic reverse ‘e’, long ‘r’, the more complex form of ‘w’, and a sigma-shaped final ‘s’; the single-compartment forms of ‘a’ and ‘g’ however are drawn from the repertoire of the secretary script, though the double-compartmented anglicana ‘g’ also appears occasionally.

Scribe B’s hand is larger, and the writer’s control of the pen was sometimes poor, giving the work a coarser appearance. The mixture of anglicana and secretary forms is similar to A’s. Both scribes employ the obsolete character yogh (ȝ), though not frequently or consistently, and both use the letter ‘y’ to signify both ‘y’ and the runic letter thorn (þ). Where thorn is intended it is so printed in the transcriptions of the incipits and explicits in the list of contents above.

Both scribes were called upon to write occasional lines in Latin, and where these occur it is evident that both were familiar with the conventional forms of abbreviation used at the time, e.g. those signifying ‘er’, ‘ra’, ‘ri’, and ‘us’, and the same forms are sometimes used in rendering English words. The common mark of abbreviation (or tilde) is occasionally written in the form of a dot surmounted by a crescent by Scribe A, but normally both scribes use the simple horizontal bar. Both scribes likewise employ a conventional symbol to signify ‘and’ (or Latin ‘et’), resembling a ‘2’ or a ‘z’, often with an anticipatory looped flourish, and sometimes surmounted with a tilde. Commonly occurring English words are sometimes abbreviated by using superscript letters (e.g. ‘wt’ for ‘with’, ‘þt’ for ‘that’), and it is noticeable that both scribes share the habit of writing superscripts in some words where no abbreviation is intended (e.g. ‘þe’ for ‘þe’, ‘þis’ for ‘þis’). The plural and genitive inflexions of nouns are occasionally represented by a loop and a descending stroke (sometimes mistaken for a long ‘s’); where the forms are given in full, both scribes normally write ‘-ys’.

Virtually no punctuation is used by either scribe, though both place brackets at line-endings (sometimes rather haphazardly) to indicate rhymes.