Education: The Lewde Compilator

It was just a routine chore that young (29) Mathematician Derek Price intended to do in the Peterhouse Library at the University of Cambridge. All he wanted was a look at a certain 14th century manuscript in connection with a history he was writing on scientific instruments. But as soon as the manuscript was brought to him one day last December, Price felt his pulse begin to quicken. By last week, medievalists all over Britain were talking about the mystery unearthed by Price: Who was the author of “MS. 75”?

According to the Cambridge catalogue, MS. 75 was supposed to be a treatise on the astrolabe (forebear of the sextant) by an astronomer named Simon Bredon. But, in all the 400-odd years the manuscript had been on the Peterhouse shelves, apparently no one had ever bothered to examine it carefully. The astronomical tables it contained were dated 1391 to 1393. Yet, as Derek Price well knew, Bredon had died in 1372.

A for V, B for 4. Furthermore, instead of being written in scholarly Latin, part of the manuscript was in a clumsy sort of code based on a complex series of substitutions (A for V, B for 4, C for 7, etc.) which could easily be translated into early English. Price also found that MS. 75 was not a treatise on the astrolabe at all, but a description of how to build an obscure instrument called an “Equatorie of the Planetis.” As far as Price remembered, only one example of such an instrument still exists—at Merton College, Oxford.

With these slim clues to go on, Price recalled a fragment of knowledge picked up from his studies. There was a famous man in 1391 who wrote about astronomy. The same man had a friend at Merton whom he called “The Philosophical Strode.” Could it be that the author of MS. 75—a “lewde compilator of the labour of old astrologiens”—was Geoffrey Chaucer himself?

Price had no trouble persuading other scholars to look at the manuscript. And one day, when he and his supervisor, A. R. Hall, were examining it, they discovered some notations hidden under the binding. “Good Lord!” Hall exclaimed. “Do you see what I see?” Sure enough, there in the margin was the name Chaucer.

Key to Canterbury? The next step was to compare MS. 75 with the longest and best authenticated sample of Chaucer’s handwriting—a five-line note written while he was controller of customs at the wool quay. Price looked up the note in the London Public Record Office, photographed it, and showed it to Professor Roger Mynors, an expert on medieval handwriting. Yes, said the professor, the writing in the note and the writing in MS. 75 were very much alike.

Last week Cambridge was putting other experts on the case. Meanwhile, scholars were speculating about the Price find. If Chaucer really did turn out to be the “lewde compilator,” scholars would have the first really long specimen of his handwriting. With that key, they could solve many of the mysteries that still exist in Chaucer’s texts, might be able to identify other 14th century manuscripts as his. It was even possible that MS. 75 would uncover some more of the tales told more than five centuries ago by those famous old pilgrims to Canterbury.