WHILE there is general agreement that Scribe 1 served in a final, compilational role in the construction of the Auchinleck manuscript (Edinburgh, NLS, MS Advocates 19. 2. 1), we have not (so far) succeeded in making entirely clear the chronological order in which the various booklets (or fascicles) came together and how they came to be arranged as they now stand in Auchinleck. Even if we set aside the continuing dispute over whether there were six (A. J. Bliss, Derek Pearsall and Ian Cunningham, Alison Wiggins), five (Eugen Kolbing, Malcolm Parkes, Ralph Hanna) or four (Pamela Robinson) scribes at work on the collection, we are unable to describe a firm sequence for the production of the twelve booklets that now comprise the manuscript: we do not know exactly how the contributions of the various scribes fit together into a fully convincing chronology. And, while the catchwords and item numbers attest to the present (i.e., final), compiled order of the fascicles, which we now (following Timothy Shonk) confidently attribute to Scribe 1 (Robinson's Scribe D), that order certainly cannot correspond to, or even clearly reveal, the earlier stages of the manuscript's composition and arrangement. As Wiggins quite properly notes: ‘Clues as to how the fascicles were organised and arranged during the various stages of production are not easily found or interpreted as no regular system of signatures has survived in the manuscript’. And it is not just the absence of signatures that is an obstacle to identifying the ‘stages of production’: the composition of booklets in which two (or more) scribes participated works against any simple, linear sequence of production.

If the old idea of a ‘London workshop’ has become no longer entirely tenable, how do the irregularities in the serial composition of the constituent booklets make sense? Scribe 3, for instance, clearly preceded Scribe 2 (in booklet 3) and Scribe 2 preceded Scribe 1 (in booklet 2). And, of course, if the final ordering of the quires (with their catchwords) and the titles were the work of Scribe 1, then he succeeded all of the other scribes, and not simply in those booklets where his texts appear after those of Scribe 2 (in booklet 2) and Scribe 5 (in booklet 5), but also in booklet 4, where Scribe 5's Reinbrun Gij Sone of Warwike followed his stanzaic Guy of Warwick.