Geoffrey Chaucer's sloppy scrivener unmasked after 600 years

After more than 600 years, his handwriting that gave him away. The identity of a medieval scribe - who until the last weekend was known to literary history only as Adam the scrivener - and whose carelessness was the cause of such vexation for Geoffrey Chaucer that the poet threatened to curse him with an outbreak of scabs, was discovered through some extraordinarily alert academic detective work.

The sloppy copyist of the words of the father of English literature was revealed to be one Adam Pinkhurst, son of a small Surrey landowner during the 14th century.
The revelation of his name and some of his background, announced by Cambridge University, has caused intense excitement and admiration among specialists in the subject. It indirectly helps to authenticate the two most authoritative texts of Chaucer's great work, the Canterbury Tales, the first long poem written in an approximation to modern English.