Adam Pinkhurst is best known as a fourteenth-century English scribe whom Linne Mooney identified as the 'personal scribe' of Geoffrey Chaucer, although much recent scholarship has cast doubt on this connection. Biography There are records of an 'Adam Pynkhurst' (as it is usually spelled) from 1355 to 1399–1401. The earliest is a property sale by Pinkhurst, his wife Joanna, and another married couple in Dorking and Betchworth, Surrey; this suggests that he was probably born sometime in the mid-1330s at the latest. In 1370 Pynkhurst was granted a handsome annuity by King Edward III; this record and subsequent ones identify him as a 'King's Archer', that is, a member of an elite group charged with protecting the king. The 1381 Poll Tax records for Bramley, Surrey, record amounts paid some three times what an average person would have been expected to contribute. Records of 1385 pertaining to the purchase and then sale (back to the previous owner) of a property adjoining the church of St. Thomas of Acre refer to 'Adam Pynkhurst, scriptor et civis Londonie' ('scrivener and citizen of London'), the first record of his membership in the Scriveners Company, in whose 'Common Paper' he inscribed his confirmation ca. 1395. The final record, dated sometime from 1399 to 1401, requests the confirmation of grants made by the previous kings to 'Adam Penkhurst'; these pertain to Sussex and Surrey, suggesting his retirement to his original home. There are no records of any 'Adam Pinkhurst' after 1401 or that place him into contact with Geoffrey Chaucer. Identification as Chaucer's scribe In 2004, Linne Mooney and Simon Horobin published an essay arguing that the scribe of the Ellesmere Chaucer and Hengwrt Chaucer manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, known as 'Scribe B', also copied a Piers Plowman manuscript, Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.15.17. At the conference of the New Chaucer Society that year, and in a major essay published in 2006, Mooney identified this scribe as Adam Pinkhurst and claimed, as Bernard Wagner had in 1929, that he was the referent of a short poem known as Chaucer's words unto Adam his scrivener: [Adam scrivener, if it ever befalls thee to write Boece or Troilus anew, mayst thou have ringworm under thy long locks unless thou writest more truly after my making, so often a day I must renew thy work, to correct it and also to rub and scrape, and all is