page_title: Hengwrt Chaucer
section_title: History of the manuscript
hierarchical_section_title: Hengwrt Chaucer / History of the manuscript
caption_attribution_description: English: Hengwrt, 1793
context_page_description: The Hengwrt Chaucer manuscript is an early-15th-century manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, held in the National Library of Wales, in Aberystwyth. It is an important source for Chaucer's text, and was possibly written by someone with access to original authorial holograph, now lost.
  The Hengwrt Chaucer is part of a collection called the Peniarth Manuscripts which is included by UNESCO in its UK Memory of the World Register, a list of documentary heritage which holds cultural significance specific to the UK. It is catalogued as MS Peniarth 392D.
context_section_description: The Hengwrt Chaucer has been in Wales for at least 400 years.
  This was one of the collection of manuscripts amassed at the mansion of Hengwrt, near Dolgellau, Gwynedd, by Welsh antiquary Robert Vaughan (c.1592–1667); the collection later passed to the newly established National Library of Wales.
  The Hengwrt manuscript's very early ownership is unknown, but recent research suggests that Chaucer himself may have partly supervised the making of the manuscript, before his death in October 1400, according to the Welsh newspaper The Western Mail.
  By the 16th century it can be identified as belonging to Fouke Dutton, a draper of Chester who died in 1558. It then seems to have passed into the ownership of the Bannester family of Chester and Caernarfon, and through them was in the possession of an Andrew Brereton by 1625; by the middle of the 17th century it had been acquired by Vaughan.
caption: Hengwrt, the seat of the Vaughan family, 1793
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