Were the four poems in the Cotton Nero manuscript all written by the same person? There will probably never be a final answer to this question. The fact that they all occur in the same manuscript copy proves nothing; indeed, books devoted to the works of a single vernacular author were then very much the exception, not the rule. Somewhat more significant is the fact that they all exhibit exactly the same variety of north-west Midland English, locating their language in a rather small and also thinly populated part of the country. But the geographical distribution of poetic talent is governed by no law of proportional representation: there could have been more than one good writer brought up in that region at about that time; indeed, there must have been at least two, if I am right in believing that another poem in just the same dialect, St Erkenwald, was written by someone else.

It may be that thoroughgoing computer-assisted analysis of the texts will provide more definite evidence in future; but current opinion, which in general strongly favours single authorship, rests mainly on observation of similarities in theme, structure, language, and imagery. Considerations of this sort make it very hard indeed to doubt that Cleanness and Patience, at least, are products of the same mind. They both show the same ingenuity in selecting Old Testament examples to illustrate, per contra, specific virtues; and both introduce that virtue as one of those blessed by Christ in the Beatitudes, to which both of them apply the rather singular expression ‘aght happes’ (Cleanness l. 24, Patience l. 11). This is one of those verbal parallels between the Cotton Nero poems which can escape the general suspicion attaching to such parallels in alliterative verse, where traditional or ‘formulaic’ language is always to be reckoned with. Again, Patience (but not Cleanness) has in common with Pearl and Sir Gawain a circularity of structure marked by the closing repetition of the first line; and Cleanness (but not Patience) shares with the other two poems imagery of the pearl, as a symbol of perfect or purified humanity (in Pearl, but also in Cleanness ll. 549–56, 1067–8, 1115–32, and in Gawain ll. 2362–5).