Trinity College, Cambridge [TCC], MSS R.3.19 and R.3.21 are bookletconstructed anthologies of shorter pieces in Middle English – secular and religious works in poetry and prose – with much of them ascribed to John Lydgate. Most of the booklets in both volumes were copied by a single scribe, but their separate foliation and grubby outer leaves indicate that the booklets existed as discrete units for some time. Linne Mooney's exemplary study of the division of scribal labour by booklet (Tables 1 and 2) detailed the stints of four late fifteenth-century copyists (scribes A, C, D and the ‘Hammond scribe’) and two sixteenth-century copyists (Scribe B and John Stow). She concluded that the fifteenth-century booklets were separately-produced as well as separately-used, with Scribe A's activity assigned to the 1460s and 1470s: ‘Perhaps by 1480, the exemplar booklets had passed to Caxton and from him to de Worde to serve as copytexts for their prints of English vernacular poetry and prose’. Again, more recently, Mooney viewed print's arrival as a mid-point in the timeline: Scribe A's booklets ‘remained in the London book trade up to the introduction of print’, while ‘later booklets’ by scribes C and D were ‘joined’ to those written by A (and possibly by Stow). The important consideration that underpins the earlier chronological placement of Scribe A's work is his same-booklet collaboration with the London-based Hammond scribe – and Mooney (like Eleanor Hammond before her) recognised the potential of such cooperation for what it might reveal about the circumstances of metropolitan book production on the advent of printing. Scribe A's relationship to the other producers of the Trinity booklets will be my focus, but I approach the subject via the illuminators and printers who were also certainly part of the wider environment in which these booklets were produced.

An unusually large volume of scholarship is associated with this group of unnamed fifteenth-century scribes, and with one of them in particular. The Hammond scribe (fl. c. 1458–80) is best known for preserving the shorter poems of Lydgate and Chaucer, and in copies derived in part from the manuscripts of his famous predecessor – the scribe, book collector, and man of business – John Shirley (d. 1456).