The Production of Charters and Other Documents by Commercial Scribes

Diplomatic research has revealed that in the late medieval Low Countries the production of administrative texts for temporal and spiritual lords, such as the count of Hainaut and the bishop of Utrecht, was not only done by the clerks of their chanceries, but also by public notaries and town scribes, working on a professional basis. Moreover, in the second quarter of the fourteenth century the copying of registers in the comital chancery of Holland was outsourced to two Leiden priests, Gerrit Hoogstraat and Dirk Gravekijn, who also wrote books for the famous jurist Philips van Leyden, their relative. Other professional scribes in Leiden wrote administrative texts as well as books; in the fifteenth century we have the example of Huge Claaszoon die Scriver, who worked for the town’s magistrate and for a number of religious institutions. Elsewhere in the Netherlands, and beyond, more instances can be found of professionals writing both types of texts. Research on late medieval book production should therefore take into account the work of the documentary scribes, whose products, which are often richly available and mostly dated and localised, can give much information about the activities of professional writers.