Three fingers write; the whole body labours
About the work
Imported from the workbook's Full reassessment sheet, revised 7 October 2026 (record ID 62). The assessment below is the workbook's comparative judgment under its stated criteria; source links and limits are retained.
Workbook assessment: Plausible
Date or witness: Securely dated added example late 12th–early 13th century; earlier manuscript witness also survives
Region: England; wider Latin scribal culture
Workbook date-sort bounds: 1175 CE to 1225 CE; these bounds are not automatically invention or disappearance dates.
Description
A metrical complaint about exhausting book production is copied from manuscript to manuscript. BL Harley MS 3013 f.96r has a late-12th/early-13th-century added colophon; Royal MS 6 A VI also contains the same lines.
Evidence of adoption or transmission
Scribes reuse a recognisable complaint about bodily exhaustion in separately preserved colophons.
What remains uncertain
This can represent participatory occupational culture, but medieval scribes include monks and privileged clerics as well as paid artisans. Surviving reuse does not identify one uniform working-class audience.
Candidate-index family 23: Three fingers write; the whole body labours
The workbook groups records 62 here and rates the family Plausible. This is a research shortlist, not proof of an independently established meme family.
Dated evidence: Securely dated added example late 12th–early 13th century; earlier manuscript witness also survives
Region: England; wider Latin scribal culture
Shortlist uncertainty: This can represent participatory occupational culture, but medieval scribes include monks and privileged clerics as well as paid artisans. Surviving reuse does not identify one uniform working-class audience.
Workbook revision note: Reassessed using grassroots criteria