Much codicological and palaeographical evidence was lost in the Ashburnham House fire of 1731, including threads, folds and prick-marks.[11] Studies in palaeography are, however, important and of interest when studying Judith and the constituent texts within the Nowell Codex, as the manuscript is written in two hands. Judith is in the hand of the second scribe, as is Beowulf from line 1939 onwards.
Orthography
In the Nowell Codex, the lack of scribal regularization is of note. The absence of -io spellings in Judith is of interest, in contrast to the ‘126’ <io> spellings in Beowulf, (totalling the pages transcribed by both A and B.)
As Peter Lucas has demonstrated, Scribe A, who copied the first 87 MS pages of Beowulf, made sure to use regularised <eo> spellings in ‘The Letter of Alexander the Great to Aristotle’, (66 instances,) and 'The Marvels of the East,’ (2 instances).
Conversely, The Life of St Christopher does not contain any <io> spellings, which leads to Lucas’ claim, that it is “extremely probable that Quire 14, containing Judith, is the nearest surviving part of the manuscript to its lost beginning, and that the quire was linked to the present Quire by just one quire, designated *0, at least part of which was discarded only as relatively recently as c. 1600.” [12]
