Henryson’s poem attaches itself to a specific and very popular work by Chaucer in a way that none of Thynne’s other “apocryphal” items do—most of which he inherited from earlier prints by Willima Caxton and Wynkyn de Worde. Another question: what was Thynne’s source for this stop the presses insertion? If it was a Scottish witness containing an attribution to Henryson, then Thynne was doubly disingenuous in obscuring the Scottish provenance as well as the authorship of the supplement. Yet if, as I think is more likely, he had got his hands on a manuscript that no longer survives, it could well have been an English anthology of Chauceriana, including Troilus as well as Henryson’s supplement. William’s son, Francis Thynne, claims in his Animadversions on Speght’s Chaucer (1598) that his father possessed twenty-five Chaucer manuscripts—a prodigious number, which suggests the elder Thynne had access to a wide variety of manuscripts, only five of which are extant.23 Such a discovery could have motivated Thynne’s late inclusion of the Testament and his situating it not at the end, with the other apocryphal works, but rather within an already foliated book, immediately after Chaucer’s Troilus.24
The question of whether Thynne deliberately suppressed Henryson’s authorship is impossible to answer with certainty, but I rather tend toward the conclusion that he did. Francis Thynne, working chiefly from papers he had inherited from his father, recognizes that the work is “adulterate.” It is also known that the elder Thynne did suppress specific attributions of authorship in his source texts. In his use of Caxton’s poetic conclusion to the House of Fame, he reproduced the earlier printer’s lines finishing the poem without Caxton’s signature and the identification of the work as a fragment, thereby yielding an apparently complete poem.25 It will probably never be known whether or to what extent the Testament circulated in manuscript conjoined to Troilus on either side of the border. It is known that Thynne’s conjuncture of the two works began a partnership in print that survived even correct attributions of the Testament to Henryson throughout the period from the early sixteenth through the early nineteenth century. In this sense, Walter Skeat’s relegation of the Testament to a separate volume of “Chaucer Apocrypha” produces an experience of