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The fifteenth-century English Heege Manuscript is unusual among collections of its kind and time given its focus on scary stories over more acclaimed works by celebrated medieval authors like Hoccleve. But according to professor James Wade, even more unusually, the three texts in the manuscript's first booklet were likely copied by Richard Heege from a traveling minstrel's repertoire book. The evidence includes performative elements such as the narrator directly appealing to the audience, joking about peasants and royalty, and making jokes that could be modified to refer to the town of Holbrooke when in nearby Radford to avoid giving offense.