Read the following passage. The British Library owns a fourteenth-centur

While the suggestions for the Pearl Poet’s identity may sound plausible, once we consider all the facts, they’re not convincing.
    First, John Massey. It’s true that the manuscript of John Massey’s poem, Saint Erkenwald, and the manuscript of the Pearl Poet are in the same handwriting, but this does not mean that their author was the same person. In the 14th century, books were reproduced by copying and so, most handwritten books from that period are in fact, not the original documents written by their authors, but copies made by professional copyists, so all that the handwriting similarity means is that John’s poem and the Pearl Poet’s poems were copied by the same person.
    Second, it’s true that little Hugh and the Pearl Poet both used alliteration and wrote a poem about a character called Gawain, but despite this connection they were probably not the same person since their poems were written in different dialects of English. At that time, people from different regions of England used quite different varieties, or dialects, of English. All little Hugh’s surviving poems are in the regional dialect spoken in Yorkshire, but the Pearl Poet wrote in a very different dialect of English from a different region of England, so little Hugh was probably not the writer of the Pearl Poet’s poems.
    Finally, there probably was a single Pearl Poet. The similarity among the poems goes beyond mentioning the same places. The poems of the Pearl’s manuscript also share the same vocabulary. There’re some very uncommon words that appear in two or more of the poems. Some of these words appear in no other works of literature. It’s very unlikely that several different writers would’ve used the same unique words. The shared vocabulary is a strong indication that all four poems were written by a single author.