3 - The manuscript

Summary

The sole extant copy of Ælfric's Letter to the Monks of Eynsham survives on pp. 237–68 of an extraordinarily complex manuscript, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 265 (formerly K. 2). This composite volume has been much studied, but earlier published accounts are in need of considerable revision. The present discussion can only touch on those aspects of the manuscript's contents and structure where these pertain to the unique survival of the LME, its possible relevance to those who copied it and the assumptions made by modern scholars regarding its place in the tradition of ArchbishopWulfstan's ‘commonplace book’.

DESCRIPTION

CCCC 265 is made up of 275 parchment leaves, plus one parchment flyleaf of s. xi² at its beginning, and two of s. xiii at its end. The volume measures c. 265 mm × 165 mm, with a written space of c. 205 mm × 110 mm. Its texts were copied over the course of nearly a century by a number of scribes. The present bound codex is actually a composite volume made up of at least three distinguishable sections, the first two of which also seem to have been made up incrementally before joining each other and the third. All parts must have been combined, however, by the time a thirteenth-century scribe added a crude table of contents on the verso of the first flyleaf (p. 2).