The latest text produced by the Anglo-Norman Text Society is The Life of St John the Almsgiver, edited by Dr K. Urwin. This is preserved in a single manuscript in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge. It is written in ‘a quite good thirteenth-century English hand';’ it is the copy of a scribe and not the author's original autograph work; ‘it dates from the earliest part of the thirteenth century and perhaps the composition of the Lf e may not pre-date the copy by too long a period'. The Life is in verse and its metre may be called Anglo-Norman octosyllabic.

The best scribes are human; the worst can be beastly. No editor expects to find a faultless presentation of an author's work. A prose text offers fewer problems than a verse one. If the prose is preserved in a unique manuscript, an editor reproduces this, omitting or correcting such beastliness as he can detect, punctuates it in the modern fashion, and gives such descriptions and explanations of the scribe's language, orthography, and working habits as are necessary to make the text easily accessible to the readers he has in view. When an editor establishes a text of which two or more manuscripts have survived, we expect him to inform us of all sense variants but not necessarily to provide completely detailed examinations of the orthography and so forth of each scribe. My dealings with the two manuscripts of the short (some fortyseven printed pages) mid-thirteenth-century chronicle of The Crusade and Death of Richard I sllow that these two Anglo-Nomian scribes are capable of reproducing with remarkable accuracy a text composed a hundred years or so before their time, although their spellings are by no means the same. In a prose text it suffices to note that one scribe writes le dit tempest, defendruit, and finalment, and the other la dire tempeste, defenderoit, and finalement, without trying to say what differences of pronunciation are involved.