Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 33, a late-fourteenth-century paper manuscript containing the single, unique text Sir Fyrumbras, offers an exceptionally interesting insight into the processes, both intellectual and material, involved in the production of a Middle English poem. Remarkably, the manuscript is accompanied by its original parchment wrappers, on which is preserved a draft version of over 400 lines of the text. It has been very fully described by Stephen Shepherd in an illustrated article and his later website. Both draft and manuscript book exhibit scribal corrections, which in some passages are very frequent and sometimes repeatedly address the same line. Shepherd’s work on the corrections, and on the physical construction of the manuscript and its parchment wrappers, makes clear the potential of this unusual survival for an understanding of the translator’s activity as he sought to construct an English poem from his French source, the chanson de geste Fierabras. However, Shepherd also signals the difficulty involved in trying to interpret the evidence of draft and manuscript, with their layers of revisions, as a coherent process leading to a final, perfected version. He warns that ‘even the “fair” copy may at best preserve a process of translation in medias res’ (p. 109). It is the implications and consequences of this thought, in terms both of the status of this unique Middle English manuscript text and, more speculatively, of our attitude to imperfect or problematic manuscript copies of other medieval texts, that I want to explore a little here.

The established text of the poem known as Sir Ferumbras is that of the 1879 edition for the Early English Text Society; all my references are to this edition. The editor, Sidney Herrtage, made an admirable job of producing a coherent and readable text; but occasionally, in the process of selecting appropriate readings, he excluded others, not necessarily on consistent grounds, so that the EETS text to some extent represents a yet further ‘revision’ of the poem. It seems to me that Herrtage’s solutions to the editorial problems he faced may be instructive in thinking about the state of other ‘imperfect’ copies of medieval texts.