Fragments of the Middle English Prose Brut in the Raynham Archives

Among the muniments of the Townshend family of Raynham Hall, near Fakenham, in Norfolk, is a small booklet, dating from the late sixteenth century, containing accounts relating to the manors of East and West Rudham, and other properties in the immediate neighbourhood of Raynham. 1 Whoever constructed the booklet decided that its eighteen paper leaves required some protection, and attached to the exterior a sheet of parchment, consisting of a bifolium that had once formed part of a manuscript which was, by that time, well over a century old.About half the text on the parchment bifolium remains legible, and proves to consist of passages from a well-known Middle English text, the long prose chronicle known as the Brut, which, from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, furnished the standard popular account of the history of Britain.The English text, which exists in several recensions, including many versions containing interpolations and continuations, originated in a translation of an Anglo-Norman original, probably composed in the latter half of the fourteenth century.Upwards of 180 complete or fragmentary copies have been enumerated, making it, after the Wycliffite Bible, the second most commonly surviving vernacular text from the later medieval period. 2 The survival of the Raynham fragments, hitherto unnoticed, implies the former existence of yet another