Page:The Legal Code of Ælfred the Great.djvu/28

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This manuscript is in the Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, No. 383 (19,2). It may have been used by Lambarde, but in later days its existence has been unknown until Thorpe. Liebermann has assigned it to Essex or that neighbourhood. — Th.-Sch. have variants from it.

This Ms. is a small octavo on parchment. In it our code originally stood complete p. 1—48 (in all probability), but before the pages were numbered the first layer was lost and the fourth, of 12 pages, was bound in its place; the sixth leaf of the second layer was also lost. What now remains stands therefore on 30 pp. numbered 13—42. These contain) IV (3) oðres bisceopes to the end of XXXVI (40), and XXXIX (43) dagas to eastron to end of the code. On the page numbered 6 is found the shorter, and on pp. 83—4 the longer text of the Treaty of Peace, Appendix C, both in the same hand. — The handwriting of B is neat and clear, but very compressed in every way; the scribe, keeping fair margins, gets 26 lines on the page. The numerals are left to be made in red; so is the first letter of every chapter, the first two lines beginning back from the margin to give space for it.

The numerals were never made, but the capitals were supplied much later by a very indifferent penman, who made in red ink awkward round capitals that never take up the space left for them. The same hand inserted also in red in a very slovenly manner in the space left of the last line of a chapter and on the right hand margin a set of chapter headings — this continues throughout the volume, which is a collection of legal documents — introducing on the margin many new ones, where B, like all other Mss., makes no new chapter and requires no such heading.

Still another and much later hand has been at work on B, supplying in black ink on the margins omissions noted in the Ms., using a sign consisting of a circle with a dash through it, and occasionally adding a letter, or 7. These additions are altogether foreign to B and easily distinguishable from it, and can only be taken into the text, if taken at all, in italics, like