
Cambridge University researchers found a manuscript with rare Arthurian tales bound into a ledger more than 400 years old and used advanced technology to reveal its contents.
Torn, folded and stitched, rare tales of Merlin shapeshifting into King Arthur’s court and Sir Gawain gaining power from the sun were bound into a book of property records from the 1500s. They went unnoticed for centuries, stacked among the records of an English manor and then among the millions of volumes of a university library.
At least until an archivist took another look, setting off a yearslong project to identify and then reassemble the medieval manuscript, which someone in Tudor England had taken apart and used to help hold together a ledger.
The manuscript turned out to be a priceless find: extremely rare stories of Arthurian romance, copied by a scribe between 1275 and 1315, and part of the “Suite Vulgate du Merlin,” an Old French sequel to the start of the Arthur legend. Cambridge University researchers announced their findings this week and published a digitized version of the manuscript online.
There are fewer than 40 copies of the Suite Vulgate sequel known to exist, and no two are exactly the same.
“Each manuscript copy of a medieval text, handwritten by a scribe, is going to be changed little by little,” said Irène Fabry-Tehranchi, the French specialist at the university library. “As the copies come along, each scribe imposes his own taste.”
The manuscript tells two stories.
The first is about Sir Gawain, nephew of King Arthur, whose rivals include both rebellious barons at home and pagan Saxons invading from abroad. Among the intransigent nobles is Gawain’s own father, and Gawain sides with Arthur to defeat him. Then it’s on to the Saxons.