ABSTRACT
At the far end of the display case for select manuscripts of chronicles in the British Library, the case containing, among other manuscripts, Cotton Tiberius B. I, is a highly unusual ‘history’. It is, in a manner of speaking, a chronicle, whose entries are on long, thin strips of parchment a few millimetres wide. Each strip of parchment is written back and front with the sparest of entries from unconnected years. The strips of text are gathered at one end, but unlike folio leaves of a conventional book gathered at a spine, these leaves are gathered at a handle, creating not a book so much as a whip. The final bifolium of the manuscript, containing just eight lines of text supplied to the Chronicle, was added in the later twelfth century and testifies to the use of the manuscript a century after the C-text was copied.
